Expert News and Analysis of the Championship League

Sorry Jose Aure­lio Gay, this one isn’t about you

As well as writ­ing about the Cham­pi­onship (which ruined my accu­mu­la­tor at the week­end as I incor­rectly pre­dicted four results and got none of them right. Yes I’ve thought about writ­ing up a let­ter of res­ig­na­tion) I thought I’d write about some of those talk­ing points in foot­ball that are often debated, whether it be in the main­stream media, obscure forum chats or just in the pub with your mates. There’s no bet­ter place to start than talk­ing about a sub­ject that is start­ing to become more promi­nent due to a change in cul­ture — gay foot­ballers and how they would be treated by foot­ball fans. Basi­cally, it’s more of a ques­tion as to why this is such a taboo sub­ject when it comes to football.

In west­ern cul­ture, homo­pho­bic remarks are com­monly used with a dif­fer­ent mean­ing to what they entail. You will prob­a­bly know what I’m talk­ing about, you’ve likely used terms like ‘shut up you fag’ if you are part of the MTV gen­er­a­tion onwards (what is the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion called? In fact I’m pretty sure only the “MTV gen­er­a­tion” have their own label). In most cases, peo­ple don’t use it to show spite or mal­ice against gay peo­ple, it’s as a result of mod­ern media that such terms are used so com­monly; if you have ever seen the South Park Episode “The F word”, they cover this sub­ject quite well. It’s a mod­ern day insult that is used by many peo­ple. Although despite a more accept­ing cul­ture in the west of homo­sex­u­al­ity, homo­pho­bia still exists.

The term homo­pho­bia itself is quite con­fus­ing though, as it would sug­gest that these peo­ple are scared of gay peo­ple. Algio­pho­bia is the fear of pain, achlu­pho­bia is a fear of dark­ness and lutra­pho­bia is a fear of otters. You are not born with pho­bias, if you ever see in TV shows when a char­ac­ter goes to coun­sel­lor they usu­ally ask them to back track as to what could have trig­gered the fear and what past events have been trau­matic that it makes them want to avoid it and panic about it (For another pop cul­ture ref­er­ence see The Simp­sons “Fear Of Fly­ing”, but if you are like me you’ve prob­a­bly already seen it 100 times). Pho­bias are a defence mech­a­nism from the brain so you attempt to avoid some­thing that caused so much dis­tress, I have a degree in Psy­chol­ogy and when I was at uni­ver­sity one of my lec­tur­ers told me a story where he was coun­selling a woman who had recently been raped and she had a com­plete panic attack in the mid­dle of a shop­ping cen­tre which had her scream­ing. The rea­son was that she had seen some­one wear­ing a jacket that was sim­i­lar to the per­son who had raped her, her brain had picked up on this and this caused stress. The brain stores more infor­ma­tion from trau­matic events than it usu­ally would, there is a lot of papers that look at a link between stress and mem­ory which is quite a broad and inter­est­ing subject.

Now you aver­age per­son who would be described as “homo­pho­bic” will gen­er­ally have not had an expe­ri­ence which would lead them to com­pletely panic when they see a gay per­son. In fact many of the peo­ple who go on about how wrong it is to be gay or make fun of celebri­ties that are gay will be so two faced that when they meet a per­son who is a homo­sex­ual, they’ll act nicer than they would to their mates! Homo­pho­bia in west­ern cul­ture is not as much a fear of gay peo­ple, but the hate of them or a gen­eral dis­agree­ment with their lifestyle. I’ve never under­stood though why this exists, do these peo­ple think that every gay per­son will thrust their lower region in their face the minute they meet them? And peo­ple also claim they hate how camp they are, but in truth the major­ity of gay peo­ple are camp, but in pop cul­ture when a writer wants to por­tray a gay per­son they’ll often make them so camp it truly is fiction.

But gen­er­ally the peo­ple you will find that use such lan­guage and use gay cul­ture as an insult are the lads — the boys — drink­ing bud­dies that you will sit in the pub (or bar in Amer­ica I sup­pose) with and they are usu­ally the same lads that will be debat­ing the foot­ball or hav­ing a pre-match pint. Which is why it is such a taboo sub­ject, how would foot­ball fans react to a foot­baller that they know is gay? And how would all those macho alpha male play­ers react to know­ing that they have a team mate that is bat­ting for the other team? You can’t really com­pare it to the rise of black foot­ballers as they are two sep­a­rate sub­jects and whereas that was an issue of race, homo­sex­u­al­ity is a lifestyle choice (or you’re gay from birth — whichever side of the argu­ment you want to be on but I don’t really have enough knowl­edge on what that argu­ment is about).

You hear all the rumours about play­ers that are gay, I never know where they start. I won’t list any I’ve heard because truth be told they prob­a­bly have no fac­tual basis, but most fans have dis­cussed this sub­ject at least once and you’re often given replies of “I heard *insert player here* is gay”. And there are rumours because to my knowl­edge I don’t actu­ally recall a mod­ern high pro­file player that has came out as gay. I also never get why it has to be cov­ered so in depth by the media, how is it news that some­one is a homo­sex­ual, why does it have to do the rounds? I don’t really care if some­one is gay or not, it’s about as news­wor­thy to me as my mam telling me she’s just come back from work. You never see head­lines about peo­ple being straight, the fact that it is news almost sug­gests that it is the wrong option which is non­sense and why I don’t care for it being news — it doesn’t have much sig­nif­i­cant mean­ing to me whether a per­son wants to be straight or gay and it shouldn’t be a big issue.

