The Pink Elephant

Will they name names?

TuttoBene’s enjoying this UF business, so please enjoy her latest missive with equal brio.

While rummaging through today’s stories, there were many avenues available to venture down.  I could easily discuss Inter’s win, the Serie A clubs in Europe, the UEFA coefficient points wrangle between Italy and Germany… you get the idea.

Usually all great topics to converse about, but then something jumped out at me on an Italian website:  “Nella Juventus c’è un gay tra il centrocampo e l’attacco.”

I’m sure that you don’t have to read Italian to understand what the headline says.

According to openly gay journalist Paolo Colombo—who revealed all of this on the Italian show Chiambretti Night—Juve has gay players and AC Milan had a gay player who recently just transferred out.  He also said that he had a relationship with a player back in the day, but after the relationship ended, the player went on to get married and have a traditional family.  Finally, Colombo shared that there are gay players in the top teams and also claims that he can tell if a player is gay when he interviews them.

In Colombo’s view, when it comes to homosexuality, the world of football simply does not like or want to talk about.

Recently, there has been a movement to stop homophobia in football.  As we all know, it’s hard to implement change and fight against societal views that have been around for ages (see: racism).  I find homosexuality in football particularly interesting because it varies from racism in terms of the “difference” not being visible. It’s fascinating that a story (even if it might be hearsay) like this has not been picked up, further illustrating that those deep in the footballing culture want nothing to do with it.  This is the pink elephant in the room that crosses all boundaries, no matter what the professional sport.

Some may argue that what players do in their private time is exactly that: private.  Obviously, most don’t think in those terms, especially when you visit your local newsstand, bursting at the seams with OK magazine, and assorted other tabloids.  The media bombard us with tales of players’ off the pitch lives: x slept with prostitutes, y cheated on his spouse, and so on and so forth.  Keeping this in mind, how might the reaction to an out-of-the-closet player unfold? One must hope it wouldn’t lead to another tragedy as per Justin Fashanu.

Guys:

Do you care what your team does off the field?

Would it diminish your opinion of your favorite player(s) if they were gay?

Would it make them any less of a player on the pitch if he was?

To the girls, I ask the same questions as above, but one more for those slasher-friendly audience members: how would your view change if the players depicted were closer to the slash than you thought?

Trying to end on a not-so-serious note, I had no idea what slash was until someone explained it to me in layman’s term: male on male fan fiction.  Randomly, someone told me that some wacky fangirls on twitter @’d Cesc Fabregas links to slash. About him.

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LINKS:
Here’s the link to the video of Paolo Colombo on Chiambretti Night.

Link to www.sportlive.it page.

And if you too, desire to send slash links to Cesc, here’s his twitter.