Politics, Sport and Sexuality
I’ve covered the issue of homophobia in football before in quite some detail, and so was interested today to see someone in another sport come out as being openly gay.
This is the former British Lion Gareth Thomas, who is something of a high-profile player (ninth highest ever test try scorer) even if at 35, he is presumably coming towards the end of his professional career.
I don’t think anything more positive (or negative) about Gareth for this. Basically, if he was playing for my team, I’d support him. If he was playing against my team, I’d want him to play badly. His sexuality has — as he himself says — got buggerall to do with the sport…
“I just happen to be gay,” he added. “It’s irrelevant.”Gareth Thomas, quoted on BBC News
I don’t want to praise Gareth for coming out, simply because the idea that he has to be brave in order to come out rather demonstrates that we still expect ingrained homophobia in professional sport. But perhaps we are wrong to expect this, as can be demonstrated from the reaction he encountered from some team-mates:
“But they came in, patted me on the back and said: ‘We don’t care. Why didn’t you tell us before?’ Two of my best mates in rugby didn’t even blink an eyelid.” Gareth Thomas, quoted on BBC News
Perhaps we are finally growing up after all. I’d like to think any other homosexual player in professional football would receive the same response from their team mates and — with luck — from the terraces, although I think you might need a few idiots ejected from grounds first.
And if that wasn’t a big enough sporting revelation for one day, it also transpires that Newcastle’s manager, Chris Hughton, was formerly a columnist for the newspaper of the British Workers Revolutionary Party. No, that isn’t a joke.
In his youth at Spurs, he used to write a weekly football column for The News Line, the paper of the British Workers Revolutionary Party, although he says that this was because a mate of his asked him to, and he wasn’t really bothered about politics, just liked the idea of having his own column. Yeah, and the fact that he seems to have introduced a kind of a workers’ collective at Newcastle for making decisions is entirely coincidental, is it Chris …
I knew there was something I liked about him…
Stavros says:
December 19th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Good point, my first reaction was “well done Alfie, that was brave”, but it shouldn’t be really.
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