SINGLED OUT

The story of a baseball player whose life serves as testimony to where we’ve come from and how far we still have to go.

In 1977, Burke was a gay Black man playing center field for the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series; by 1995, he would be dead at 42 due to complications of AIDS. Maraniss meticulously charts a path from Burke’s Berkeley, California, upbringing as an all-around athlete through his relatively brief but significant MLB stint to San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, where he struggled through addiction, incarceration, poverty, housing insecurity, and sickness in the final chapters of his life. The author presents a critical interpretation of Burke’s life, juxtaposing interviews with contemporaries with accounts of 1969’s Stonewall uprising, Anita Bryant’s anti–gay rights campaign, and Magic Johnson’s 1991 HIV announcement. This creates a compelling narrative, offering helpful context for young readers in a complicated account of race, sexuality, and a dream deferred, yet it pushes Burke from the foreground, centering the national media and sports establishments that used and critiqued Burke’s body and what he did with it. Not exactly a biography, this is a meticulously researched history of the ways queer culture in the ’70s intersected with baseball, Blackness, and larger culture wars, with one man at their center.

Burke was so impressive a figure, his story so gripping, that this book holds unquestionable merit.