My site referral statistics are telling me some names....
Will Young
Matt Taylor
Jermaine Jenas
Cristiano Ronaldo
Alan Smith
Actually, those last two names have featured frequently in my site stats for a couple of weeks now...
Update: Incidentally, double standards alert having got all those search requests I felt the urge to click to the NOTW story. I'm neither linking or copying it; by next Sunday it will have disappeared out of cyberspace.
I happen to think that it's an example of tabloid journalism at its worst. Assuming the story to be true, and regardless of who the names may or may not be, it is absolutely not in the public interest to publish it - just because the public is, clealy and inevitably interested, I cannot find any justification for publishing what some young men happen to do in private. Indeed, it seems to me that it is an invasion of their privacy, with no justification.
There is a public interest to be served in outing politicians, journalists, religious people etc who preach homophobia in public and practice homosexuality in private. But a bunch of footballers and a pop star, who, if it is that one, we all know to be gay anyway, and to my knowledge has never demonstrated any hypocrisy about it. The footballers, whether they are genuinely bisexual or just bi-curious, experimenting, or whatever, so what. What is the problem?
Actually, the problem lies with many of those who are desperate to know the identities. Although we live in a society which (often grudgingly) accepts that some showbiz people and politicians are gay, we haven't been able to accept that sportsmen are (and we're a bit unsure about sportswomen, too).
It must be extremely difficult for a footballer who is young, who operates in that macho neanderthal largely homophobic world one moment and then goes to the trendiest nightspots in eg Manchester and discovers lots of other young men who are out gay, or relaxed about their bisexuality, or just totally metrosexual. Probably some of those footballers have non-footballing friends who are gay, but then a footballer or two gets 'found out' and they're up against the retarded views of the News of the World, when suddenly, it's quite a different deal from the designer bars of Canal Street.
In my ideal parallel universe I would love the News of the World to explainwhy this story matters. It is only printed to sell copies. Naturally, I didn't buy a copy, but my interest was stimulated. If their sex life interferes with their performance on the pitch, well, that's another matter, but one that could never be proved, and is likely to occur whether the sex is gay or straight, casual or in a committed relationship.
