(illustration by Sara Drake)
It’s part way through the second half of the game and the rugby team I play in is winning – a rare occasion for us this year. I can tell the opposition is getting frustrated. They’re certainly not expecting a loss. In fact, I am sure they expected to walk all over us.
Once again they try but are unable to push through our line. One of their players bellows at his teammates, “Come on! We can’t let these faggots beat us!”
My blood boils. Don’t get me wrong: I can handle tough talk on the field and I don’t care about a bit of sledging. I tend to avoid it - prefer to stick to the game - but I understand others need to gee themselves up. But as soon as I hear the word ‘faggot’ I’m ready to rip someone’s head off.
I’m lucky. Before I can do anything rash and stupid the play continues. Having to make the next tackle, there is no chance for a fight - a fight I’m certain I would have lost. And in the end we win – a much greater punishment.
I play in Brisbane’s only gay-friendly rugby union team, the Brisbane Hustlers.
**
I have been playing sport my entire life. As a kid I was obsessed with basketball and played for ten years. My brother started first, and Dad convinced me to sign up by joining as the coach of our team at the same time. I ended up quitting at the end of high school, because as I said “basketball is full of wankers.” Looking back, I’m pretty sure what I meant is “basketball is full of homophobes.”
During university I spent most of my time in the gym. It was my turn of the phase that many gay guys go through, where one aims for the perfectly sculpted body (I have finally accepted my fate of being known as a ‘cub’—a young, hairy and solidly-built guy). After uni I was recruited by a friend to play in an Ultimate Frisbee social league – an obsession that lasted for a couple of years. The Frisbee community was the most open sporting community I had ever been involved in and I made great friends through it. Although, whilst I can’t remember any experiences of open homophobia, the heteronormativity—the assumption of straightness—was always present. As it goes in most of my life, playing Frisbee I often felt on guard, concerned that the next person that found out about my sexuality would be the one to have a problem. Moving to Queensland after spending all my life in Canberra that issue became much more prominent; playing in a men’s Frisbee team up north, I noticed more open homophobia. It’s not like I couldn’t deal with it, and I certainly didn’t feel excluded because of my sexuality – whenever I came out no one blinked. The homophobia was just incidental, not vicious. Still, I noticed it, and I found it tiring. It stopped me from really being myself in the team, and that takes way too much energy.
Then I found the Hustlers. I’d always been interested in rugby, and after reading about the Sydney Convicts—Sydney’s gay-friendly team—I thought I’d see if Brisbane had an equivalent. They did, and so I decided to go to one training session, see what it was like.
The Brisbane Hustlers reformed in 2012 after a hiatus, and after playing our first real game in the 2012 Purchas Cup—an annual gay rugby tournament—we entered a Brisbane competition and set ourselves for the season. Our team—a mixture of gays and straights—played a total of fourteen games, winning two and losing twelve, and then went on to come second behind the Sydney Convicts in the 2013 Purchas Cup.
**
If you were to try and find the realm where homophobia is most persistent in Western culture today, sport would have to be pretty high up in the list. In both professional and amateur leagues, homophobia remains a serious issue. In 2010, former AFL player Jason Akermanis caused a storm when he wrote an opinion piece calling on any gay AFL players to stay in the closet. The piece came after persistent rumours (ones that continue today) that gay players in the league were being gently encouraged to come out (none have yet). His argument was simple – that the code wasn’t ready for an out player. In his piece he recounted the story of an out player he knew during his early years and the apparent awkwardness his sexuality caused. Akermanis argued that an out gay player would still make others uncomfortable, and could “break the fabric of the club.”
We can see what Akermanis means. Last year St Kilda AFL player Stephen Milne was fined $3,000 for calling a Collingwood player a “fucking homo”. During the 2010 rugby season, swimmer Stephanie Rice was criticised after she tweeted “Suck on that faggots” when the Wallabies beat South Africa. Similar incidents can be seen in professional sports around the world. When NBA player Jason Collins became the first active male athlete in a major US team sport to come out of the closet, it was reported that he was so scared of how his team would react that he didn’t tell anyone before he made it public. Reports about Collin’s outing often focused on historical homophobic stereotypes – talking about straight players being “comfortable” in the locker room with a gay player, as if that was the biggest issue at play. Internationally we can see it as well. When Qatar—a place where homosexuality is illegal—was awarded hosting duties of the 2022 Football World Cup, the advice FIFA President Sepp Blatter provided to gay and lesbian people if they wanted to attend was to “refrain from sexual activity.” The International Olympic Committee has been no better, having done basically nothing in response to anti-gay laws recently introduced in Russia, which is due to host the 2014 Winter Olympics.
For women’s sports, the issue is perhaps even more complex. Despite the relatively low numbers of professional women’s sports players who are publicly out, there is an assumption that all women who are in competitive sport are gay. For example, Australian tennis star Jelena Dokic’s father made a controversial statement in 2003 in which he said that 40% of women’s tennis players were lesbians. Damir said at the time, “I wouldn’t be able to stand it if it turned out that Jelena was one of them. If she was a lesbian I’d kill myself.” In the US this has lead to a backlash. As Jessica Luther explains:
“There are often backlashes within women’s sports to the stereotypes that all female athletes are gay. Only six years ago, Rene Portland, the then-head coach of Penn State’s women’s basketball team, resigned after it came to light that she had a strict ‘no lesbians’ policy for her team. Lauren Lappin, a gold medalist softball player for the US, has talked candidly for years about her fears of coming out because of the negative stereotyping around gay people generally and her fears of feeding the idea that all women who play sports are necessarily lesbians. Often, teams or leagues retreat to what Hamilton has described as ‘an almost hypersexualized version of femininity’ in order to ‘derail homophobic assumptions’ by glomming onto sexist ones. This was evident in 2009, when the Florida State women’s basketball team created a media campaign that featured their athletes in fancy dresses, heels, and makeup (since being seen as ‘butch’ by playing sports feeds stereotypical ideas about gay women in our society). Or more recently when the Women’s Tennis Association’s “Strong is Beautiful” campaign used similar techniques to draw attention to their players.
The fate for intersex and trans* competitors is no better. In 2009 South African runner Caster Semenya was subjected to gender testing and then publicly ‘outed’ without her approval as an intersex person. A similar controversy was stirred after the London Olympics when it was revealed that four female athletes had the “genetic make-up of males.” These and other controversies demonstrate a complete inability of powers-that-be to deal with gender issues in sport.
To read the rest of Simon’s essay (it’s over 6000 words in length!) grab a copy of our latest issue.
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Simon Copland is a freelance writer and climate campaigner. He plays rugby union and is a David Bowie fanatic. He’s at http://themoonbat.com on Twitter as @SimonCopland.
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Sara Drake is an over-emotional detective who is to close to the case and about to be sent home.