ABSTRACT
Is male team sport, and particularly association football, homophobic?1 The answer to that question is more in the balance in the spring of 2016 as I write this chapter than at any time in the past. For many years it seemed that homophobia persisted in many sports even as it was diminishing in society more generally (Weeks 2007). It is, perhaps, this tension between the past and the present that has given rise to one of sport’s lesser known rivalries. In one corner stand a number of academic sociologists, notably Eric Anderson and Mark McCormack, who have alerted the world to rapidly improving attitudes in regards to sexuality in university, college and school sport settings. Prowling in the opposite corner is an array of activist groups, led by the UK’s leading lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) charity, Stonewall, but also including specialist LGBT sports groups such as the Gay Football Supporters Network (GFSN). In short, as I will develop in more detail below, the ‘Anderson school’ of sociologists are announcing a brave new world of ‘inclusive masculinities’ (Anderson 2009), proclaiming the end of overt homophobia as we know it in the process. Meanwhile, the campaign groups continue to find and report endemic levels of homophobia in British society in general, but especially in sport.
