It is 6.45pm on a freezing Wednesday evening and, in the shadow of West Ham’s London Stadium, 25 men are changing into their kit as fast as is humanly possible so that they can run around and get warm.
The soundtrack will be familiar to so many who call amateur football home: the hum of low-level banter pierced frequently by shared laughter. Someone nips and tucks between the group with a card machine to collect subs. A new face is welcomed to training for the first time.
As they run out onto the Astroturf pitch of the Bobby Moore Academy, their breath collides as one and hangs in the icy air. When they begin training, it leaves a trace of where every player has just been, a literal heat map. Someone is busily putting out cones with the concentration of a surgeon. A coach brings them all into a circle and explains the format of the training session.
This scene is being replicated across the UK, at rural leisure centres and in inner-city cages from south to north and east to west, meaning that there is both nothing special and something deeply special happening here all at once. Welcome to Stonewall FC, the largest LGBT+ football club in the world.
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The courage of those early players cannot be overstated. In 1991, the UK was still gripped by the Aids crisis and deep-rooted homophobia, both in terms of hate and damaging media stereotypes, was rife.
Before the club had decided whether or not to make the sexuality of their players known, the Daily Mirror obtained the story and published it under the headline “Queens of the South”. On matchdays, players were spat at and abuse was commonplace.
“The one thing I always impress on new players is that they are playing in these conditions, free from abuse, because of what their predecessors did,” first-team coach Eric tells i.
Eric has been part of the club as a player and manager since 2001 in an environment where stability is vitally important. “We have to remember that. People might turn up to Stonewall and assume that it was always this way; it wasn’t.”
The club’s rise over the last five years alone has been extraordinary. Stonewall FC have three 11-a-side male teams, one of which plays in the Middlesex County Football League Premier Division (step 7), another in the step below and the third in the London Unity League, an LGBT+-friendly football league.
They also have multiple women and non-binary teams that play in five-a-side leagues and the club runs extensive, intra-club five-a-side sessions. They have a partnership with lead kit sponsor Adidas and the club’s official shirt sponsor is EA Sports, makers of the globally successful FIFA video game series. They are big news and news means awareness.
Stonewall FC’s core aim is their commitment to creating an environment in which people can be themselves, a safe space for anyone who wishes to be involved in football. Players like JP, who joined Stonewall during lockdown at the age of 31 after several years out of the game.
“I was playing for my old school team and stopped playing,” JP says. “I loved that team, but I did always feel like I had this secret: that I was gay. I think I was the only gay guy at the club. They probably knew, but I was in the closet. It’s not that I felt like an outsider, but I felt so comfortable here.
“You cannot overstate how important it is to be able to be yourself. I’m 33, but I think I just caught the end of the period where it felt taboo to be gay. I was in the closet for a number of years and then came out when I was 24. I stopped playing when I was about 26. And now I’m here, squeezing out the last few years before I’m sent to play vets football.”
Another player, who had also been out of the game for years before Stonewall FC, discusses how he had his own stereotype in his head, that he wouldn’t quite fit in with a straight 11-a-side team because there might be homophobia, either as perceived banter or as abuse.
But he also describes how Stonewall FC works so well because it automatically offers a like-minded social and friendship circle too. “My biggest regret now is that I didn’t do it sooner,” he says.
Over time, perceptions have changed. Several weeks ago, during a reserve team match, the reserve team captain was wearing his armband – which is a rainbow armband – and a member of the public was walking past and made hateful comments.
Stonewall FC’s opponents offered to stop the game, but instead both teams asked the abuser to leave and the game carried on. There is comradeship now.
“We are gradually challenging those stereotypes of what a gay man is supposed to be and supposed to be interested in,” Eric says. “And that’s not just us: what we have now is a very healthy, UK-wide list of LGBT-inclusive football clubs.
“If you came to watch one of our games at the stadium and turned up 10 minutes late knowing nothing about us, it’s not like you would be able to tell which the LGBT+ team was. It’s two teams of 11 people playing football. Nobody is wearing a tutu.”
The weekend has arrived which only means one thing … FOOTBALL!!
— Stonewall FC (@StonewallFC) October 8, 2022pic.twitter.com/GbDzR6xAy7
On the pitch, the club can be roughly split into two goals. The first, self-evident, aspect is to offer football purely as an enjoyable pursuit. Alex manages the Thursday five-a-side sessions that have seen numbers grow from 15 to 50 post-Covid, requiring a round robin and seeding system that is enough to make any spreadsheet nerd purr.
“The nice thing about the club is that there is something for literally everyone,” Alex says. “I joined through five-a-side, got the chance to participate off the pitch. We’ve got people who just want to play football and they might worry that they aren’t good enough – but I call it a post-embarrassment zone.
“You might have older people who want to find a way to socialise. You might have younger LGBT+ people who lack a friendship group within that community and see football as a way of making friends. Post-Covid, we had a big wave and now we meet up socially, we go out a lot. The whole event has become a lot more social than it would have been 10 years ago.”
But one thing that is repeated throughout my conversations with players, coaches and officials at Stonewall FC is that this is also a competitive football club. Having a good time, being inclusive and relentlessly wanting to be the best they can be are not mutually exclusive and nobody within this club believes otherwise.
