When I asked Equality Florida Executive Director Nadine Smith to identify local allies of the LGBT community, she immediately cited the Tampa Bay Rays, and in particular the team’s president, Brian Auld.
She noted that the Rays were one of only three major league sports teams (the others being the San Francisco Giants and the New England Patriots) to sign onto an amicus brief filed last year with the U.S. Supreme Court in favor of same-sex marriage. They were also among the teams that made anti-bullying “It Gets Better” videos in 2011. In the days after Smith and I spoke, we would see the team stand in solidarity with Orlando, transforming its annual Pride Night into a profoundly moving tribute that raised more than $300,000 for EQFL’s Pulse Victims Fund.
For Auld, the team’s visibility on these issues is nothing remarkable.
“At the top of this organization,” he says, “there is no doubt about where we stand regarding LGBT equality under the law.”
Auld himself is straight, and the father of three. During our phone conversation on the day before Pride Night, he said that if he sounded tired it might be because his kids’ ages are 4, 2 and 9 months.
His own support of LGBT rights goes back to an early career experience. After graduating from Stanford (with a bachelor’s in economics and a master’s in education), he taught fourth grade in a charter school in E. Palo Alto, California, where his co-teacher was a lesbian. “Working side by side with a gay woman for many years helped me understand how difficult it was” for LGBT people, he says.
That was in the early 2000s; years later, his former colleague was working on marriage equality and he was with the Rays, and she reached out to him about the team signing the amicus brief.
His interest in charter schools led Auld to get an MBA from Harvard Business School, but an opportunity came along in 2005 to join a former high school classmate, Matt Silverman, on a different career path. Silverman, then president of the Rays, brought him on as the team’s director of planning and development, and when Silverman took over as GM in 2014, Auld was promoted to president.
His dream has been “to turn a true community asset into something that could make a major impact on the region.” Though the team’s (and its stadium’s) fate remains a subject of much conjecture, there’s no doubt that it has made a concerted attempt to forge a good relationship with LGBT fans. Its Pride Night collaboration with St. Pete Pride, which began in 2007, is a prime example.
Has there been pushback over the years?
“Absolutely,” he says. “With anything that we do we get letters from fans, their displeasure with a stance one way or another.” And while the team strives for a delicate balance that allows for differences in opinion, his own position is clear: “This is the civil rights issue of our generation.”
On Pride Night the first pitch was thrown out by Billy Bean, the former major leaguer who is still the only player past or present to have come out as gay (he waited till after his playing days were over) and who now serves as MLB’s Vice President of Social Responsibility and Inclusion. Bean wrote about the struggles he went through as a closeted athlete in his book, Going the Other Way.
“Billy’s story is heartbreaking,” says Auld, who also thinks back to the playing days of Jason Collins, a college classmate who did not come out until years later after more than a decade in the NBA. “It could not have been a more gay-friendly environment than Stanford,” says Auld, and yet Collins told no one.
“It helps me to understand the depth of the issues,” he adds. “It’s great that we’re an ally, but I can’t pretend to understand the pressures.”
The prospect of a player coming out while still on an MLB team seems “inevitable” to him.
“But we’re not there yet.”
And if a member of the Rays came to him and said he wanted to come out?
“Our organization would work as closely with the player to be as supportive as possible. We want the player to control the message the way they want to be.”
This article appears in Jun 23-30, 2016.