Potential for homophobic chants has fans 'dreading' Crystal Palace's M23 derby against Brighton
Brighton arrive at Crystal Palace tomorrow and Emma Wright, a Selhurst Park regular since the age of eight, is among a community of fans “quite frankly dreading it”.
Homophobic chants are all-but-guaranteed, the 37-year-old fears, after a chorus of abuse was heard “like a warm-up act” against Bournemouth last week. Every year Brighton travel up the M23, Wright’s heart sinks at hearing chants such as “We can see you holding hands” from season ticket holders dotted all around her.
“Taking my identity and using it as a battering ram to hit the opposition with is a terrible feeling and I don’t think it’s possible to understand it unless you’ve felt it,” she explains. “Every other game feels like the Palace family but these chants cause real division, almost like a betrayal by your loved ones.”
Wright, one of the founding members of Proud and Palace, an LGBT fan awareness cause launched in 2014, has unanimous support from other fan groups in her attempt to beat the bigotry. She dreams of a day when her beloved team also take a stand and threaten to stop a match.
“We know that huge numbers of LGBT supporters who have been going to Selhurst Park for years dread this fixture,” she added. “You’re on tenterhooks just waiting for things to be said around you. You think, ‘If people are doing it when we are playing Bournemouth, you know what’s going to happen against Brighton’. You start second-guessing yourself and wondering whether you will feel brave and empowered enough to turn around and have a word, because you know they are there the next match and then the match after that.”
The fans are not alone in raising concern about tomorrow. Stonewall and Kick It Out are calling for a major new assault on discrimination in the Premier League after two men were ejected from the away section at the Amex Stadium and arrested on suspicion of using homophobic gestures during Brighton’s 2-2 draw with Wolves.
Everton also launched an investigation into an allegation of homophobic chanting aimed at Chelsea fans on the weekend of Stonewall’s “Rainbow Laces” campaign, with Premier League clubs showing their support for LGBT inclusion. The Palace-Brighton rivalry is an unlikely one, forged four decades ago after the clubs played each other five times in a year. Wright’s mission is to show “the homophobic abuse against Brighton is nothing to do with the rivalry”.
“Our approach since we started as a group, and since Brighton were promoted to the Premier League, has been, rather than ask the club for help, we’ve gone to the other fan groups,” she says. “We’ve had a campaign for the last couple of years called ‘99 reasons to hate Brighton and homophobia doesn’t need to be one of them’.” Many of the fan groups will share a message on forum pages and social media sites over the next 24 hours in an attempt to “empower people to challenge” abuse online or at the matches.
“We have had a lot of support but as much as we value that, change isn’t going to come because Crystal Palace FC or Steve Parish, our chairman, tells fans to stop it,” she says. “It will come if the fan next to you, who is a season-ticket holder for 10 years, goes, ‘Cut that out – that’s not OK any more’.”
She hopes the stand taken by Raheem Sterling and his England team-mates against racism can one day translate to homophobic abuse.
“I can relate on a level to Sterling because I have heard it about my sexuality,” she says. “I know how it feels to not feel welcome at a place that I feel most passionate about. Selhurst Park has been in my family for three generations. I’ve been coming since I was eight and I’m 37 now. You get people saying keep LGBT out of football – it’s telling me that I’m not welcome even though my grandfather was coming here all these years ago. To me, that’s mad.
“There’s a lot of conversation around whether a gay player would ever come out in the top tiers of English football and I think sometimes that conversation does more harm than good. But it would be amazing if there was an ally in the men’s game who at least said, ‘I’m not putting up with it because I want to stand in solidarity with a family member or a friend – I’m going to make a stand and walk off the pitch’.”
