In my upcoming book, “Literary Philadelphia” (The History Press), I write about Philly journalist Buzz Bissinger.
Bissinger is a non-fiction writer, columnist for The Beast and a contributing editor of Vanity Fair. The Pulitzer Price winning author is best known for his book “Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream”, the story of a Texas high school football team during its 1988 season.
Bissinger often writes about sports. In 2005 he penned “Three Nights in August,” a New York Times bestseller which documented the trials and tribulations of the St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs in 2003. In 2009, his star faded somewhat with the publication of “Shooting Stars,” about basketball star LeBron James. Bissinger says he wrote this book for money and prefers to forget that he wrote it.
It would have been easy for him to typecast himself as a sports writer, especially after Sports Illustrated called “Friday Night Lights” the best book on football. But in reality, Bissinger has a vast interest in things other than sports.
Harry Gerard “H.G,” Bissinger III was born in November, 1954 and educated at Philips Academy and the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn he was an editor at The Daily Pennsylvanian, later going on to write for The Philadelphia Inquirer where he won a Pulitzer for his investigation of the Philadelphia Court system. His 1998 feature article in Vanity Fair, “Shattered Glass” about the writing career of shamed New Republic writer Stephen Glass was the basis for the 2003 film of the same name.
His one political book was the 1998 “Prayer for the City,” in which he followed Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell’s first campaign for mayor.
A much more personal and therapeutic book by Bissinger was “Father’s Day: A Journey into the Mind and Heart of My Extraordinary Son,” which took him four years to write and forced him to confront many of his personal demons revolving around his son, Zach, and his mental disabilities. In “Father’s Day”, Bissinger attempts to exorcise the emotional pain he has felt caused by birth complications surrounding Zach’s premature birth. That premature birth caused Zach to have the mentality of a nine year old, although he would exhibit a bizarre talent for matching up random dates with the correct day of the week.
“Father’s Day” is an account of a cross country road trip that Bissinger took with Zach and his twin brother, Gerry (he has another son, Caleb, from his second marriage). The book is an in-depth, Norman Mailer-like examination of his relationship with the twins, but especially with Zach. Some reviewers have praised the book while others expressed the thought that they wished the book was “Less Buzz, and more Zach.”
“As much as I try to engage Zach, figure out how to make the flower germinate because there is a seed, I also run. I run out of guilt,” Bissinger writes in Father’s Day. “I run because he was robbed and I feel I was robbed. I run because of my shame. I am not proud to feel or say this. But I think these things, not all the time, but too many times, which only increases the cycle of my shame. This is my child. How can I look at him this way?”
The author then recounts a shopping trip with Zach to Brooks Brothers on Philadelphia’s Walnut Street.
“…He comes out of the dressing room. The pants cannot make it over his protruding stomach. The legs billow like the jib of a sailboat in a dead wind. I silently rail against the cruelty of his metabolism that in a few years has made his midsection mushroom after being stick thin throughout his youth. The salesman knows I am trying to dress this man-child in Brooks Brothers from head to toe. He intuits my need to keep alive some fantasy that my son must have gray flannels because he works as a lawyer or hedge fund trader.
“…We purchase the blazer, which Zach is still wearing. He asks the salesman if they have a pocket square he could put into the breast pocket because that’s what my uncle wears and maybe it would be nice maybe to look like my uncle yeah yeah Dad don’t you think it would be nice to maybe look like him?
Bissinger, who divides his time between Philadelphia and the Pacific Northwest, does not spare himself in his work, such as when he wrote a long article in GQ on his shopping addiction. The surgically honest piece touched on his purchase of $5,000 pants, $20,000 coats, and dozens of boots and gloves.
He sets the stage with a critique of Philadelphia fashion:
“Fifty-eight-year-old men who live in the nation’s capital of fashion dreariness, Philadelphia, where wearing a striped tie with a striped shirt to a cocktail party causes Main Line doyennes to whisper “the horror, the horror” in between the third and fourth martinis and little nibbles on saltines with Velveeta served on silver trays.”
Describing his wardrobe, Bissinger writes:
“Some of the clothing is men’s. Some is women’s. I make no distinction. Men’s fashion is catching up, with high-end retailers such as Gucci and Burberry and Versace finally honoring us. But women’s fashion is still infinitely more interesting and has an unfair monopoly on feeling sexy, and if the clothing you wear makes you feel the way you want to feel, liberated and alive, then fucking wear it. The opposite, to repress yourself as I did for the first fifty-five years of my life, is the worst price of all to pay. The United States is a country that has raged against enlightenment since 1776; Puritanism, the guiding lantern, has cast its withering judgment on anything outside the narrow societal mainstream. Think it’s easy to be different in America? Try something as benign as wearing stretch leather leggings or knee-high boots if you are a man.”
Bissinger reminds the reader that Gucci makes up the highest percentage of his collection:
“The Gucci brand has always held special power for me, ever since the 1960s, when the Gucci loafer with the horsebit hardware was the rage, and my father, who fancied himself as being anti-status when he secretly loved it, broke down and bought a pair. Followed by my mother’s purchase of the famous Jackie O. shoulder bag. As a 13-year-old, I circled the old store on Fifth Avenue several times before getting up the courage to go in and buy a Gucci wallet covered with the insignia…”
From fashion he segues into sexuality:
“I never fit the traditional definition of a sexy male straight or gay—tall, ripped, six- packs within six-packs. I wanted the power that sex provides, all eyes wanting…. you and you knowing it, and both men’s and women’s clothing became my venue.
He then begins to wonder about sex and sexuality and where he fits in the complex spectrum:
“I did go into the sexual unknown, and the clothing I began to wear routinely gave me the confidence to do it, to transcend the rigid definitions of sexuality and gender, just as I also know there were the requisite stereotypical snickers.”
“Was I homosexual because so much of what I wore is associated with gays? I did experiment. And while I don’t think it is my sexual being, I can tell you that gay men as a group are nicer, smarter, have a shitload more fun than straight whites. Was I veering toward becoming a dominant leather master in the S&M scene, the leather fetish an obvious influence in most of the clothing I purchased and in much of high fashion itself? I did experiment. Was I a closeted or maybe not so closeted transvestite? Tom Ford makeup is divine; the right foundation and cheek blush and eyeliner and lipstick can do wonders for the pallid complexion. Thigh-high boots add to any wardrobe, although walking on six-inch stilettos for hours is just a bitch and therefore confined to the privacy of my house, seen only by the UPS man, who at this point could not possibly be surprised by anything. But a dress or skirt just doesn’t look good on me, and I can’t ever do a thing with my hair. The look I was going for was more David Bowie androgynous. It wasn’t successful.”
Even in this age of marriage equality, it is still rare for a primarily straight-identified man, albeit a well known journalist and author, to write about same sex experimentation.
Bissinger was saved from his shopping addiction when he signed himself into rehab.
“Shortly after I got out of rehab in May of 2013 I put the leather collection into storage. It was well maintained, but it was costing money to keep it home, plus I knew I had to get rid of it as part of my continuing recovery. Through a mutual friend I was put in touch with Matthew Ruiz of LuxeSwap. We corresponded by email. This company is excellent and has done thousands of eBay transactions. He and his wife both used to work in the fashion industry.
“They asked how much I had. I told them to bring a U-Haul van. It was pretty much filled by the end.”
Bissinger says that the experience was cathartic, and that it was good “to put a very fucked-up phase of my life to rest.” He goes onto explain, “I want to say that the clothing addiction was probably the least of a host of issues that sent me into rehab. There was suicide ideation. I was doing physical harm to myself. I was beginning to play around with drugs such as Percocet.”
