Boxing and homosexuality 1: Emile Griffith

Life, death, and masculinity in the ring

The gay boxer is an apparent contradiction. Boxing is sometimes considered to be the most masculine, manly, or macho of sports, seen as hypermasculine. Homosexuality, on the other hand, is often (if wrongly) regarded as hypomasculine. Hypomasculinity, which racks up a mere 1010 Google hits (hypermasculinity gets 1,320,000), is “a psychological term for the absence of male stereotypical traits.”

We seldom get a chance to test the paradox of the gay boxer because boxers who stand outside the traditional heterosexual model and who seem less than hypermasculine are rare. In this post and the next I look at two boxers who were homosexual or bisexual, Emile Griffith (b. 1938, d. 2013) and Orlando Cruz (b. 1982, retired 2019).

Griffith was a good boxer. In the 20 years that he fought (1958-1977), he held championship titles in welterweight, junior middleweight, and middleweight divisions and compiled a very good but not stellar record (85-24-2, 23 knockouts).

Griffith was known as bisexual playboy. As Ron Ross notes in his 2008 biography, it was possible to keep gayness in the closet in the 1960s and 1970s, which were Griffith’s fighting years, chiefly because there was no public way to discuss homosexuality, which had long been regarded as a criminal activity. Griffith claimed to prefer women to men, but not everybody accepted his ruse. His reputation as a gay man led to a disaster that shadowed the last 50 years of his life.

Oliver Mayer wrote a play called “Blade to the Heat” about a gay boxer that seems to pick up elements of Griffith’s life and career. The play concentrates on discrimination against gay men and was staged in New York (1994, 2006) and in Los Angeles (1996). Griffith’s life is also the subject of a 2005 DVD by Ron Berger and Dan Klores called Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story, which Griffith saw. Drawing on the film and on Ross’s book, jazz trumpeter and composer Terrence Blanchard, with librettist Michael Cristofer, turned Griffith’s story into an opera. “The Champion” premiered in St. Louis in 2013, the year of Griffith’s death, and has been performed in Washington, D.C., New Orleans, and elsewhere. In Spring 2023 it will appear at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the gold standard of the U.S. opera world. Reviews suggest that the work, which I have not seen, focuses on institutional racism and homophobia, not on boxing. Another biography, this one by Donald McRae appeared, in 2015.

The cover of Ross’s book (seen above, adapted from The Ring magazine) captures the contradictions of Griffith’s life, a grinning boxer, gloves raised, wearing a goofy lavender hat (a crown), seemingly sitting on top of the world. The book’s subtitle is “the two worlds of Emile Griffith,” but what are they? Boxing and—silly hats? It falls to the last words of the title, “and Out!” (in lavender type) to tell us that the other world is gay.

Griffith grew up in poverty in the Virgin Islands. He arrived in New York at age 14 and was discovered by Howard Albert, a manager in a hat factory. When he saw Griffith, who worked there, without a shirt, Albert decided that the young man had a boxer’s build. Albert had a background in boxing and had contacts in the boxing world. Griffith, a talented athlete, became a boxer.

Once he succeeded as a pro, Griffith connected his personal world to his boxing world and relished opportunities to exhibit his private side in public (Ross, p. 18). In a 1966 article in Sports Illustrated  cheekily titled “Camping Out with the Champ,” Milton Gross describes Griffith’s home:

“The wall-to-wall carpet in poinsettia red is what first strikes you when you enter the living room of Emile Griffith's apartment. Then the cupids decorating the wall and the delicate furniture: the twin French Provincial tufted couches, the spindly-legged end table supporting a pink Princess telephone.  . . . The style is parvenu modern, or, in the hip phrase, high camp. Everything was bought personally by Griffith, the middleweight champion of the world.”

With his flashy clothes, disco mania, and mix of boyfriends and girlfriends, Griffith maintained an image that would be considered risky for boxers even today, when few openly gay men compete in contact sports, including those that showcase masculinity less ostentatiously than boxing does.

Before his fight with Gaspar Ortega in 1961, for example, Griffith gave an interview on fashions in women’s hats; Griffith won the match (Ross, p. 45). In 1964, arriving in England for a match with Brian Curvis, Griffith presented Curvis’s wife with a hat that he had created for her (Ross, p. 112), surely a first in the boxing world. He also won that match.

