‘This is my story’: In Miami, baseball’s Billy Bean came out as gay and found new purpose

Billy Bean, a former baseball player who came out as gay after retiring and then dedicated his life to inclusion, died this week.

Before his death at age 60, Bean was an executive for Major League Baseball on diversity issues.

Billy Bean also had a presence in South Florida through the years, including his time as a restaurateur.

Let’s take a look at Billy Bean’s life here through the archives of the Miami Herald:

About Billy Bean

Published July 25, 1999

By Lydia Martin

He was a closeted gay outfielder in the macho world of big-league baseball, then the silent life partner of a famous name in South Beach cuisine. But now as an equal partner in a new restaurant, he is finally finding his own voice.

Just before you sit down for lunch at the Albion Hotel with Billy Bean, the former big-league baseball player who gave it all up for love, he takes you on a tour of his new restaurant.

This fall, he’ll be opening Mayya with the man who made him hang up his San Diego Padres uniform.

The new place, adjacent to the Albion on the eastern stretch of Lincoln Road, will be upscale Mexican, featuring a star chef direct from the famed Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago.

There are dozens of workmen in the gutted space cluttered with plywood, wiring and metal sheeting. You strain to visualize how fabulous it will all be when it’s ready. But you’re not that creative.

The work crew calls Billy “Chief.” That’s a big deal for Billy, who had a rough time when he gave up baseball in 1995 and moved to Miami Beach to be with Efrain Veiga, the well-known Miami restaurateur who founded Yuca and helped establish the Nuevo Latino movement. Veiga sold his share of Yuca recently to focus on Mayya.

“Three years ago, I was just his little boyfriend,” says the soft-spoken Billy, who keeps his ball-player physique, but never flaunts it.

“Sometimes I’m sad that nobody here knows I played major-league ball. Because when you’re with somebody prominent, everybody thinks you’re just riding their coattails.”

Mayya gives Billy and Efrain a chance to start fresh. It’s a project that allows the younger baseball player equal footing with the older restaurateur.

“I spent four years at Yuca University. Now I can pretty much be the operations guy and give Efrain the time he needs to do the creative side. I think our dream of owning a project together - outright, with no other business partners - is going to come true.”

Their meeting was storybook. Billy was in town with the Padres to play against the Marlins. After the game, the ball player went to dinner at Yuca. The restaurateur was there that night, being his warm, charming self.

“I didn’t know anything about him except that he owned the restaurant. He had no idea who I was. I left town again, no big deal. But four months later when we came back to play, I wanted to see him again. He didn’t care what I did for a career. He had never been to a baseball game in his life. Anybody who has ever met him can understand why I felt so comfortable with him. I like to be around people who make me appreciate life and who are in touch with the things that really matter. And that’s Efrain.”

Billy had promised himself he’d give up the game if he ever met anybody who mattered that much.

There had been somebody before. But back then, Billy wasn’t out of the closet. Being a major-league ball player meant he couldn’t be gay.

He paid a huge price for the secret.

“One day, my friend died. He had a ruptured pancreas. It was something bizarre and unfair. I rushed him to the hospital at 11 that night. At 7 a.m., he died right there in front of me. I couldn’t tell anybody. So that same day, I played a baseball game at 1 o’clock.”

That’s when Billy vowed not to let baseball get in the way of his life again.

“I told myself that if it ever came around again that I found somebody, I would sacrifice everything for that relationship. And ultimately, that’s what I did. The death of my friend made me so cynical about baseball. That day when I played that game, everybody was joking around about this girl and that babe. And I thought, I’m fighting to stay in this environment. Why? Is it all about money? Is it about fame? Do I have such a lack of self-esteem that I can’t be myself in the real world?”

There’s one thing Billy realized - he couldn’t tell the world he was gay and continue to play ball. Nobody knew about him, and if there were other gay ball players in the majors, they kept it secret, too.

“I would have been ostracized. I would have wound up on Oprah. Overnight, they would have found some way to kick me out. Because some dad doesn’t want his little kid watching some gay baseball player and saying, ‘I want to grow up to be just like him.’ “

So Billy, the outfielder with the uneven career - who went from the majors to the minors to the majors again, who got married at 24 and divorced at 27 when he finally figured out he was gay - lied his way through baseball.

“I dated girls on the road. I sat down and had drinks with them. I submerged myself in the world I needed to be in to play. I didn’t sleep with any of the girls. You take it as far as you need to. People don’t need to see things.”

Billy didn’t even attend his former companion’s funeral. He had to go on the road to play ball, and without revealing the truth about his life, he didn’t have an excuse to get out of it.

A year later, he met Efrain.

“I had gone through a seriously difficult time. I was tired of holding my breath eight hours a day when I walked into the locker room and heard the guys saying, ‘Let’s go kick some gay guys’ asses.’ Or when I went to Hooters or to strip bars just to be one of the guys. I was selling myself out.”

Billy hardly gets through his turkey sandwich. He’s cool with telling you all of this - but it’s the first time he has talked about it publicly. There are still a lot of people in his life who don’t know he’s gay. Just a couple of weeks ago, he finally told a couple of his best buddies from college, after another best buddy died in a car wreck.

At 35, Billy says he won’t waste time hiding anymore.

“I still have nightmares that people are going to find out and they’re not going to like me. But I know that’s just residue.”

No strikeout

Published April 21, 2003

By Steve Rothaus

At last, Billy Bean feels comfortable with his teammates.

Every Sunday morning, the San Diego Padres outfielder who quit pro baseball and came out of the closet, hits the basketball courts at Nautilus Middle School in Miami Beach.

