Before Kevin McClatchy came out as gay, he called ‘the midwife’ for help
The New York Times wasn’t going to publish his story until nighttime — so, Kevin McClatchy had some work to do.
Mr. McClatchy, the Pirates’ lead owner from 1996-2007, was about to come out as gay in the most high-profile news outlet in the country. Before that, though, he started a marathon phone session, calling politicians, baseball colleagues and business people to tell them what was set to happen. He says he rang close to 100 people, including thenMLB commissioner Bud Selig and Rob Manfred, Mr. Selig’s eventual successor.
“A lot of phone calls,” Mr. McClatchy said this week. “I remember that.”
The article, posted the night of Sept. 22, 2012, made Mr. McClatchy one of the first major sports executives in the country to come out publicly as gay. To help him with that process, he turned to public relations guru Howard Bragman, the architect of many celebrities’ coming-out strategies.
“He was sort of the one reassuring me that the skies weren’t going to fall after it happened,” Mr. McClatchy said.
While coming out is typically a private process, it can be especially thorny for sports figures like Mr. McClatchy. Mr.
Bragman, the founder of Los Angeles-based communications agency Fifteen Minutes, has worked with openly LGBT celebrities since 1991, when he helped TV actors Dick Sargent and Sheila Kuehl come out to the public.
“Most people can come out once. They come out to their family, they come out to their friends, they come out to their colleagues,” Mr. Bragman said. “When you’re a celebrity, you have to come out again and again.”
In addition to Mr. McClatchy, Mr. Bragman has worked with former NBA player John Amaechi; professional golfer Rosie Jones; CNN anchor Don Lemon; Michael Sam, the first openly gay NFL draft pick; and former WNBA star Sheryl Swoopes.
“I consider myself the midwife for people to come out,” Mr. Bragman, 61, said.
In 2007, Mr. McClatchy stepped away from the Pirates organization. The challenges of leading a losing team and getting PNC Park built, on top of keeping his personal life a secret, had worn on him.
“The culmination of the two put together, it was clear for me, at that time, that I needed to make a change,” he said.
So he retreated to his home in Ligonier, where he lives with his now-husband, Jack Basilone, and their infant son, Connor. After Rick Welts, then-CEO of the Phoenix Suns, came out as gay, Mr. McClatchy decided to return to the public eye.
“I read his story and I thought that there seemed to be momentum, and it was a better time for me to do it,” Mr. McClatchy said.
It was also the right time to call Mr. Bragman, who met Mr. McClatchy through former MLB player Billy Bean. Mr. Bean, who is one of Mr. Bragman’s best friends, had come out in 1999; he was also one of the people Mr. McClatchy called before the Times article was posted online.
Mr. McClatchy and Mr. Bragman made their plans: Mr. McClatchy would sit for interviews with New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, whose work Mr. McClatchy admired and who hada strong relationship with Mr. Bragman and with ESPN.
“That worked so well that that was the playbook we used for Michael Sam,” Mr. Bragman said.
Mr. Bragman said he also reached out to major LGBT organizations, like the Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD, to develop posti nterview press releases in support of Mr. McClatchy’s story. As for all those telephone calls, Mr. Bragman said those too are a regular feature of the public comingout process.
For Mr. Amaechi, a former Academic All-American at Penn State who lives in London, the process was different. Nophone calls necessary — in 2007, when he came out in his memoir, his friends, colleagues and family had long known he was gay.
“I was pretty much out in the way most people are out,” he said.
But he wanted to show that, as he put it, “pseudointellectual six-foot-nine black folks” can be gay, too.
“I saw an opportunity to enlighten people,” he said. “Don’t forget, this was back in the mid-2000s, so it was a point when all gay people were Jack or Will from ‘Will & Grace,’” he said, referring to a sitcom about white young professionals.
So he got an assist from Mr. Bragman. Mr. Amaechi said he didn’t want to vet the media outlets for interviews after the book was published, so he enlisted Mr. Bragman to manage the process.
“I’ve never seen anyone work harder,” Mr. Bragman said of Mr. Amaechi. “By the end of the first day, he was Teflon.”
Despite that tough exterior, and the fact that he was already out to so many people, Mr. Amaechi still found the prospect of publicly revealing his sexual orientation to be “pretty terrifying.” He received weekly death threats for the first few years after his book was published.
“They weren’t messing around,” he said. “I had one email where somebody sent me a picture of myself from a book signing.”
With a doctorate in psychology and a love of “Star Wars” and “Star Trek,” he also felt that writing his own book would provide a more holistic picture of his background and accomplishments than leaving his story up to media outlets.
“Far more important than knowing I am gay,” he said, “is knowing I am a geek.”
Mr. Bragman knew Mr. McClatchy wanted to maintain his sense of self, too, as a golfer, a major sports figure in a town of Rooneys and the chairman of a newspaper chain — who happened to be gay.
“This is a guy who really, really embraced it, changed himself, changed the community,” Mr. Bragman said.
And embracing it, Mr. McClatchy has found, has turned out to be a relief.
“It was, as I say, a story for a day, and then you move on,” Mr. McClatchy said.
After a pause, he added: “In a positive way.”
Indeed, the skies still haven’t fallen. Elizabeth Bloom: ebloom@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1750 and Twitter: @BloomPG.