But pretty much every­one either knows a gay per­son or has met one. It’s very likely that there are gay foot­ballers but they prob­a­bly live in fear that knowl­edge of this might alien­ate peo­ple. The sub­ject itself is tricky because you have no idea how peo­ple will react to it. At uni­ver­sity I had a mate who was a Brighton fan and if you are unfa­mil­iar with Brighton, it is pretty much known as gay cap­i­tal of Britain as it is a pop­u­lar place to go for gay peo­ple (par­tic­u­larly from Lon­don) in the sum­mer time. But the stereo­type is that every­one from Brighton is gay and there­fore their fans deserve to hear about it. I only went to two Brighton away games and I have been assured that the chants of “Gay! Gay! Gay! Gay! Gay! Gay!” are as com­mon in all Brighton games as they were at those two. Stuff like this leads you to ques­tion how worth­while it would be for a foot­baller to let the world know he is gay, as this sort of reac­tion could be a real bur­den on not only them but the team as well as it is hate­ful dis­trac­tion that isn’t welcome.

This is why foot­ball isn’t ideal for this sort of thing. Peo­ple should have the right to be gay with­out any sort of announce­ment or bur­den, but it will always change opin­ions. I’m in no doubt that there are a lot of foot­ball fans that would be accept­ing of a foot­baller being gay, if you have any sense it shouldn’t change your opin­ion, but even though black foot­ballers are wel­comed with open arms by foot­ball fans, racism still exists. Not just those inci­dents reported in East­ern Europe that Sky report, if you’re sit­ting in the sta­dium you’ve more than likely heard some­one use a racial slur against a black player. Chris Kamara spoke about racism in the mod­ern game, at one point he was even told that when they were mak­ing racist remarks against Emile Hes­key, they were not intended to offend Kamara because “they didn’t con­sider him black”. In the 21st cen­tury cow­ardly fans shout­ing from their seat, in the knowl­edge that the play­ers can’t react, resort to using vul­gar lan­guage against black play­ers and it is more than likely that this would be the same for a gay foot­baller. Hell, it even exists within the game, just look at Michael Ballack’s agent who called the entire Ger­man squad gay for not win­ning the World Cup and we all know that the rea­son they didn’t win it was because of Paul the psy­chic octo­pus.

I myself am not per­son­ally gay and I don’t try to push “gay rights” in peo­ples face but I do believe in com­mon sense. I can bet in the future that high pro­file player will come out as gay, but the real ques­tion is to how it will be han­dled by the sup­port­ers and if it would change people’s feel­ings towards that player. Sure they might be abused by fans for their lifestyle, but if they can put it aside, block it out and show that they are a good player, it could change a lot of opin­ions and let peo­ple know that gay peo­ple are not some giant machine that is com­ing to destroy the world. The weird thing about this sub­ject is that it isn’t some­thing that is spoke about heav­ily in the main­stream media, but instead it is sub­ject dis­cussed by fans. I’m not say­ing we should get ten ex-professionals around a table and list down which foot­ballers are gay, but it would be inter­est­ing to hear a high pro­file player or ex-pro turned pun­dit if they knew any play­ers and how foot­ballers feel about the sub­ject of homo­sex­u­al­ity. It almost echoes the Amer­i­can army with their “don’t ask, don’t tell” pol­icy, which is with­out a doubt one of the most ridicu­lous things I have ever heard. If you aren’t aware of it, you can be gay in the army but you can’t let any­one know you are gay. Appar­ently a gay solider might dis­tract the sol­diers, but to be hon­est if you try to have sex with any type of co-worker then that is con­sid­ered unprofessional.

The bot­tom line is that mod­er­ate to extreme “homo­pho­bia” exists in our cul­ture, but gay peo­ple are accepted in every­day life, so why should it be dif­fer­ent for foot­ball? I know I said I didn’t really get why peo­ple had to make a big announce­ment about the fact that they are gay, but if that is the way of the world then why should a foot­baller cover it up? Actu­ally, like I pre­vi­ously men­tioned, I don’t get why being gay is even an issue, so this whole debate is built on pretty shal­low foun­da­tions. I do know how­ever that there are a lot of gay peo­ple who are fed up of peo­ple using slurs like “gay” and “fag” to describe peo­ple and want it to change. Many famous gay peo­ple are often seen as fig­ures who have the abil­ity to change opin­ions and make it more accept­able to be gay, yet there are none in foot­ball. I’m not say­ing we need gay foot­ballers, but on aver­age it is likely that there are a few gay foot­ballers, so why should they cover it up?

Fans are unfor­giv­ing in what they say and every game for a gay foot­baller could end up hav­ing a sim­i­lar atmos­phere to a Brighton away day, but if this were the case, the abil­ity to over come this would speak louder than any words could. Should gay foot­ballers be accepted? Abso­lut­ley! Would we see a bar­rage of offen­sive chants directed towards them? Who knows…

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