Fear of the fans, teammates and the loss of sponsors, why don’t athletes come out of the closet?

The Spanish judo championship was about to start and Marc Fortuny was filled with a contradictory feeling. At 23 years old and after having been the junior champion of Spain and having achieved a bronze in the absolute category, this could be the turning point of his career. But something inside him didn’t want to win the championship.

In fact, he had already decided that he wanted to stop competing. A few months later, after winning the bronze medal, Fortuny abandoned judo and returned to his native Sabadell.

“I didn’t know exactly what was happening to me, but there was something that wasn’t going quite right, my sports career was affected because I was struggling internally at the same time and there came a point where I couldn’t give my best anymore. myself, because, if you don’t accept yourself and you’re not okay with yourself, how are you going to be giving 100%?” Fortuny recalls, seven years later.

“Over the years I’ve seen that the main reason I quit was because the fact of accepting my homosexuality and being an athlete was not compatible of elite and to move in the environment in which I moved”, adds the former professional judoka, who now works as a personal trainer.

“I didn’t know exactly what was happening to me, but there was something that wasn’t quite right, my sports career was affected because I was fighting internally at the same time”

The decision was not easily understood in his environment, nobody knew his personal situation. He came out of the closet with his best friends, but no one linked to the world of judo. The environment in which he had been almost totally immersed for the last few years was not, after all, a secure environment.

“The funny thing is this, in the end, where I spent the most time was the place where it took me the longest to accept it, to say it and not feel judged or afraid of what people would think. It’s funny, it was what identified me the most, but… “.

a straight space

The world of professional men’s sports, especially in the disciplines that mobilize a greater number of fans, remains an essentially heterosexual space, at least from the outside.

English Justin Fashanu became the first soccer player high-level to come out of the closet in 1990, which made him for years the target of insults from the stands and uncomfortable protagonist of some malicious jokes by peers as his career declined.

He ended up committing suicide eight years later after being accused of rape by a 17-year-old in the United States. Since Fashanu’s coming out of the closet, practically no peer has dared to follow in his footsteps. No soccer player or basketball player in the top Spanish divisions has ever done it.

However, it cannot be said that there have been no advances in recent years in other sports. 11,700 athletes participated in the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, of which 179 were visible LGBTI, almost triple than in Rio 2016according to the specialized magazine Out Sports.

A “double life”

In 2016, the water polo player Víctor Gutiérrez became the first Spanish athlete in a team discipline to come out of the closet. His image appeared on the magazine Shangay next to a quote: “I hope that my coming out of the closet will serve to break a taboo within the sport”.

“I understood that I lived in a privileged situation and that I had not fought for it, but that another generation before me had sacrificed a lot so that I could have an easier life, so I also had a part of the responsibility in doing things for the others a little easier”, declares Gutiérrez, who is now 31 years old, is still active and has been, for eight months, secretary of LGTBI policies of the PSOE.

Unlike Fortuny, Gutiérrez did feel comfortable in his sporting environment to come out of the closet. At 17, a teammate became the first person he spoke to openly about their sexual orientation. His reaction, affirming that they would continue to be best friends, filled him with confidence to continue telling other colleagues.

“Then there was a stage in which I went back a bit when I left the high-performance center and signed for Canoe and became a professional. I was very afraid that my dream would be cut short because my teammates saw who I was,” he recalls. Gutiérrez, who describes those years as a “double life, moving forward and also remaining hidden.”

“I understood that I was living in a privileged situation and that I had not fought for it, but that another generation before me had sacrificed a lot so that I could have an easier life”

normalize insults

Despite everything, his coming out of the closet has not prevented him from having a successful career in which there have been hardly any dark spots because of his homosexuality. IN 2021, Gutiérrez denounced on his social networks that a rival player, the Serbian Nemanja Ubovic, had called him a “faggot” twice during a match. Following his complaint, Ubovic was banned for four games.

“In the end, you normalize it because you’ve been hearing that word all your life,” says Gutiérrez. “But, I don’t know why, that affected me, I hadn’t heard that word in a long time, that they didn’t attack me in my space and I understood that I didn’t have to normalize or justify that type of behavior. That’s why I decided to denounce it publicly and became a the involuntary protagonist of the first sanction for homophobia in sport in Spain”.

The fear precisely of seeing oneself as the involuntary protagonist of an episode like this is one of the reasons why, as Gutiérrez himself admits, Hardly any homosexual professional athlete dares to come out publicly from the closet.

“It continues to be difficult because there is a lot of fear of rejection from your teammates in the first place. Then also, effectively, there are sports in which the stands have a lot of influence, especially in football. And then in smaller disciplines there is fear of the departure of the sponsors that many athletes depend on to be able to dedicate themselves fully to it”.

“I hadn’t heard that word in a long time, that they hadn’t attacked me in my space, and I understood that I didn’t have to normalize or justify that type of behavior”

Lack of commitment from the clubs

The culture that surrounds sport, with its exaltation of virility, strength and heteropatriarchal masculinity, clearly does not help that sexual diversity be normalized to the same extent as it is already in the rest of society. Nor do sports clubs and companies seem to have the same level of involvement in changing things as companies in other sectors.

Óscar Muñoz is the co-director general of the Business Network for LGBTI Diversity and Inclusion (REDI), a non-profit association that has been advising companies for four years to help them create respectful, inclusive and safe work spaces so that people of the LGTBI collective can develop professionally without fear of prejudice or stereotypes.

“We have come a long way with companies, we have grown from 11 to 160 companies in the last four years and, a few months ago, we asked ourselves why we were growing in some sectors that are very conservative such as legal or banking, but not in the world of sport”, declares Muñoz, who admits that they have not yet managed to work with a single sports club or company.

“The step has not yet been taken to train sports clubs in diversity and equality so that all kinds of discrimination are eradicated”

According to Munoz, only four out of ten LGTBI people dare to say it today in their work. A fact that can be striking, but that is greatly worsened if we talk about companies and sports clubs. For Muñoz, the key is in the formation and the later externalization of the advances.

“The step has not yet been taken to train sports clubs in diversity and equality so that all kinds of discrimination are eradicated,” says Muñoz. “Once we work within a company we ask them to externalize it, that’s when you have to put the flag on Pride. Football clubs have enormous visibility worldwide. Why aren’t they doing it with the great capacity What would they have to improve society?

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