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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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