General Football 23/24

[Buzzo]

Doubles down on the ‘jobby’ comment, gets minor rebuke so trebles down on it

https://www.twitter.com/emctear/stat...28832688549888

[S-RED]

About time TBH; love the fact they left Ali & Fab out of the names.......


Premier League clubs can prevent their Portuguese or South American players travelling to represent their national teams in the March international break.

Clubs are normally required to release players for international duty.

However, governing body Fifa has extended an exemption rule introduced in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

It allows clubs to prevent players leaving in certain situations, such as if there is a mandatory quarantine of five days or more on their return.

Anyone returning from one of the UK government's 'red list' countries - including Portugal, all of South America and parts of southern Africa - is required to quarantine for 10 days.

Portugal stars such as Manchester United's Bruno Fernandes and Manchester City's Bernardo Silva, and several Brazil players including City pair Ederson and Gabriel Jesus, Chelsea's Thiago Silva, Everton's Richarlison and Liverpool's Roberto Firmino, are among those who could be affected.

[Exiled_red]

About time TBH; love the fact they left Ali & Fab out of the names.......


Premier League clubs can prevent their Portuguese or South American players travelling to represent their national teams in the March international break.

Clubs are normally required to release players for international duty.

However, governing body Fifa has extended an exemption rule introduced in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

It allows clubs to prevent players leaving in certain situations, such as if there is a mandatory quarantine of five days or more on their return.

Anyone returning from one of the UK government's 'red list' countries - including Portugal, all of South America and parts of southern Africa - is required to quarantine for 10 days.

Portugal stars such as Manchester United's Bruno Fernandes and Manchester City's Bernardo Silva, and several Brazil players including City pair Ederson and Gabriel Jesus, Chelsea's Thiago Silva, Everton's Richarlison and Liverpool's Roberto Firmino, are among those who could be affected.

A sensible decision and a step in the right direction, but I still think that it's stupid to be holding such games in the current climate.

[Doc_Piptorious]

A sensible decision and a step in the right direction, but I still think that it's stupid to be holding such games in the current climate.

Makes no sense at all to have international games going on. You could make a small arguement for club competitions as the teams would be made up of players that are within the same bubble, but internation et ups have no such bubble as the players and staff would be coming from lots of different clubs and countries.

[Irishnev]

David Carmo (we were linked to him this window) with a shocking injury.......yikes

[ame="https://twitter.com/cm__lfc/status/1359630328680316929"]https://twitter.com/cm__lfc/status/1359630328680316929[/ame]

[Norbs]

Poor guy, is that a double break or dislocation?

[Shaggy]

Anyone able to kindly post this please?

[ame]https://twitter.com/AdamCrafton_/status/1360858775729676289[/ame]

[Buzzo]

Ive not read it yet, best settle in for the afternoon. It's long!

We know Justin Fashanu died. Now let us hear how he lived

Speaking over the telephone from his Nevada home, A.J. Ali’s voice softens.

“Justin Fashanu was a man on an island,” says Ali, one of Fashanu’s former agents and also one of his dearest friends. “Justin desperately wanted acceptance. In some ways, he reminded me of a 10-year-old little boy finding his way. He had that wonderment, that humour and that openness but he also had this craving to be accepted. It really hurt him when he did not receive it. Yet he would not back down. He would face it head-on, most of the time. But sometimes he would run and, ultimately, we know he took his life.”

On May 2, 1998, aged only 37, Fashanu stepped off his island once and for all. At a lock-up garage in Shoreditch, east London, Britain’s first £1 million black footballer, best known for being the only British player to have declared himself gay, decided his life was no longer worth living.

Fashanu, a tall, broad and highly skilful striker, rose to stardom as an 18-year-old. He won the Match of the Day Goal of the Season award by scoring a glorious volley against Liverpool in February 1980.
He was swiftly a fixture in the England Under-21 set-up and a year later, Brian Clough signed Fashanu for a Nottingham Forest side that had won the European Cup in two of the previous three seasons. This, however, was the beginning of a devastating downfall.

This week, Fashanu ought to have turned 60. Michael Cashman, the British actor-turned-politician, became a friend of Fashanu. He says that Fashanu would have a place in British parliament now, such was his strength of courage, his lucidity and the multiplicity of oppression he experienced as a gay black man.

The footballer’s fiercest critics, however, would contend that Fashanu may only have recently emerged from a long stint in a prison cell in the United States. Just over a month before he took his life, a 17-year-old American boy, whose identity is protected, accused Fashanu of sexual assault. Howard County police department registered five charges, including first and second degree of assault, in addition to a second degree sexual assault. Two of the charges, however, were for the crimes of “sodomy” and “perverted practice”. These laws in the state of Maryland criminalised sexual activities between same-sex individuals, even if they occurred on a consensual basis. The laws, effectively banning sexual relations between gay people, were enshrined under the same “Unnatural or Perverted Sexual Practices Act” that declared it illegal to have sexual relations with an animal. Those homophobic laws were only repealed four months ago.

Against this backdrop, Fashanu responded by fleeing the United States. In a suicide note, Fashanu insisted that his sexual contact with the young man was consensual and he also expressed fears that he would not receive a fair trial as a black gay man against a white complainant in the US state. “He did have a lot to fear when it came to this,” says his friend Ali. “Racism and homophobia would definitely play a role in how he would be judged.” The allegations, which will be further explored in this report, remain grave and the alleged victim stood by the claims after the footballer’s suicide.

The Fashanu story has often been told through the prism of his brother, the former Wimbledon footballer John Fashanu, who publicly admonished Justin for speaking openly about his sexuality. He offered to pay his brother not to come out and, when Justin did so anyway, John described his gay sibling as an “utter stranger” and said he would not share a post-match shower with Justin if they were on the same team. In 2018, he conceded he had acted like a “monster” yet only in 2012, he angered those in the gay community who grew to admire Justin when he alleged that his sibling had never really been gay. John said he was only “making up stories to get attention”.

Yet Justin Fashanu’s passing, much like the life he lived, was one of almost inconceivable complexity. Placed into care by his mother as a child, he took shelter at the Barnardo’s children’s charity, before entering foster care along with his brother under the guidance of a white Norfolk couple.

In his football, he experienced the boom and bust of life as a £1 million signing who did not live up to expectations at Forest. He clashed with managers, most notably under the homophobic Clough. He suffered the anguish of a career-derailing knee injury. His 19-year playing career spanned 22 clubs in seven countries, including the USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. He encountered homophobic abuse and discrimination from a sport steeped in tired stereotypes of what it means to be masculine. There were whispers, innuendos and catcalls, both on the training ground and on the terraces. One club insisted he take an HIV test as part of his medical.

After declaring his sexuality, Fashanu regularly changed in the referees’ room rather than with his team-mates at one of his clubs. Players refused to bathe with him after games at West Ham. The tabloid media, turbocharged by a Conservative government that demonised gay people under law and stigmatised the community in its rhetoric, presided over alarming levels of intrusion. The pressure came from all angles. Fashanu became a born-again evangelical Christian and The Athletic has heard alarming accusations that figures within the church urged Fashanu “not to be gay”. It is also alleged that he was repeatedly “left in tears” by his treatment in religious circles and that “a lot of people should be ashamed of themselves”. Asked whether this extended to suggestions of methods such as cure therapy, one friend answered: “Yeah, it was, it really was.”

The obstacles were plentiful. As a black man, he received vicious racist abuse from the terraces but he also received a chilling backlash from sections of the black community when he revealed his sexuality in 1990. One columnist in the black community newspaper The Voice said he “belonged to Satan” as part of a devastating spread of coverage, including a front page interview with his brother John, under the headline of “My Gay Brother is an Outcast”. This report details the rarely told story of the inspiring black gay activists who waged a year-long campaign to secure fairer coverage for Justin and black lesbian and gay people in Britain.

