Inside the AFL’s ‘culture of silence’

Samantha Hawley: Hi, I’m Sam Hawley, coming to you from Gadigal Land. This is ABC News Daily. Did you know the AFL is the only code in the entire world where not a single elite player has ever come out publicly as gay? So why is that? Today, Four Corners’ reporter Louise Milligan on her investigation into the league, its management, and its fans. And a warning, this episode contains some homophobic language. Louise, what sent you on this journey to try and get inside the AFL to establish just how inclusive it is?

Louise Milligan: I’ve been thinking about this issue for a few years and wondering why it was that the AFL was the only code, the only major sporting code in the world where there was no male elite player who had come out publicly as gay. So if you go back 23 years ago, the Australian Government, via the Australian Sports Commission, put out what was known as a compliance directive to all sports in Australia. They said to sports you have a problem with homophobia.

They were saying this is a breach of the law to allow homophobic discrimination in your clubs and your settings and you open yourself to costly litigation if you don’t do something pretty drastic about this.

Samantha Hawley: So you need to end any form of discrimination.

Louise Milligan: Absolutely. I wanted to see how that was sort of all going now.

Samantha Hawley: 23 years later.

Louise Milligan: Yeah. And it was interesting because back in April, the AFL CEO, Gillon McLachlan, made a statement about gay players in the league and he said that he did know that there were gay players in the league, but they hadn’t made this statement sort of publicly.

Gillon McLachlan, AFL CEO: So the pressure and the weight of being that person is known to be the first AFL player who comes out and plays as an out gay man, I think that weight… And I frankly understand why they would choose not to have to carry that burden around forever.

Louise Milligan: He said. I understand why they would choose not to have to carry that burden around forever.

Samantha Hawley: And Lou, that went down really badly?

Louise Milligan: When we spoke to gay players and advocates, they said it was such a missed opportunity because he was using negative language, talking to the gay players that we have, one of whom worked for the Melbourne Football Club in communications.

Samantha Hawley: That’s Michael O’Donnell.

Louise Milligan: Michael O’Donnell. So Michael said to me, it shows that they haven’t thought through, oh, this could be a negative connotation. This could be, you know, pushing someone back into the closet.

Louise Milligan: What do you think about that choice of words?

Michael O’Donnell, Australian rules football player: It’s a burden not being able to be yourself. If he can’t use the right words then, that suggests to me that it hasn’t been discussed on a higher level or a wider basis. And that’s quite concerning. We exist. And unless we tell people that we exist, they don’t know about us. And so it’s a really good opportunity to show younger people that there is a place for them in the game.

Louise Milligan: And it was interesting because I interviewed Tanya Hosch, who is the AFL’s general manager of inclusion. I asked her about the use of the word burden.

Louise Milligan: Surely that was a time, these people say to us, when the leader of the AFL could have made a positive statement?

Tanya Hosch, AFL General Manager of Inclusion and Social Policy: Yeah, look, I think it’s really good to hear that that’s how it’s been perceived. Certainly, you know, I that that framing you just gave about the positive alternative and that encouragement. I’ve heard Gil do that as well. And you know, he was very strong around the marriage equality issue.

Samantha Hawley: Tell me a bit more about Michael O’Donnell. He was never an elite player. He certainly had a bad time in the sport.

Louise Milligan: Well, Michael O’Donnell is a deeply impressive young man who’s now 31. He plays for the UNSW eastern suburbs Bulldogs, which is a big amateur team in Sydney. Back when he was a teenager of 13-14, he was living in Melbourne, he began to realize that he was gay.

Michael O’Donnell, Australian rules football player: I started noticing that there weren’t people like me around AFL. There weren’t, you know, coaches, there weren’t AFL players. I realized that the changing rooms and the football field were just not a place that accepted me.

Louise Milligan: And he talks about the sort of homophobic language that he would hear not just at the club but also in the football media.

Michael O’Donnell, Australian rules football player: Hearing those sorts of words internalizes your homophobia. And it creates a sort of self-perpetuating hate within you as well. And that can be difficult to deal with. And something that I dealt with for a long time.

Louise Milligan: He thought he wasn’t welcome. He felt that he wouldn’t be welcome if he was to come out. And so he left. And he didn’t play football for ten years until he moved to Sydney. And he’s now such an inspiration. But it’s so astonishing that there isn’t a Michael O’Donnell in the professional game.

Samantha Hawley: Yeah, exactly. It sounds like Michael’s got a fair bit of guts and determination to him.

Louise Milligan: Oh, he’s beautiful.

Samantha Hawley: Yeah. Let’s just talk a bit more about this homophobic language, which is dreadful. You spoke to Dr Denison from Monash University and he has sort of been collating data on this. What is he found?

Louise Milligan: So Erik Denison is one of the country’s kind of leading experts in looking at homophobic language in sport, and he’s looked at studies in the AFL.

