Boxing for everyone

I haven't seen Million Dollar Baby yet. I'll probably end up watching it on DVD. People are surprised, but for a long time I had trouble with the idea of women boxing. I thought they should know better than to want to hit each other. Now I know better. Gay men are not supposed to like hitting each other, either. I always chuckle at the line in Tough Enough when Battling Gay Bob pummels Art Long, the Country-Western Warrior, who says to his cornerman, "I thought this guy likes men." "He does," his cornerman says. "He's hittin' on you, ain't he?"

In some ways women and gay men are fighting the same fight, to be accepted by the sport, but from opposite corners, maybe even different rings.

I was 24 when I started boxing, or, I should say, again, at a gym in Falls Church, VA. The fighters were a mix of white collar, blue collar, and guys who'd been in trouble with the law. While waiting for the trainer before my first lesson I was speaking with a black kid, about 16 or so, who had just been released from a juvenile hall; his social worker had recommended he take up boxing to control his aggression. I don't know how the subject came up, or if he sensed something about me, but he said that in juvi he'd "known some fags--and even some lady fags."

Patty was the only woman who came to the gym regularly. At the time women were not legally allowed to box as amateurs or as pros--at least, no state commission would give them a license--and few of them ever showed up at male-dominated boxing gyms. Despite being the odd one out, Patty worked hard in the gym, sparring with guys and winning their respect.

I identified with Patty: she bravely entered what was then exclusively a straight man's world. I secretly envied her because she was able to be herself and accepted for who she was. I, on the other hand, felt I had to pass in a straight boxing gym. There was no one else in the gym who was gay--at least none I could identify. Maybe, like me, they felt they had to hide who they were.

As I child I never played sports, but even before puberty I was secretly attracted to boxing, drawn to its masculinity, its power and intimacy. As Joyce Carol Oates asserted, it's one of the few sports in which it's socially acceptable for two men to hug or kiss each other after a fight. As a teen I watched a tough fight that ended with the fighters briefly kissing--on the lips--before the decision. It was the first time I'd ever seen such obviously masculine men express affection for each other.

I had street fights growing up, but my first boxing match wasn't until the seventh grade. My classmate Richie's dad had been a Navy boxer, and one day he pulled out his father's black 16 oz gloves and asked me if I wanted to box. "No bloodbaths!" Richie's mom called as we stepped outside into the yard. Richie hit me so hard between the eyes I got a headache. it would be another dozen years before I'd get the nerve to put on the gloves again.

When I first took up boxing I felt like an outsider, an intruder, a spy. Like Patty, I trained hard and gained everyone's respect, but sometimes it seemed I was compromising my identity. If anyone suspected I was gay, they never let on. I became friends with Bobby, an ex-con, and Alan, a heavyset guy who was a bit of a loner. Bobby said I was easy to talk to, and I sensed he knew something was different about me but couldn't quite put his finger on it.

In 1993 I had my first amateur fight, at the Rainbow Gloves, an all-gay boxing tournament organized by the Bay Area Boxing Club. It was the first time I'd been in an environment with other gay people who seriously trained and felt as I did about boxing. I never felt as much pride as I did that day. I fought a guy from Seattle and scored a draw. One of the most impressive bouts was between Cappy Kotz, a lesbian coach from Seattle, and one of her trainers. That was the first time I saw two women box. I had mixed feelings about it, but that was mostly because I had been drawn to boxing in the first place because of its masculinity. But like me, these women had claimed boxing as their own.

A year later, a 16-year-old girl, Dallas Malloy of Washington State, challenged USA Boxing's bylaw banning females from competition. She won.

Support for boxing among the gay establishment has not been forthcoming. In the early 1990s I was part of a group that tried to petition to include it in the Gay Games. The reaction of the organizers was far from welcoming. It was fine to embrace the more obviously sexy sport of wrestling or the less brutal martial arts, but boxing was not quite socially acceptable. To this day it is still not included in the Games.

There are many gays who box, more than anyone realizes. In 2003 Charles Jones, aka the Pink Pounder, became the first openly gay boxer licensed in the UK.

In every gym I've trained at it's not important whether you're straight, gay, male, female, uncoordinated. What matters is that you work hard and have heart. Boxing is about relying on yourself, and that's what makes it attractive to me. The title of Cappy Kotz's best-selling instructional book says it all: Boxing For Everyone.