Gay&Night-ZiZo Februari 2014

Interview / Thomas Hitzlsperger
Former Premier League
footballer and German
international Thomas
Hitzlsperger talks to
Gay&Night 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
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