Out in the field: sport's big problem with homosexuality

It’s not hard to see why: there is a long shadow cast over the English game by the life and death of Justin Fashanu, who came out in 1990 and committed suicide in 1998, following allegations of assault and non-consensual sex in Maryland, where homosexuality was illegal; in his suicide note, he denied those allegations. Two years ago, his niece, Amal Fashanu, made a BBC documentary about the issue of sexuality in sport. ‘No one wanted to speak to us,’ she remembers now, but adds that she thinks things have changed significantly since. She believes the fear of the initial reaction is receding, but she also thinks change takes time. ‘For now, there isn’t an openly gay professional footballer who’s actually playing,’ she explained to me. ‘If there was, I feel it would give other players a sense of encouragement. Not the first, not the second, not the third — by the fifth, then people will start coming out and being who they really are. The problem is, no one wants to be that first one, no one wants to be that second one. It’s about finding a player who has the courage, while he’s still playing, to say: “Do you know what? I’m fed up of this. I’m not going to pretend and be gay with my partner only at home. I’m going to go out, be who I am; if they don’t like it, it’s their bloody problem.” ’

As this country’s sporting obsession and as the golden goose of a dizzyingly wealthy global entertainment market, football has its own issues; it is also seen as tribal and populist, with the suggestion that gay players will find themselves the target of homophobic abuse from fans. Certainly, those in other sports have not come under such scrutiny: consider, for example, cricketer Steven Davies, who came out in 2011, to a small but short-lived amount of media interest, or boxing Olympian Nicola Adams, whose sexuality occasionally crops up, but is rarely central, in interviews. And the universal admiration occasioned by diver Tom Daley’s recent announcement that he was in a relationship with another man is perhaps attributable more to his popularity in celebrity youth culture than to his career as a diver.

I spoke to Gareth Thomas, the legendary rugby union winger who chalked up 100 caps for Wales before his retirement in 2010. He came out in 2009, and was the first RU player to do so. ‘Nobody ever used it as a weapon against me,’ he said. ‘Nobody ever used it as a way of winding me up, nobody ever used a derogatory term against me. Maybe in the sport of rugby I was blessed. It’s a sport played by complete and utter gentlemen, but from my experience within the game and of the people who run the game, they made an environment for me that I could focus and concentrate on my rugby and not have to worry about my sexuality.’ I ask him whether he ever experienced abuse from fans. Some, he replies, but it was always ‘stamped out’ by the authorities and he firmly believes that if all sporting bodies operate a zero-tolerance policy towards abuse — fines for clubs and bans for fans — progress can and will be made. I also asked him what he felt when he considered events in Sochi. Clearly an exceptionally positive man, he replied that at least it meant that there was a spotlight on what was happening in Russia, but, he added, he also found the archaic laws ‘a terrible tragedy’. Was he in favour of a boycott? ‘If I was a gay sportsperson going there, I would be like every other sports-person. I would have trained my whole life to want to be there, so I wouldn’t want to have to pull out because of my sexuality, because, do you know what, that’s not a creation of who I am. My sport is a creation of who I am, I just happen to be gay.’

Even more forthright was John Amaechi, the English basketball player who is this country’s most successful export to the NBA — the only one ever to have his jersey hung in the US Basketball Hall of Fame. Since his retirement in 2003, Amaechi has worked as a psychologist and educator and as an advocate for equality and inclusion. He argues that true progress often stalls at the point at which some change occurs — at which point we all convince ourselves that things are getting better and that we don’t need to do anything. Of football, he says: ‘It’s not progress to have one footballer who comes out and then kills himself, one footballer who comes out and immediately leaves the country, and then one footballer who played in the country but waits until he’s back in his own country before he comes out. Only a moron would look at that and say that’s progress.’ What is required, he says, is a change in mindset among the sports authorities; he also believes that fans are being used as ‘foils’ in the debate about inclusion. ‘What’s easier?’ he asks. ‘To change yourself? Or to go to the media and find the most yobbish, least representative football fan.’

Ask Amaechi about Sochi and you will get real wrath. ‘When you say in your Olympic principles that sport should be used for the furtherance of human dignity, a country where young men are being raped with bottles in parks in front of passers-by while the authorities do nothing, that is not a country that believes sport should be used for the furtherance of human dignity, and therefore they should be ineligible to host it.’

It is instructive to note that the IOC has been slow to comment on the clash between its ‘fundamental principles’ and Russian social policy. Rather, it has invoked Rule 50, which forbids athletes from making political gestures. It was a rule most famously flouted by Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who performed a Black Power salute on the podium at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. They were expelled from the Games, and an IOC spokesman condemned their ‘violent and deliberate breach’ of the Olympic spirit. And yet they changed history.

But where does this leave the Sochi athletes? ‘It may well not be the job of athletes to go to Russia and stand there and pull back the curtain behind the Wizard of Oz,’ Amaechi says. ‘It may not be the job of athletes to point out the deception. But it is certainly the job of athletes to make sure they are not used by superficially charming men to further evil.’