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News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyJuly 1st, 2016
30 YEARS AGO: There are few active gay people in professional sports. Boxer Orlando Cruz is one of those few. El Fenómino, as his fans call him, was born in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, and he represented the island territory at the 2000 Olympic games in Sydney. He lost his bantamweight fight in a first-round bout, but he also began a relationship with a man in Sydney.
He turned pro later that year in a knock-out fight against fellow Puerto Rican Alfredo Valdez, and he remained undefeated until 2009, when he lost to Cornelius Lock in a TKO. (He fought to a draw in 2007 against Colombian fighter Jesús Salvador Pérez.) But rumors surrounding Cruz’s sexuality followed him through much of his career. Tensions came to a head during his 2008 featherweight world title fight against NicaraVguan Carlos Guevara. He won the title, but “The spectators bad-mouthed me; they called me a faggot,” said Cruz. “That’s when I realized that something had to change.”
But making that change while so heavily invested in such a machismo sport wasn’t easy. When Oscar de La Hoya asked him in 2009 if Cruz was going to tell people he was gay, “I said to myself, ‘Oh, my goodness, (he must know).’ I told him, ‘No — I’m a man.’ I wasn’t ready.”
He spent the next few years working with a psychologist to work through his own issues before finally coming out. In 2012, he was ready. “I have and will always be a proud Puerto Rican,” he said in a statement. “I have always been and always will be a proud gay man.” He was the WBO Latino featherweight champion at the time, and was slated to fight Mexico’s Jorge Pazos less than three weeks later. Any fears that all of the talk about his sexuality would be a distraction were quickly laid to rest when Cruz won by unanimous decision.
Cruz married his boyfriend, José Manuel Colón, in New York’s Central Park on November 15, 2013.
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