Mr. USA is a gay! – 1997 Mr. USA International winner Gene Kuffel
Brendan Lemon
AT THE AGE OF 9, GENE
Kuffel watched his first Miss USA
pageant on television and decided that
winning a beauty contest was the sole
road to happiness. The next morning he
asked his mother whether he could ever
enter such a competition. “She said, `No,
you cant’–that’s for women,'”
remembers Kuffel, now a 33-year-old
who teaches sixth grade in New Jersey. “I
asked, `Is there one for boys?’ And she
said, `Yes, there’s Mr. USA.’ And so I
said, `OK, then I’m going to be Mr.
USA.’.”
If you had told Kuffel’s mother that
her son would win the Mr. USA
International 1997 contest and that he
would be the American representative at
the Mr. International competition this
November, she probably would have
visualized her son flexing
his muscles on a stage, acting as
a paragon of heterosexuality. Instead, he
has decided to use the title as a platform
from which to announce that he is gay.
“This title is supposed to be the
search for America’s most outstanding
gentleman” Kuffel says, clarifying the
distinction between Mr. USA
International and the more brawn-based
events such a title might first bring to
mind. “Well, he’s also gay too.” Kuffel
hopes that by disclosing his orientation
before his reign ends he might serve as a
model for other gay people. “Wouldn’t it
have been nice,” he says, “for us to have
known that Greg Louganis was gay prior
to his competing in the Olympics?”
When Kuffel won the second annual
Mr. USA International contest last
October in Los Angeles, he not only
shattered the stereotype that America’s
most desirable man must be heterosexual
but also upended the assumption that a
hot gay man must be
muscle-bound. And he did this primarily
on the strength of his performance in the
interview and evening-wear
events–categories generally associated
with more traditionally feminine parades
of beauty. (Kuffel knows the women’s
contests well, having coached Miss
America-bound contestants from his home
state in the art of public speaking over the
past three years.) He was less successful
in the competition’s third category,
swimwear. “I have inherited my
grandfather’s Eastern European build,”
says Kuffel, a 6-foot 2-inch man with a
darkly handsome face and the beginnings
of a spreading waistline,” and sometimes
that doesn’t come across so well in a
swimsuit.” Taking a tip from TV’s
Baywatch, Kuffel, who was competing as
Mr. New Jersey, eschewed skimpy
Speedos and went with oversize
boxer shorts. “I couldn’t decide on
the color,” he recalls, so he selected five
pairs. “I brought them all out with me.
And at the last minute I decided on lime
green because I figured I’d blind the
judges from any flaws that I have.” The
strategy worked, and Kuffel went on to
win the overall contest by a wafer-thin
margin.
Kuffel laughingly says that he knew he
was not the only gay competitor in the
contest when he reamed that one of the
other contestants had sewn beads and
sequins onto his tuxedo vest. He stresses,
however, that Mr. USA International is
not a gay event: It is open to any man 18
and over, and state winners are selected
not through competing in local pageants
but by filling out an extensive
application. Although the contest’s
predominance of straight guys shows
that all sorts of American
men have decided to start owning up to
their vanity, the fact that its present
titleholder is gay, Kuffel says, reminds us
that gay men may still be more
experienced than straights in the art of
competitive display.
“You can go to any club on any night
and see gay men competing among one
another for the attention of a certain
person,” Kuffel observes. In such a
setting, he continues, it is understandable
that outward appearance would be the
first thing to catch one’s eye. But many
gay men’s obsessive reliance on looks still
leaves him feeling ambivalent, even
though he knows that the beauty myth is
deeply rooted in all of American culture.
“I think [gay men] need to feel as though
we have to look our best in order to be
accepted.” The Herculean body, he
suggests, is often a compensation for
childhood slights.
Slights were certainly part of Kuffel’s
early years. He was a friendless
child. He endured the guilt-inducing
tribulations of a traditional Catholic
education. And he bounced back and
forth between his divorced parents,
enduring physical abuse that culminated
when he was 13. “My father threw me
out of his house and gave me the number
to foster care,” he says. In high school,
however, and particularly in college (in
New Mexico, where he received a degree
in communications in 1986),
he began to blossom. And while on his
first job after graduation, as a reporter
for a television station in Grand
Junction, Colo., he won a state
broadcasting award. He also began
indulging his taste, acquired in
New Mexico, for competition based on
appearances. One Halloween he went to
an office costume party as Carmen
Miranda and was named runner-up–to
a gorilla. “I would always come in
second,” Kuffel says. “I was `the best of
the second best.’ In fact, I always said if
I wrote a book, that would be the title.”
While Kuffel was enjoying
professional success and gaining a
reputation as the office cutup, his
personal life was unhappy. He kept his
sexual feelings repressed, convinced
that “people did not want to turn on the
news and watch a gay man.” He had been
attracted to boys since first-grade
summer camp but was still a virgin. On
days free from his second job, in Elmira,
N.Y., he would drive to a gay club in
New Jersey, and one night, outside a
nearby after-hours diner, he hooked up
for the first time with a guy. The pair
drove to a parking lot, where, like legions
of Americans before him, Kuffel lost his
virginity in a car. “Front seat, with the
stick shift between us,” he says.
Kuffel didn’t come out to his family
right away; he says he was too confused.
“I’m 26,” he recalls, “and I am going
through the feelings that most kids go
through at 14 or 15.” Perhaps it was this
delayed adolescence that led Kuffel to
decide to teach middle school. (Tired of
all the negative news he’d been reporting,
he went back to college and received his
teaching certificate in 1991.) In his class
of 12-year-olds–who by all accounts
are proud of their instructor’s status
as Mr. USA–Kuffel says he “goes
through puberty every year.” But
adolescence now, as experienced by his
students, doesn’t seem to be what it was
for Kuffel. For one thing, kids today
seem more curious. His students have
never wondered openly if he is gay, but
they often ask if he’s married. “That’s
followed up,” Kuffel confides, “with the
same exact question: `Aren’t you lonely?'”
If Kuffel does seem a little lonely–at
the moment he’s unattached, a situation
he says he wants to remedy very
much–the current Mr. USA
International seems less concerned by his
students’ queries or by the response of
fellow male beauties at the upcoming Mr.
International contest to his coming-out
than by the possible fallout from his
colleagues at school. Kuffel hasn’t
revealed his orientation to his school’s
principal. However, he jokes, “I’m single,
I’m 33, I never talk about a girlfriend. I
mean, you don’t need to be a great
mathematician.”
Still, Kuffel says, the threat of
professional repercussions is outweighed
by the possibility that his disclosure
might make things easier for some
teenager than they were for him at that
age. “I’m doing this,” Kuffel says,
“because I know that there are kids out
there, whether they’re in my classroom
or not, who need to be told and shown
that it’s OK to be who they are.”
COPYRIGHT 1997 Liberation Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