Erik Denison, Monash University: The idea that AFL is safe and inclusive, and welcoming for gay people is just it’s fiction. It’s a delusion, it’s not true.

Louise Milligan: There’s a pride match every year between the Swans and the Saints, and VicHealth surveyed fans and found that more than half of fans LGBTIQ+ fans had witnessed homophobic slurs at an AFL game. And I think it was about a quarter had experienced it themselves. I think in the professional code within the clubs themselves.

They are pretty nurturing places in lots of ways, but Denison kind of believes that it’s a bit naive to think that there is none of this going on in the professional clubs as well. We spoke to Izzy Huntington from Greater Western Sydney and she talked about all the homophobic trolling that she’s received.

Izzy Huntington, Greater Western Sydney AFLW player: It is wild, that these people think it’s appropriate to be doing that and saying that and putting their name to comments like that. I think it shows just how far we’ve got to go in this space.

Louise Milligan: And even though the women’s space is a safe and in her words, beautiful space and there are a lot of out lesbian players in the AFL, such a contrast to the male game. These fans bleed on over into the women’s game and the point that Erik Denison and also Chloe Clark from Amnesty International have said to us is if the AFL has a problem with its fans, it needs to do something about that and the AFL has refused, the men’s game has refused till now to have a pride round.

Samantha Hawley: And that not more is being done Louise it’s disappointing for a lot of current and former players who are not gay and I want you to tell me about Bob Murphy because you did a really powerful interview with him because he thinks change is possible and he sort of regrets his past behavior?

Louise Milligan: Yeah so, I mean, Bob’s an ally of the gay community. He’s a married straight man with three kids.

Samantha Hawley: And a former member of the Western Bulldogs.

Louise Milligan: He was the captain that captained the team to their first grand final in 62 years. Bob had a memory that he wanted to share with me about the so-called goal-kicking yips.

Bob Murphy, Former AFL player: I was playing in the forward line and I was going through what would be commonly known as the goal-kicking yips. It’s where you’re not just missing goals. You are completely mentally ravaged.

Louise Milligan: And he remembered years later and he describes it as like a punch to his stomach.

Bob Murphy, Former AFL player: And it makes me uncomfortable to this day. And I would refer to myself as a f****** p******, you f****** p******.

Louise Milligan: When he came to this realization that that’s what he used to do, he wondered, how loud did I say that? Did anyone come past? Did anyone hear me?

Bob Murphy, Former AFL player: What if a gay footballer who I played with who would have assumed I was an ally, heard me talk like that about myself? In a way that’s self-flagellation.

Louise Milligan: Because it would be so hurtful to them.

Samantha Hawley: People like Bob Murphy. They’re campaigning, of course, for things to change at the AFL. So what did you find out, Louise? What is the AFL doing to address this?

Louise Milligan: We went to all of the clubs and the AFL to see, you know, what they had done. And it is true to say that the AFL now has a complaints policy and has changed its anti-discrimination regime to include sexuality. But then when we went to the clubs, one of them said to us, we can’t tell you for privacy reasons. The whole point about complaints mechanisms is that they need to be public and that’s what the Australian Government said back in 2000.

And another club said to us that they would ban us from filming on their premises from that time forward and an AFL executive said to us that our questions were aggressive when we went to all the clubs and asked them if could they provide some players to talk to us about these issues like current players, we went to every single club and not one of them could provide a player. So you know, there is a silence and the silence needs to change.

Samantha Hawley: Louise, what has the AFL said to you about all of this?

Louise Milligan: They sent us a statement just to let us know about, you know, the complaints mechanisms that they had put in place and they have followed, you know, the Australian Sports Commission guidelines and they said to us the AFL is a game for all, regardless of race, religion or sexual identity, and that they want players, staff and everyone in football to be their authentic self.

Samantha Hawley: And what does the AFL need to do immediately, do you think? So that the 14-year-old on the AFL field who might be gay, do not feel like they can’t play that game anymore?

Louise Milligan: Well, I think one thing is working out how to engage with its fans. If it has a problem with homophobic fans, they need to start getting on the front foot with those fans. And one way that they could do that is by doing a pride round, but also just talking about it, not saying it’s too sensitive, you know, not acting like it’s this last great taboo. Just actually being more open about it. They’re trying to say that their code is a safe space for gay men, but you can’t have no out gay player and it is a safe space at the same time. Those two things don’t go together.

Michael O’Donnell, Australian rules football player: I lost 15 years because there was no one ahead of me. And if we can have someone come out and stop that happening, there will be, you know, a bunch of young, very talented AFL players who end up in the top level of the game and that would be awesome and that’d be a great legacy for someone to leave.

Samantha Hawley: Louise Milligan is an investigative reporter with Four Corners. You can catch her report on ABC TV tonight at 8.30 or on iView. This episode was produced by Veronica Apap, Anna John, and Sam Dunn, who also did the mix. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I’m Sam Hawley. ABC News Daily will be back again tomorrow. Thanks for listening.