All through February we are going to come along with the Arsenal household to have fun LGBTQ+ Historical past Month and mark the continued significance the LGBTQ+ group has on soccer and past.
We’ll mark the month formally at our FA Girls’s Continental Tyres League Cup semi-final towards Manchester Metropolis (February 8) and our subsequent Premier League house recreation towards Brentford (February 11). Maintain a watch out for our actions at these fixtures as we stand collectively to make sure everybody feels welcome to be a Gooner.
10 years of GayGooners
This February additionally marks the tenth anniversary of our GayGooners supporters’ group. GayGooners exists to unite LGBTQ+ Arsenal supporters and allies world wide. The group has grown from being the primary LGBTQ+ supporters’ membership in soccer, to being the most important of its form on the earth right this moment.
Throughout these 10 years, GayGooners has labored tirelessly to unfold the message that love is love, and everyone ought to really feel welcome at Arsenal. True trailblazers, and fearless campaigners, GayGooners has had a profound affect on guaranteeing visibility for the LGBTQ+ group in soccer and wider sport.
GayGooners marketing campaign supervisor Jacob Jefferson mirrored on the sense of belonging he now has as a member of our supporters’ group. “Rising up I by no means felt snug being my true self round soccer, regardless of my love and keenness for it. GayGooners gave me an area to be myself and to help The Arsenal much more than I did earlier than. I’m extraordinarily grateful for the group’s existence.”
For co-chair Carl Fearn, who has been an Arsenal supporter since 1971, GayGooners represented the primary time that he felt a real connection to the membership.
“GGs are like household. Attending meetups and video games means the world to me. The variety within the group actually displays an ‘Arsenal for Everybody’.”
Throughout this month and all through 2023 we’ll be listening to extra from our GayGooners, together with some fascinating perception on the way it was based by those that had been there.
LGBTQ+ schooling in our group
Through the years, Arsenal within the Neighborhood has taken an lively function in offering LGBTQ+ schooling and tackling homophobia. Our group staff are educated by Stonewall to ship LGBTQ+ consciousness periods to employees and group teams, and this yr, we’re delivering schooling periods in native major faculties in affiliation with Camden and Islington LGBT Discussion board.
Our collective motion in February builds on our continued help for Stonewall and the Premier League’s Rainbow Laces marketing campaign, to in the end kick homophobia, biphobia and transphobia out of our recreation for good.
In October 2022, we teamed up with adidas to create the adidas x Arsenal Love Unites package, impressed by the activists of the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion and proudly worn by our gamers. Jahmal Howlett-Mundle, Lucy Clark, and Lianne Sanderson additionally joined us pitchside for our respective Premier League and Girls’s Tremendous League video games, to share their experiences as LGBTQ+ folks inside soccer.
In July 2022, GayGooners got a particular send-off by Mikel Arteta and our males’s gamers as they departed our London Colney Coaching Centre for the Pleasure in London Parade. Collectively we celebrated the return of the Pleasure in type with an open-top, double-decker float, adorned with rainbow colors and the Arsenal and GayGooners logos.
Everybody within the Arsenal household could make a distinction by having conversations, listening to others, understanding the stigma that also surrounds the LGBTQ+ group and calling out discriminatory behaviour once we see it.
As stewards of our membership and our values, we ask supporters at Emirates Stadium to report any type of discrimination and abuse by texting 67777 with their block, row and seat quantity.
Copyright 2023 The Arsenal Soccer Membership plc. Permission to make use of quotations from this text is granted topic to applicable credit score being given to www.arsenal.com because the supply.