Sport and society still needs more people like Daniels and Peat and Cusack and McCarthy and Thomas
“Since I’ve come out there has been rumours of Premier League footballers who might be coming out but you can’t force someone to come out,” he said.
It begs a number of questions. At what point will it no longer be a story? Or a matter of interest? How long before it will no longer seem necessary for a courageous young man like Daniels to run the gauntlet of social media abuse, in order to chip away at toxic prejudices? Should we expect sportspeople to carry that load?
Earlier in the conversation O’Driscoll and Peat discussed why it is different across the spectrum of female sports, where gay women can be open and comfortable about their sexuality without the fear of not being accepted. Male sports are still a million miles from that place. When Cusack came out in his 2009 autobiography Come What May he was the first high-profile GAA player to do so. From the hundreds of letters he received he knew that his book had made an impact on other people’s lives, but in the 14 years since it was published no other high-profile GAA player has made the choice Cusack did. Glibly, we imagined that others would follow.
The dynamics of the story, though, were of its time: for that newspaper Cusack’s sexuality had a sensational quality. That equation doesn’t exist in the same way now. Because sport is so mainstream and is so embedded in the small talk of daily life, it has a role to play in reshaping norms. Not every sport has a developed social conscience, or feels an obligation to step outside its lane, but that power exists nonetheless. Damnable tokenism is the parallel track: professional football fumbles with that.
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