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Does ‘coming out’ now wipe away all sins?

Disgraced football referee David Coote is the latest public figure to try the 'Phillip Schofield defence'.

Gareth Roberts

Topics Identity Politics Sport UK

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Football referee David Coote found himself in hot water last November. Leaked phone-camera footage recorded in 2020 showed him referring to then Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp as ‘a cunt’ – in fact, a ‘German cunt’ – among other pleasantries. Some curious leaked texts also emerged that suggested Coote had been involved in dishing out a yellow card at a particular moment in a match for betting purposes – an allegation he denies. Then came more footage, apparently recorded during Euro 2024, in which he was seen snorting a line of white powder, chopped out next to a copy of The Year of the Locust by Terry Hayes (‘Hard men, resilient women and lots of pain… not for the faint-hearted’ – Sydney Morning Herald).

Oops! But might we have judged Coote too soon? He now insists there was some missing context. Speaking to the Sun this week, he revealed that he is gay, and kept it secret in the ‘macho world’ of football for fear of being abused. It was this sense of ‘double being’, he says, that helped to steer him towards these behaviours.

I’m afraid my first reaction to this revelation was not ‘Oh dear, “double being”, how sad’, but ‘Come off it, mate’. It may shock you to hear it, reader, but plenty of openly gay men also take recreational drugs. In fact, in my lived experience, the proclamation of one’s sexual orientation to the high hills hardly seems an impediment to the practice at all.

Coote also mentioned other exculpatory factors, including a family bereavement and work pressure. Those are far more acceptable. He didn’t need to over-season the dish with this sprig of gay garnish. My limited understanding – from anecdotal evidence supplied by friends and family who, unlike me, follow the footie – is that everyone already knew Coote was gay, and publicly had a partner, but that he didn’t comment on it in the press.

The Coote swerve reminds me of the initial Phillip Schofield defence in 2020. The then This Morning presenter came out on national TV amid rumours about an extramarital entanglement of his. The seeming point of a move like this is to deflect from your suspected wrongdoing by re-focussing public attention on homophobia in society.

Coote may have a point about the ‘macho’ world of football inhibiting gay men – the highly statistically unlikely lack of homosexuals among top-flight male players suggests as much. But Schofield was on a far stickier wicket trying that one in television. (‘I am sick of the sight of homosexuals in this building’, my gay boss at Granada TV told me many years ago, ‘but you’re all right, I suppose’.)

Underlying all of this, and providing the platform from which this rocket can still, just about, be launched, is our strange cultural assumption that ‘coming out’ is a panchreston for all manner of ills, a kind of rebirth, a moral slate-wipe. Being ‘in the closet’ is seen as an imbalance in the universe that causes strange behaviours. The making of the public declaration causes the restoration of the cosmic order. ‘I’m gay’ – literally magic words.

There is a peculiar significance attached to ‘coming out’, which seems especially ludicrous now that more than one in 10 teenagers ‘identifies’ themselves as ‘LGBTQIA+’. Young people, and older folk who should know better, use coming out as a shortcut to being interesting. That never worked, believe me, even in those days when the dread revelation was rare.

Still, the spectacle of someone in trouble scrabbling for red herrings can be very entertaining. Who can forget the then Tory MP, Jamie Wallis, who in 2022 rather gloriously fled the scene of a car accident in the Vale of Glamorgan in ‘a black leather PVC miniskirt, tights, dark shoes and a pearl necklace’. (Dark shoes! Whatever next?) Wallis whipped out the trans card, but even that was not enough. The notoriously woke judge, Tan Ikram, described him as ‘not credible’. (And that’s the same Judge Ikram who declined to convict violent felon and trans activist ‘Sarah Jane Baker’ after he told a rally in London: ‘If you see a TERF, punch them in the fucking face.’)

This confession dodge happens outside the LGBTQIA+ world, too. Comedian Marcus Brigstocke – a kind of less inventive Stewart Lee, if you can imagine that – outed himself this week as a porn addict. I can’t work out why we had to be informed about this, especially as he has teenage sons, who must be delighted that the whole world knows about their dad’s frantic masturbation habit.

Unfortunately, this has not knocked Brigstocke off the rails of his pretend-left, upper-middle-class, ‘good person’ opinions. His interview in the i is a miserable exercise in self-exoneration, blame shifting and judging other men for their ‘toxic masculinity’. So much judging, from that hillock of the moral high ground occupied by prolific pudding-pullers.

In all these cases, ‘I did it because I enjoyed it and I thought I was getting away with it’ would at least be honest. For addictions, you could add ‘because I am an idiot’. We’re all idiots, after all, so that’s far more appealing and relatable a tactic.

We all wrestle with guilt and shame. Forgive a moment of banality, but these are parts of being human. What’s different today is this use of the media as a confessional.

The traditional, tried-and-tested version is better. Because you can’t slip into the box and tell the grille: ‘Father, society has made me do some very dodgy things this week, I don’t know, bloody society eh, what am I like.’ You confess, you are cleansed in private, it all happens between you and God with the priest merely acting as your ISP, and then you go back into the flock.

Such matters of conscience are best left to the courtroom, if it comes to that, or to God. Not loudly acted out to the world and its wife, or indeed its husband or civil partner.

Gareth Roberts is a screenwriter and novelist, best known for his work on Doctor Who.

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