Rose George

Lover and fighter

A Man’s World: The Double Life of Emile Griffith, by Donald McRae, tells the fascinating tale of a boxer who loved men, and killed a man

I don’t like boxing. If I ever get into a boxing ring, I’ll be in the corner with the governor of California, Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown, who in 1963 called for ‘the abolition of this barbaric spectacle’ because another man had just been beaten to death in the ring. That man was Davey Moore, who had defended boxing before it killed him on the grounds that no one stopped the Indianapolis 500 when racing drivers get killed.

But another dead man is the focus of this book: our hero is the captivating, frustrating, brutal Emile Griffith, who we meet at the age of 22, ‘happy and beautiful’, and who one year later battered to death the Cuban fighter Benny Paret, the first man whose death was shown live on television (the second was Lee Harvey Oswald). Griffith was not the only boxer to have killed another, but in most other ways he was unique: a man with the rippling muscles of an Adonis and a prodigious talent for punching, he was a closet homosexual all his life. And what a closet gay he was: defiant, comfortable, oblivious, even though these were times in which, according to a nasty documentary produced by CBS, Americans considered homosexuality more harmful to society than adultery or prostitution, and it was still considered a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association.

Luckily for Emile Griffith, it was also considered so shocking that he was left to be ‘different’ by the press, at least as long as he was a world champion fighter. So he could frequent the gay bars around Times Square with impunity. He could be found French-kissing his friend Calvin Thomas in his dressing room after a fight, and nothing would be said until years later. There were barbs, of course: he did actually make ladies’ hats, so he was the ‘Mad Hatter from Manhattan’; he had ‘outrageous flamboyance’.

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