Who You Callin' A Faggot?

The Ring Record Book and Boxing Encyclopedia reflects that, on the night of March 24, 1962, Emile Griffith defeated Benny "Kid" Paret by a knockout in the twelfth round. In a doleful footnote, the record book also reflects that Paret died ten days later from injuries received in the bout.

The two boxers had fought twice before in the previous twelve months, swapping the welterweight title each time. They had thus come to know each other, perhaps a bit too well; at the pre-fight weigh-in, Paret, Cuban-born, called Griffith a maricon — vulgar Spanish slang for "homosexual." As Griffith explained many years later, "I knew maricon meant faggot, and I wasn't nobody's faggot."

That Paret's taunt goaded Griffith to violence that blurred the distinction between boxing and street fighting was a tonic note with two overtones in a minor key; first, if any boxer was ever homosexual or bisexual, it was Griffith. By his own admission he has frequented gay bars, and in the early '90's he was beaten almost to death on leaving one in a drunken state.

Second, the rules that govern boxing today, and in force during the third Paret-Griffith fight, are based on the Marquess of Queensbury Rules. The code was published in 1865 by John Sholto Douglas, the eighth Marquess of Queensbury and father of Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, the man whose homosexual relationship with Oscar Wilde resulted in a sentence of two years' hard labor for Wilde.

Wilde had sued for criminal libel after Queensbury, enraged by the attentions Wilde was paying to his much younger son, left a calling card at Wilde's club in London for "Oscar Wilde posing somdomite" (sic). To the charge of libel Queensbury raised the defense of truth, and produced evidence that Wilde had consensual sex with "rent boys," young male prostitutes from the lower classes. Wilde, like Griffith, denied the charge, but later admitted he was lying.

The curious intersection where boxing and homosexuality collided in the 19th Century was formed by roads that led back to the ancient Greeks.Paiderastia, or "boy-love," originated with the Spartans as a bond between a boy and his protector, who lived a life of discipline together in the outdoors as the elder man introduced the younger to the concept of valor, and trained him to endure hardship. As sports became a substitute for military training, the concept moved indoors to gymnasiums. An ancient law forbade the presence of men in the wrestling grounds, but over time it came to be ignored. Lucian of Samosata, a Greek satirist, said of one such boy-lover: "You care for gymnasiums and their sleek-oiled combatants."

In the 20th Century, heavyweight Muhammad Ali attracted the sort of attention from boxing writers that Aeschylus noticed in a "noisy haunter of gymnasiums" eighteen hundred years earlier. Boxing writers of the literary dabbler sort swooned over Ali in prose that would have embarrassed a boy band beat reporter for a teen girls' magazine. George Plimpton: Ali had "great good looks"; Norman Mailer: The first round of the Ali-Frazier rematch was the "equivalent to the first kiss in a love affair," and later the fighters "moved like somnambulists slowly working and rubbing one another, almost embracing, next to locked in the slow moves of lovers after the act"; Pete Hamill: Ali had "beautiful legs."

As with much else about Ali, there is nothing new about the afflatus that boxers blow upon writers. In Pugilistica, an earlier 20th Century history of British boxing, the author quotes the following description by one Firby, a correspondent for the Morning Post, of Jem Belcher, Champion of England from 1798 to 1809: "He ... strips remarkably well, displaying much muscle.... [A] braver boxer never pulled off a shirt."

The most notorious homophobe/homophile Möbius strip of the current boxing scene is Mike Tyson, the lisping heavyweight who in 2002 grabbed his genitals and threatened a male reporter at a joint press conference with violent anal sex. Other boxers — Mitchell Rose and Mitch "Blood" Green — have accused Tyson of being gay, and Tyson seemed to suggest as much himself in a 2002 interview with the Guardian, saying the two decades of constant media attention he had endured would make anyone a homosexual.

Boxing is the more primitive contest to which other sports are reduced when their rules break down. Rodney Dangerfield's memorable one-liner — "I went to a fight last night and a hockey game broke out" — is funny because of its absurdity; things flow in the other direction. It just so happens that professional hockey players resort to fisticuffs more frequently than athletes in other sports.

Boxing's elemental character has something to do with its ancient origins. Several boxers are mentioned in Homer's Iliad: Polydeuces, Nestor (who says he's lost the left-right combination of his youth) and Epeus, who drops Euryalus with a roundhouse hook to the head. Perhaps boxing's antiquity places it closer to a prelapsarian time when men could look upon each other with shameless admiration.

Consider, then: there are handsome men in other sports, but if a sportswriter ever filed a story about an NBA game (to pick the major sport whose players' dress most closely resembles boxing trunks) that said he thought Steve Nash was cute, or that Kobe Bryant had nice legs, he'd be banished to the Lifestyle section.

Queensbury's family tree included a cannibal who ate an entire kitchen boy, making Tyson's bite into Evander Holyfield's ear in 1997 seem an hors d'oeuvre by comparison; yet it was Queensbury who reclaimed boxing's good name after it was banned as a public nuisance by creating a set of rules that elevated fist-fighting from the barbarity to which it had sunk. In so doing, he made violence between males socially acceptable — within limits.

Wilde and Queensbury's son Lord Alfred Douglas, though they were associated in the public mind as lovers, both preferred sex with boys. Wilde with others formed the Order of Chaeronea, a homosexual rights group that fought an 1885 law criminalizing indecent conduct short of penetration between men. By offering himself up as a martyr in the Oedipal struggle between the hyper-masculine Queensbury and his effeminate son, Wilde made sex between males socially acceptable — within limits.

Queensbury, the patron of the fistic arts, brought boxers with him on more than one occasion when he confronted Wilde, the first time leaving Wilde's residence "with his tail between his legs" (according to his son) as Wilde sent the two more virile men away using only the sheer strength of his personality. Queensbury's wife, protector of her effete son, had mocked her husband for his lack of culture, banishing him to the 19th Century equivalent of the Man Cave in the basement.

The 19th Century's domestication of previously-forbidden sex and violence has left us a legacy of muted passions. Boxing seems tame by comparison to mixed martial arts or "ultimate" fighting, to which it is losing spectators. The battle lines on gay rights have moved to a front where the debate is no longer about sex, but about the humdrum issue of gay marriage — state sanction for an arrangement that Wilde ridiculed by saying "Twenty years of romance makes a woman look like a ruin; twenty years of marriage makes her look like a public building."

What Wilde wrote about his forbidden relationship with a younger man in "De Profundis," a letter written to Douglas from prison, was also true of boxing in his time: "It was like feasting with panthers. The danger was half the excitement." Perhaps, among men, violence and love are two tributaries of the same river.