I overheard a rather interesting debate in a bar last night. Two guys were talking about this years Fantasy Football and who they were including in their team.
One of them said “Well at least that homo(sexual) Ronaldo has fucked off to Real Madrid”. That very statement got me thinking.
In acting homosexuality is accepted. Even in music many homosexual singers have a vast following and loyal fan base. Over the past few years members of former Boy Bands, idolised by millions of girl’s world wide, have said they were homosexual. N-SYNC, Blue, Westlife, Boyzone, to name a few. Yet there are very few male sports stars who will admit to being gay.
Why?
I cannot see the harm in any sports star being homosexual. Just like the singers they have fans, but is it because sports is perceived as a masculine activity? Gladiators in combat, man against man to prove who the best is in a particular event. Pure bollocks if you ask me.
But there is a downside
If any gay footballers have considered going public in the past 13 years, they need look no further for discouragement than the traumatic tale of Fashanu, the first million-pound black footballer, the first and only professional footballer to come out. Fashanu sold his story to the News of the World in 1990 (making a claim, later retracted, that he had slept with MPs), but the reasons are unlikely to have been entirely financial. He may have feared being outed, and chose a more dignified option. Or there may even have been a touch of nobility about it. ‘Many people thought I just did it for the money,’ he wrote in the mid-Nineties. ‘I suppose they have never stopped to consider that my world is based around Sun and Daily Star readers… I genuinely thought that if I came out in the worst newspapers and remained strong and positive about being gay, there would be nothing more that they could say. Of course, I was wrong and lost three years of my career.’
His ‘lost three years’ are not immediately attributable to homophobia; certainly he was riled by fans and some footballers, but he also suffered recurrent knee problems and a loss of form. He never fulfilled the early promise shown at Norwich (where he is remembered for volleying the Match of the Day Goal of the Season in 1980 against Liverpool) and at Nottingham Forest, where Brian Clough dealt with the early rumours of his homosexuality by banning him from training and calling him a poof whenever the opportunity presented. In a 15-year career, Fashanu played for 11 clubs in England and Scotland before taking up a coaching job in Maryland. He fled the United States in 1998 after a 17-year-old accused him of a drunken sexual assault, and he hanged himself not long afterwards in a London lock-up. This is a unique case, and not a cautionary tale in any conventional sense. And it leaves a couple of questions unanswered: would Fashanu have done better to hide his sexuality until his career was over, or would he have had a better career had he been out from the start?
One in 10 people are said to be gay, which means there are hundreds of gay professional sportsmen and women, including roughly one member of every football team. So why have so few gone public about their sexuality?
David Beckham is a gay icon across the globe, and whilst clearly, heterosexual it shows that any homosexual footballer would be welcome by fans. Of course, like racism, you will have the idiotic minority who will yell abuse each day, but I am sure this is something that they have not heard before.
Footballers are style icons, spend thousands on designer clothes, and look far more camp than a shaven headed tattoo fan. So maybe that is the reason, is it purely down to style and attitude? Would the England fans think anything less of a captain that bled for the team, defended and ran his heart out if her were homosexual rather than heterosexual? It baffles me.
If the statistic that one in ten people are either lesbian or homosexual than that equals a LOT of professional sportsmen and sportswomen around the world. Yet they will have to “come out” of two closets, one personal and one public. It is that public closet that seems to have many padlocks and chains around it, chains that seem to be impossible to break.
Sport is the last domain where homosexuality is not accepted. I hope this will change.
