England’s World Cup flameout left gay fan gutted but with a glimmer of hope
As a fan, England self-destructing in a World Cup semifinal really hurts, but watching the game in a packed gay bar brought optimism, too.
Mark
When that all-too familiar crushing pain of being an England soccer fan finally arrives, as it always does in a major tournament, it helps to have an immediate distraction.
I appreciate that bossy drag queens and up-tempo karaoke are not everyone’s cup of tea, but I’d take that in a gay bar any day over the heavy silence that fell on many pubs and clubs across the country following the Argentina sucker-punch on Wednesday night.
Some people accuse the English of arrogance when we sing “it’s coming home” during a World Cup, but really, it’s just wistfulness. Every four years, we dream the impossible dream, and then bear the unbearable sorrow of defeat.
This time, sitting in the reopened Black Cap — an historic bar in Camden, north London, that was gay even before the one time England actually won the World Cup in 1966 — I was truly gutted.
For want of a better analogy, we deservedly made it to the “Final Four” only to be eliminated embarrassingly by our own inner saboteur.
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Yet looking around at my fellow supporters, I couldn’t help but feel happy and proud at the same time.
This fusion of football and queerness is still a relatively new phenomenon, and can increasingly be found in cities and large towns across the U.K. For more than half of my adult life, I hardly ever saw these two worlds collide, and when they did, it was often awkward or acrimonious.
Now I’m surprised when LGBTQ bars in England choose not to screen big international matches. Maybe they worry it’ll turn into “straight Pride,” but it’s much more like a watch party in which we’re all cheering for the same contestant.
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The inclusive pubs and bars that do ‘stick the footy on’ are invaluable because LGBTQ folks here are by no means guaranteed to feel welcome at your average boozer.
A recent study by Kick It Out, Guinness 00, and Greene King revealed that one in five Britons has experienced discrimination or harassment in a pub. That figure rises to a depressing three in 10 among the LGBTQ community.
The stats show an equivalence for people with disabilities, while ethnic minorities are even more likely to be targeted on matchdays.
Still, our LGBTQ and allies football community in the U.K. continues to grow at a rapid rate, with around 50 supporters groups, and around 200 clubs and teams nationwide which specifically state that they are queer-friendly.
Often, these groups and teams are the organizers of World Cup watch parties, working in tandem with their local gay bar to pull in a crowd.
Speak to those attending, and you’ll hear a few horror stories about encountering homophobia in football environments.
We know that for a lot of men, these attitudes persist. Recently, a student writer from Loughborough shared a particularly heartbreaking account of watching a match behind a middle-aged man who repeatedly shouted gay slurs at the pitch, all while his eight-year-old son watched and laughed.
That writer literally witnessed hate becoming normalized in front of their very eyes. That’s before you even contemplate another dark reality of an England exit from a major tournament — the surge in online searches for domestic abuse resources.
LGBTQ bars and clubs in Britain are facing new challenges
Under pink lighting and with images of Lily Savage gazing down from the walls, the Black Cap is a sanctuary from all that.
Photos and videos from other gay bars, such as South London’s Two Brewers and The Village in Birmingham, reflect the same heady mix of joy, despair and camp-as-t*ts nonsense.
Thank goodness for that, and it’s been happening across the World Cup as well, thanks to Pride Houses in places like “Woofs” in Atlanta — the city where England hit the front through Anthony Gordon, only to reverse so much that they were practically in the Convention Center next door by the end.
In an article for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “Woofs” regular Eddie Lacher summed it up nicely.
“Not everyone’s masculine or heteronormative,” said the Atlanta United season-ticket holder, who is bi.
“So for those that aren’t, they can come into this space and have a good time. I’ve seen all different genres of people in the place, and no one’s ever made fun of anybody, no one’s harassed anybody.”
It’s the kind of atmosphere we’re desperate to retain in our LGBTQ bars in the U.K., where new Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) guidance is about to come into force.
The guidance is a result of last year’s Supreme Court ruling, which defined sex in law as biological. The application of that law is expected to negatively impact gender-diverse people, and cause challenges for businesses that want to stay trans-inclusive.
With fewer male LGBTQ allies speaking up, Football Pride matters
As for the England team and the national football association, there have been no questions asked on LGBTQ topics, in contrast to the Russia 2018 and Qatar 2022 World Cups.
The age of active, vocal queer allyship in the men’s game appears to be over, and while it’s encouraging to read about what players like Harry Kane and Declan Rice have said and done in the past, we’re realistic about the present day.
Even a mildly supportive statement is at the mercy of being misconstrued via social media algorithms and right-wing media outlets.
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So let’s hear it for gay bars everywhere that elect to show sports. Let’s support the owners and managers who open their doors to us hopeless romantics, the soccer fans who are longing for a trophy lift and who would also love to one day see a World Cup goalscorer run into the stands to celebrate with his boyfriend.
For those of you in Britain who are reading this, you can meet people just like us at the annual Football Pride event this coming Saturday, which is being held in Leeds on Pride weekend.
This year’s get-together is centered around a special northern U.K. premiere screening of the superb new documentary “The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel” about lost gay professional player, Tony Powell.
Next summer, England fans will go through the motions once more when the Lionesses head to Brazil and try to win the Women’s World Cup for the first time in their history. They do so as two-time European champions, a pair of successes that have inspired millions of new fans.
We’re proud of England’s men too, although it feels rather too raw to talk about that today. As co-hosts of UEFA Euro 2028, alongside Scotland, Wales and Ireland, the expectation levels will be high for the next major tournament.
And we’ll be back in the gay bars, telling anyone who’ll listen that football’s coming homo.
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