Graeme Le Saux: Left Field. Graeme Saux Le

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      Bobby Campbell had succeeded John Hollins as manager by then but neither he nor anyone else in authority said ‘Lads, look, this is getting a bit silly’. By now the rumours were out of control. The piss-taking about camping with Ken started some time around the beginning of July and eight weeks later, my worst fears were realized.

      On 7 September, we went to play a league game against West Ham at Upton Park. I got the ball on the left flank some time in the first half and played it upfield. Then the chant started. It came from the hard-core fans in the North Bank and was set to the tune of the Village People’s ‘Go West’: ‘Le Saux takes it up the arse, Le Saux takes it up the arse,’ they yelled – again and again and again. I stood there in shock. ‘Oh my God, that’s it,’ I thought. ‘It’s reached the terraces.’ I knew fans everywhere were going to try and make my life a misery.

      Justin Fashanu had ‘come out’ in the News of the World a year earlier and even though his career was practically over, he was ridiculed and scorned for his admission. A few years later, he committed suicide. There also had been rumours about Trevor Morley and Ian Bishop, two West Ham players. They probably had about as much foundation as the rumours about me and Ken. I didn’t think I could afford for people to think there was the slightest hint of me being gay. Everything I was worried about, my preoccupation with being isolated and ostracized, was now turning into reality. Suddenly, I had something else to cope with as I tried to make it as a footballer, something else I had to fight against.

      That afternoon at West Ham really scared me. I felt it had the potential to ruin everything. I didn’t know how to deal with it. It left me feeling isolated on the pitch. It left me feeling apart from the team, even on the pitch which had been my last refuge. I didn’t know who to be angry with, because it was my own team-mates who had started it.

      It made me even more sensitive and my life at Chelsea even more complicated. It was the start of a series of problems for me at the club that ended with me hurling my shirt to the floor when Campbell’s successor, Ian Porterfield, substituted me and my departure from Stamford Bridge soon afterwards. I was very insecure, very nervous. I kept myself to myself because I didn’t feel I could trust anyone.

      At Upton Park, no one mentioned the chanting when we got back to the dressing room at half-time, or at full-time. No one spoke about it at all. Maybe it didn’t register with some of them. It was never discussed and I didn’t make a point of saying to any of them ‘Thanks a lot for that boys’. But after that game, the chanting about me grew more and more regular. The pressure I was under when the taunts about being homosexual took hold was immense. I would go out onto the pitch knowing that I was going to get a torrent of abuse before I had even kicked a ball. Normally, as a player, you want to stand out but you want to stand out for the right reasons. If you get stick from the away supporters because you have done something well, you can live with that. It’s actually quite satisfying. But what started happening to me was that if there was some sort of lull in the game, I was the first fall-back option and the taunting would start. If the home fans got bored, they’d start singing about me.

      I often wonder whether I could have prevented it. I tried damned hard to prevent it. I stood up for myself and got physically angry with people who pushed it too far, but I also withdrew more and more into my own little world to try and protect myself from the abuse so I wouldn’t have to confront it.

      Once the thing about me and Ken spread beyond the dressing room, it went crazy. It became an urban myth. Wisey’s friends from Wimbledon would ask him about it; other players would talk to their mates at their former clubs. Soon, everyone was talking about it as if it was a fact. People said there was no smoke without fire. It was generally accepted – in football and in the media – that Ken and I were in some sort of closet relationship.

      It never got to the point where I would go in the showers and someone would say ‘Watch out boys, Graeme’s around, backs to the wall’. But it was enough to give me a sense of isolation and paranoia. Once it really gained momentum, everything I did was used as evidence I was gay. The way I dressed, the music I listened to, the fact that I went to art galleries and read The Guardian all turned into more clues about my sexuality.

      The sheer number of people that would ask me about the situation between me and Ken was bewildering. I got bits and pieces of abuse in the street: the odd shout of ‘poof’ or ‘shirtlifter’ from the other side of the road, mainly from lads trying to get a laugh from their mates. No one said it directly to my face unless they were in a crowd at a game but the variety of insults aimed at gay people became my specialist subject. The worst thing was when you’d go to get the ball for a corner or a throw and there would be somebody a couple of feet away from you in the front row. Their faces would be contorted with aggression and they’d be screaming this homophobic abuse at me that was often really vicious stuff. When it was that close and one-on-one, it was shocking.

      Pretty soon, opposition players were winding me up about it on the pitch. It didn’t happen that often but there were a couple of occasions when I responded or retaliated and all hell broke loose. When I made it an issue, the lack of action taken against the people responsible said a lot about the reluctance of the authorities to confront the problem, a reluctance that still exists today.

      The media hounded me about it, too, particularly the tabloid newspapers. When I first started going out with Mariana while I was playing for Blackburn, she was a press officer for Camelot. The lottery was very high-profile back then and gradually people began to find out that we were seeing each other. A couple of papers started harassing her at work. They phoned up on the pretext of asking something about the lottery but pretty soon they dropped the pretence and started asking her about me.

      The Daily Star was particularly persistent. Their reporter kept going on about how there were all these rumours about my sexuality and how the paper wasn’t convinced we were actually seeing each other. Mariana could have lost her job because she was spending so much time fielding these crackpot calls. She had to go and see her boss about it. In the end, this guy from the Star rang again and blurted out ‘Is he gay?’ She just said ‘Of course he isn’t’ and he said ‘Thanks’ and put the phone down. The following Friday, they ran a front page that said ‘Homo Le Saux? Not my Graeme’. On the inside page, it had the rest of the story and there was a picture of me. Underneath the picture, they ran the caption ‘Le Saux: all man’. It’s funny now but at the time I was fuming. It was the day before a game and we were travelling. All the playerswere getting on the Blackburn team bus and Tim Sherwood asked me if I had seen the paper. The guys were upset for me. It felt like I had some support from them. In contrast to the way it had been at Chelsea.

      I think they were genuinely mortified that I was having to go through all that kind of stuff. I wondered whether it was defamatory: being called gay if you weren’t. In the context of football, I think it is, because, sadly, it could cost you your career. No manager would want to buy you, in those days, anyway. It’s a terrible indictment of the game but I’m afraid it’s true.

      I was in my second spell at Chelsea when the real problems on the pitch began. Ironically, the atmosphere at the club had changed radically in the time I had been away. It was much less threatening, much less intimidating. Most of all, it was much more cosmopolitan. Ruud Gullit was the manager when they brought me back and they had recruited players like Gianluca Vialli, Roberto di Matteo, Gianfranco Zola and Frank Lebouef. It could hardly have been more different from the dressing room I had left behind. From feeling like an alien in my first spell at the club, I fitted in easily second time around. Unfortunately, the age of enlightenment hadn’t yet spread to some of my rivals at other clubs.

      I had had four years at Blackburn Rovers by then, four years of an increasingly high profile and four years of taunts from opposition supporters. Everyone assumed that the fight between me and my Blackburn СКАЧАТЬ