Football’s Coming Out was published in 2015. It went on to be longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year. The book details Neil Beasley’s poignant and uplifting story as he fights to enjoy the sport he loves without prejudice. You can read an extract, where Neil shares an incident from his time as chairman of Birmingham Blaze FC, below. For more information and details of how to buy the book direct from Floodlit Dreams, click here.

“Neil…” he said. I didn’t like the way he said it or the way he was looking at me. He was small and flustered. His red face had beads of sweat trickling down. This was a man looking for an argument. Well, let him come at me. I’d dealt with people like him before, and now there was no Jonny to hold me back.

“Neil,” he repeated, only this time trying to place more authority on the word, a ridiculous attempt to seize power. “I don’t like what’s happening with Blaze. We’re getting a bit straight.”

Believe it or not, this wasn’t an isolated incident. It was a sentiment echoed by a few. Even one of my closest allies warned me that we were ‘getting a bit straight’. What on earth does that mean? ‘A bit straight’. Who cared? Why should we limit the number of straight people allowed in the team? It’s all about inclusion and acceptance. That and getting the three points.

The second season had started well. Jonny’s departure gave me free rein as chairman. It was a move which initially left me nervous that I wouldn’t be able to cope alone, but as it unfolded, it proved a big relief. I was being held accountable for my own actions and not someone else’s. It made me the responsible person that I needed to be in the first place.

I had imagined the previous season that changes would be implemented with results coming immediately but actually, coming rock bottom in that first season was the best thing that could have happened. After the shock and humiliation, I came back focused and motivated anew. Whatever happened in that second season, I knew that things couldn’t get worse.

Fortunately, I had some good people round me and while they didn’t let me mess up, they gave me enough autonomy to get things done. For a new era, I wanted a new kit and we were now in one that Dave and I had chosen. The red and black stripes were replaced by a bespoke black shirt with a pink stripe. It looked really smart and everybody liked it. New players came in, a number of them – as the small flustered man who stood in front of me pointed out – straight.

There’s a weird dynamic with straight players in the gay leagues, and their numbers have increased as the league has gone on. At first we didn’t have many at Blaze and there were only a handful in the whole league. We rarely played against straight teams, or predominantly straight teams, when I first joined. You could mention it to the players and they’d all fearfully whisper that, ‘Oh no, we’ll all get beaten up’.

Attitudes have begun to change but even so, when I joined the second time round and we played against a straight team, or a gay team with a number of straight players, then our players would approach the game expecting to lose. Worse still, it was deemed acceptable. Losing to anyone is not acceptable. It doesn’t matter if they’re gay or straight. In fact, it annoys me more when we lose to a straight team because until we gay players are good at football we are never going to change anyone’s opinion. If you lose 10-0 to a straight team then what have you proved? You’ve only reinforced the stereotype that gay men can’t play football because they’re ‘not macho’. If you compete with them, let them know they’ve been in a game, that’s when you start to change perceptions.

I’ve got my theories as to why straight players want to play in the GFSN league. Sure, they’re sympathetic to the gay cause and in no way are they homophobic, but that’s not the only reason they play. I was guilty of it when I first joined gay football. ‘This is brilliant,’ I remember thinking, ‘I’m going to be the best player here by miles.’ And that is the case for quite a few of the straight players.

They come with all of these preconceptions that gay players aren’t going to be the greatest of footballers and reckon that they’ll be the biggest of big sh in a small, homosexual pond. They turn up young, straight and full of confidence, dragging their girlfriend along because they’re a bit unsure and they feel they need to prove to everyone that they’re straight. Then they realise that some gay people actually can play and that they’re not the best player on the pitch. Worse than that, they realise that their opponents aren’t afraid to kick the shit out of them.

Not all of our straight players were like that. By the middle of my second season as chairman we weren’t far off being 50/50 with gay and straight players in the team. The straight players felt totally comfortable playing in the same team as gay players. For some reason that was seen as a negative. I didn’t understand why. Surely having a load of straight players in the team is the ultimate aim? Because the last thing you want is a gay league and gay teams. Then you’re segregating yourselves from the mainstream, whereas really what you want is to be incorporated.

