In Premiership football, coming out as gay would mean singling yourself out. We share a training pitch with other teams and, when we walk past, they do tend to stop and stare at the chest. But I think it’s breaking down a bit of a barrier.I’ve heard about the two gay footballers in the Premiership; we all know who they are, but I understand why they don’t want to come out as gay A lot of non-celebrities take a long time to come out, too. We said yes in the end, but some people felt uncomfortable: they didn’t want to single themselves out.

We were a solace to players who wanted to play football and felt they couldn’t because they were gay. Now we are about celebrating a way of life.This year we had a tough decision to make about sponsorship. We were offered sponsorship by gay , and we had a big debate about having “gay ” across our shirts. It’s not so much that all these athletes feel too intimidated to play in the standard Games, but it’s more a celebration of a culture and a way of life. But you don’t have to be gay to play in the Gay Olympics.We have straight players in our team now It’s not a gay boys’ club. We would always want to be known as Stonewall, but as we’ve become more successful there seems to have been less homophobic abuse towards us, and what we represent to people is slightly different.

We’re not having a very good season this year – it’s a team in transition. But in 2004 we won the County Cup.Every four years we enter the Gay Games, which were started in 1990. It has the majority of sports that are in the standard Olympics: swimming, athletics, football… By this stage the abuse was coming not so much from the sidelines as from the other players. I had it from a couple of teams, they’d say, “Have you got Aids?” Some teams were fine, others were always a problem. You still get a bit of that, but generally things are very different now.I heard about Stonewall in 1997, and, soon after, I joined the team. Strangely, some of the younger teams were worse than the older, more mature teams.In 1999 we went into the Middlesex County first division, and won that Now we are in the Middlesex County premier division.

They would shout, “You’re a queer”, “don’t touch him, you poof.” It was quite evil. They played on Sundays, and when a team was playing Stonewall they would get a much bigger crowd to support them Their wives and friends would turn up Even their kids would come and shout hate. In any team there is going to be mickey-taking, but some of the sniping was at a pretty base level.
From the start, we were the only gay team. Stonewall has always played in straight leagues and, at the beginning, it was sometimes difficult. They didn’t get a fair crack of the whip in terms of team selection There were people not wanting to shower with them.