Bean’s basketball buddies say it’s no big deal that he’s gay. “About half the people here know - the other half wouldn’t care,” said teammate Wayne Pathman, a Miami lawyer. “Billy’s a great guy.”

Bean, who turns 39 on May 11, won’t be playing with the rest of the guys for a month or so. He’s off on a cross-country tour plugging his just-published autobiography, Going the Other Way: Lessons from a Life In and Out of Major-League Baseball.

“This is my life story,” said Bean, who since 1996 has lived in South Florida with partner Efraín Veiga, a restaurateur-turned-developer. “I didn’t write the book for the gay and lesbian community. I wrote it for our friends and our family and the people we work with.”

Much has been reported about Bean’s life since he tentatively stepped out of the closet in July 1999 during an interview with Herald columnist Lydia Martin.

Within weeks, Bean’s story appeared on the front page of The New York Times.

Diane Sawyer profiled Bean on ABC-TV’s 20/20. Today, Sawyer again interviews Bean live on Good Morning, America.

Then Bean travels alone from city to city across the United States, promoting the book he co-wrote with Advocate reporter Chris Bull. “I am gambling on my ability to tell a story,” Bean said.

The autobiography is frank at times in describing Bean’s transformation from married ballplayer to gay icon.

In the book, Bean refers to one episode as “a scene from a tacky porn flick,” as he is seduced by a man in a fitness-club shower room - while Bean’s wife of four years waits for him outside.

Bean, who describes himself as “maniacally organized,” said it would have “been a cop-out” to describe the sex scene less graphically.

“That was an unbelievably freaky moment for me,” recalled Bean, who at the time was just coming to terms with being gay. “My wife was on the other side of the wall. I needed to give the reader some kind of sense of that.”

Soon after the shower-room encounter, Bean divorced his wife, not telling her the real reason why: He had fallen in love with “Sam,” the man from the fitness club.

“I told her I wasn’t in love anymore and confused,” Bean said. “That is not easy for a girl or woman to digest. She needed more concrete reasons. She said, ‘People don’t leave unless you have somebody else.’ That was the truth, but I couldn’t tell her.”

Bean secretly moved in with Sam. “We were monogamous, and though we’d never spoken about HIV, it was clear that the last thing either of us desired was a latex barrier,” Bean writes in the book.

Two years into their relationship, Sam became ill and learned he was HIV-positive. Bean tested negative.

Sam suddenly collapsed on April 23, 1995. Bean rushed him to a hospital, where Sam died early the next day of AIDS-related complications. After spending the entire night with Sam in the emergency room, Bean went directly to the ballpark.

He played baseball that day as if nothing had happened.

Bean quit the Padres the following year, after he came to Florida on vacation and met Veiga, then the owner of Yuca restaurant.

The ex-baseball pro moved in with Veiga and joined him in the restaurant business. They sold Yuca and opened Mayya on Lincoln Road. The new restaurant quickly failed. The couple lost everything, including their Coral Gables home, and had to start over.

Today, Bean and Veiga, 51, live in Miami Beach. They redevelop and sell expensive real estate.

Much of Bean’s story could be seen as tragic. He refuses to look at it that way.

“It’s not that bad things happened to Billy Bean,” he said. “It’s the choices I made I regret the most.”

- First bad choice: “To not talk to my mother for 10 years about anything important,” rather than confide in her that he is gay.

- Second bad choice: Getting married to a naive young woman who had no idea Bean was struggling with his sexuality.

- Third bad choice: Not going to his lover’s funeral because he feared people would find out about their relationship.

- Fourth bad choice: “To walk away from baseball” in 1996.

Bean probably had little choice. Homophobia is still rampant in professional sports.

“It would be very hard for someone in the sporting arena to come out,” said Archi Cianfrocco, a former Padre who was Bean’s roommate and best friend on the team. “It might never change.”

For years, Cianfrocco didn’t know Bean was gay. “I don’t think it would have made a difference because of the person he was. I hope I wouldn’t have reacted any different. We had a good friendship. Looking back, I wish he could have told me because he went through a lot. I could have been a friend he could lean on.”

Cianfrocco, a utility infielder who retired in 1998 at age 32, said that if Bean had come out while still on the team a lot of people would have stood by him.

“But the majority wouldn’t.”

Former minor-league umpire Tyler Hoffman said he could relate to every chapter of Bean’s book.

“When he went back to play after the death of his partner, that totally epitomized the arena of professional sports,” Hoffman said.

Hoffman, 27, quit pro baseball after a few seasons. He now is a member of the Gay & Lesbian Professional Athletes Association. At age 19, he realized he was gay and came out to just a few close friends.

“I probably only did it half-assed at the time, even to myself. I knew I was going to start the baseball career and it wouldn’t mesh. It came back to the role-model thing. I had nothing to relate to. All the stereotypes didn’t add up to who I was, which made it more confusing.”

Like Bean and Hoffman, most gay professional athletes come out after they leave the business. Alissa Wykes, a fullback for the Philadelphia Liberty Belles, is an exception. Still an active player, she spoke of being a lesbian in a December 2001 Sports Illustrated interview.

“Nervous? Oh yeah, I was very nervous,” said Wykes, 35, whose partner Karen Ericsson also plays on the Independent Women’s Football League team. “When I saw it in print, I thought, ‘Oh God.’ It wasn’t easy.”

Wykes said she’s glad to be out. “It’s had an impact on young people’s lives. One young man came up to me at the [gay] pride parade with two young women. They said, if I could do it, they could do it.”

Bean also is proud that young gay people look up to him.

“I’m a living example of living an open and honest life,” Bean said. “I’m a role model for a lot of kids and I feel a lot of responsibility for that. I would have loved to have read this when I was 19 years old. It would have changed my life.”