We had to set up our own league because we weren’t accepted, and now that we’re beginning to be accepted some people resent it. They don’t like winning the war because then what have they got left to complain about? The fight’s almost won. On pretty much every front other than football the fight is won. Some people like to be the victim, though, and how can they be the victim if everything suddenly becomes fine?

Indeed, how could I have enforced a ban on straight players at Blaze? How ironic would that be? We can’t start excluding people because of their sexuality. I was pretty mindful of asking people their sexuality anyway, not only because I had no right to, but also because how could I have known whether they were telling the truth?

I don’t understand what people want sometimes. They wanted an organisation that protected them and allowed them to play in a safe environment. They got that. They were able to play a sport in which the mainstream leagues had isolated them and kicked them away. Now the mainstream leagues are welcoming them back and everyone is being integrated and they don’t like it. There’s so many ironies here. I’ve always said that being the chairman of Birmingham Blaze is essentially overseeing all of these ironies.

To put it bluntly, I have to preside over a number of people who want equality and to be treated equally but do not want that enforced inside their own club. They’re happy in their own little world in the GFSN. Gay football for gay footballers.

As a concept, the GFSN league that we were a part of worked. It started off as a social league with the emphasis on the night out that took place either before or after the game – usually before. It was meant as a way of like-minded people meeting each other, though in reality it ended up being a way for players from the two teams to hook up with each other.

The league itself was founded at a time when gay football fans often had to conceal their sexuality. Straight football was never the safest of environments, so the league offered a safe, inclusive place where people could be whoever they wanted whilst playing a sport they loved. Times change. Whereas mainstream football became more and more accepting, the GFSN league stayed the same. It was still a social league where like-minded people could meet and have a laugh. It remained fun whilst not necessarily catering for those of us with ambition.

Although the standard has improved over the years, the more serious players have to make do with a handful of GFSN games and the irregular EuroGames.

It explains why teams have started to leave the GFSN leagues. Stonewall, for example, play in the Middlesex County Football League Division One. Their reserve side play in the London West End AFA Sunday League, and it is only their third team who play in the gay football leagues, competing in the London Unity League. They’ve had no issues at all, and now other teams such as Village Manchester are taking their lead.

In that regard, it can be said that we’re all ultimately working toward our own demise. It seems strange, doesn’t it? Our ultimate goal is acceptance, yet once we’re fully accepted we’ll no longer need gay teams.

Teams leaving the GFSN in search of better, more regular competition can cause problems internally. Infighting is not uncommon. Clubs like ours that aren’t quite big enough to have two teams, yet are too big to have just one, are torn. In an ideal world we’d have a first team competing in a straight league, aiming to get as high up the pyramid as possible, and a reserve team in the GFSN league. One would take their football seriously; the other would take their football socially.

As soon as someone voices that we should take things seriously and enter the straight leagues, however, the dissenters always gather around them. ‘If you want to go and take it seriously, go and join a straight team,’ they get told. It annoys me. Why can’t you be gay and take it seriously and have pride in your team? It doesn’t make any sense at all, but it’s the kind of attitude that the structure of the GFSN breeds.

There is currently no registration for players. You can play who you want, when you want. It’s a ringer’s paradise. Nobody is tied to a team. If you play for Stonewall one week you can go and play for Birmingham Blaze the next. Everything is focused on inclusion. The league has been left behind, because as the teams and players have become more professional, the league itself hasn’t.

It’s not just the competitive element forcing teams into straight leagues. Clubs are becoming more and more influential in their communities, and as time goes by they want to make a greater difference. To be honest, I’m not helping anybody in the West Midlands if I spend my Sunday heading off to London to play a game of football. Playing nationally and keeping ourselves to ourselves and only playing against other gay teams is not furthering the cause. If I play in a local league, however, I can make a positive difference in my local community.

I suppose there is some kudos in playing in a national gay league. The very fact that it’s played nationally gives it credibility, and it also gives clubs publicity, which can lead to exceptional opportunities. You can actually feel privileged just for being a gay man who likes football. How times have changed. I’ve been invited to play at Villa Park twice, I’ve met with Birmingham City’s top players and I’ve been wined and dined by any number of marketing executives from professional clubs. None of that would have happened if I played in a regular Sunday league team.

