Two Australian football clubs—St Kilda and the Sydney Swans—played the first Pride Game in Australian professional sport in 2016 to support and include the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) community at and through a major sporting event. This study examines the framing of this game in the print and online media and in public responses via comments on media coverage and comments on Facebook posts. The framing of both the media coverage and the public response was predominantly supportive, with the theme of the “inclusion,” of gay Australian Football League players and the broader LGBTIQ community, prominent. However, there was a significant difference in the frames used in media coverage compared to the public response to this coverage. There was a relatively high proportion of unsupportive comments (e.g., a “stick to football” theme), including pernicious homophobia, present, particularly in the public response, compared to other recent related research. Overall, the findings suggest that, while there was strong support for the Pride Game, homophobia in sport remains, and the media, particularly social media, can be a platform for its expression. This study also highlights the value in analysing multiple platforms in media framing research.
AndersonE. (2002). Openly gay athletes: Contesting hegemonic masculinity in a homophobic environment. Gender & Society, 16, 860–877.
2.
AndersonE. (2009). Inclusive masculinity: The changing nature of masculinities. Routledge.
3.
AndersonE. (2011a). Masculinities and sexualities in sport and physical cultures: Three decades of evolving research. Journal of Homosexuality, 58, 565–578.
4.
AndersonE. (2011b). Updating the outcome: Gay athletes, straight teams, and coming out in educationally based sport teams. Gender & Society, 25, 250–268.
BillingsA. C.MoscowitzL. M.RaeC.Brown-DevlinN. (2015). The art of coming out: Traditional and social media frames surrounding the NBA’s Jason Collins. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 92, 142–160.
BuryJ. (2015). Non-performing inclusion: A critique of the English Football Association’s Action Plan on homophobia in football. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 50, 211–226.
11.
BushA.AndersonE.CarrS. (2012). The declining existence of men’s homophobia in British sport. Journal for the Study of Sports and Athletes in Education, 6, 107–120.
12.
CashmoreE.ClelandJ. (2012). Fans, homophobia and masculinities in association football. British Journal of Sociology, 63, 370–387.
13.
CassidyW. P. (2017). Inching away from the toy department: Daily newspaper sports coverage of Jason Collins’ and Michael Sam’s coming out. Communication & Sport, 5, 534–553.
14.
CavalierE. S.NewhallK. E. (2018). “Stick to Soccer”: Fan reaction and inclusion rhetoric on social media. Sport in Society, 21, 1078–1095.
ClelandJ. (2014). Association football and the representation of homosexuality by the print media: A case study of Anton Hysén. Journal of Homosexuality, 61, 1269–1287.
17.
ClelandJ. (2015). Discussing homosexuality on association football fan message boards: A changing cultural context. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 50, 125–140.
18.
ClelandJ. (2018). Sexuality, masculinity and homophobia in association football: An empirical overview of a changing cultural context. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 53, 411–423.
19.
ClelandJ.MagrathR.KianE. M. (2018). The Internet as a site of decreasing cultural homophobia in Association football: An online response by fans to the coming out of Thomas Hitzlsperger. Men and Masculinities, 21, 91–111.
20.
ConnellR. W. (2005). Masculinities (2nd ed.). Polity Press.
DenisonE.KitchenA. (2015). Out on the fields: The first international study on homophobia in sport. Repucom, Australian Sports Commission, Federation of Gay Games. www.outonthefields.com/
23.
EntmanR. M. (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43, 51–58.
24.
FitzSimonsP. (1995, October10). Roberts does hard yards with gay abandon. Sydney Morning Herald, 44.
25.
GitlinT. (1980). The whole world is watching: Mass media in the making & unmaking of the new left. University of California Press.
26.
HardinM.KuehnK. M.JonesH.GenoveseJ.BalajiM. (2009). “Have you got game?” Hegemonic masculinity and neo-homophobia in U.S. newspaper sports columns. Communication, Culture & Critique, 2, 182–200.
27.
HsiehH. F.ShannonS. E. (2005). Three approaches to qualitative content analysis. Qualitative Health Research, 15, 1277–1288.
28.
KianE. M. (2015). A case study on message-board and media framing of gay male athletes on a politically liberal web site. International Journal of Sport Communication, 8, 500–518.
29.
KianE. M.AndersonE. (2009). John Amaechi: Changing the way sport reporters examine gay athletes. Journal of Homosexuality, 56, 799–818.
30.
KianE. M.AndersonE.ShipkaD. (2015). “I am happy to start the conversation”: Examining sport media framing of Jason Collins’ coming out and playing in the NBA. Sexualities, 18, 618–640.
31.
KianE. M.ClavioG.VincentJ.ShawS. (2011). Homophobic and sexist yet uncontested: Examining football fan postings on Internet message boards. Journal of Homosexuality, 58, 680–699.
32.
LuisiM. L. R.LuisiT.GeanaM. V. (2016). Homosexuality and the heartbeat of a locker room: An analysis of quotations in the context of hegemonic and inclusive masculinity theories. Journal of Homosexuality, 63, 1314–1338.
MagrathR. (2018). “To try and gain an advantage for my team”: Homophobic and homosexually themed chanting among English football fans. Sociology, 52, 709–726.
35.
MagrathR.StottP. (2019). “Impossible to implement?” The effectiveness of anti-homophobia policy in English professional football. International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics, 11, 19–38.
36.
McCombsM. (2005). A look at agenda-setting: Past, present and future. Journalism Studies, 6, 543–557.
37.
McCombsM. (2013). Setting the agenda: The mass media and public opinion. Wiley.
38.
McCormackM. (2011). Mapping the terrain of homosexually-themed language. Journal of Homosexuality, 58, 664–679.
39.
MessnerM. (1992). Power at play: Sports and the problem of masculinity. Beacon.
MurrayA.WhiteA. (2017). Twelve not so angry men: Inclusive masculinities in Australian contact sports. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 52, 536–550.
