Why is Everyone So Shock that a Young Boxer Would Come Out?
Orlando Cruz has announced he is gay. Photograph: Dennis M Rivera Pichardo/AP
Since the carefully and successfully choreographed outing of Welsh rugby ace Gareth Thomas there has been a slow but steady drip-feed of sportsmen following his lead. Not all of them will be given the plaudit of a Hollywood biopic pitch, but each has added a layer to the snowball of sporting inclusivity. A Swedish footballer, an English cricketer and now Puerto Rican featherweight boxer Orlando Cruz have made their own minor splashes.
In each news item the spectre of the ghost of gay sports' past, Justin Fashanu, has been evoked and woven through the reportage. At each point the reference of implicit tragedy has felt less relevant.
Here's the thing. Where there are groups of men involved in close physical contact, there will likely be some sort of gay attraction, both covert and overt. It is no big reveal. There is something in "the sound, the smell and the spray", as Morrissey sang in Boxers. Christopher Isherwood wrote in detail of the playful wrestling he exchanged for foreplay in his LA years memoirs. The squashed noses and split lips of Bruce Weber's hyper-masculine photography have wrought art from the erotic subtext of boxing. Reggie Kray sitting ringside at Bethnal Green boxing meets held its own special subtext, spelt out in riveting emotional detail in Jake Arnott's underworld thriller, The Long Firm, and the opening frames of The Long Good Friday.
So being surprised that a gay boxer exists is a little like being surprised that gay activity exists in prisons, the army or boarding school dormitories. The sliding scale of testosterone exchange is a broad, welcoming and sometimes titillating church. Long before Orlando Cruz joined the burgeoning league of elite gay sportsfolk, boxing had transparent gay heat. The story of the writer who entered the changing room of 1960s welterweight champ Emile Griffiths and found him kissing his cornerman cannot be isolated.
Perhaps it is time to stop seeing these personal stories as exceptional, standalone news items and start looking at the wider culture around them. When I heard about Cruz's decision to declare his sexuality, I could map out a familiar pattern – the placebo Stonewall award, the gay magazine cover, a couple of appropriate grooming sponsorships, perhaps even a minor ruckus with a fellow sportsman. Not to diminish his story, Cruz's was in the recent succession of Ricky Martin's page-break in the Catholic dialogue still dominating Latin cultures. The interesting aspect of his story is not sporting but cultural and religious. How gay firsts in sport are yet to come? Should we steady ourselves for the grand reveal of the first openly gay darts player? Actually, that would be kind of genius. Boxing has always been hardwired to underworld glamour, pristine routine and the thrill of controlled, regimented touch.
Each of these individual sporting narratives has accrued an emblematic momentum outside of the weight of its own significance. It is time for institutional acknowledgement and acceptance to lessen the drama. And we may be closer than we think.
It was the gentlemanly Italian national football manager Cesare Prandelli who most prominently shot the obvious undertones of homosexuality and sport into the wider world. Earlier this year the author Alessandro Cecchi Paone asked Prandelli to furnish him with a forward for his book The Champion of Love: The Banned Games of Sport, a work hinting at a gay slant to the Azzuri. Prandelli returned the request with a wonderful, liberating missive, making him the first global spokesman to hint at an institutional urgency for modernisation to match the personal narratives of individual sportsmen.
"In the world of football and of sport in general," he wrote, "there is still a taboo around homosexuality. Everyone ought to live freely with themselves, their desires and their sentiments. We must all work for a sporting culture that respects the individual in every manifestation of his truth and freedom. Hopefully soon players will come out."
In 2012 there should be no surprise that gay men excel at sport. The personal stories of gay sportsmen are just a natural manifestation of the homo-friendly subtext of men touching each other professionally. It is the wider bodies that organise, police and monetise these sportsmen that need to sort out an arena in which comings out of Orlando Cruz's type do not necessitate breaking news. The lead to follow here is not Gareth Thomas's, as fantastic as that was, but Cesare Prandelli’s.
Comments