Why do the professional clubs do it? Do they really care? Probably not. It’s usually done to tick boxes. All we do is serve a purpose. The professional club goes back to the FA and can boast about championing equality and the FA says well done and gives them an award, perhaps even a grant. The club is thus rewarded for acting how any half decent human being should. We shouldn’t be celebrating this kind of behaviour – it should just be the norm. Acceptance should be widespread.

Some people in the gay football world believe the breakthrough for us was when these opportunities started to come.

They think that being invited into the hospitality suites to watch Birmingham City on their Football vs. Homophobia Day, that playing at Villa Park, meant we’d finally been accepted. I didn’t see it like that.

In my opinion, the main reason we were invited to play at Villa Park was so that Aston Villa could put it on their website. It was exactly the same reason that Birmingham City invited us, though at least they were up front about it. “To be honest,” we were told, “your presence here benefits us more than it does you.”

Being given privileges isn’t the breakthrough because we don’t want to be treated differently. The aim is to be treated the same as everybody else. Our sexuality shouldn’t matter. It all goes back to competing. To change perceptions, we have to compete regularly with straight teams on the pitch and prove that gay people can play and are just as good as anyone else at a sport as physical as football.

Times are changing, and for the better. Though the GFSN league is bigger than ever before, it’s also becoming more and more unnecessary. The people who organise the league will probably be the first to admit that in 10 years it won’t exist. There will just be no need.

That being likely, we had to make the most of our time in the GFSN and of the resources available to us at Birmingham Blaze. That’s why we decided to start picking players regardless of their sexuality. Unsurprisingly, being able to select from a pool of gay and straight players made us stronger. And the straight players we brought in were the catalyst behind our improved performance as we only brought in straight players better than what we already had, to complement a decent foundation of gay players. We had to let a few players go which I didn’t like doing, but if you want to be the best you have to make a few sacrifices and sentiment takes second place.

In Cristiano Ronaldo: The Biography, Guillem Balague tells how Ronaldo was tested by his teammates and almost bullied when he joined Manchester United. He had to deal with snide remarks, people saying he was only keeping David Beckham’s number seven shirt warm while Beckham was in Madrid, negative comments about his fashion sense and, humiliatingly, being placed in the weakest group for rondos – a ball drill with players in a circle passing it around a piggy in the middle – where he was often intentionally stitched up. Players would re balls at him at knee height knowing that he was only allowed one touch to deal with it. Giving the ball away would make him look like a weak player. It would mean he’d have to go in the middle of the circle and take his turn chasing the ball, trying to win it back.

Ronaldo was truly tested and came out of it to become the player that he is today. It’s refreshing to know there are similarities between straight football and gay football. When straight players come into a gay team they get tested, just not in the same way as Ronaldo did. We’re not bullies – and we certainly wouldn’t be bullies if Ronaldo turned up to train with us.

It’s no secret that he’s a beautiful man. There are some in the gay community who believe that he may be gay, but more likely it’s a case of them hoping he is. Unfortunately Ronaldo hasn’t yet turned up, so instead we test the straight players we do get along with relentless flirting. What makes the flirting even more fun is the trend for straight players to seem more attractive, though that’s probably a case of forbidden fruit. We know they’re off limits.

Even so, we love to watch them squirm in their skin with every passing line we throw their way. Almost all of them take it in good spirit – and some even take it in their stride and flirt back – but the vast majority of them are uncomfortable with it. We want to see just how comfortable they get so we push them to their limits, seeing if they break. They rarely do.

Despite our flirting, the new recruits at Blaze conducted themselves admirably and it helped that results were improving. None of them ever turned if they were kicked. Even at their most aggressive they never started spouting homophobic rubbish. We were in it together.

