Fateful moments - heading abroad
One TV show and a fork in the road
Back in the days when you had to stand up and go and change TV channels, I watched a show that changed my life. I didn’t know it at the time; I didn’t know that a football club on the other side of the world could set off a chain of events that would see me move to the UK and settle into a life I couldn’t imagine while sitting in my families TV room in suburban Adelaide.
Growing up in Australia, most people who had an interest in sports followed the English Premier League or British football more broadly. I wasn’t one of these people until late one evening, while aimlessly switching between channels I stumbled onto a documentary. This show followed David Sullivan and David Gold as they bought Birmingham City Football Club and installed the first female managing director of a British football club, Karen Brady. I missed the start of the documentary but quickly got the gist — this was a struggling club with little prospects for success prior to it being bought out. Financial troubles abounded, and things were looking bleak. On the field, performances were average at best. They, the Blues, were just like my own Aussie Rules team, poor, struggling and with a limited record of success!! This was my club. From that day forward, I decided I would follow the Blues. You see the internet was emerging at this time and you could follow sports from abroad, more easily than before. There was no live streaming, but you could follow matches live on basic websites and supporter fora. I participated in the supporter chat sites and followed the club more and more closely.
In 1997 I was struggling with my sexuality. I mean, really struggling. I had turned 21 earlier in the year, and my brother, sister and I were still grieving our dad’s sudden death just a year earlier. My sister and I, with me still fully in the closet, decided to go on a trip of a lifetime to the UK and USA. We packed our bags and jetted off. In the UK we decided to go to our first ever Blues game, and what a game it was! If you ever needed a game to ensure you had the bug and got hooked then this was it. Blues came from a goal down to win against Manchester City, late in injury time. It was magical, the atmosphere electric and buzzing. My sister and I were delighted, and I, for one, was a Blues fan now!
Following the match we were on such a high we didn’t really think straight — We had no idea how to get back into the city centre; it was a dark, cold December evening. We decided, in our naive wisdom, to follow a group of supporters leaving the stadium. Suffice to say they didn’t head back into the city! We walked a long way in the dark and made it back eventually. To this day I have no idea where we were headed!
The seed was sown and upon returning home I followed Blues closely, participating in many chats on supporter message boards. It was an outlet, one of many. By this point in my life, cricket was becoming a distant memory. Living my life through the passions of sport was an easy way out, all the while denying my sexuality to myself and others. I was lost in the world of Blues, South Adelaide Football Club and cricket. I only watched from the sidelines, but it helped keep me sane. I could ignore my sexuality for a while, it was supressed and denied as much as I could.
Following a crisis point, coming back from the brink of internal despair, I acknowledged to myself that I was gay and started to reach out.
I came out to some friends and then my mum and brother and sister. All of these moments filled me with trepidation, terror, sweats and fear. All went okay, some better than others, but none (thankfully) resulted in outright rejection. Coming out to my mum and best friend at the time were the hardest for me, given where I was in my head. My mum because, well, she is my mum and rejection there would have been devastating. She took it hard, but things improved quickly. My best friend was someone I had loved and coming out to him was tough. He took it in his stride and still does today, even if we live on other sides of the world.
Coming out created a fork in the road. I knew work wasn’t progressing as I would have liked in Adelaide, and my personal life and head was still a mess. I decided to head to the UK to visit my brother (who was studying in Edinburgh) and travel and work for a while. I needed space to breathe, to work out my life, to find out who I was. Birmingham seemed like a good place to head first — I ‘knew’ several fans on internet chat sites — and meeting up with them seemed like a good plan!
I arranged flights and following teary goodbyes to family and friends I flew to the UK on Valentine’s Day, 2000. I flew to Birmingham via Paris, and I still remember sitting at Charles De Gaulle airport on a freezing cold February morning thinking ‘what the fuck have I done’. I was nervous and started to have doubts. I was being met at the airport by a man I didn’t know, had never seen before, I mean really, what was I thinking?
Stepping off the plane and emerging into the arrivals hall, I spotted my ride straight away — he was the only one there in a Blues top.
Those first few days in Birmingham were a whirlwind. The cold had a novelty value that has long since died. I went to St Andrews, home of the Blues, on my first night in the country and watched us beat Blackburn 1–0. On the following Saturday, I went with even more people I didn’t know to see Blues beat Swindon 4–1 away from home. The hospitality shown to me by these fans, people I didn’t really know at all, ensured I became and remain a Blues fan, even if I don’t go to matches so often anymore.
During those first few days, I met Neil. He was a Blues fan who was interested in my work background and suggested I come for an interview at his company. Within six weeks, I’d found a place to live and settled in the city. I wasn’t to know I’d still be there 19 years later. In the first couple of months, I met my current partner for the first time, although we didn’t get together for another couple of years.
So here I am now, fully out, playing cricket, running my own business and settled in south Birmingham. I have an amazing partner and friends across multiple generations who all mean a great deal to me, even if struggle to show that sometimes. And all of this can be traced back to watching just one TV show in the early 1990’s — a show I never planned to watch, one that needed me to stand and manually switch the channel to find. That, I think, is a fateful moment, a key part of my reflexive narrative of life. Life turned and changed that night, even if I couldn’t know exactly how at the time.