Fashanu’s light burned out early but for a long time, it was aflame. His gay friends and some former lovers provide a unique and uplifting insight into a voyage of gay discovery that was vibrant, bold and utterly radical for a footballer. This report does not seek to sanitise Fashanu in order to eulogise him. Even those who at one time admired Fashanu recognised his faults; most notably a tendency to rip people off and an appetite for the high life that saw him at times play the tabloids at their own game in return for financial benefit.

Yet it is wrong to speak only of Fashanu’s tragedy. The ghosts of Fashanu’s death stalk football to this day. He is offered up as cautionary tale to any prospective gay footballers. There was one gay British footballer — and we all know what happened to him. We know he died. Now let us hear how he lived.

To be a gay man in 1980s Britain was to be confronted by overwhelming animosity. In 1967, the Sexual Offences Act decriminalised homosexuality. Yet inequality remained, notably around the age of consent and the right to marry, while broader prejudice was widespread.

In the 1980s, an environment that had already restricted the freedoms and rights of gay men became downright hateful. The epidemic of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) toxified the treatment of gay and lesbian people. Misinformation about the syndrome was rife. In the United States, HIV was publicly described as GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) for several months in 1982, suggesting there was something particular to gay people that rendered the community responsible for the virus. This scientifically inaccurate myth lingered and British newspapers fired warnings about a “gay plague” throughout the decade.

Cashman, now a member of the House of Lords, was a gay actor in the British soap opera Eastenders and his character performed the first gay kiss in a British soap in 1989. He became a friend of Fashanu. The pair met at the London gay nightclub Heaven, where Cashman’s partner, Paul Cottingham, clicked with Fashanu over their shared love of football.

Yet the backdrop of the decade was brutal. Cashman says: “As soon as you were known to be bisexual or gay, you were seen as an AIDS carrier. The courage to ‘come out’ during that time was immense. Immediately, people associated you with something that they and the popular media had stigmatised.”

Cashman’s partner was “exposed” in the Sunday newspaper the News of the World. He continues: “Once he was known to be my partner, he was airbrushed and rarely mentioned — except in scandal. When I was in Eastenders, the producers said they tried to cast a straight actor in my role as they thought it would be easier for the actor given the tabloid focus on that person’s life. They turned our lives upside down. They revealed our address. There were bricks thrown through our window.”

The prevalence of HIV among gay men provided confirmation bias for the most damaging homophobic tropes. To understand the climate Fashanu endured, the coverage of national newspapers needs to be spelt out.

On February 7, 1985, The Sun ran a headline that read: “Aids is the wrath of God, says Vicar”.

The same newspaper wrote the headline: “Perverts are to blame for killer plague”.

In The People, the comedian Bernard Manning argued that gay actors should be banned from television, stage, clubs and pubs so they do not “corrupt the children”. The headline read: “Ban The Panto Fairies”.

The Sun, billing another story under the tagline “Another Red Hot Sun Exclusive” ran another tale inspired by a man of cloth — “I’d shoot my son if he had AIDS, says Vicar”.

Only this past week in The Guardian, Reverend Richard Coles recalled how his former Bronski Beat bandmate Jimmy Somerville received a call from one tabloid newspaper threatening to publish a story to say he was HIV positive unless he could produce a negative test. The Sun’s agony aunt ran one advice column entitled “My child is Gay!”, in which the mother of a 23-year-old member of the Royal Navy had said, “I loved him — now I wished he was dead”.

The poison seeped into the newspapers widely considered to be more mild-mannered. The Times wrote a leader editorial arguing that “many members of the public are tempted to see in AIDS some sort of retribution for a questionable style of life”.

Hints were dropped about celebrities suspected to be gay. A nudge-nudge here, a wink-wink there to the reader. The Guardian mentioned that the actor Sir Ian McKellen shared a home with a man. The Daily Express referred to him as “The Queens’ favourite actor”, intentionally misplacing the apostrophe.

If this feels like a needlessly long list, or a little heavy to read, imagine how it felt to be Fashanu, carrying his secret, encountering the drip, drip, drip of shame-inducing headlines. Imagine the fear that set in. Imagine what he thought it could mean for his career prospects, his faith and his relationship with his friends and family. As a talented young footballer, he had it all. And here was society, convincing him he risked losing it all.

These were the years in which Fashanu began to discover and explore his sexuality, underpinned by the innocent joy of sexual liberation but also a growing dread of rejection. While living in Nottingham, Fashanu dated a woman but he began to attend Part Two, the local gay nightclub in the centre of town. He met Peter Tatchell on one trip to London to go to Heaven. Tatchell became one of Britain’s most famous human rights activists and he endured one of the most homophobic political campaigns in recent memory, including a bullet through his letterbox, when he stood in the 1983 Bermondsey by-election.

The pair became “close”, Tatchell says. He tells The Athletic: “Justin regularly went to Heaven nightclub with me in the early 1980s and he was very cool and comfortable about being there. When he did not go with me, after 1983, he would go alone.”

Despite Tatchell’s growing public status, Fashanu had no qualms about being seen collecting Tatchell in Nottingham after a political meeting that the latter attended in support of the campaign for nuclear disarmament.

“Part of him seemed to be wishing to be outed,” Tatchell suggests. “We went to public places together, despite the fact that this risked him being outed by association with a well-known gay man like me. He was in the closet but a bit daring — even reckless. Even in the early 1980s, he was tempted to come out to ease the pressure of leading a secretive double life. But he was afraid of negative reactions from his manager, team-mates and fans, and also from the very homophobic press at the time. I cautioned him against coming out at that point as I could see he was not mentally prepared for the likely backlash.”

Cashman underlines the risk to a public figure. He says: “Back then, you could be sacked if you admitted you were gay. You could be denied insurance, denied a mortgage, kicked out of your rental property. The age of consent was 21. To meet a man in the street was illegal, you could be charged with soliciting, procuring or an immoral act, or accused of a breach of the peace.”

It was only in 1984 when Chris Smith became the first member of parliament to declare himself gay. He spoke out about the manner in which the police targeted gay people, in particular how the authorities sought to dress provocatively outside gay bars to entice and entrap gay men into sexual contact for which they could be arrested.

It is little wonder, therefore, that Fashanu recognised the need to be defensive when reports of his visits to gay nightclubs returned to his manager Clough and soon spread like wildfire in the Forest dressing room in 1982. Football was, and arguably still is, imbued by a certain perception of what it means to be masculine. Certainly, he did not possess an ally in Clough, one of the most celebrated managers in this country’s history but a man who would later admit in his autobiography that even his own wife had admonished him for his prejudiced treatment of Fashanu.

Clough recalled one episode where he confronted Fashanu. “I asked him ‘Where do you go if you want a loaf of bread?’ He said a baker’s. ‘Where do you go if you want a leg of lamb?’ He said a butcher’s. ‘So why do you keep going to that bloody poofs’ club?’”

Fashanu’s on-field form suffered. He scored three goals for the club in his only full season. In Forest team-mate Viv Anderson’s autobiography, the defender says that Clough would call Fashanu a “poof” in training. The situation became farcical when, after a loan spell at Southampton, Clough insisted Fashanu sign for Derby. When the striker refused and continued to attend training, Clough called two policemen to remove him, or in Clough’s own words, “to come and nick my own centre-forward”.

Clough wrote: “When Fashanu at first refused to leave, I resorted to a tactic that had been used against me countless times as a player. I kicked him in the calf, which makes you bend the leg slightly.”

Clough later acknowledged the injustice of his behaviour. He said “I know now that I should have dealt with Fashanu differently, certainly with a little more compassion and understanding,” he said. “I don’t believe I was wrong to confront him about his sexuality but I should have done it more privately. I did it in front of the other players and in front of almost anybody I talked to. I was extremely unkind to him.”

