"Gay Hero" to Zero?

Given the potential, The Daily Mail’s piece by Martin Samuel on Joey Barton this week really should have been taken at face value - as the slightly lazy inoffensive piece of journalism it was - by both Barton and gay pressure groups.

The article - which suggests Barton come out and acquire 'gay hero' status - and the player’s subsequent response via twitter point to curious attitudes from both men. 

It's unlikely anyone thought Samuel would handle homosexuality in football with kid gloves and there was no surprise in his casual sneering at gay pressure groups, nor his archaic assertion that having a French accent makes you gay (did Graham Le Saux ever stand a chance?).

More interesting was the response of Barton and the aforementioned gay groups. Having carefully re-positioned himself as the thinking man’s footballer in recent years, Barton’s panicked tweets seemed less than carefree.  Having justifiably claimed ‘My sexuality is of no concern to anyone except me and my family’ he then added swiftly ‘Can’t see the missus being happy about this piece’. The double-whammy subtext appearing to be: don’t forget I’m heterosexual and though the wife will be angry, clearly this does not upset me.  Except it seems to.

Next comes ‘Nor would I like my child to read this’. Someone as newsworthy as Barton has countless column inches written about him, it’s interesting that a jokey article about his sexuality is the one that he wants to hide from the kids. Finally he threatens to sue the newspaper, a move that has ominous echoes of Jason Donovan’s ill-fated legal action against The Face magazine in the 90s. Donovan famously shed an army of gay fans and was thus depicted as a homophobe for years after.

This fate is unlikely to befall Barton. He has already contributed greatly to the debate thus far, most notably through his eloquent appearance in a BBC3 documentary earlier this year. However, his reaction does put him in danger of coming across as a sort of gay football Nimby. A less defensive, more humorous approach may have done more to confirm Barton’s new-man credentials. Given his impeccable comic timing on twitter last week regarding his questionable accent, he could even have perhaps made a joke to lighten the mood.

Lightening the mood is what football needs to do next. At one point in his article, Samuel appears to mock the argument that a ‘culture of fear’ exists in football regarding homosexuality. On this he is wrong. However - unwittingly or not - he is actually helping to alleviate that fear culture with articles such as the one he wrote this week.

In that sense it’s unfortunate that The GFSN’s statement condones Samuel’s comments as ‘unhelpful & a distraction’. A prominent sports journalist in one of Britain’s biggest newspapers casually discussing the idea of a player’s sexuality? I’d call that progress.