The Boxer
Before Heated Rivalry, there was Jean Cocteau and 'Panama' Al Brown.
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Long before Heated Rivalry charmed us with its story of hot, fluffy love between two hockey players, Jean Cocteau was one half of a high-profile, interracial, same-sex sports romance. (He really did it all, first.)
In one corner: ‘Panama’ Al Brown. Born the 5th of July 1902, he was and remains a boxing icon (who happened to share a birthday with his future lover-slash-manager.) He was the first Latin American boxer to be a world champion title holder, in 1929 achieving the title of world bantamweight champion; this made him an instant celebrity throughout the Americas, but especially in the United States and in his native Panama. Throughout the 1920s, he was considered one of the best in the world, and toured internationally, including to Paris, a city he’d return to several times throughout his tragically short life.
A series of humiliating losses in 1934 and 1935 pushed Brown to retire; battered, physically broken, and mentally scarred, he resorted to performing in Parisian cabarets to scrape enough money together to get by and fuel what was by that point a crippling drug addiction.
Which is where, and how, Jean Cocteau found him.
1936 was not a kind year to Cocteau. He was strung out on opium (again), his lover had one foot out the door, and though he was consistently employed, he was rather washed up. Once the most notorious social butterfly of Paris, he had become a recluse (by his proto-Charli xcx 365 party girl standards, that is.)
