In support of my brothers

Hello and welcome back to my blog

I believe sport is an important frontier for the homosexual community.  Success in sport but more importantly, acceptance within a traditionally and stubbornly heterosexual fortress.  It is increasingly clear that gay men and women are achieving great feats in various sports - even if the public don't realise it at the time - whether it be a footballer in the USA, Olympic Diver in the UK, or an Australian swimming champion - the number of professional sports men and women coming out is on the rise and hurling society forward to the promise of equality.  It has been a very positive few years but we cannot lose sight of the cost to these brave, trail-blazing individuals.

Two stories this week highlight the current situation: the confirmation by Ian Thorpe that he is gay and the depression he suffered from while grappling with this during his career, as well as the story of a Christchurch born rugby player who faced exclusion, humiliation and abuse from rugby clubs both in New Zealand and Australia.  As sad as both stories are, they do affectively highlight the reality that young, gay athletes face.  In a largely individual sport Thorpe confronts the idea that Australia would not accept or support a gay champion and his success as a swimmer while struggling with this burden is amazing.  Men like the rugby player suffer a different daily hell as do many gay men in team sports (at this point I will leave it to more informed writers to speak to the experiences of gay women).  The key thing to understand here is that while an individual pursuit is as much battling against yourself as anything, being part of a team requires basic levels of agreement amongst team mates - namely the greatness of the sport in question and interest in the opposite sex.  The majority of conversations in a sports team surround these two past times, but what happens when you have a team member who does not desire women, secondly cannot desire them and in fact prefers the opposite (which may or may not include members of that same team).
Club sport - the form that most young men play - is the social life of many men.  Here in lies the problem, because much of the banter surrounds the topics of women and experiences with women, it is very intimidating for gay sportsman who have no dog in that hunt, if you'll excuse me.  Particularly as many gay men experience love slightly later in their youth than their straight comrades.  The uglier side to this situation is that the team huddle is also a bastion of competitiveness.  Which brings us to the use of the word "faggot" for those who don't measure up to the - largely nonsense - notions of what a successful (straight) man ought to be.  You will witness men who would never use this word otherwise, bandy it about as if it were going out of fashion.  This is a true f-word and the most cruel, evil and twisted part is that many men don't mean anything particularly hurtful or homophobic when they use it.  They really mean the opposite of what the archetypical alpha-male should be.  The result however is that because the word still holds associations with being gay (or at least stereotypes of what a gay man is) suddenly a gay team mate isn't just not-into-women but he is the complete opposite of the rest of the team and easily maligned.  The use of the word "gay" in the same constant, negative way has the same effect.

Personally I am able to survive this environment as the gay manager of a premier cricket team because firstly I joined the team after I came out, secondly it was my accepting straight friends that encouraged me to take the position in the first place and in doing so provided a small core of players who knew what I was going through, which brings me to the third reason which is that I did not volunteer the fact that I was gay until I had been involved in the team for a full season.  I wanted to prove that I was part of the team first and to their credit the lads have been nothing but supportive as they slowly found/find out.  I consider myself incredibly lucky because the rugby player I mention above was not so fortunate and was forced to leave the team he played for (twice).  I was also lucky that I was largely settled in my social life when I became the one gay man involved in a team; the continuing fear I have is that it would be next to impossible for a young man to come out while already part of a cricket team.  How the hell is a confused youth supposed to be sure of who he is when surrounded by the claustrophobia of a team environment?  The all-day nature of cricket makes me even more certain that this is a real problem in the sport.  It will be a gradual evolution of attitudes.
However there are a couple things I would say at this point to my heterosexual colleagues.  A gay player is as much interested in you as you would be in a lesbian team mate.  If a gay player ever did like the look of another man - I would be lying if I said I hadn't - possibly in the team, you have nothing to fear; it is much more tormenting and distracting for the gay player than for you  Remember that every player in the team is there because they like the sport, they're not there for the visual buffet (you should be so arrogant) and this is where the balance lies in my opinion.  The thing that unites the team is their shared passion for the sport (and probably many other sports besides) and the fact that one or more players might be gay is as relevant as whether they like Game of Thrones or not, whether they study law to your arts degree or whether they prefer vanilla to chocolate.  I would ask that you lay off the language though...

If you think I'm exaggerating then consider one of my heroes is English cricketer Steven Davies (who describes his coming out to team mates before he toured Australia in this short interview).  He brilliantly conveys what it is like, I encourage everyone to watch him describe the process, reasons and timing for his coming out to his team mates.

Well that's it from here and I hope you join me again
It's good bye for now