On Sunday at 11am, history is tantalisingly close to being made in Sydney, as the England football team take on Spain, playing for the first English World Cup win since that seismic summer of 1966. Don’t say you won’t be watching. Everybody will. By Sunday morning, a time traditionally reserved for religious worship, irreligious hangover or a selection of Steve Wright’s indomitably cuddly Radio 2 love songs, a collective fever pitch will grip the nation. Everybody is on their side. It feels almost ominous to say the words, but triumph is within touching distance.
This is good news for football. It is joyous news for the country, which has felt singularly bereft of happy bulletins since long before the pandemic. But it is, frankly, amazing, near revolutionary news for LGBT+ people. During their astonishing rise to prominence, the Lionesses have come to represent not just the best of the best of English football, but a dream state of gay equality in action.
Clearly, each member of this team is touched by a particularly special brand of athletic excellence. Some of them are lesbian, including the stand-out performer of the semi-final victory over Australia, Lauren Hemp. She is one of many obvious symbols of English lesbian excellence in the world right now. These women make my heart sing.
The players have come to represent not just the best of English football, but a dream state of gay equality in action
I have the same feeling cheering on a squad with incidentally gay team members as I have when I watch Marcus Rashford play for the men’s squad. He grew up a few streets from me in south Manchester. I know what that place looks like, what it feels like, what it means to come from there. Equally, for Rachel Daly, Jess Carter, Bethany England and Lauren Hemp, I know what it will mean to them to have their partners cheering them along as the world watches.
Perhaps at one point in their youth, they thought that might not happen? Maybe they had to battle torment from the other kids for who they are? This draws me closer to wanting them to win. It invests me personally in their stories, beyond the way they reach for their dreams with the strike or capture of a ball. I felt the pain of Australia’s national heroine captain Sam Kerr that little bit stronger on defeat, because I know what it means to grow up feeling perhaps excluded a little from life, then to find yourself defining it in your own way. This stuff matters. LGBT+ isn’t a slogan, banner, or flag. This isn’t identity politics. It’s who we are, flesh and blood. Football itself is now a lesbian business, at least in part. Honestly? That feels like an utterly amazing thing to be able to say in 2023, like we’ve suddenly stepped into the 21st century. Like assimilation has happened, quietly, beautifully, with everyone watching and nobody caring.
So yes, Sunday will be a historic day, whatever the outcome. Obviously, I hope they become the first English football team to bring home a World Cup victory in nearly 60 years. The Lionesses are visibility goals. Role models of their generation. Heroes to everyone questioning themselves at a young age and many who tried to repress themselves into later adulthood. But, to my eyes at least, just by being themselves, come Sunday their job is done. The Lionesses have already won.
Senseless homophobic attacks will never rob us of our defiance
To our other LGBT+ heroes of the week, the victims of the Two Brewers stabbings in Clapham, a senseless homophobic attack on a pedestrian high street. Actually, “victim” feels like almost precisely the wrong word here.
Before social media, we would have perhaps heard a word or two, mediated mostly through straight voices, from the gay men on a sad news bulletin. Now we can hear exactly what they want to say, in their own voice. “What today has strengthened in me,” wrote one on Instagram, along with a smiling picture of his head in bandages, “is that I could never and have never been prouder, happier or more comforted by the community I have as my LGBT+ family. I would never change it for the world.”
This is a portrait of defiance, a snapshot for our times. A we-will-not-be-cowed moment that sends direct messages to the perpetrators of hate crimes, from source. Hate crime figures rise with dizzying, shaming numbers in the capital. Sometimes our defiance is all we have to combat them. But it is the one thing the aggressor can never rid us of.