The referees never seemed to think that way. Even though – or perhaps because – the referees themselves tended to be straight, it seemed to be that more straight players than gay ones got sent off, and they’d only ever get sent off for gobbing off at the referee. There was certainly no equality when it came to the referee’s interpretation of the rules. Gay players seem to have this invisible force eld protecting them from going into the referee’s book, though I’m not going to complain too much about that form of positive discrimination. Imagine how many red cards I’d have suffered if things were equal…

Still, the gobbing off was quite rare, and referees in the GFSN usually have a pretty relaxed job. There aren’t many easier ways to pick up £30 for 90 minutes’ work. We only had one incident with a straight player, this one sparked by a referee.

The straight player had been sent off and obviously hadn’t agreed with the decision. Back in the changing room he was angry. He sat there, focused intently on the concrete floor, his brow furrowed and his kit still wet with mud. We went in there and tried to console him, but he just couldn’t tone down his anger. He hadn’t deserved it, he reckoned. That ref was a faggot, that’s what he was.

I let it go at the time. Emotions were running high and it just wasn’t worth it. There was no point in making it into a big thing. I knew the straight player in question. He wasn’t malicious. He wasn’t homophobic. Later on, when he was calm and having a drink in the clubhouse, I approached him.

“What do you think I want to talk about?” I asked him. I felt like a school teacher, him the naughty school boy, too shy to look me in the eye. It must be the red card, he concluded, taking a bitter sip of his drink.

“Nope, nothing to do with your red card,” I told him. That surprised him. What then? “It’s what you said about the referee after the game.”

Now he was confused. He hadn’t said anything about the referee had he? Certainly not anything out of order, anyway. So I mentioned the faggot word and he physically recoiled. He hadn’t a clue what he had said. It had been in the heat of the moment and he wasn’t thinking. He was just saying words, angry aggressive words and he didn’t know where they came from. He apologised profusely and said he hadn’t meant it.

Not for a second did I ever believe that he had done. It all comes back to the playground though, that attitude of, ‘Oh, this is gay, that’s gay’. Gay used as a word with negative connotations. People take it on subconsciously, programmed to think that way. It’s ingrained in their psyche.

They may be only words but the player in question had to understand the effect such language had on those around him. It had only been an hour or two between his outburst and my clubhouse chat with him and already two club members had asked me to expel him from Birmingham Blaze FC. He immediately made a verbal apology and the next day I got this lengthy written apology totalling two sides of A4. The club members calling for his head relented. He stayed and would play a sizeable part in what would be a successful season.

The reaction to his comment was justified, but it was also ironic considering how the gay players can be pretty homophobic themselves. I’m guilty of it too. To explain…

There are players with whom I’ve got into arguments and I’ve just come out with something like, “Fuck off you old queen.” I’m not condoning it but you get drawn in by the culture. When you consider that, the way straight players keep their cool becomes even more admirable. Loads of gay players call each other queens and mincers and names that are, shall we say, more colourful.

In fact, gay footballers can be vicious to each other. Often they have a sharp tongue because of all they have had to deal with in their lives. They become automatically defensive, and when you add in the competitive element of football to make their emotions run high, you’ve got a pretty aggressive concoction on your hands. That doesn’t make it OK. There’s no excuse for homophobic language from anyone, gay or straight. Because we’re gay we think we can use these words. Every time I call someone a mincing old queen I should get held to account. Both straight and gay should get castigated for such remarks. It’s not right, yet it’s so prevalent in gay football. Sometimes we’re our own worst enemy.

The whole homophobic slip of the tongue was one of only two real issues we had in an otherwise smooth season. I agreed to be a player when I pulled on the Birmingham Blaze match shirt and a player only. No longer would I try and be a chairman from right back (and despite my best persuasive techniques, Dave had still refused to play me up front).

At the start of the season we had also agreed to be a bit less hands on. It was time to relinquish some of the power. Dave had been both manager and captain but now we decided to give the captaincy to someone else. There were a few obvious candidates, but I wanted to make more of a left-field appointment and Dave agreed.

I wanted to appoint someone unpopular in the hope that it would change him from the confrontational character with whom I often clashed – perhaps because of our similarity, some pointed out. Instead, the armband went to his head and it became the second issue of the season.

