YEARS ago, Judy Garland was a gay icon before the term had been invented, before the term gay was in common use, before homosexuality could be mentioned in newspaper pages outside court reports. She was a glamorous loser, a musical comedy tragedienne, a mixture of frivolity and misfortune. She was courageous, she was a star, she was ultimately hopeless. Who could better serve as an icon for the persecuted community of homosexuals? These days, Kylie Minogue is a gay icon: a figure of transcendent silliness, of high- spirited daftness. The gay community has outgrown the need for identification with losers. The icon need no longer be hag-ridden by misfortune: a modern gay icon need only be a fount of gaiety.
Which brings me to Mike Tyson; more Judy than Kylie. The fact that he has always been a black icon is disturbing. It means that all the nice things we want to believe about western society and racial integration are simply not true. If they were, Tiger Woods would be the black icon. Instead, Woods is an icon for American-based, multinational corporations. Woods stands for the lie that everything is all right.
“I would love to be Tiger Woods, I would love to be Michael Jordan . . . I love my babies, don’t crucify me for what I am. You guys have written so much bad stuff about me I can’t remember the last time I f***ed a decent woman. I have to go with strippers and whores and bitches because you put that image on me.”
You can do your own amateur psychology on that one. It was one of the many strange and intriguing things that Tyson said in a press conference at his training camp in Hawaii this week, where he is preparing for his world heavyweight title fight with Lennox Lewis on June 8.
My most vivid Tyson experience was in Brixton. Tyson went walkabout and stopped the traffic. Literally. I had to pay off my cab halfway along Stockwell Road and shove my way through the crowds to reach Brixton High Street.
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Tyson had taken refuge in Brixton police station. He was charged with emotion — because he was surrounded by love. He appeared at a third-floor window and waved. The crowd went mad. Just about all of them were black, apart from a few whiteys trying not to look like newspaper reporters. The atmosphere wasn’t threatening, it was a nice day and we were in holiday humour. Mike was cheered and cheered. Yes, and there were pretty black girls in the crowd, just as pretty as Desiree Washington. Tyson was sent to jail for raping Washington.
“Here’s Mike!” the girls said behind me. “Hurray! Whooo!” There was a deep sense that Mike was seriously one of us, just another guy with a black face who has had a raw deal in life. To say that any black person has had a raw deal is instantly to ask questions about the nature of a white-dominated society. Tyson stands for the ten-to-one-against of a poor black person’s life.
There’s no point in saying, and most particularly no point in a white writer in the pages of The Times saying, that Tyson is not a nice person, that he has convictions for violence and rape. There is no point in saying that he once bit a chunk from his opponent’s ear, or that he almost scuppered the richest fight in boxing history by biting his opponent in the leg at a press conference. There is no point in saying that he is a sociopath.
There is no point, for that matter, in saying that he is nuts. The fact is that he is a black icon and details such as these are completely irrelevant, just as the details of Che Guevara’s CV are irrelevant to the fact that he became an icon of protest and revolution. It is not the life of a saint that matters: it is the way in which he inspires acts of prayer and pilgrimage.
Tyson is aware of his own iconic status. He is unacceptable to corporate America. How many other blacks across the world believe they are unacceptable to American power-wielders? “Mike Tyson is a bad nigger, but he’s very popular,” Tyson said. “He’s a big nigger and he’s a bad nigger and we can use him. You don’t like that word, do you?” Brilliant, that — using the white term of abuse to wrong-foot an audience of whites.
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Tyson is both fighter and victim, that is the point. Just as Garland sang through her traumas, so Tyson continues to box whenever the white establishment will let him. “I’m just a dark shadowy figure from the bowels of iniquity. I wish I could be Mike who gets an endorsement deal, but you can’t make a lie and truth go together.”
Tyson’s is not the face to sell Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, not unless the fast-food chain was to introduce an earburger. He doesn’t work as a symbol of respectability and success. He stands for something much bigger than that. He stands for oppression, for a feeling of being suffocated, overwhelmed, nowhere to turn, destiny taken out of your hands. He is a symbol of despair — yet he is still fighting.
And though the psychology of Tyson’s nature is intriguing, perhaps we should think more not about what Tyson is but what Tyson means. Garland was an icon for a troubled community that felt oppressed and persecuted: Tyson is just the same. His iconic status tells us troubling things about the nature of society, that the only people who think that we have made it to a comfortable multiracial society are white. Tyson is trouble and he is a symbol of trouble.
This country has gone through massive changes in the past halfcentury and our attitudes to people of different races have changed profoundly. We have had, without turning a hair, a black England football captain and we have an Asian-born England cricket captain. These are not small things. But there is nothing to get smug about. We have a long way to go: a just society is no nearer than (cue Miss Garland) somewhere over the rainbow.
DEBATE
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Should Tyson be allowed to box?
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