Yet there are also plenty of self-imposed caveats from Clough, such as his crass suggestion in the same book that Fashanu was a “fraud” for introducing his manager to his girlfriend, rather than recognising his player may have been a frightened and vulnerable young man yearning for acceptance in an unwelcome environment. Girlfriend Julie, for her part, understood Fashanu’s strife and they remained on sufficiently warm terms for Julie to attend his funeral in 1998.

Beyond Clough’s bigotry, Fashanu’s inner turmoil intensified and it was not only his sporting life that provided cause for concern.

Several months before Fashanu publicly revealed his sexuality in The Sun newspaper in October 1990, he strolled into the London Apprentice gay bar in Shoreditch. Matthew Hodson recalls the bar as being “quite leathery, quite masculine, with a sawdust feel”. Hodson was then a student at drama college and he and Fashanu swiftly made eyes at one another.

Hodson tells The Athletic: “We have to acknowledge just how hot Justin was. He was tall, he was very handsome. When he smiled at me, it was a very nice feeling. I just thought, ‘Wow, he is super hot’.”

The pair began talking, “had a little snog” and soon went back to Fashanu’s flat in Dalston. Hodson was not aware of Fashanu’s celebrity status as a footballer and his apartment had nothing over the top to suggest he was famous. Hodson was one of those upset by John Fashanu’s claim in 2012 that Justin had invented claims about his sexuality — he, after all, could very much attest otherwise. Yet two of his sharpest memories of their time together offer an insight into what had become one of the defining tensions of Fashanu’s life.

When the pair returned to Fashanu’s flat, the footballer offered to turn on some music to set the mood. Hodson, very much into dance or blues, was startled when Fashanu began to play faith music. The next morning, the pair went for breakfast and Fashanu spoke a little more openly about his Christianity.

Hodson explains: “It was challenging for him, between the Evangelical and Pentecostal communities, where it was perceived as hard to be Christian and gay. I asked him about this. He told me: ‘I feel that it is a test that God has sent to me — and I am failing’. I felt really sad for him because who wants to think their sexuality is a burden or a sin. It gave him a very cruel perception of his own sexuality.”

According to Nick Baker’s biography of the footballer entitled Forbidden Forward, Fashanu’s spiritual awakening had first come about during a visit to car supplier Terry Carpenter in Nottingham. Carpenter had seen Fashanu feeling down and told the footballer that Jesus Christ could help him. The pair went to Carpenter’s house, where he read passages from a Gideon Bible and prayed for Fashanu. Carpenter then introduced Fashanu to a Sunday service at his Pentecostal Church and the footballer became close to the preacher David Shearman at the Christian Centre in Nottingham and J. John, an international evangelist.

J. John lived only around the corner from Fashanu’s new home in Nottingham and became a close confidante. J. John tells The Athletic that Fashanu would eat five times per week with him and his wife Killie, sometimes even stopping by for both breakfast and dinner.

“I would liken it to a godparent relationship,” He continues. “I was a minister. He was hungry for guidance, wisdom and knowledge on a spiritual level. He came once per week at 7am for bible studies in my flat. He came at 7.15am on one occasion. I put the chain on and opened the door. I said, ‘What do you want? It started at 7am’. I told him he had missed it and was too late. I pushed the door back and said the class was finished. He was pounding the door asking to be let in. So I said, ‘Don’t be late again’. He never was.

“At one point, Justin, my wife Killie and I collectively came up with 16 people we knew had no faith. We invited those 16 people to Justin’s house on a Monday night and we called it Agnostics Anonymous. They came for a meal, a glass of wine and a discussion. The first week, I got a pad of paper and asked these people for their objections about faith. I chose a question and then we would discuss it and give guidance. We went through all the questions. These 16 people all had significant spiritual experiences during the three months of meetings.”

Fashanu’s spiritual conversion also irritated Clough, as did the striker’s decision to appoint a personal martial arts trainer and masseur. J. John also began to take Fashanu to the Mount St Bernard Abbey monastery every so often to relax his mind. He explains: “You come from a noisy world and it can still feel noisy even if there is no noise. It is like those snow globes — it takes a minute or two for the snow to settle.”

To those who knew Fashanu, he appeared to be somebody in need of an emotional crutch, particularly after being placed in care as a child. Viv Anderson shared a room with Fashanu at Forest and remembers one night when he awoke to the sound of a huge commotion during a pre-season tour in Spain. Anderson wrote in his autobiography: “A thick strong door had a huge hole in it. I heard the sound of sobbing in the bathroom. Justin was bathing his hands — covered in blood — in the sink, and he was moaning. He had smashed through the door with his fist. He didn’t appear to be awake, almost like he was in a really bad dream. I got the impression he was reliving some dark incident from his boyhood but I have no idea what it was.”

While he attended persuasion seminars for agnostics and bible classes with J. John, Fashanu’s ultimate contradiction lay in the fact he also attended gay nightclubs in Nottingham and London. He still dated his girlfriend Julie. Was his spiritual advisor J. John aware of Fashanu’s sexuality? He continues: “Sometimes when you have struggles, it is difficult to always articulate or express. I honestly do think he loved his girlfriend and he could have married her. They could have had children.”

Many gay people would counter that it is a simplification, or even a delusion, to suggest that Fashanu could have continued throughout life restraining his attraction to men. Many would also oppose his suggestion that a sexuality is a choice. J. John is asked how Fashanu felt about his sexuality. He says: “It is not just him, is it? We all carry baggage. We all have certain needs. We are all a little broken and a little dysfunctional. There is this enigma, this puzzle. He had a girlfriend, he had his struggles, he had faith, he had issues from adoption, rejections, there are scars. Of course we had conversations about lots of things. He expressed hope that he would get married and have children with a woman. It was not something anyone imposed upon him.”

J. John adds: “Once he left Nottingham and went to Brighton, that is when things changed.”

Brighton is commonly known to be the gay capital of England. What does J. John mean by this? He says: “We were in Nottingham and he was in Brighton. He had a good Christian community and that is when he lost this, as telephone relationships are not quite the same. It was not easy.”

After a spell at Notts County, Fashanu signed for Brighton. He lived in a basement flat in Regency Square and befriended Terry Wing, a gay man who lived close by. Wing plays down the sincerity of Fashanu’s spirituality. Wing tells The Athletic: “He used to promote himself as a born-again Christian to hide what was going on. More than a bit, he used it as a major, major cover. That’s what he told me. I never knew him going to church or prayer meetings in Brighton. He demonstrated nothing religious whatsoever. I believe it all to have been a facade.”

Others say that Fashanu attended the Emmanuel Full Gospel Church in Brighton and Baker’s biography suggests he even invited people to his apartment for prayer meetings. There is a further anecdote, from his former boxing coach Gordon Holmes, who recalled Fashanu’s foster mum Betty Jackson being concerned about Justin’s state of mind as he has started “erratically talking in tongues” during one conversation on the phone. Baker’s book also records an anecdote from when Fashanu played football for a Los Angeles team created by Sir Rod Stewart. At a party, Fashanu presented Stewart with a bible on his birthday. It led some among the rock star’s entourage to wonder whether Fashanu had suggested Stewart needed saving.

Consistent accounts, therefore, indicate that Fashanu was at certain times swept away by his faith. Tatchell says that Fashanu “reverted to Christianity big-time in the mid-1980s and got ashamed of his sexuality again.” At that stage, Tatchell adds: “Justin did not want to come out.”

On one occasion in 1985, Fashanu even refused to play on the Sabbath. Beyond the curiosity, it is justified to wonder what the impact of religion may have been over his sense of self-worth. The UK Evangelical Alliance website currently contains guidance on the mainstream evangelical response to homosexuality. Bullet points include the opposition of “certain churches to accept and/or endorse sexually active same-sex partnerships as a legitimate form of Christian relationship”.