In the end we took the captaincy off him but left it too long, almost half a season. He angered his teammates as he thought everyone should be perfect and was intolerant of people’s weaknesses while overlooking what they did well. At our level all players are different, yet he just couldn’t fathom that. Now, I like a good argument now and then, but his regular rows became a distraction. Our original decision to make him captain had been all about catching people off guard and showing them that we weren’t scared to do something different. It back red. Lesson learned.

Despite that hiccup, Blaze were motoring along quite nicely. With our reinforced side – a little ‘straighter’ than usual, apparently – we ended up finishing second in the league, guaranteeing us promotion the following season. Not only that, but we won the local league: the Midlands Unity league. The one blot on an otherwise perfect season, excluding the whole captaincy issue and the homophobic slip of the tongue, of course, was our swift exit from the cup competition that the GFSN holds annually. Ever since their foundation, Birmingham Blaze had never got past the first round of that cup. That’s 10 whole seasons, 10 failed attempts to get just one win, and it’s a tradition we managed to uphold despite our other successes.

We could have done with some cup games. The GFSN leagues don’t really provide you with enough for a full season. The three divisions that make up the GFSN are national, remember, meaning that there’s a lot of travelling for all of the clubs taking part. It’s not cheap, which is why there’s only five teams in each division. Teams play each other home and away to make up eight games in the whole season. Teams then supplement this by creating and entering leagues locally. The gay London teams were the first to do it. They all joined together to create the London Unity League, and such was its success that the practice grew throughout the UK. Along with Nottingham Ball Bois, Leicester Wildcats and Wolverhampton Warriors, we founded the Midlands Unity league, which gave us an extra six games in the season.

The Midlands Unity League was a laugh and we wanted to win, but the GFSN League was our main focus. Joining us in the Third Division were Cardiff, London Leftfooters, London Romans and London Titans. Three trips to London gave us another reason for wanting to get out of that league. The first time you play in London it’s great because of the bright lights and the big city and the fact that G.A.Y is just around the corner, but the novelty soon wears off. It’s not long before you realise that an away trip to London takes up your whole day, and when you’re playing the same teams each season it becomes that extra bit dull.

Thank goodness we managed to escape that. That was our initial reaction, anyway, because not more than two weeks after our promotion was confirmed, the people in charge of the GFSN League decided to condense the three leagues into two. It was a sensible move. Though travelling costs would go up, the extra games would add more of a competitive element. We’d be going one step further away from the ‘let’s turn up and have a kickabout’ mentality.

We soon found out that with the restructure we’d be placed in the bottom of the two leagues, thus rendering our promotion pointless so were less enamoured of the new arrangements. We’d pushed so hard to escape those London teams and now we were due to be thrown back into the depths of the GFSN with them. We weren’t exactly over the moon at the prospect.

We lodged an official complaint. It was the first time that Birmingham Blaze had ever been promoted and we weren’t going to let the men in charge take that away from us. It seems we weren’t the only club to do so because the GFSN soon changed their tune. Instead of putting the highest ranked eight teams into the First Division and the bottom seven into the Second, as had first been proposed, the GFSN were instead going to honour any promotion from the previous season. That meant that the top two teams from the Second and Third Division would join the teams who finished in the top four in the first division.

Neither situation was ideal. We wanted our promotion to count for something but we’d essentially be going up two leagues, which seemed to be too big a step. We had a group of players who were now used to winning and that was probably going to end. I was now against taking promotion but the players were up for it. They wanted their chance to show they could compete with the best. I couldn’t fault their attitude. They’d come a long way from being social players.

We informed the league that we’d accept their proposal of placing us in the top league. It’d be tough but we’d be heading into the elite of gay football with a mixed team of gay and straight players. In hindsight, it was just what the club needed.

Under Birmingham Blaze’s new philosophy, it wouldn’t matter if a player was gay or straight. Sexuality would, and should, never enter into the equation. Ability was the criterion. Everyone should be treated equally, and under Blaze’s new direction, they would.

After all, we weren’t building fences. We were building something that enabled everyone to take part in something they loved, to mix freely and not to hide away in fear. If we could all take part together then surely that would make the activity just that bit more fun. Everyone feels happier when they’re accepted. Bit by bit, Birmingham Blaze were getting to that stage, both on and off the pitch.