Page 20 - 364645 LP243221 A Love Supreme 48pp A5 Aug22

PRIDE
May 2022 gave us what we’d all been waiting for. Sunderland finally winning under the Wembley arch with us there to witness it, not to mention the promotion we’ve been impatiently expecting ever since we dropped into League One. But as I walked up Wembley Way before the game, I did so with an extra spring in my step. That’s because the week already had its football feelgood story. The whole season had, in fact.
Blackpool F.C.’s Jake Daniels had come out as gay and
I couldn’t wipe the grin off my face. Plenty of people will say ‘it shouldn’t be news’, and they’re right, but only if they mean we should have dozens of happily out footballers already and Jake’s story shouldn’t have made the headline splashes it inevitably did. It would be nice if this stuff didn’t matter, but it does.
A few rainbow laces each year doesn’t count as proper inclusivity, I’m afraid. It’s a sweet gesture but ultimately a token one if a good handful of players don’t feel like they can be their truest selves playing in front of British football crowds. And that’s without stirring up any of the debate around the World Cup being held in a country with appalling rights records around homosexuality and a certain Premier League club being bought out by an investment fund representing another. Higher footballing powers aren’t taking the messages these moves send seriously enough.
I’ve supported Sunderland since I was knee-high and yet I’ve never exactly been ‘out’ while at a game. That’s not because there’s been OTT homophobic abuse swirling around me every week, but because football in general traditionally hasn’t bred a friendly enough atmosphere for anyone other than white, male and straight. Things have come on leaps on bounds in every one of those regards,
but we’re still not there yet. Such fanfare around 17-year-old Jake publicly declaring what ought to be an inconsequential fact proves there’s still plenty work to do.
There might be mates of mine reading this who’ve not known I’m gay until now. It’s nothing personal, it’s just that being
at a game, or sat watching one in the pub, has never felt conducive to a coming out chat. I’ve always felt the need to separate these two areas of my life, an implicit pressure on me that I somehow can’t be both queer and a football fanatic all at once. I bet there’s someone reading this now who feels (or has felt) exactly the same.
If you’re reading this thinking I’m daft, worrying about a problem that isn’t there, then stick ‘Section 28’ into a search engine and educate yourself on yet another strand of Thatcher-era cruelty many of us grew up under. I’m in my mid- 30s and I’d wager there’s a good handful of people like me in every SAFC crowd who’ve been in exactly the same boat. It’s perhaps no coincidence it’s taken a teenager to make a step that no professional player in the generation above him, who therefore hit adolescence in the grip of an especially mean Tory law, has felt able to do.
A world obsessed with the WAG culture, which the intense and widespread coverage of ‘Wagatha Christie’ proves we still are, can’t also claim that a footballer’s sexuality is irrelevant
20 ALOVESUPREME ISSUE259