It also adds that while evangelical congregations should welcome sexually active lesbians and gay men, “they should do so in the expectation that they will come in due course to see the need to be transformed and live in accordance with orthodox church teaching”.

A.J. Ali, Fashanu’s friend in the United States, attended bible classes with Fashanu. His analysis of the evangelical impact on Fashanu’s state of mind is troubling. Fashanu, as Hodson can attest, continued to have same-sex relations despite his faith. Ali says: “I am a Christian and attended bible study with Justin, where we spoke about it quite a bit. There were times that people in the Christian community would apply so much pressure to him to want him to be a certain way. It was unfair. The judgmental people came out of the woodwork. It was a lot of pressure. I know that. There were many times Justin was just in tears.”

What was Fashanu being asked to do? “Not be gay,” Ali responds, instantly.

I then say that stories are told from this period in the 1980s and 1990s about methods such as gay cure therapy or attempts to discipline the mind. Would it go that far, or was it suggested to go that far? Ali replies: “Yeah, it was. It really was. There are a lot of people who should be ashamed of themselves.”

Did Fashanu try any of these things? “He was tormented by it,” Ali says. “His self-confidence was challenged. He loved the Lord. He loved God, no doubt about it. I know he is up in Heaven probably just having a great time and joking with people and being himself. That was a real challenge for him, the way people treated him who were religious and who wanted him to be something other than that he was.”

Malcolm Doney is a Church of England priest but also a journalist who befriended Fashanu in the 1980s. He first met Fashanu in 1984, when he accompanied Nick Beggs from the band Kajagoogoo to interview Fashanu for a religious publication. He remained in touch, visiting Fashanu in Brighton and he then received a curious phone call in 1989, shortly before Fashanu publicly declared his sexuality.

Doney explains: “He phoned me in a state of excitement to say he wanted me to ghostwrite his autobiography. He thought God had told him this because Justin found my phone number in an old address book. As I answered it, he thought there must be some meaning or some kind of miracle. In fact, I had not moved house, so the number had not changed. He said I should write his story and that he had explosive things to say. I regret to say I thought by this time Justin’s career had gone into the doldrums. I thought it would be difficult to find any publisher to pick him up, even a religious publisher, and that he did not have any currency.

“The next thing I saw, there was the expose in The Sun, where he came out as gay. This concerned me not because he was gay but how it was being handled. I feared that because of his association with the evangelical wing of Christianity. I was worried about him but I could not track him down. Evangelical is a hot term, post-Trump, so we are not talking about the new right wing of politics in this sense. These were old-fashioned, bible-believing Christians on the stricter end of the spectrum who felt people needed to be saved.

“There is a tendency to think that if God does not want it to happen, then with God’s help, you can change it, perhaps by going through some cure process, such as ‘praying away the gay’. Evangelicals talk about same-sex attraction rather than sexuality, something you can live with, rather than it being your identity. It is almost spoken about as a disability. One of my regrets is that I was not able to get back in touch with him. I wish I could have been a friend to square that circle a little bit. He did not have the context, support or the kind of friends to help him join this stuff up.”

J. John remained a source of counsel. He named Fashanu as a godfather to his own son, before the footballer came out publicly, and spoke at the footballer’s funeral in 1998. There is no suggestion that he was one of those figures who left Fashanu distressed. J. John says: “He knew he would be accepted by my wife and I. He knew we loved him and accepted him. Sometimes people put down the church and say we burn rather than build bridges. This is not true at all. He would be welcome.”

Yet in Fashanu’s own words, he encountered rejection from the church. For at least eight months after coming out as gay in October 1990, he claimed not to have stepped foot in a church. His words give the impression less of a man troubled by his sexuality and more of a man alienated by the judgment others imposed upon him.

Fashanu told The Voice newspaper in May 1991: “I have not wanted to embarrass, or rather wanted to put pressure on, the minister and congregation. In the Bible it states that when someone carries on living in sin, he should be asked to leave the church. Since they may feel that I am living in sin, well, it is hard because every day I need to go to church and read the Bible but I am not reading or praying any longer. The saddest thing has been the disruption of my relationship with God. I think basically that if God wants to deal with me and I go to Hell, then at least I can look him in the face and say: ‘At least I didn’t pretend to be something that I wasn’t.’ But so many of those who are in high spiritual positions, so many of those are ducking and diving and doing the same things in private. I think certain Christian qualities such as compassion and kindness have been missing from those who criticise me strongest.”

On October 22, 1990, Justin Fashanu made history. In an interview with The Sun newspaper, he revealed himself to be a gay man. In a BBC news report, the football agent Eric Hall recounted: “I was awoken in the middle of the night by a panicking and desperate Justin Fashanu. He was going to be exposed in a national Sunday newspaper about being gay. He was also desperate for money. I phoned up my friend, the editor of The Sun Kelvin MacKenzie and told him he could do his own story, confess he is gay and talk about other footballers, MPs, whatever.”

For many gay men, coming out is a positive and liberating experience. It represents the deepest intake breath and the biggest blowing out of the cheeks imaginable. Yet in Fashanu’s case, it was brutal and bruising. How could he feel pride when he was shamed at every turn? Shamed by the church, shamed by his sport, shamed by members of his family and shamed by the media.

Some of his friends resent the suggestion that Fashanu himself chose to come out. They point out that Fashanu cited how pressure from one publication led him to feel little choice but to speak to another. The sense of disempowerment must have been profound. Young, fearful and still in his twenties, the closet door had been locked, bolted and barricaded for a long time. He had considered coming out earlier, particularly confiding in Tatchell and also speaking to Leyton Orient manager Frank Clark, who recalled Fashanu being terrified of the potential response. As a young man, Fashanu would have imagined repeatedly the words he might use, who he might tell first, where he might tell them and when he might tell them. Now all sense of control had been pulled from under his feet. This was his story, to be told on his terms, but others dictated the pace.

The Sun went to town. “I’m Gay — and I want everyone to know it”, read the front page copy. The payment, in excess of £70,000, encouraged him to exaggerate the stories. He was mocked up in front of a phallic Big Ben and said he had slept with unnamed pop stars and an MP in the House of Commons. The language was of its time, with the sub-headline stating that “Fashanu confesses”. As is often the case in popular media, the language of a person revealing their sexuality is described as an admission, or a confession, conjuring the image of a sin, or suggesting that a person has done wrong.

Fashanu, it should be said, played his own part in his infamy. He entered something of a Faustian pact with the tabloid media, seemingly enjoying elements of fame and also the financial benefit of selling stories. This escalated in the early 1990s when, for example, he falsely claimed to be dating Coronation Street actress Julie Goodyear and he bizarrely invented claims that he may be able to help police detectives investigating the death of Conservative MP Stephen Milligan in 1994.

Yet his friends share unsettling memories of the media culture that consumed his life. The People called him “Joystick Justin”. In the mid-1990s, while between clubs, Fashanu briefly moved back to Brighton. He became friends with Iain Gowers, then a university student and they sometimes met up at the Revenge nightclub.

Gowers says: “If I had come out and this was the life I was having to lead, I would have questioned whether I should have done it in the first place. He was aware the tabloid newspapers wanted scandal from him. We were chatting in the club one time. Straight after, someone came up to me randomly and said, ‘Isn’t it terrible what has happened to Justin?’ I said ‘What?’ The person just walked off. My friend explained it was an undercover journalist. He was in there scratching around for an article on Justin, which had become a common trick to play on gay people in clubs that Justin frequented.”

By the mid-1990s, Fashanu had long ceased to be a top-flight star but the “hounding”, as several friends describe it, did not let up.

