Gay&Night-ZiZo Februari 2014

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HITZLSPERGER OUT IN THE OPEN ‘I nally gured out that I preferred living with a man’ 34
Interview / Thomas Hitzlsperger Former Premier League footballer and German international Thomas Hitzlsperger talks to Gay&<strong>Night</strong> about how he wanted to tell the world he was gay while he was still playing in Germany for Wolfsburg, but was advised against it. Thomas Hitzlsperger had managed to stay away from his computer for a long time. In the morning he had become the highest-profile footballer to announce he is gay, and in the hours afterwards he had not checked the public reaction. When I speak to him I tell him that support has been flooding in from fans, fellow footballers and well-wishers. “But where’s David Cameron?” the former Germany international asks with playful indignation. “He’s a Villa supporter, after all!” The British prime minister, as it turns out, would soon add his voice to a raft of high-profile well-wishers that included Angela Merkel, the German national team manager Joachim Löw, and the former German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle, who is also gay. They all talked about the former Aston Villa, West Ham and Everton midfielder’s “courage” in breaking one of sport’s last great taboos: Hitzlsperger, capped 52 times by his country, is the first German footballer to reveal he is gay. He is also the first former Premier League footballer to do so. It was a moment he always knew would come, and one he dreaded. The decision to address this issue publicly was a “hard, difficult one” that took a number of years to gestate, he tells me. The 31-year-old, who retired from the game last year because of injuries, first told his friends and family. “I was surprised and happy that they were all totally OK with it. Where I come from, in rural Bavaria, homosexuality is considered ‘unnormal’. I knew that there would be negative reactions from those who will never understand it, also towards my family, but that didn’t bother them. I’ve had nothing but total support from them.” Hitzlsperger, who was engaged to his childhood sweetheart and broke up with her shortly before the scheduled wedding six years ago, was not certain of his sexual orientation until his career was almost over. “I finally figured out that I preferred living with a man”, he says. He had thought about coming out while still playing for Wolfsburg in 2011-12 but then listened to people who warned him of the negative consequences. “They all said ‘don’t do it, a big wave will crash on you’,” he says. “But in the end I realised that nobody knows. There was no precedent, so everybody could only speculate on what would happen.” While Germany as a country has noticeably become more and more relaxed about homosexuality in recent years, he had also noted there was an unhelpful media obsession with finding the first gay footballer. All sorts of well-intended but ultimately unhelpful interventions from heterosexual players – who either opined that gay players would benefit from coming out or cautioned against it – did not exactly fill him with confidence that this was indeed the right step. Homosexuality was rarely a big topic in any of the dressing rooms he encountered, he says, and “the subject only came up when people were speculating about someone else’s sexuality, but never in their presence.” There was the odd incidence of crass homophobia, as well, “but that was just your general, non-specific football talk”, says Hitzlsperger. “I too, used derogatory terms like ‘what a gay pass’ without thinking about it when I was younger.” The former international, who played in the 2006 World Cup and the 2008 European Championship, maintains that he did not have to lie about his sexuality and that team-mates eventually stopped asking about his lack of a girlfriend. In any case, he says, an ultimately fruitless battle to regain full fitness after a series of operations was more important to him than telling his colleagues about his sexual orientation. The announcement of his retirement last September brought more time to think, however. “It really helped 35
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Gay&Night-ZiZo Februari 2014

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