Boxing and homosexuality 2: Orlando Cruz

Boxers, homosexuality, and the tribe

What a difference a half-century makes. American welterweight champion Emile Griffith was born in 1938 and boxed in the 1960s and 1970s. His culture had no language for speaking about bi-sexuality or homosexuality—no language, perhaps, except the law. As recently as 1998 men were arrested in Texas for homosexual activity; at the time thirteen states criminalized homosexual acts. A Supreme Court decision in 2003 invalidated the Texas statute.

Griffith was alone. His successor in the minute category of the gay or bi-sexual boxer is not. He is Orlando Cruz, a Puerto Rican featherweight who represented Puerto Rico in the 2000 Olympics in Sidney. Born in 1982, Cruz boxed from 2000 to 2018. In 2012 he identified himself as a gay man. Unlike Griffith, Cruz could join a gay tribe. He could speak gay to those were ready to hear him.

In Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, Sebastian Junger explains how tribes create security and happiness. He emphasizes the dangers of not having a tribe. His model is the man who returns from combat and finds himself disconnected from the world he once called home. Junger believes all of us, not just combat veterans, need tribes. 

The gay boxer is not what most people expect a boxer to be. Boxers might not welcome him because he is gay; gay men might not welcome him because he boxes. Which is his tribe? Must he choose?

We earn our place in a tribe. The gay boxer passes one test of masculinity but fails another. By getting into the ring and fighting, he demonstrates strength and skill far beyond the powers of most of the men watching him. By declaring himself a gay man, the pro boxer takes the risk that these same observers—the vast majority of them heterosexual—will believe, by their standards, that he is inferior. His sexual behavior outweighs his achievements in the ring.

Cruz’s great courage in coming out was widely hailed and is still celebrated. In October 2012 he issued a press release about his sexuality, just two weeks before his featherweight title fight with Jorge Pazos in Kissimmee, Florida, which he won. His announcement and subsequent victory made history, as USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Forbes, Time magazine, and numerous other media not famous for their boxing coverage quickly noted. After the announcement, Cruz was sometimes booed, as he was before a title fight with Orlando Salido in London in 2013—but not often. He continued to fight and to win.

Cruz was written about in The New Yorker magazine in 2016. His victory over Alejandro Valdez that year for the NBO Super Featherweight title was dedicated to victims of the mass gay nightclub shooting in Orlando a month earlier (49 dead); the fight was held in nearby Kissimmee. In 2017 Cruz was featured as a LGBTQ “trailblazer” in an ad campaign by the apparel manufacturer Lululemon, which aimed to showcase “men around the world who are challenging the tired, traditional stereotypes of masculinity in positive ways.” In 2018 he was the star of two large summer events in Chicago, the Puerto Rican People’s Parade and, one week later, the city’s huge Pride Parade. In May 2020 Telemundo celebrated his coming out and his boxing record with a special program.

Cruz’s 2012 announcement was good for boxers and for gay men. The New Yorker article by boxing writers John Florio and Ouisie Shapiro (authors of One Punch from the Promise Land, a book about Leon and Michael Spinks) treats 2012 as a marker in Cruz’s boxing record as well as in boxing history. The authors note that Cruz had won seven of nine fights in the four years between his announcement and the appearance of the article, which turns out to be a marker of its own. In 2016 Cruz held the North American Boxing Organization’s super featherweight title. But shortly after the article appeared Cruz did not win the World Boxing Organization World Lightweight championship, which he lost to Terry Flanagan. That fight ended the best phase of Cruz’s career. He went on to lose two more fights, draw one, and then retire.

Cruz started fighting in 2000 and compiled a lifetime record of 25 wins, 7 losses, and 2 draws (25/34), 74% wins. Before his 2012 announcement his record was 18-2-1 (18/21), 86% wins. Cruz won seven bouts after the 2012 announcement but lost five; for fights held after the announcement, his record was 7-5-1 (7/13), 54% wins. His last boxing years were unimpressive. Do these facts suggest anything about the relationship of his announcement to his boxing career?

We know that Griffith’s boxing record declined sharply after he caused the death of Benny “Kid” Paret in 1962. Griffith seems to have lost confidence in his self-control after this disaster and to have become a more cautious—and hence less-successful—boxer. Gay life caught up with Griffith before his death in 2013. He made the New  York Times in an interview shortly before he rode in the Gay Pride parade in the city in 2007. He was a guest of the Stonewall Veterans Association and was vice-president of the group. Much more recognition came after his death, however, including an unprecedented number of dramatic and musical works based on his life. Griffith had a record of 85-24-2, over three times as many fights as Cruz had, and by the time he was recognized as a sexual pioneer, dementia had set in.

Cruz had a much better experience as a gay boxer than Griffith could have had as a bi-sexual boxer. It does not seem likely that there is a connection between Cruz’s announcement of his gayness and the sharp decline in his win percentage that we see above. Did his opponents get tougher? Apparently they did not. Boxingrec.com rates both boxers in a given match using a system of one to five stars, where five stars mean that those boxers are among the best 100 boxers, three stars put them among the best 900, two among the best 2,700, and one star among the best 8,100 boxers.