Gowers continues: “I then noticed how, when we spoke, Justin had a strange posture in a club. He stood in a way that was never too close, so they could not get a photograph that would frame him negatively next to me. I would have been 19 and he would have been in his early thirties. It would have been perfect for a newspaper to take a picture of me and him to suggest he was trying to pick up young men in a nightclub. The security in the nightclub told me to be careful because I was the right age for that kind of trick to be played on Justin.

“On another occasion, we were getting our coats from the cloakroom and as he left the nightclub, the journalists were there outside, waiting for him. I asked him what it was all about. He said it had become normal for him to get a taxi to his flat and they then followed him home. I don’t know how he could possibly have met someone romantically. It would have had to be very clandestine. They just wanted a picture to show he was picking up young men. It was not the coming out story we craved for a gay footballer. We wanted him to be out, enjoying life and falling in love but while he was out there, everything had to be in the closet for fear of it being misconstrued by the tabloids.”

While Fashanu became au fait with the worst excesses of the tabloid trade, he was left startled by matters closer to home following The Sun’s article. He had informed his brother John that the story would be coming and, incredibly, his brother offered to match the money that Justin was set to receive from the newspaper on the condition that Justin did not reveal his sexuality. A hyper-masculine figure in Wimbledon’s “Crazy Gang”, John feared the taunts on the terraces and the impact on his family.

Justin claimed that his decision to accept the deal from The Sun also factored in his fear as to what may lie ahead if he revealed his sexuality in a different publication. Fashanu said: “I genuinely thought if I came out in the worst newspaper and remained strong and positive about being gay, there would be nothing they could say. I object to people thinking I took the easy way out. My colour made it even more difficult. The tabloids don’t like black people being successful, so they take any opportunity to bring us down. Saying I was gay was the perfect excuse for them to attack me.” He also pointed out that readers of The Sun, known for its sport coverage, had followed his career closely. In 1992, he further rejected that he had been financially motivated, arguing that coming out had led him to lose “four or five times the money I earned from The Sun through lost contracts or sponsorship”.

John Fashanu’s opposition would not have been unusual for its time, it ought to be said, but the ferocity of his response in the black community newspaper The Voice is staggering to read with the benefit of hindsight. In a television interview, he had already said he would not be prepared to shower in the same dressing room as his brother.

In The Voice edition that followed Justin’s “coming out”, the footballer was subjected to page upon page of shame and loathing. The front cover carried a quote from an interview with John Fashanu, who declared “My Gay Brother is an Outcast”. The newspaper’s spiritual columnist wrote that Justin now “belonged to Satan”. Another writer, Tony Sewell, chastised Fashanu, saying: “We heteros are sick and tired of tortured queens playing hide and seek around their closets. Homosexuals are the greatest queer-bashers around. No other group of people is so preoccupied with making their own sexuality look dirty.” In July 2020, prime minister Boris Johnson’s government appointed Sewell to head up a commission on race and ethnic disparity in response to concerns raised by the Black Lives Matter protests. In a statement to The Guardian, he conceded his comments were “wrong and offensive”. He curtly declined to expand when contacted by The Athletic.

As a black child adopted by white parents in Norfolk and then as a footballer in the 1980s, Fashanu had encountered and challenged racism throughout his life. Baker’s biography of the player records how, on one occasion against West Brom, an opposition fan threw a banana at Fashanu. He responded by picking the banana up and eating it. His American friend Ali also recalls a meeting among US soccer owners in the late 1980s, where Ali was then a 24-year-old seeking to own a team. Ali recalls to The Athletic: “I went into this room and saw a dozen or more older white gentlemen. Some looked at me with disdain. I know that look, I have seen it before when I walk into a room. The racism in sport ownership is quite real. It is one of these old boys’ clubs. Justin saw me and there was a big smile on his face. We became best friends then and there. He never pulled any punches. You never had to guess what he was thinking. He saw right through sneers and glares and he let them have it. He was not going to stand for anyone not giving them a chance due to my age or colour of my skin. That meant the world to him.”

It explains, perhaps, why Fashanu would later confide in friends how The Voice’s coverage had cut him deeper than the expected homophobia from mainstream media outlets. Yet the abuse he endured also acted as a lightning rod for black gay and lesbian activists to rise up and secure fairer representation. In the aftermath of the 1981 Brixton Riot, The Voice had been founded to support the black community. The newspaper secured high levels of advertising funding from left-leaning councils around the country. Yet despite accepting the money from council keen to promote equal opportunities, gay and lesbian people were often stigmatised in the newspaper. This, sadly, has been an element of Fashanu’s story that has often been erased or airbrushed but the courage and dedication of campaigners such as Dirg Aaab-Richards and Ted Brown was extraordinary.

Aaab-Richards, a black gay activist who also worked in a support centre for LGBT people, recalls: “It was not just that day. You had to have been watching The Voice beforehand — ‘I’m no lesbo, says Whitney’ — was one headline. It was drip, drip, drip. I would buy The Voice to look for jobs and be confronted by this consistent negativity. They felt it OK to write things around some war zone where somebody had their genitals cut off but then we could not talk about sexuality because it goes into black homes. It was like. ‘What is going on?’”

Brown had previously campaigned publicly when the Jamaican reggae star Buju Banton released a single called Boom Bye Bye in 1988 in which the singer sang about shooting gay men, pouring acid on them and burning them alive.

“He was being promoted as the best thing out of Jamaica since Bob Marley,” Brown explains. “It was played on BBC radio and stations in America. He was speaking in a strong Jamaican patois (dialect) many people did not understand. We translated the lyrics and his record was banned from being played on the BBC. Various venues continued to promote it. I was beaten up as a result of complaining.”

After the Fashanu coverage, Aaab-Richards and Brown organised. Both had personal experience of trauma while coming to terms with their sexuality. Aaab-Richards slept in the Maudsley psychiatric hospital the night after coming out to his parents. While working in support services, he came across one child whose brother had put a gun to his head when he stated his sexuality. Brown, for his part, says the only thing that stopped him from killing himself as a teenager was the knowledge that his siblings were in care and needed his support.

Brown was the vice-chair of the Lewisham branch of the National and Local Government Officers’ Association (NALGO) and a member of the black and gay caucus. NALGO’s headquarters endorsed a boycott policy on The Voice, which saw advertisers threaten to withdraw funding from the newspaper in response to the severity of the homophobia. Aaab-Richards and Brown held a meeting with six directors from The Voice. They admit it was “scary”.

Aaab-Richards says: “I remember serving the tea and my hands were shaking. They were these powerful people from the newspaper who wanted the boycott lifted. NALGO had around 750,000 members at the time.”

The editor Steve Pope left the newspaper shortly after the Fashanu issue but Winsome Grace-Cornish, who was a staff member at the time of the Fashanu edition, took over and swiftly improved the tone. The campaigners secured a four-page right of reply to speak positively about LGBT issues.

Grace-Cornish says: “On publication, a lot of staff were quite surprised, and so was the publisher and the general public. It came across as very hostile reporting. Everyone realised that day a massive mistake was made. We contacted Justin and some leaders in the black gay community. We gave them the space to respond and Justin the space to respond. We had a desire to rectify the emotional harm that had been done.”

In May 1991, The Voice carried an interview with Justin Fashanu. It was groundbreaking. Diran Adebayo had covered arts for the newspaper and had previous experience in sensitively covering LGBT black artists in the newspaper. The headline of the article was emphatic, quoting Fashanu as saying: “Those who say you cannot be black, gay and proud of it are ignorant”.

