Chris Billig embraced soccer the same way a lot of Americans first fell in love with the sport back in 2010 – wide-eyed and in awe of the World Cup. A native of Austin, Texas, Billing watched the tournament in a local movie theater and was immediately hooked on the game and the culture surrounding the sport.
And in many ways, what Billig did next was just what most soccer fans did too. He started Twitter and tumblr accounts and later a full-fledged soccer blog in 2012 to cover the sport, but with a unique bend. Billig’s gay4soccer site covers MLS and North American soccer from the perspective of gay and lesbian writers, sometimes focused on LGBT issues in the sport but always primarily fixed on the game they love.
Ahead of the Seattle Sounders’ second annual Pride Day at CenturyLink Field on Saturday, SoundersFC.com spoke with Billig about launching gay4soccer and how MLS and its players have supported the LGBT community.
SoundersFC.com: What was the rationale behind starting gay4soccer?
When you look at your typical soccer blog, there’s nothing really up there coming from a gay or lesbian perspective, from a soccer perspective. There’s some sports sites, but not specifically soccer. And on the flip side, I was reading a lot of gay blogs that weren’t doing soccer the way I appreciated it. To this day you’ll see blog posts that say things like, ‘Check out these hot pictures of Robbie Rogers!’ I would see those and just say, ‘No! If you’re going to oogle the players, at least get the soccer facts right too.’
SoundersFC.com: The site’s tagline is ‘Because soccer isn’t gay, but once in a while it kinda is.’ Was that your idea?
Yeah (laughing). Honestly, my first thought was that it was a throw away kind of thing, I could change it once in a while. But people just responded to it so well, it’s kind of stuck there for four years.
SoundersFC.com: What was the reaction from your friends?
I I have a lot of soccer supporter friends who had started their own blogs, so I had some great role models and great support to say, ‘Hey, I’m going to do a similar thing with a different angle.’ It’s funny, though, because when I first started it I heard stories from people who weren’t sure if I was real or not. They thought it was a parody account or something. It wasn’t until 2012 when I started the full-fledged blog that there were articles going up and people realized it was a very real thing. The reaction has been all over the place, but the negativity has actually been surprisingly low.
SoundersFC.com: How would you describe how MLS supporters groups embrace the LGBT community today?
I think we’re very lucky in this county to have multiple kinds of supporters groups out there that cover a wide breadth of different kinds of people. Obviously there are some groups who I think we’ve ruffled each other’s feathers a little bit and who I generally don’t get along with on social media, but there are so many groups out there doing such great things. The first people who supported me were the supporters’ groups, tweeting at me and asking what they could do and trying to connect with other groups.
Seattle is a perfect example, where they have the Pride of the Sound, a subset of LGBT supporters. It’s great to have that up there. And now you’re starting to see groups in the English Premier League like the Gay Gooners at Arsenal or the Proud Canaries at Norwich. It’s cool that at least in Seattle we have a model of how it’s done in terms of gay supporters groups.
SoundersFC.com: Do you think MLS and its clubs are doing enough to increase and promote awareness of LGBT issues?
There can always be more done, but MLS has done much better and much more than other North American leagues. I thought the league’s Don’t Cross the Line campaign this year was a big jump forward in addressing some issues head on, instead of just talking about respect and tolerance. This year they really worked with racism and anti-homophobia groups to really have a strong message. And more and more teams are having pride nights, and working with the You Can Play Project. MLS is definitely one of the best for LGBT support in the country, but there’s always room for improvement as well.
SoundersFC.com: Three MLS players were suspended multiple games and fined for using glay slurs in 2012 and early 2013, including Marc Burch, who was a defender with the Sounders at the time. We haven’t seen another incident like this in MLS since, but what was your reaction at the time?
A lot of people have different perspectives on this kind of stuff, but I’m a little bit forgiving about this. Some of those guys did so many things beyond serving their suspension, behind the scenes. Marc Burch, for example, quietly spent time with some LGBT rec teams, and he wasn’t doing it for publicity, he wasn’t doing it to get noticed as a mea culpa. He just did it because he wanted to interact with the community. He made his own personal amends beyond the punishment that the league handed down to him.
I think those kinds of actions really serve as the silver bullet here, because the more gay people you know, the less likely you are to have those slurs in your back pocket. And when we talk about what more MLS can do as a league on this topic, the one thing I’d love to see more teams do is interact with the LGBT community more and more. If interacting with folks helps personalize the LGBT community for folks, then they’re less likely to pass around words that hurt people.
SoundersFC.com: The gay4soccer site has a section devoted to the site’s “Allies,” players committed to ridding the game of homophobia and transphobia. A number of players have been very responsive supportive of the cause …
Yeah, and Brad Evans is a great example, he’s always been very supportive. Obviously he has a personal connection from playing in Columbus with Robbie Rogers, and we saw the Sounders put out a video with a number of players in support of Robbie when he came out in 2013.
And I can’t begin to tell you what it meant to me to see Michael Bradley wear that captain’s armband last week. That was the catharsis I needed after everything in Orlando. I couldn’t really process it during the game because I was doing things with the American Outlaws, but on Friday, I finally could sit and think about it and process it. And that’s when I finally started to feel better after everything that happened. It was exactly what I needed.
