For years my bisexual identity and the love of West Ham I shared with my dad seemed irreconcilable. But Pride of Irons changed that
Like many of those similarly afflicted, I don’t know West Ham without my dad, or my dad without West Ham. My earliest memories of Saturday afternoons are of crackling football commentary on a transistor radio, as his tea cooled in a 70s brown and orange mug – a familiar place of safety and happiness. Like our shared big noses, my support for West Ham wasn’t something I could really choose of my own free will.
As a teenager I was still listening to matches on the radio while I did my homework, but gradually the emotional pull of football waned. The son of one of mum’s best friends, who was the same age as me, was murdered in an incident connected to Scottish football sectarianism. I rolled my eyes at the naff jingoism surrounding the 1996 European Championships. Above all, the sport seemed at odds with my growing confusion about my sexuality. During the 1990s, it was a pillar of the homophobic lad culture that I encountered at school, in the media, on the stands when dad and I went to Upton Park, and in the brutal treatment of the gay footballer Justin Fashanu, who died by suicide in 1998. I felt excluded from football, and music took over as my life’s passion.
Luke Turner’s second book, Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945, is out next year
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