Adebayo dislikes assumptions about homophobia in “the wider black community”, noting how London in particular was home to a growing scene of black gay people. Yet he is able to diagnose some of the conspiring factors that had led to a particularly vehement tone of homophobia within sections of black British society in 1990. He expands: “Breaking it down into communities, some of these black worlds were highly conservative, both African and Caribbean. These were places that are often authoritarian and did not have so much respect for coming to individual judgments about things. It was a sense of, ‘You do what I tell you to do and all the rest of it’. Some African countries had been taken over by highly judgmental Protestant cultures, to just be humble before God, to work really hard, puritan projects.”

Those who could not fit in, therefore, were at risk of being cut out. “In all sorts of ways,” Adebayo acknowledges. “Even to want to be an artist, for example. It has certainly been present. It is true to say there may have been a wider homophobic culture than the white world at that point, but arguably that was also because the white world had a larger middle class and were, in some ways, more sorted.”

Justin Fashanu would later say that his brother John was “going around with a crowd of black guys at the time and for them, homosexuality was worse than murder”.

For Aaab-Richards and Brown, there is some enduring sadness, in that Fashanu did not embrace the opportunity to connect with the black gay community after growing up in predominantly white surroundings. They spoke on the phone but Aaab-Richards recalls Fashanu stating that he wished to work in a “cosmopolitan” way, across different communities. The pair believe that spending more time with the intersection of black gay men may have helped Fashanu develop a “more positive ideology of self” and he may have found “kindred spirits”. Aaab-Richards did manage to connect Fashanu with a younger black gay man, who was a football devotee and keen to speak to the striker.

Brown’s final attempts were, sadly, unsuccessful as he reached out to contact Fashanu in the final few weeks of his life. Aware of the allegations emanating from America, he wanted to provide legal and pastoral support. Tragically, they were unable to connect.

The year 2017 saw the release of the film Forbidden Games. This documentary demonstrated the tension between the Fashanu brothers and the darker elements of Justin’s life. The i newspaper came to the following conclusion on football’s enduring inability to reconcile itself with homosexuality.

“Where are the gay partners, the gay husbands, the gay athletes competing in plain sight? They remain largely an invisible species. It’s not worth the trouble. They see how it ended with Fashanu, hanging from a rope in a Shoreditch garage.”

There is truth in the statement but it is also a conclusion that pays little heed to Fashanu’s broader contribution to the LGBT community during his life and the experiences he was able to enjoy, as well as endure, on account of declaring his sexuality. The debilitating burden of secrecy had weighed so painfully on his shoulders, yet instead of bending him forward, Fashanu found a community eager to help him to his feet.

His friend Cashman says: “He encountered people who wanted to be with him because he had declared who he was. Here was a young brilliant footballer walking into our community and saying, ‘I am one of you’. It meant Justin got a welcome he probably never imagined. I remember a couple of occasions being out with him and he was always surprised and overwhelmed that people actually liked him.”

Fashanu discovered his voice and demonstrated renewed confidence. Like a muscle developing with every rep, he became more assured in presenting his sexuality. In May 1991, he joined Cashman for a BBC documentary, where a series of gay and lesbian people from different walks of life addressed homophobia over a dinner party.

Cashman says: “The fact he took part in the programme showed that, yes, he had come out but that for him, it was not the end of it. He was going to become this person he was allowed to be.”

In July 1991, he went further. Posing for a front page cover shoot for the Gay Times, Fashanu was now on the front-foot, expressing who he was in an unapologetic fashion. When he attended the interview with The Voice newspaper during the same summer, the journalist Adebayo recalls how Fashanu brought an attractive white man along with him, who he presumed to be the footballer’s boyfriend at the time.

Robert Hanwell, who remains the receptionist at Gay Times, recounts: “Back then, Justin was a regular visitor to the offices and we always chatted. I recall visiting him in hospital when he tore a ligament. He was always charming and smartly dressed. In fact, he dressed like royalty. I particularly remember his black velvet monogrammed slippers!”

Far from the reputation of a man always tortured by his sexuality, Fashanu was often very comfortable in gay social spaces during this period. He received no payment for The Voice or Gay Times interviews. Journalists at the Gay Times recall plenty of other “out” stars turning down approaches for fear of jeopardising their careers. “I expected him to tell me to piss off,” says the former Gay Times employee Terry Deal, who organised the interview.

Not everyone, it should be said, has entirely fond memories of Fashanu’s arrival on the scene. Deal felt the adulation appealed to Fashanu as it mirrored the sentiment he previously experienced as a young footballer bursting onto the scene. “It was a good cover for the mess that lay beneath,” Deal says. “It gave him some kind of reason to exist for a while.” There were things he still hesitated over. One friend, for example, recalls how he was reluctant to walk into a newsagents to buy a porn magazine and he would instead telephone a friend to ask for spare copies. Fashanu upset Deal in the end, when he accepted a holiday from a gay travel company that Deal had recommended but failed to provide payment.

Fashanu was becoming a spokesman for the gay community. It was not a responsibility he always relished, tiring of being the man in the firing line, but his presence was notable. His obituary in The Independent said he became a patron of the Terrence Higgins Trust, which continues to do invaluable work in the battle against HIV. He accepted an opportunity to be a judge on Mr Gay UK.

Gay Times employee Deal recalls introducing him to the VIP culture of London gay nightlife. Fashanu requested backstage access to events, where he socialised with the actress Barbara Windsor and artists such as the Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant and actors such as Sir Ian McKellen.

In 1992, he appeared on the BBC current affairs programme Open To Question, where an audience quizzed him, often invasively, about his sexuality. His answers were confident and challenged stereotypes. In The Voice interview, he had rebuffed the trope that gay men are promiscuous. He said: “In any environment, you get people who are sexually active and those who are less so. But there’s much more to a homosexual person than just sex.”

Fashanu went on BBC programme Open to Question
On the BBC, he responded to a question about football’s perception of masculinity. It is an answer that remains pertinent to this day. “It is ridiculous,” he said. “What is machismo? Does it mean you smack your wife around? Does it mean you have 15 pints? What is macho? If macho means fighting, I can fight with the best of them. If macho means getting stuck into a tackle, I can do that. We need to re-evaluate our view on what makes a man a man.”

He told a story of a 17-year-old boy he had met while in Canada, whose parents had ordered him to leave home after coming out as gay. Fashanu continued: “He left home, became a male prostitute on the streets of Toronto and felt he had no friends. A group of us were talking and told him he did have hope. We were going to keep corresponding but it finished up with him jumping off a hotel and dying. People need to know the truth. Young people, old people, need to know it is OK to express your sexuality. If it means Justin Fashanu, who has a reputation of being a macho, aggressive footballer has to come out and say, ‘Yes, this is what goes on in my life’ — I will do that.”

Fashanu briefly considered attending marches and demonstrations, telling The Voice that “sometimes you have to be militant to get things changed”. Ultimately, he did not join his friend Tatchell in serious political activism. Yet as the celebrated gay screenwriter Russell T Davies points out. “So few people actually go on those marches that make history — the rest of us just sit there worrying.”

In the case of Fashanu, his visibility did, for a while, provide so much more. He wrote an essay to mark the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall protests in New York. Entitled “Strong Enough to Survive”, he joined British LGBT icons such as McKellen and Eastenders actress Pam St Clement in a collection of reflections on the state of play for the queer community in 1994. He wrote that he had felt “suicidality lonely” in coming out and had “no support from the church”.

His voice resonated with gay people. This was the period of Section 28, where teachers were banned from explaining homosexuality to children. One of Fashanu’s gay friends recalls being asked to bring his own wine glasses to a pub as other drinkers were too afraid and too ignorant to share with gay people. Many gay pubs or bars did not have see-through windows due to a fear of reprisals. There were scare stories about sharing toilet seats or swimming pools with gay people.

