Burke, who also died of AIDS-related causes in 1995, came out to the world outside baseball in a 1982 article for Inside Sports and even followed it up shortly after with an appearance on The Today Show with Bryant Gumbel. But his story was greeted by the rest of the news media and the baseball establishment, including Burke's former teammates and baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, with silence. Even his superb autobiography, Out at Home, which published the year he died, failed to stir open conversation about homosexuality in sports. Practically no one in the sports-writing community would acknowledge that Burke was gay or report stories that followed up on his admission.
He told People magazine while promoting his book in 1995, "My mission as a gay ballplayer was the breaking of a stereotype ... I think it worked ... They can't ever say now that a gay man can't play in the majors, because I'm a gay man and I made it."
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/05/actually-jason-collins-isnt-the-first-openly-gay-man-in-a-major-pro-sport/275523/
Of course back in the 1980's and mid '90's, nobody in the media was pushing an agenda regarding gay marriage.
This is interesting and an instructive reminder that the left lies as a manner of course.
Go away Republican Troll. 
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