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Review:
I recall the stir created by the book by
former Washington Redskin Dave Kopay in the early 1980s. This autobiography
relates the story of a football player born and raised on Hawaii of Somoan
descent. He gradually came to terms with his sexuality, resisting the
religious intolerance of his Assembly of God upbringing as well as Somoan
culture, which stresses interdependence and loyalty among blood family
members. Playing for several teams, he kept his sexual orientation a secret,
as any leak would have ended his career. On some teams, there was
considerable verbal fag-bashing and aggressive women chasing by players.
The writing style is simple and homey.
Toward the end, he plays in a Super Bowl with the Atlanta Falcons in a losing
effort. He settles in Minneapolis, and relates visiting the Saloon, a popular
dance bar on Hennepin (three blocks from the Gay Nineties) with a patio, a
computer bar, grille, and a dance floor with three wooden stages that would
fit a wide angle movie camera perfectly for a future on-location film shot in
any film that needed to show dirty dancing.
He also sings the national anthem at a
college football game. He relates being a poor student in high school, and
being misclassified as needing special education. He also has a younger
brother who dies of AIDS and is given a Somoan funeral.
Mark
Tewksbury, Inside Out: Straight Talk from a Gay Jock. (2006,
Toronto: Wiley Canada, ISBN 0-470-83735-7, 262 pages, hardbound). Canadian
Olympic swimmer Mark Tewksbury, born 1968, gives us an account of his career
as individual sports celebrity, and of his gradual coming out. The most
disturbing incidents have to do with the queasiness of his sponsors over the
public's finding out about his homosexuality, even in liberal Canada. He
would have to agree to "morals" clauses, not to bring disrepute on
the sponsors, and he looses a huge contract in the 90s when he is outed. Then
he goes solo. There are a lot of color pictures, which have the effect of a
filmstrip.
I have been to only one swimming meet in
my life, at the SMU natatorium in Dallas in 1982. In the 80s, swimmers would
talk about peaking before performances, including complete body shaving.
Tewksburu backs into this subject around p 87, and the accounts for his total
depilation once he went to Australia, undergoing what Steve Carell does in
"The 40 Year Old Virgin."
Jon
Barrett. Hero of Flight 93: Mark Bingham: A Man Who Fought Back on
September 11 (2002. Advocate, ISBN 1-55583-780-8, 173 pages,
paper). About a most serious topic, first a joke. This book arrived in an
Amazon "pseudobox". Mail box services call small boxes that. Attack
of the pseudoboxes. More seriously, this book is very personal, almost like
what an autobiography could be. But the author has to piece together not only
what happened on Flight 93, but what Mark's life was really like. He starts
out with a prologue telling the story of Oliver Sipple, who saved the life of
President Ford in 1975, and it was a big deal for the press to deal with the
fact that he was gay. Sipple was also a Marine Corps veteran, years before
"don't ask don't tell" when the ban was per service (when they
needed people for Vietnam). Bingham's coming of age as a gay man seems almost
incidental. In the meantime, he got good at rugby, and the book gives some
description of this form of English football. He had a few boy friends, and
the book describes a certain fetish for body hair and bears, and his concerns
about his own body image, which he gradually outgrew. (It's coincidental that
one boyfriend was named Chris Pratt, no relation to the actor who plays
Bright on Everwood). The book also gives an account of the life
of Alice Hoglan, his mother, who would appear so often in the days following
9/11. Each of the ten chapters in the book starts with the voicemails that he
never got, and actual details of how Mark was situated on Flight 93 during
the counterattack on the terrorists are uncertain. After the tragedy, Mark
was honored by many conservative speakers, who had to decide what to say
about him. He would be considered for the Congressional Medal of Honor, an
irony of both the history of "don't ask don't tell" and then of the
9/11 attacks.
An interesting subtext is his
development of a public relations business during the dot-com boom, and his
having to cut it back during the bust in early 2001. His reaction to how to
use the Internet was somewhat the opposite of mine.
Would this book make a good biographical
film? I think so.
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