NZ in last place as gay athletes suffer slurs
A major new academic study puts New Zealand at the bottom of an international table as gay male athletes in this country remain all but invisible. Paul Cully reports.
THE plague of homophobic language in New Zealand sport is keeping athletes in the closet while sporting bodies are asleep at the wheel, according to two major international academic studies released to Sunday News.
In a sobering assessment of what sports participation in this country actually looks like, a paltry 13 per cent of LGBTQ Kiwis aged between 15-21 have come out to their team-mates, trailing Ireland (15 per cent), Canada (15), Australia (15), the US (22 ) and the UK (28).
One-third of Kiwis who do come out then face homophobic abuse, and the problem is most common in male team sports, where the use of derogatory terms such as ‘‘faggot’’ and ‘‘poof’’ are common, creating ‘‘toxic’’ cultures, harming LGBTQ youngsters, depressing overall participation rates and contributing to a global phenomena where ‘gay’ rugby teams are rebranding as ‘inclusive’ teams to accommodate disaffected heterosexual players.
‘‘This is just more evidence that this language is common and harmful, andmore evidence that it’s actually being driven by, like not being driven by attitudes, it’s being driven by people’s thoughtlessness,’’ said Erik Denison, lead author from Monash’s Behavioural Sciences Research Laboratory.
‘‘Really, this is not a very complex problem. But we need the sport to actually do something about it.’’
Denison said that despite New Zealand being seen as a socially progressive country with broadly supportive political parties, LGBTQ male athletes were practically invisible (especially in team sports) and the recent ‘coming out’ of former Wallabies prop Dan Palmer (now the Brumbies scrum coach) appeared to be some way off.
Sporting bodies in New Zealand have given broad approval to ‘inclusion’ in recent years but Denison says their efforts have either been piecemeal or almost tokenistic, leaving the heavy lifting to individuals such as TJ Perenara and Brad Weber, both of whom have been supportive of the LGBTQ community.
In fact, Denison says platitudes from sports bodies such as ‘‘ending homophobia’’ are meaningless because research has consistently shown that players who use homophobic slurs – and data from Australia suggests more than 50 per cent do – don’t even see it as harmful, unless it is specifically aimed at a LGBTQ player.
Instead, Denison says real progress depends on having ‘‘pride events’’ or ‘‘uncomfortable conversations’’ at the community and sporting club level – where North
Harbour board member
Ngarimu Blair separately identified a ‘‘macho booze culture’’ as being an issue in a column for Stuff– and training club captains to stamp out the use of derogatory language in the dressing room.
‘‘We also see that when you decide as a group to be inclusive, to be welcoming, all those toxic characters who kind of lurk in the corners of sport clubs, they suddenly realise that they are not just in the minority, but they are unwanted,’’ Denison said.
‘‘Ultimately, it’s going to help with this big problem we have, which is the homophobic and sexist banter that it seems most people in rugby and all sports don’t want to continue.
‘‘So this all just seems like a no-brainer. And whenwe reviewed the entire world systematically to see what sports have done on these issues, we saw that New Zealand had started the race really well, they’re riding a pretty good thoroughbred.
‘‘And then it seems like after about 100 metres [they slowed].’’
The peer-reviewed research is backed up by the on-the-grass experience of Kiwi Mitch Canning, who coached in Auckland before taking up a role at Melbourne Rugby Club and subsequently the Melbourne Chargers, the gay inclusive side he led from nowhere to win the Bingham Cup (world championships) in 2016.
Canning, an investment banker and leadership consultant by profession, who has workedwith Ben Smith and Tamati Ellison on lessons for the corporate sector, now has a heterosexual son of no limited rugby talent who has chosen to play for the Chargers because he prefers the environment they have created.
And he thinks he knowswhy young men are following that path.
‘‘There’s a re-prioritisation of what’s important,’’ Canning told Sunday News.
‘‘In a traditional rugby environment competitiveness and mateship are really important. But in the Chargers and other gay and inclusive teams mateship comes before competitiveness.
‘‘If I play in a traditional rugby team and I miss a tackle or drop a ball, what I’ll hear from my team-mates is something along the lines of ’’awwww, come on’.
‘‘If I was to do that at the
Chargers, what I’d get is something empathy from my team-mates, like ‘next job, don’t worry, we’ve got this,’ because a handling error is what happens in the game and the relationship between the players is more important than that.’’
The other factor at play in New Zealand is the lack of a David Pocock-type character, whose long-term advocacy on behalf of LGBTQ communities in Australia was so profound that academics coined the term ‘the Pocock effect’.
Pocock – and other Brumbies players – even called out homophobic slurs from Waratahs player Jacques Potgieter in 2015.
‘‘I think [what] he did within Australian rugby, is he normalised, pro-LGBT rights, ideas, discussions and action,’’ Denison said.
‘‘And so the Pocock effect is that you don’t have to do a lot, but you normalise it. People in sport are generally very conformity oriented.
‘‘They’ll just do what the team is doing. And if the team decided to do X, they’ll just do X.’’
Still, Denison is hopeful that incoming SportNZ boss Raelene Castle will act.
As Rugby Australia CEO, Castle sacked Israel Folau for inflammatory anti-gay Instagram posts and also funded research into why rugby players continued to use homophobic language.