Yet Fashanu pinned his rainbow colours to the mast. When playing for Torquay, Fashanu became a regular at the Boxes club in Exeter. He requested songs, and he hit the dance floor. The DJ and newspaper editor Alan Quick tells The Athletic: “People used to swoon over him. He parked his big Rolls Royce right outside the door and asked the door staff to watch it to ensure it was not damaged. He was proud to be there.”

The prevailing sadness is that the sport Fashanu adored rarely took pride in his new status as the only publicly gay footballer. When asked how his career had been affected in January 1992, Fashanu replied: “Very badly. For somebody who has the pedigree and background I have, a lot of doors closed. Friends who I had known for years had become coaches, directors and chairmen — their doors suddenly shut. There was a lot of backlash and the bottom line is that I could not get a job.”

Fashanu did play for 11 clubs after his sexuality was revealed but he was by then hampered by a series of knee injuries. When he broke down playing for Brighton against Peterborough in an FA Cup game in the mid-1980s, an infection attacked his knee joint. He visited specialists in Los Angeles, spending six-figure sums in a desperate attempt to salvage his career. He often borrowed money in his quest to prolong his career through further treatment. The injuries certainly contributed to his inability to find a home.

Malcolm Doney, a Christian friend, visited him shortly after he suffered the injury in Brighton. He tells The Athletic: “I dug him out from a damp basement in Hove where he was recovering. We went for a drink. I felt he was a bit of a lost soul. He was kind of left adrift, which is the saddest thing. When you see him in that period going from one club to another, without any geographic settlement, it was very sorrowful. He was a young man with the world at his feet and it came to that. He came to my mother-in-law’s flat and we gave him dinner. He just seemed lonely.”

Despite the injury, Fashanu insisted in The Voice in 1991 that his sexuality became the defining factor in stalling his career. In mid-1991, he was recovering his fitness at Southall FC. He said: “I’ve approached a number of clubs and people know I’m available. Managers I’ve spoken to have said, ‘Of course I am interested but you are just too hot to handle at the moment’ or ‘That queer! After what he said? No way!’ Clearly I am being judged on my sexuality and not my football.”

Certainly, homophobia did damage his career. Shortly before coming out, he played at West Ham and his former team-mate Mark Ward recalled in his 2009 autobiography how he was told he would be sharing with Fashanu in the hotel the evening before a game. Ward wrote: “I left the key on the reception desk and started to pace up and down looking for help. Being asleep in the bed next to Justin Fashanu? No ****ing way! I was panicking now and started to hunt for someone to talk to — where the **** was (the captain) Alvin Martin? He would sort it out. Just at that moment, I heard lots of sniggering. I turned the corner and there pissing themselves laughing were Alvin, Tony Gale and Julian Dicks. It was a good set-up and I was so relieved to hear that Justin was rooming on his own that night.”

His former West Ham team-mate Leroy Rosenior admitted recently how he “left that void of homophobia to grow” because he did not speak out when players walked out of the post-match bath as soon as Fashanu stepped in.

He said: “I knew why they’d got up and walked out and so did Justin and I didn’t know what to say. Maybe I could’ve said to them not to be so ridiculous and that Justin wouldn’t fancy them because they were ugly, just something to break the ice. I didn’t deal with it and when you don’t deal with things at the time they happen, they lose their power.”

When the striker played in New Zealand, the former footballer George Best did a speaking tour and he was asked about Fashanu. “He will certainly stiffen up the back four,” came the tedious reply.

Fashanu played for Torquay United despite having to take a test for HIV as part of his medical (Photo: Neal Simpson/EMPICS via Getty Images)
Fashanu did receive an opportunity from Torquay United, where he played for two years between 1991 and 1993 but he was asked to take an HIV test as part of the medical. “It was the most stringent medical of my life,” Fashanu told the BBC. “The doctor said he would take a blood test. I asked if it was a mandatory thing for everyone and he said it was. He then said I was in a high-risk category; not of being gay but of having multiple partners. I said, ‘Hang on, I have not had multiple partners’. I approach it with realism, knowing that if someone thinks you are gay, they think you are at higher risk of catching HIV. I looked at it and thought, ‘Why give people ammunition by saying no?’ I said ‘Fine, do the test’. The problem is the people who don’t have the test done are probably those most likely to have HIV. If we look at statistics, it is not the gay community on the rise. Anyway, you will be pleased to know it came back negative.” Again, it was a brave message to send out on national television.

His friend A.J. Ali became one of his agents in the 1990s and represented him on contracts to play in Toronto and Atlanta. He did not encounter discrimination based on Fashanu’s sexuality when doing those deals. He recalls: “I like to think the people I dealt with were better than that. It was not an issue. It was, ‘Can the man do the job?'”

At Torquay, the chairman Mike Bateson often invited Fashanu over for dinner and also appointed him as the club’s assistant manager. There were, again, complications. Witnesses at Craven Cottage, one of football’s more genteel locations, recall the Boxing Day Torquay faced Fulham in 1991. The Fulham fans mercilessly mocked him. It was imperfect among Torquay players, too, as Baker’s biography claims that Fashanu often changed in the referees’ room rather than the dressing room.

Ali was the person who eventually persuaded Fashanu to hang up his boots and he accepted a role as a coach under Ali’s presidency at Maryland Mania. For Fashanu, it would be his final chapter.

The voice on the phone line dims in volume. Over 20 years on from Fashanu’s suicide in 1998, Ali needs to compose himself. “The last time we spoke,” he begins, “It was right before he took his life. I was begging him to come back, to face his accuser and get his life back.”

Fashanu had mostly become popular in Ellicott City, Maryland, as a coach inspiring talented young footballers. Working alongside his best friend Ali, a Christian who accepted his sexuality completely, he seemed at ease. He attended Washington Wizards basketball games and played billiards and tennis with new friends. Ali says: “He would always ask 20 questions when you saw him. He made those around him more interested in life, especially when it came to their success. He wanted those around him to succeed and bring out the best in everyone. That would have been great as a team-mate, I imagine. Those are endearing qualities.”

The erratic nature remained, too, and Ali accepts that Fashanu was someone who flitted in and out of people’s lives, ignoring 20 phone calls and then turning up and cracking a joke as though little had happened. He baffled and impressed his friends. Even back in Nottingham, there were times he approached homeless people and invited them to his home for dinner. Ali recalls Fashanu asking to borrow $50, only to then gift the money to someone else straight in front of his face.

While in Maryland, not everything was perfect. Ali tells The Athletic that some of the investors in the soccer club were “very judgmental and cruel”. Baker’s biography alleges that some are said to have raised concerns that a gay man was working close to children.

On March 24, 1998, a police complaint was filed against Fashanu. He was accused of sexually assaulting a 17-year-old teenager. Police documents record that Fashanu was charged on five counts. These included first and second degree of assault, in addition to a second degree sexual assault. In case files made available to Baker, Fashanu is alleged to have told lies to the investigators, denying that he was a gay man and denying sexual contact when first interviewed by the officer. Both of these statements would prove untrue.

The 17-year-old had alleged that he had woken up at Fashanu to find the footballer performing oral sex on him, with his jeans and underwear pulled down. The boy alleged he left Fashanu’s home and told his mother what happened. When he went to the toilet, the boy claimed to have encountered blood in his stool. A medical examination found tearing on the boy’s rectum but no sperm.

In his suicide note, Fashanu conceded sexual contact took place but insisted it was consensual. He said the teenager had woken up the following morning and stated his intention to blackmail Fashanu. Even in the best-case scenario, the admission of sexual relations confirmed two of the charges of which Fashanu was accused. The state law criminalised sexual activities between same-sex individuals, even if they occurred on a consensual basis. The laws, effectively banning sexual relations between gay people, were enshrined under the same “Unnatural or Perverted Sexual Practices Act” that declared it illegal to have sexual relations with an animal. For this alone, in the best-case scenario, he ran the risk of up to 10 years of imprisonment.

