Ocean's Apart

Out of nowhere, without warning, a single tweet.  Cutting through a culture seemingly submerged in deep-rooted homophobia, a testament so honest it made all previous negative posturing on the subject redundant.

If not perhaps for its eloquence, it could easily have been a statement from a premiership footballer. Instead, Tuesday’s tweet and evocative letter that accompanied it came from urban singer/songwriter Frank Ocean.

Following well-documented progress in areas such as the armed forces, it’s become something of a cliché to refer to football as the last gay taboo. To do so however, is to overlook the historically hostile urban music scene from which Ocean emerges.

Whereas football may have been guilty of turning a blind eye to homophobia over the past couple of decades, hip-hop in particular has aggressively targeted the gay community over the same period. A loss of innocence in the genre and a shift to an increasingly sour cocktail of misogyny and homophobia can, perhaps only now, be seen to have gone unchecked for too long.

Yet the parallels between these two final outposts for homophobia are uncanny: both so clearly homoerotic, yet fiercely macho at the same time. The bling; the fur coats, the hot pants! Were both not so clearly coveted by an overwhelmingly hetro-following surely they would have been celebrated more emphatically by the gays in recent years?

The contradictions that particularly hip hop has offered up both then and now – Eminem’s use of ‘faggot’ then duet with Elton, Odd Future’s homophobic lyrics then backing of Ocean – are at least played out in public in a world where being outspoken is part of the job description. Football, meanwhile, defaults to its position of head-burying and non-engagement on the issue, it’s most notorious homophobic incident being directed at a player – Sol Campbell – who hasn’t even come out as gay.

The most refreshing thing about Ocean’s words were how considered they were, how he linked to a specific - if not handwritten, then typed - letter. Taking ownership of the moment, he avoided the indignity of a garish News Of The World-style confession under duress. Its intimacy ultimately fuelled its impact while its ambiguity swerved traditional tabloid traps.

The democracy of the Internet - the same democracy that may ultimately have done for Murdoch - should finally sweep away the lingering homophobia in the darker corners of an entertainment industry where football surely now finds itself positioned. The Ocean road, then, has been mapped out and football remains one tweet away from history.