When the pro boxer came out last fall, he became a hero to the LGBT community. As a trans man just beginning to box, I saw myself in him — and room for men like us in the most macho of sports.
Puerto Rican boxer Orlando Cruz looks on before his WBO NABO featherweight title fight against Jorge Pazos of Mexico at the Kissimmee Civic Center in Kissimmee, Florida October 19, 2012. Cruz won by decision. Cruz faced opponent Pazos just days after announcing that he was gay, the first active fighter in the macho sport to openly discuss his sexual orientation.
Image by Scott Miller / Reuters
Let's be clear: He is a former Olympian, a 19-2-1 pro boxer, and I'm a hobbyist just breaking in my gloves at an amateur gym in Pawtucket. But Orlando Cruz and I have a lot in common: Our birthdays are only four months apart, and we're both featherweights, at 5 feet 6 inches and 125 pounds — which makes us small men, men used to being underestimated. We're also men who didn't come into our own until our thirties. For Cruz, that's when he came out as gay, making him the first openly gay boxer; for me, that's when I began my gender transition.
I got into boxing because I'd been holed up in my house for a year and a half, trying to figure out who I was, mostly by working out. Testosterone gave me a jangly energy that I found could best be released by high-energy, endurance-oriented sessions: jumping rope, burpees, chin-ups, mountain climbers, push-ups, squats, planks — repeat. I wanted to build a strong core, and when I went to my first boxing gym, I discovered I'd been training to box all along.
I loved everything about my first day: the drop-dead drills, the smack of my fist on a bag, the way the old pros hassled each other. Few sports so mimic the basic reality of life — how, in the end, it's always you against yourself, no matter who's in the ring or hitting the bag beside you.
As a trans man, a different kind of man, it's a lesson I needed to remember.
Being a writer, I know boxing is the most literary of all sports. The simplicity of it in the sparkly, crazy MMA age has led many to declare it dead. But it can never really die: As everyone from Mailer to Hemingway to Joyce Carol Oates knows, pro boxing is one of the most poetic physical expressions of masculine vulnerability.
I've trained a little with a former pro in Narragansett who'd speak in these tender metaphors: "When the other guy comes at you, baby, lean in; you'll want to do anything else, but the only way you win is to move toward him. Relax and be here. If you back off, you lose."
In the ring it's just you, exposed — and exposure is a particular kind of bravery. It draws a certain kind of man. Men like Cruz. Men like me.