When approached by police, the alleged victim’s own ex-girlfriend told officers she believed the complainant was lying. The teenager, she claimed, had already informed his ex-girlfriend of his intention to sue Fashanu. Yet Fashanu ran. He fled the country. Some will argue that innocent men do not run. Those who spoke to Fashanu between his return to London at the end of March and his death at the beginning of May describe a scared and isolated figure.

Darryl Telles, an acquaintance of Fashanu, saw him in the Coleherne Arms gay pub in Earls Court, London. He recalls: “I saw him around Easter time and remember distinctly he was not himself. He was not smiling. He usually had a gorgeous smile on his face. He did not that day. He looked angst-ridden. I asked how he was and he just wanted to be alone. I found that strange and odd, for Justin.”

An arrest warrant was issued on April 3 and then came a press release on April 30. The news spread rapidly among the newspapers. “Sex Rap Gay Fash Vanishes,” read The Sun’s headline.

On his final day, Fashanu spent the afternoon at a gay sauna, the Chariots Roman Spa in Shoreditch. He then made the short journey to Fairchild Place, breaking into a garage and taking his own life. He wrote a note: “I want to say I didn’t sexually assault the young boy. He willingly had sex with me and then the next day asked for money. When I said no he said, ‘You wait and see’. If that is the case, I hear you say, why did I run? Well, justice isn’t always fair. I felt I wouldn’t get a fair trial because of my sexuality. I wish I was more of a good son, brother, uncle and friend but I tried my best. This seems to be a really hard world. I hope the Jesus I love welcomes me home. I will at last find peace!”


The garage in east London where Fashanu killed himself (Photo: Paul Treacy – PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images)
His old friend Deal pauses, before saying. “The idea of him hanging himself is so sorrowful because it was the complete opposite of his public persona.”

Subsequent newspaper cuttings from the Baltimore Sun show the teenager alleged that Fashanu had given him a job earning $200 per day and said that while he felt bad about the suicide, he was “disgusted” about Fashanu’s alleged assault. The newspaper also reported that the alleged victim had been tested for rohypnol, the date rape drug, as well as HIV, but it was not reported as to whether he had tested positive for either.

Ultimately, we may never know the truth of what happened between Fashanu and the 17-year-old boy at his home that evening. Fashanu’s friends and allies, as we might expect, are unanimously defensive. Fashanu’s friend Ali insists his fears over the Maryland legal system were well-founded. “Homophobia and racism would have played a part in how he was judged,” he says. Ted Brown, the black gay activist who countered The Voice’s homophobic coverage but did not have a personal friendship with Fashanu, says: “If he had been hetersoexual or white, the disruption to his reputation would have been nothing compared to that of a black gay men. A white youth had accused him. That’s it, virtually, when that happens.”

Ali, then the president of Maryland Mania, left soccer altogether soon after. He says: “When Justin died, my ability to mentally be in the game died with him. He wanted to be a coach. Part of the reason why it was so devastating for me personally was we had many long talks about this. He had a brilliant gift for working with players and I knew he would rise as a star in this realm. I thought he would have 30 years ahead of himself doing that. He was so good with younger players. We ran a series of camps, where kids were amazed by him and his passion. When he passed away, I just felt this sense of loss, not just for him, but all those he could have helped, or inspire, the impact he would have made on the game. It’s an immeasurable loss to the sport.”

Jay Lemonius, a black gay man who has worked in sports inclusion projects and plays for Stonewall FC (an LGBT-friendly football team in London), says people in his position craved an example while growing up. He says: “There were very few examples of ‘This is what happy looks like for you.’ If I had a visual representation of a successful gay black footballer living a happy life, it makes the process easier. A measuring stick to look up to, or aspire to, is so valuable. His passing feels like we had something stripped away from us.”

The coverage that greeted Fashanu’s death was broadly in keeping with the tone that covered his life. The Daily Mail confidently wrote that “he hanged himself in torment over his homosexual lifestyle”. No reporter put their byline on that story. Vicky Powell, in the Gay Times, wrote that “scarcely have there ever been obituaries so devoid of feeling, compassion and warmth”.

Cashman stirs, before concluding: “The relentless attacks on Justin were because he dared to be himself. He dared to throw off the constraints that others placed upon him. The popular media and football are symbiotic, they feed off one another. They were saying to him, ‘If you dare stray off course from the life that we need to depict for you, then we will punish you’. He challenged religion and the narrow view of life that so many successful people have to emulate in order to continue having success.

“His religion was saying, ‘If you dare stray from that which you can do publicly and be a Christian, then we will punish you’. The Voice newspaper was saying the same at the time, that a black man cannot be open and out. Or, you can be out but you have to be ashamed. He made all of those places that he was challenging different. Some have not evolved quickly, particularly professional football, which I find astounding. Football should be so much more interesting than that.

“He did for me something that is essential to achieve your unique potential: he owned his own space in the world by being himself, not by pretending to be someone else in order to be loaned the land in which he would live. He claimed his space in the world. If he only changed one person’s life for the better, he has done more than generations in his field. If he was 60 this week, he would probably be in parliament and leading on a range of issues. He had the courage to recognise the oppression that had been placed upon him. He, above all, was his own liberator.”

[Shaggy]

**** me! Haha. Thanks man.

[Shaggy]

That's a great read. Grim and pretty horrifying.

[gratziani]

No wonder footballers never say anything about their sexuality, they get destroyed nowadays let alone back in the 80's

[Buzzo]

That's a great read. Grim and pretty horrifying.

I’ve just finished reading it.

Yeah, fascinating What a tough set of circumstances he found himself dealing with. And in reality though society has moved on, it’s not all that far and many have actually not moved at all.

I actually just watched a film on Netflix about gay conversion therapy, ‘boy erased’, which is equally fascinating/grim.

I did watch John Fashanu on SAS Survivor and he opened up a little about how badly he dealt with his brother. He definitely carried a lot of guilt.

He was the person who could have helped Justin, and he absolutely abandoned him.

[frank the tank]

I’ve just finished reading it.

Yeah, fascinating What a tough set of circumstances he found himself dealing with. And in reality though society has moved on, it’s not all that far and many have actually not moved at all.

I actually just watched a film on Netflix about gay conversion therapy, ‘boy erased’, which is equally fascinating/grim.

I did watch John Fashanu on SAS Survivor and he opened up a little about how badly he dealt with his brother. He definitely carried a lot of guilt.

He was the person who could have helped Justin, and he absolutely abandoned him.

I never knew about John Fashanu turning his back on his brother like that. I remember when he died, John Fashanu being interviewed and playing the whole grieveing brother card. Terrible **** altogether. Imagine doing that to your own brother.

We obviously know about how the S#n newspaper is a ****in toxic cesspit so again no surprise to see them feature. Anyone who reads that newspaper is a horrible person. The fact that it is still the most popular "news" paper in the UK tells a lot about the state of the country.

Also, this quote didn't surprise me either - ffs:

Another writer, Tony Sewell, chastised Fashanu, saying: “We heteros are sick and tired of tortured queens playing hide and seek around their closets. Homosexuals are the greatest queer-bashers around. No other group of people is so preoccupied with making their own sexuality look dirty.” In July 2020, prime minister Boris Johnson’s government appointed Sewell to head up a commission on race and ethnic disparity in response to concerns raised by the Black Lives Matter protests

[ChesterDave]

It might have passed people by last year with so much distraction but point of note 21 June was the 20th anniversary of the repeal of section 28. 21st century

[Shaggy]

How ****ing weird is this

[ame]https://twitter.com/offtheball/status/1359639684738121734[/ame]

Usual accent

[ame="https://youtu.be/mTylfkysjoU?t=23"]Dermot Gallagher - YouTube[/ame]