Gay soccer legend Justin Fashanu finally gets the long overdue TV treatment he deserves

Justin Fashanu pictured center with his school team in 1974
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Justin Fashanu, the first professional soccer player to come out as gay, will have his life explored in an upcoming dramatic TV series, finally giving the trailblazing athlete’s legacy some long-overdue retelling.

When they were barely 20 years old, Fashanu and his younger brother, John, both achieved national fame in England by becoming pro-soccer players in the early 1980s.

However, after Justin Fashanu came out in a 1990 British tabloid interview — scandalously mentioning his hookups with closeted Parliament members — his brother and other family members rejected him.

His own coaches and teammates directed crude, homophobic insults at him, and soccer fans regularly chanted anti-gay songs at him during matches. Soccer authorities did nothing to stop the abuse.

Such homophobic jeers were sadly common at the time — and to a degree, still are in pro-soccer — especially since, in the early ’90s, religious and political conservatives regularly demonized gay men as sexually promiscuous spreaders of HIV.

But things worsened when, in March 1998, a 17-year-old in Maryland accused Justin Fashanu of…

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