Australia’s Field Hockey Star Gus Johnston Comes Out To A Positive Response

Gus Johnston was a champion Australian field hockey goalkeeper. A courageous player who regularly put his body on the line for his team, Johnston represented Victoria for 12 years. While his striking red hair and natural ability made him a big identity in his sport, he was little known outside hockey circles. Until last month, that is, when he posted an emotional video on YouTube in which he outed himself as gay. In the 12-minute film, which he called The Reality of Homophobia in Sport, Johnston looks the viewer in the eye as he says, ''I'm a writer, art director, filmmaker and a hockey goalkeeper. I'm also a gay man - and that's something I never thought I would say in such a public forum … I regret immensely that I wasn't strong enough as a leader, that I didn't step up when I was playing and share this about myself,'' he says, explaining that he has done so 10 months after retiring to let young gay athletes know they are not alone and to alert the broader sporting community that gossip and ''jokes'' peddled in locker rooms are homophobic and hurtful. Posting an e-mail address at the end of his YouTube clip enabled hundreds of people to send him their congratulations, among them an AFL coach and several players. ‘I went from someone who has never been in the public eye in the slightest to someone experiencing a tidal wave of complete positivity,'' Johnston says. In coming out he joins an exclusive club of elite Australian athletes. Only three other men have come out: Olympic diver Matthew Mitcham, Olympic swimmer Daniel Kowalski and rugby league player Ian Roberts. For lesbians the landscape is different. Only former Olympic cyclist Michelle Ferris has publicly spoken about being gay. Yet in public life it is no longer a career-ending move to be ''out''. MPs Penny Wong and Bob Brown, comedian Josh Thomas, former judge Michael Kirby, Dr Kerry Phelps and DJ Ruby Rose, among others, are public about their private lives. Sport is the last bastion of public life in Australia in which same sex attraction is kept under wraps. The last closet in which it is safer to stay silent than speak up. Elite Australian athletes who are gay or lesbian mostly play it straight. It is, as academic Mariah Nelson put it, ''a silence so loud it screams.” For men, sport is a potentially lucrative, extremely heterosexual environment. There is a perception there is a lot to lose by coming out. But as the experiences of Johnston, Kowalski and Mitcham attest, the consequences are not as dire as some predict and fear. In fact, each has had an overwhelmingly positive response since revealing he is gay. The remaining excellent, exhaustive story from The Sydney Morning Herald is here.