Will there be the first outing of active professional footballers in Germany next year? The gay former youth national player Marcus Urban wants to offer homosexual players a digital platform and organize a joint public confession on May 17, 2024. FC St. Pauli is also one of the project’s supporters.
“We want to create a platform on which they can show themselves and position themselves,” says initiator Marcus Urban in the FC St. Pauli podcast. Based on the year it was founded, the second division soccer team will support the “Sports Free” campaign with 1,910 euros. According to Urban, Borussia Dortmund, VfB Stuttgart and SC Freiburg have also already donated. In addition, a documentary film about homosexuality in football is being made with clubs, players, presidents and informants.
May 17th is International Day Against Homophobia. On this day next year, an internet platform will be launched on which gay professional footballers, but also other professional athletes, will tell their stories with texts and videos, if in doubt also anonymously. There has never been an outing of an active professional footballer in Germany.
Urban: “There is a bit of a lack of courage and encouragement”
In the 1990s, Urban was on the verge of entering professional football, but ended his career early because he no longer wanted to hide his gayness and reported on it in his biography “Hide and Seek”. The now 52-year-old has been dealing with the problem for years. He knows that many players would like to come out. “But the setting is missing a bit, perhaps also the courage and encouragement. Someone who says: ‘Let’s finish this now so that normalization occurs.’ That’s what we offer them. Ultimately, they make the decision themselves.”
Former footballer Marcus Urban (l.) with his husband Jens.
“We’ll build them a house, but they have to go through the door themselves.”
—Marcus Urban
Urban fights to ensure that “playing football, earning money and being happy and authentic can belong together.” Easier said than done. The players’ fears are great and have prevented planned outings. “There are fears that the clubs will let you down, that you will no longer be marketable, that the sponsors will drop out and that you will be bullied.”
May 17th reminds us of paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code
Hence the idea of a group outing in order to be able to distribute the resulting attention across several shoulders. “May 17, 2024 is a worthy date for this,” said Urban. Based on Section 175 of the Criminal Code, which criminalized sexual acts between males and thus enabled the persecution of homosexuals. However, the players are not pinned down on the date, says Urban. “There will now be an opportunity to position yourself on the platform on the 17th of every month.”
Paragraph 175
- Section 175 of the German Criminal Code existed from January 1, 1872 to June 11, 1994. It criminalized sexual acts between men.
- In 1935 the National Socialists tightened the paragraph. They increased the maximum sentence from six months to five years in prison. In serious cases the sentence was even up to ten years in prison (§ 175a).
- The Federal Republic of Germany stuck to the versions of Section 175 from the National Socialist era for two decades.
- There was a first reform of the paragraph in 1969 and a second reform in 1973.
- It was only lifted in 1994. In total, around 140,000 men were convicted under Section 175, 50,000 of them after 1949.
This topic in the program:
Sports | 12/30/2023 | 10:00 a.m
