Pulling Punches
By David Damiani
When Denzel Washington won a Best Actor Oscar in 2002, one of his Hollywood cohorts put a damper on his triumphal evening with her appalling condescension. Julia Roberts, the award presenter, cheapened his well-deserved victory both with her incessant race-centered commentary and her patronizing announcement of the award. As commentator Ann Coulter caustically noted, Roberts managed to turn Washington's meritorious recognition into her "personal triumph over racism."
A similar convention seems to be afoot in the media's coverage of an arresting documentary that recently made its television premiere. Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story chronicles the life of a retired welterweight boxer, a multiple-time champion, still confronting the demons arising from a 1962 title bout in which his 23 unanswered twelfth-round punches ultimately left opponent Benny Paret dead.
While the documentary focuses on Griffith's and the Paret family's grief, culminating in a forgiving meeting and embrace between Griffith and Paret's son, it also touches on a subject that has dominated much of the recent coverage the story has received. Griffith was and is widely rumored to be homosexual, and Paret called Griffith a Spanish slang term for homosexual during an earlier match and at the weigh-in before their fateful encounter. And this has given many in the sports and other media occasion to lament the theoretical plight of the gay athlete and to spew chastisement toward society, and especially its sports fans, that it (as usual) perceives and assumes into evidence but never bothers to know.
Griffith has never admitted to being homosexual--though he did state to both the New York Times' Bob Herbert and Sports Illustrated's Gary Smith that he had pursued relationships with men as well as women. This hasn't stopped some coverage from calling him gay as a statement of fact. An Associated Press article on the documentary, which appeared in many major papers, refers to Paret's slur against Griffith but never treats it as more than speculative. Nonetheless, the Houston Chronicle referred to him as homosexual in the headline on that article. Even the measured documentary itself leaves in a few statements that treat Griffith's sexuality as conclusively proven, and the gay rights group GLAAD has presumptively championed Griffith, sponsoring a preview of Ring of Fire.
Smith explores the evidence in some detail in a major Sports Illustrated article, including the fact that Griffith frequented gay bars and was viciously beaten outside of one. But whatever revelations he provides are tempered amidst his obvious intent of chastising society--or at least, the sports fan component of it--for not accepting (or so he and the results of a sidebar survey assume) gay athletes. Though not as blatant a "shame on you!" condemnation as Herbert's piece, Smith's motives become clearer with his loose references to "hate crime" and the sports world's ostensible failure to move beyond 1962. After quoting a boxing trainer who suggests that a gay boxer should dominate his field before admitting his sexuality, Smith triumphantly concludes, "Five times world champion. That's sufficient [posterior] kicked." His story, and similar high-profile pieces like Herbert's, creepily come off like Roberts' remarks on Denzel Washington--as the writers' personal triumphs over anti-gay sentiment they perceive in the culture they breezily slander.
This creepiness manifests itself most in these authors' disturbing enthusiasm for getting to the bottom of Griffith's sexual preferences. Regardless of one's perception of Griffith's honesty as to his sexuality, no one deserves to be subject to a constant barrage of questions about that choice--to say nothing of some of the flimsier evidence that has been trotted out to support the portrait of Griffith as homosexual. Among the facts Smith pointedly and accusingly references, Griffith was knowledgeable about the millinery industry, wore glitzy clothes and tight pants, and has a high-pitched speaking and singing voice--in short, trotting out a number of standard-issue gay stereotypes.
If a conservative columnist used such details to suggest an individual to be gay, we'd never hear the end of such perfidy. But apparently--as with Jeff Gannon, Roy Cohn, J. Edgar Hoover, and others--it's perfectly acceptable for the mainstream media that attacks middle Americans as intolerant and insensitive to out a celebrity either to advance an agenda or to try to cast shame upon him. Ring of Fire tells the substantial story of a man who has experienced tragedy and redemption in a way many likely cannot fathom. Sadly, many of those covering his story have callously and hypocritically tried to reduce him to their pawn. Fortuitously, the power of the full breadth of Griffith's experience rises above this repulsive trivialization.
Sports aficionado David Damiani works as a tax accountant for Witt Mares in Newport News, Virginia.
