“Steven Davies, the Surrey and England wicket keeper is gay.”
I wrote that pithy sentence yesterday and have since spent 24 hours trying to work out whether anything more needs to be said. After all, what’s the big deal? We’ve all worked in numerous offices and attended various educational establishments in which it was common knowledge that colleagues were gay. My neighbours when they moved in upstairs announced they were gay. I didn’t feel moved to write a blog about it.
And indeed, if you read comments on newspaper sites you will frequently hear the refrain “OK so he’s gay. Why do we have to know about it?” But it is precisely for that reason that we should take a moment to pause for reflection.
There are broadly speaking two sides to this discussion and I believe one of them is speaking with forked tongues to cover up its bigotry.
Let us examine the notion that Steven Davies has “every right to be gay but do we really need to be told about it.” It sounds very reasonable. After all, did Kevin Pietersen announce that he was heterosexual? Did Darren Sammy or Jimmy Anderson?
Well actually they did. When KP and Jimmy witter on endlessly about their kids or Sammy engages in crude metaphors to describe his love making exploits on Twitter they exploit the freedom that comes to the majority. There are a few titters here and there but what they are doing is raising their profile by giving an insight into their lives; lives that broadly speaking contain shared elements with their audience.
If Davies hadn’t come out would he have been able freely to express himself? Why shouldn’t he feel secure enough to tweet “just got back after 12 hour flight. Looking forward to seeing my man again.” Something tells me that were he to tweet it would also be far less stomach churning than the nonsense about tasting the sweet sweet honey of his lover that Sammy foists on us daily.
The same forked tongues who would have Davies keep quiet seem to think that homosexuality is a “lifestyle choice” equivalent to being a vegetarian or owning a dog. Aside from the fact that they see nothing odd in vegetarians expressing their vegetarianism, it is also a fallacious premise. Being homosexual is not a choice. Having homosexual relationships is a choice, and in a country that has sensibly legalized homosexuality it is perfectly normal for homosexual people to have homosexual relationships.
But the covert bigots are not the only issue. It is easy enough to tear apart the raft of false oppositions that spew from their unthinking mouths.
What troubles me is what Davies’ outing tells us about cricket and team sports generally. I have played club cricket for 25 years in the company of Marxists, Liberals, Socialists, Tories and the occasional Fascist. I can think of only one out and proud homosexual team mate in all that time. Davies himself is the first professional cricketer I can recall coming out.
Whether we like it or not, whether we think we go out of our way to make our club welcoming or not, the fact remains that I have played cricket with more native Peruvians (two) than I have out homosexuals. And that cannot be right (not that I have anything against native Peruvians per se, you understand). When British Asians feel excluded from cricket clubs around the country we are right to be concerned. But I have never sat in a committee meeting in which we’ve discussed our failure to recruit good young gay cricketers, or even acknowledged that our club may not be welcoming to gay men.
We are all complicit in sweeping this issue under the carpet and that is why Davies’ decision to go public is one we should all support. Not because it’s brave, nor simply because it relieves him of the burden of secrecy. But because there is clearly something wrong.
After all, are we to believe that there is something intrinsic in cricket that makes it heterosexual? Are we going to posit that it’s a game that exclusively suits the heterosexual man? He can stand in a field and avoid childcare duties for a day or dodge that trip to B&Q? Will we construct some farcical argument that gay men are too style conscious for cricket to explain away the fact that somewhere between 3 and 5% of the population are thought to be actively gay, yet Davies is the first cricketer ever to come out? Are we to assume instead, therefore, that there are plenty of gay cricketers but only Davies has felt able to come out?
The former argument is ludicrous and the latter scenario is extremely troublesome.No one likes to confront issues that paint them in a harsh light which is why so many sympathetic commentators and fans still struggle to find the right response. As a result they tend to ignore it while giving, they think, tacit support.
But that is not enough. Davies’ announcement should be the start of a conversation that addresses the non-representation of one section of our society within our great game.
After all, thanks to vociferous women and people of colour we have no trouble discussing racism or sexism in cricket even if we still have a long way to go to eradicate either. Strategies are devised to tackle racism and sexism. A sharing of thoughts and professed intolerance to bigotry has made progress in addressing these blights.
What has prevented us from addressing the place of homosexuals in cricket has hitherto been the absence of a voice. Now we have found one we should all get talking.