Were these examples of reverse psychology, part of the team’s pre-fight strategy of lowering expectations? The speculation that these events fueled would not have been to Griffith’s advantage, but no apparent damage was done. In their 1961 fight, Griffith stopped Ortega early in the twelfth round. In 83 fights, Ortega had been defeated but had never been stopped. The smirking about Griffith’s gayness faded, if only for a while (Ross, pp. 46-47).

Griffith insisted on standing out. Few are the boxers who design women’s hats. Fewer are the boxers whose mothers pick them up and carry them around, as Griffith’s mother did; Ross includes a picture of her doing so (p. 157). Some of this was defiance on the boxer’s part, and some of it was naivety. Griffith’s eccentricities undercut his reputation. He cultivated an image that emphasized his “kind disposition, gentleness and love of everyone,” in Albert’s view, a rarity in boxing (Ross, p. 48).

If you watch Ring of Fire you will see that the boxer is low-key, soft-spoken, and charming. He seems utterly sincere and comes across as a tender man closely connected to a large family whose financial burdens he willingly assumed. Yet he fueled gossip about his sex life, and even as a champion Griffith must have seemed like an easy target. That brings us to the disaster.

Griffith’s place in boxing history is based on the end of a single round with Benny “Kid” Paret, whom Griffith fought three times. He defeated Paret in April 1961, winning the New York State Athletic Commission title, the National Boxing Association title, and The Ring welterweight title. But in September 1961, in a split decision, he lost them to Paret. In their 1962 rematch Griffith regained these titles but hurt Paret badly. In a few seconds, Griffith pounded Paret with “twenty-one full force blows,” even though Paret’s “upper body was outside the ropes, his arm tangled in the middle strand” (Ross, p. 64). The event was witnessed by some 14 million television viewers and it helped to close the door on televised boxing for many years. The twenty-five-year-old Cuban boxer died of his injuries twelve days later.

Unfortunately for everyone concerned, the fatal fight was connected to Griffith’s sexual persona. In 1961, before the fight in which he took the middleweight title from the champ, Paret called him maricon [faggot]. That was “the first time anyone made fun of me like that,” Griffith said. He added that Paret’s remark “started me thinking of other things” (Ross, p. 50). Before their fight in 1962, Paret stood behind Griffith at the weigh-in, and, according to Griffith, made “suggestive motions with his body.” Others confirmed that Paret said, “Hey, maricon, I’m going to get you and your husband!” (Ross, p. 58). Boxing historian Bert Blewett calls this encounter a “rumor” (A to Z, p. 127), but I have not seen the anecdote challenged elsewhere. Indeed, other sources confirm it.

Ross does not elaborate on the “other things” that Paret’s slur brought to Griffith’s mind in 1961. Readers might suppose that they included physical abuse by the aunt who raised Griffith (she beat him; see Ross, p. 12), and, later, homosexual encounters at an orphanage (p. 18). If we expand Griffith’s comment about “other things” to include these shaming experiences, his attack in the 1962 fight can be seen as a response to something more than Paret’s pre-fight strategy. When that fight ended, Griffith returned to the dressing room, according to Ross, and wept. Griffith said he was “asking myself if I could have been so angry that I wanted to kill him. . . . I had to admit that I hated him so much for what he said but I really didn’t hate him—the person—Benny Paret” (p. 65). In 1963, Griffith claimed in a boxing and wrestling magazine that it was all behind him (see above for the cover; below, Paret being carried from the ring).

Griffith has, then, two distinctions, his reputation as a gay or bi-sexual boxer and his role as a boxer who killed an opponent. Many people mistakenly see boxing as an outlet for anger and rage. For them, boxing serves a hydraulic model of emotions (a model psychologists dismiss as naive). In that model, feelings are liquid. They heat up, boil, and then burst out under pressure, overwhelming (in this case) both the boxer and his opponent. The thinner the skin, the more likely the boxer is to blow up. Griffith was likely to blow up, in this model, for he certainly was thin-skinned. His behavior in 1962 confirms the worst of the stereotypes about boxing as mindless—or mindful—excess.

Boxing is a martial art. It requires 1) greater strength and faster responses than most men have and 2) more emotional self-control and restraint than most  men have. Absent the second factor, the boxer is a deadly force. Since 1895 over 90 boxers, male and female, around the world have died of injuries sustained in the ring (and probably more; list are incomplete).