In his boxing career Cruz had only four three-star fights, two before 2012 and two after; he lost them all. Most of his fights were two-star fights, including his last losses, although earlier he had won six matches against two-star boxers. Cruz boxed for 18 years and had 34 fights. Depending on where you look, you will see that the average featherweight has a career of about 14 years and fights about six times per year, more than Cruz at his busiest. Cruz had five fights in one year and four fights in each of two years, including in 2016. But he averaged fewer than two fights per year and also fought at the lower levels of competition, one- or two-star matches.

Cruz’s leadership on the gay front outshines his boxing career. To be a hero to homosexuals, Cruz did not need to be a champion, but he did need to be a professional boxer. It has been said that Benny “Kid” Paret’s hostility to Griffith’s sexual identity, which led to Paret’s fatal injuries in the ring, stemmed from the homophobia of Paret’s Latino culture (he was Cuban). Cruz was born in Puerto Rico and has surely endured and overcome the same homophobic prejudice.

Things have changed since Cruz’s retirement. For example, in February 2023 Gay Boxing Championships were held in Sydney, part of Sydney’s WorldPride 2023 festival, which was a mix of arts, sports, and human rights discussions. There were two days of amateur fights, each lasting for three two-minute rounds. Speaking of tribes, I note that Sydney WorldPride took place “on the lands of the Gadigal, Cammeraygal, Bidjigal, Darug, Dharawal people who are the Traditional Custodians of the Sydney Basin.”

There is now a Wiki page that lists LGBT boxers, including sixteen women and eight men. Most of the fighters are contemporary and clearly belong both to gay-lesbian tribes and the tribe of fighters, the limits of which they are helping to redefine.

The Wiki page also offers a few examples of lost lives of historical interest, men who brushed with fame and the very famous. Three stand out.

Most notable is the bantamweight Panamanian Alfonso Teofilo Brown (Panama Al Brown; 1902-1951), who was the first Latin American world champion. He had 163 fights, with 129 victories, an amazing record. He is ranked among the greatest of all bantamweight boxers and was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1992. Brown also enjoyed a career in gay cabaret in Paris, where he shared an apartment with Jean Cocteau, the French poet and a leader of the surrealist movement. Cocteau also managed some of Brown’s boxing career. When he needed medical treatment, Brown received financial assistance from Cocteau’s close friend, Coco Chanel, one of the most important figures in the history of fashion. (There is, fortunately, a full-length biography of the extraordinary Brown; I can’t wait to read it.)

Then there is the German Norbert Grupe (known as Wilhelm von Homburg; 1940-2004). He boxed from 1962 to 1970, after having had a pro wrestling career that he shared with his father. He had a minor film career following some time in prison for selling marijuana to a cop. He worked with German director Werner Herzog in Stroszek (1977) and appeared in Die Hard (1988) and in Ghostbusters II (1989). Sadly, he died a homeless man.

A distinction of a different kind belongs to Canadian boxer Mark Leduc (1962-2009). He won a silver medal in boxing at the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics. He spoke as an anonymous gay athlete on CBC Radio in 1993 and came out a year later in a television documentary called For the Love of the Game. He was a grand marshal in the 1999 Toronto Pride Parade. Like Cruz, who was also an Olympic boxer, Leduc lived in an era in which it was possible for gay boxers to identify themselves. But there seems to have been no notice of his 1994 announcement that he was gay, chiefly because, after his Olympic success, Leduc had only five fights as a pro, winning four of them. That said, Leduc deserves credit for coming out as an athlete and an advocate for his gay tribe. He did not box long enough to leave a mark in the tribe of fighters.

Griffith and Cruz have earned admiration for their bravery as boxers who also belonged to a tribe many boxing fans shun. But these two boxers are not the whole story. A brief look at their lives and careers leads us to the lives of other boxing men whose sexual behavior does not fit the boxer stereotype. The three men noted above, Brown, von Homburg, and Leduc, are rarely mentioned. But they are important. They show us that long before Griffith’s time the tribe of the fighter had made room for at least a few members who pushed against the narrow limits so often imposed on the man who boxes.

Books by Allen Frantzen

2022. Boxing and Masculinity: Fighting to Find the Whole Man. Amazon e-book $3.99
      https://www.amazon.com/Boxing-Masculinity-Fighting-Find-Whole/dp/1667851829

2016. Modern Masculinity: A Guide for Men. $2.99

https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Masculinity-Guide-Allen-Frantzen-ebook/dp/B01J6K6T86.

Also available as La Masculinidad Moderna: Guía Para El Hombre.

https://www.amazon.com/Masculinidad-Moderna-Gu%C3%ADa-Hombre-Spanish-ebook/dp/B072M1VSFC

2023. Allen reviews 100 boxing books at

http://www.allenjfrantzen.com/Boxing/bookblog.htm