There are professional soccer players across Italy praying that Victory doesn’t name names. You see, he’s the the latest rent boy to come forward and claim that he beds down pro soccer players in Italy for cash. A lot of cash, actually. About $2,000 a pop, so to speak.
“A lot of them are bisexual, they are married or have girlfriends. They have a respectable image but none of them will ever admit to being gay, not for the time being anyway. Most of the time we meet in hotels after matches, that’s when they get their only free time,” he said.
The man, who says he’s also a pro player in the minor leagues, dished during a recent TV interview. There are group sessions, mouth-to-mouth kissing and above all else, discretion, he says. While he proudly spills some details, he won’t name any names, including his. The journalist in me thinks this is suspect. But that’s just me.
The interview comes in the wake of Franco Grillini, a legislator and honorary head of Italy’s leading gay rights group, saying the nation’s top pro league includes at least 20 closeted players.
“A lot of these players have girlfriends or wives - it’s all a facade,” he said. “They are really scared of coming out because they are terrified what the supporters would say.”
Oh, the travails of pro jocks.
Matt Hennie blogs on Atlanta’s gay sports scene at Project Q Atlanta.
on Dec 11th, 2008 at 1:27 am
Dear Matt Hennie: Why do you trivialize this issue of worldwide gay shame in professional sports by ending your article with the limp wristed “Oh, the travails of pro jocks”? Did your attention span run overtime? Was there a pie cooling on the windowsill & it started to rain? You miss the entire friggin point of “death by example” that’s foisted upon young LGBT folks who may have true athletic talent but settle for less, most likely never developing their best traits, allowing their inner dreams to die away, because of the rampant & accepted homophobia of worldwide pro sports. Are you so prejudiced against high-income earners that any sort of prejudice holding them back is just, la-dee-da, too bad? This goes way beyond financially compensable sacrifices. Even though, once again, the wider issue is the shame-based example that this screams out to athletically talented (or even interested) LGBT children on the playing fields or in the stadium bleachers. Do you consider yourself so much more morally righteous, so detached because of income differences, so unconcerned with the private political rights of your fellow LGBT citizenry as to brush off with flippancy the evisceration of public displays of homosexuality that are enforced as an additional cost upon involutarily closeted LGBT professional athletes? I indeed have protested too loudly here, but the two points I wish to make are important: 1) LGBT children have every right to have heroes to emulate as all other kids; and 2) LGBT professional jocks, despite their high incomes & rare opportunities to play their sports at the highest levels, are victims of this homophobia too!