“Deliberately creating spaces where you commit to an inclusive culture is what helps the club grow and thrive,” says reserve team manager Hugo. “When people hear about us, it’s because of that culture. When we play other teams, we want players to think ‘that looks like a great club to be part of’.
“But we’re not asking for special treatment. We want to beat you. We have demonstrated that we can behave in an inclusive way, can stick to our principles and can also be damn sure that we’re going to compete to be as successful as we can. Nobody here is just to be inclusive; we’re here to be inclusive and to win.”
One of the things that I hadn’t been aware of before spending time with Stonewall FC was that this is an LGBT+ football club that welcomes non-LGBT+ players. That caused some consternation when it began to occur, as Eric is only too happy to admit: why would the club provide an avenue to those who already have the rest of the sport?
But the answer lies in progress, a word you hear a lot at this club. As Eric says, progress is not that there should be an – or even many – exclusive LGBT+ club and straight club playing separately.
Progress is that the concept of sexuality in sport is so totally irrelevant that members of the LGBT+ communities feel entirely at ease with entering and thriving within any environment in the sport and are comfortable being themselves. By welcoming allies, therefore, Stonewall FC are offering their own vision of that ideal future.
Allies join Stonewall FC for various reasons, but two stick out when speaking to the squad. Coltrane is a first-team player who had played football since the age of four but had drifted away from the game after experiencing multiple incidents of toxic masculinity. He figures that if he can play the football he wants at the level he wants and be an ally, it provides everything he ever wanted.
“Part of football becoming more inclusive is realising that the toxicity of some environments, the testosterone-fuelled atmosphere and the ego-driven world doesn’t have to keep existing as it is,” Coltrane says.
“We can attack both issues at the same time. The statistics are that there will be players at the highest level who feel unable to come out. And that has to change.”
George came to the UK for university and found a local football club that happened to be LGBT+. When he was looking to move up a level, it was only ever Stonewall FC for him, despite him being straight – he has been at the club for seven years and says he never wants to leave. I wondered why that initial decision was so straightforward for him.
“You quickly realise that if you play in a straight club, you’re playing to have fun and you’re playing for glory – to do the best you can,” George tells me.
“But then if you play for a LGBT+ club as an ally, you have the added value that you are also improving other people’s lives, even if only by tiny, incremental amounts. The more you win, the more you improve the status of the club, the more people will hear about it and will either be educated or will know they have a support network for them.”
Welcoming everyone is not simply a tagline here. Sophie coaches one of the women and non-binary teams. She joined Stonewall FC in 2021 after hearing about it through a work colleague who played in the unity team; she had been out of the game for almost 10 years.
She began as a first-team player, then second team and then later interviewed for the coaching role, which she took on last September. There is football on a Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Wednesday. Sophie met the woman who became her wife at the club.
“We face very different forms of discrimination to some of the other teams at the club,” Sophie tells me. “We’ve had issues with transphobia, with people’s pronouns not being accepted.
“There are also challenges of finding places to play, because there are lots of rules and restrictions on those who are transgender and non-binary. For a transgender person, the sheer difficulty of the situation means that it’s probably unlikely we will see a sea change in the near future.
“For some people, just being there means that there will be questions, upheaval and hurt for people who just want to play football and celebrate their love of the game. But that only makes what we have created more important.
“It becomes a matter of respite. For those who are non-binary and trans, a lot of your time and energy does feel as if it is spent explaining who you are or how things work. What we’re aiming to give is a space where that is the last thing you have to do, a respite from all of that. You can come and play football and just be who you are, free from questions and judgement. I know that my role could be done by someone else, but it’s a privilege to be part of that.”
I wonder about Stonewall FC’s future. If the ultimate goal is for progress to reach the point where the LGBT+ community feel entirely accepted and comfortable to be themselves within the amateur and professional game, is that goal also not the point at which Stonewall FC ceases to be needed? Is the entire aim of the club to ensure that it no longer needs to exist?
“I always used to say that we were fighting for their own extinction,” Eric says. “But what I have now seen, with the rise of allies into the club, is that we can exist. We can maintain and share our history. We can act as a beacon if two steps forward is ever followed by one step back. We can be the blueprint and a continuing example of the culture we are fighting for in football.”
That makes complete sense, surrounding Stonewall FC with an air of serendipity. All of the sponsorship deals and the pursuits of success are to destroy stereotypes and to increase visibility for a community that, scandalously, can still often feel isolated within football.
And that will always continue: success breeds acceptance, acceptance breeds success. There is no perfection, no finish line; the club will just keep on keeping on. The victories come on the pitch, but also in the experiences of those who are proud to call this club home.
There’s a line that sticks out more than most. One player at the club also works in professional football, but is not openly gay there. He was worried that the level of football would not be high enough at Stonewall FC, but was quickly impressed. But the club has convinced him of something else; it makes Eric smile as if he has had the last two decades of his work distilled into just a few seconds.
“Before coming to Stonewall, I was not convinced. I had two huge parts of my life: being gay and loving football. But I doubted whether they could ever truly come together,” the player says.
“Everything that I have experienced here proves that it can. And I’m just so, so thankful and proud of the club for that reason.”
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