There is much to admire in Griffith. His interests and enthusiasms did not confirm to accepted standards of the masculine. It was courageous, if not foolhardy, to pursue them as openly as he did. They not only inspired scorn from Paret and his handlers but also led them, unwisely, to underestimate Griffith’s power and perhaps, at the same time, to exaggerate Paret’s dominance. When Paret fought him in 1961, Griffith’s record was 23 and 2; in 1962 it was 25 and 3 (reflecting the loss to Paret); for their last fight it was 29 and 3. But Paret had only one fight between his second and third matches with Griffith, and he lost it. Griffith won four fights in the same interval, with no losses. Paret’s record at this death was 35-12-3. Griffith was losing one fight in ten, while Paret was losing one in three.

Just as Paret was unable to overcome his homophobia, Griffith was unable to control his anger in the ring. It might be that Paret’s slurs in 1961 awakened a history of shame and guilt in Griffith. In 1962 he had had a year to nurse his grudges. Personal attacks at weigh-in or elsewhere are strategic; no one was better at this than Muhammad Ali. These attacks aim to unsettle the opponent, inspire fear, and sap his confidence. Paret might have had one or more of these objectives. They have to be resisted. Griffith did not resist them. Anyone looking at those final seconds, with Griffith hammering Paret’s unprotected head, will see the outburst as murderous violence, not good boxing, and something more than revenge for a sexual slur.

As we hear in “Ring of Fire,” some pros believed that Griffith was a lazy boxer who only came to life or “went to work” when he had to, when he had been hit. The immediate cause of his deadly fury in round 12 of his third fight with Paret is not apparent. But what you can see on the DVD is that Griffith knew that he had his antagonist at a rare disadvantage, stunned, caught in the ropes, and unable to defend himself. Yet Griffith continued to blast hooks at Paret’s head. No one could survive such a battering.

Much was written about the referee’s failure to step in. But the fault does not lie with him, or with boxing as a sport. It lies with Emile Griffith, who as a man felt free to cross lines other boxers refused to cross. Griffith was willing to pay the price for his flamboyant transgressions, his talents as a milliner included, even if he seemed puzzled by the responses his behavior prompted. So long as he was willing to take the consequences, no one could object. But in his last fight with Paret Griffith crossed another line and vented murderous rage on a helpless opponent.

Griffith paid the lesser price of a different kind of death. He received hate mail, suffered a loss of respect, and lost one more thing, his confidence. Although he had nearly 80 fights after Paret’s death, Griffith lost or drew 23 of them. He was now losing one fight in four, not one in ten, which was his percentage before the third fight with Paret. After Paret’s death Griffith compiled a record that was not significantly better Paret’s own.

In Blanchard’s opera, Griffith has a line that addresses the paradox of a world that accepted death in boxing but not homosexuality: “I kill a man and the world forgives me. I love a man and the world wants to kill me.” Griffith made much of his sexual preferences outside the ring, but then objected when others used his behavior against him. He never saw himself as a man who could both love some men and fight others.

Those who insist that great boxers must be heterosexual are confusing dominance—which every sport privileges—with heterosexual dominance. Homosexuals and bisexuals can dominate heterosexuals in the boxing ring, something Griffith proved over and over. Some fans cannot reconcile gay sexual preference with the masculine image of the boxer. Today, few care about Griffith’s sexuality. But everybody cares about life and death. I very much doubt that the opera is right in claiming that the world forgave Griffith for killing a man.

Those who cannot recognize excellence in gay athletes misunderstand contact sports as a theater of heterosexual masculinity. Boxing is a theater of masculinity, period. Boxers are supposed to abstain from sex for days, even weeks, before their fights (see Boxing and Masculinity, ch. 21). That rule, if it had merit (few think it has), would apply to any kind of sex. Griffith demonstrated that a man’s sex choices are not related to his power as a boxer any more than his sex acts are. His emotional life should not have been related to boxing, either, but it was. Most gay ir bi- men cannot box. Neither can most straight men. The stereotypes that get in the way of understanding gay boxers are not simply stereotypes about homosexuality. They are also stereotypes about boxing itself. Griffith had the unhappy fate of confirming the worst stereotypes in both categories through a single weakness, his lack of discipline.

More on boxing and masculinity from Allen

Men Are Good / Interview with Janice Fiamengo and Tom Golden

https://menaregood.locals.com/post/3233543/boxing-and-masculinity-fighting-to-find-the-whole-man

Amazon e-book $3.99

Boxing And Masculinity: Fighting to Find the Whole Man
https://www.amazon.com/Boxing-Masculinity-Fighting-Find-Whole/dp/1667851829