Pride Round and the Question the AFL Won’t Ask

A solo episode about Pride Round, psychological safety, queer inclusion, AFL culture, masculinity, and the difference between performative allyship and genuine cultural change in Australian Rules Football. 

Catharine explores the AFL, AFLW, homophobia in sport, rainbow branding, and why visibility without safety is not enough.

Content Note
This podcast gets into bodies, panic attacks, trauma, sexism, mental health, and the occasional emotional sinkhole. Please look after yourself only listen when you feel safe to engage with potentially triggering material. 
Also, I swear.

Support
These aren’t here as a formality. I’ve used some of these myself.

Lifeline 13 11 14 (24/7)
Kids Helpline 1800 55 1800 (ages 5–25)
1800RESPECT 1800 737 732
Emergency 000

Outside Australia, local crisis services are available.

The Socials (I'd love a follow) 
Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/catharine.redden/

LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/catharine-redden/

Support The Pod
Substack (where I write stuff)
https://catharineredden.substack.com

Buy Me a Coffee (where you can financially support the pod, and me!)
https://buymeacoffee.com/CatharineRedden

Credits
Recorded on the lands of the Ramindjeri and Ngarrindjeri peoples.
Sovereignty never ceded.

Recorded & edited at Ridley Farm Studio by Luke Ridley
https://ridleyfarmstudio.com.au...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to your Saturday episode of The Seaword with Catherine Redden. Hello, hello. This is a standalone episode, meaning that there are no guests today. It's just me, a weird little microphone attached to my iPhone in my bedroom in an attempt to process Australian culture in real time. And I am indeed sitting on my bed in the guest bedroom at mum and dad's. The microphone is attached to my iPhone with a sort of engineering confidence usually displayed by a woman trying to assemble a key of furniture whilst muttering. Oh yeah, that'll do. Today I'm podcasting from Encounter Bay, Victor Harbour, South Australia, and I'm hoping that it stays quiet enough around me on this Saturday afternoon so we can get through this without too much wind, traffic, people stomping around upstairs. Now I've released quite a few episodes recently, and I'm going to continue to ramp things up. My hope is that there'll probably be two or three episodes a week, but I want to say this really clearly. Something that you already know and you're probably already doing. You absolutely do not need to listen to every episode. Some of you are here for the guest interviews. Oh, I'm just on that. The feedback on my conversation with Associate Professor Simon Graham has been incredible, so thanks so much for that. Some of you are here for the feminism. Some of you are here because I occasionally swear about public policy whilst eating a hash browns that I've got through a drive-thru car park. I love the McDonald's hash browns, I'm kind of addicted. Treat this podcast like a pick and mix lolly jar. Take what you want, leave the black licorice. And look, today we are talking about Australian rules football again. If you're an international listener, firstly, welcome. Secondly, I'm I'm really sorry that I seem to be banging on about AFL a lot. Now, look, if you're not into footy, stay with me. Because I'm not really talking about the strategy of the game. I'm talking about where the game sits culturally right now. And honestly, I suspect the thing I'm talking about today exists in a lot of professional men's sports around the world. AFL, footy, matters a lot in Australia. Look, and not equally in every state, actually. Interestingly, um, if you're not from Australia, AFL is popular in South Australia, where I grew up. Victoria, Western Australia, Tasmania, and the Northern Territory. Queensland and New South Wales have a really strong rugby league culture, although recently the AFL um has expanded into those two states, so they're getting a bit of a foothold there. I grew up around footy. Dad played for the Nord Football Club in the South Australian Football League. My brothers played, my uncles played, one of my cousins played professionally. When I was little, we went to footy every Saturday. When I lived in Melbourne, I'd go to two or three AFL games a week. So I want to say this clearly: I love football. Loving AFL does not mean I adore every part of the culture, and it does not protect that culture from criticism. And look, a lot of the AFL culture still feels emotionally prehistoric. A couple of weeks ago, the Sydney Swans announced they would no longer participate in the annual Pride game against St Kilda, following the controversy surrounding a homophobic slur used by a St Kilda player. Now Sydney actually it was a couple of slurs. Now Sydney has since announced they'll instead play the Pride Round match against the Western Bulldogs later in the year. And the official line from Sydney was essentially this Look, it's not just about the slur, but about how the situation was handled afterwards. Meaning the appeals process, the media circus, and the public campaigning around it. Sorry, that's my stomach. But respectfully, Sydney, the slur is the problem. The whole thing got me thinking about Pride Round more broadly. I've reached the point where performative inclusion may actually be more harmful than useful. The AFL loves a special round. And with this round, they love rainbow socks, rainbow footballs, rainbow media walls, rainbow graphics, rainbow slogans. And look, symbols matter, visibility matters. Symbolic inclusion without actual change, without real safety is just marketing. That's it. The AFL, Australian Rules Football, became a national competition in 1990, but it has been going for over 150 years. For the purposes of the statistics I'm going to talk about today because I love a stat, we're going to treat it, we're going to talk about the stats. Since Australian rules football became a national competition. So that was in 1990, 36 years ago. Since then, roughly somewhere between five and six thousand men have played AFL football professionally. Statistically speaking, it is extraordinarily unlikely that every single one of those men was heterosexual. The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates that around 3.6% of Australians identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. And if we take the broader LGBTQIA plus community into consideration, those estimates would be even higher. So mathematically, we are likely talking about hundreds of Australian rules footballers across the modern era who were gay or bisexual and who did not feel safe enough to come out whilst they were playing. In the more than three decades of AFL football as a national competition, not one actively listed AFL player has publicly come out. Not one whilst still playing. Two former AFL footballers have publicly come out after retirement. Mitch Brown, who played for West Coast between 2007 and 2016, publicly came out as bisexual after his career in 2025. And Lee Riswick, I'm not sure if I'm saying the surname properly, so apologies to Lee, who played for Brisbane before a long SANFL career, publicly came out as gay after his retirement this year. So that's two players not whilst they were playing, not whilst they were employed by the AFL, but after they left the game. And it's nuanced and it's not black and white, but it's a very important discussion. What I am saying is this. If even one AFL player genuinely felt safe enough to publicly come out whilst he was actively playing professional football, that would probably do more for queer inclusion than a million rainbow socks. That would tell some queer kid sitting in the bush, somewhere watching footy, you belong here too, just as you are. And what's fascinates me is that in many Australian workplaces now, people quietly do feel safe, or loudly, depending on where you've worked. Call centerculture, am I right? Um, people quietly do feel safe enough to exist openly. Maybe they casually mention their same-sex partner. Maybe they bring someone to the Christmas party, maybe they simply stop editing themselves every second of the day. That's what psychological safety looks like. But men's AFL football still appears to be an environment where that safety does not exist, and that silence tells its own story. Because heterosexuality is already performed publicly in football culture and in culture constantly. And so for those of you saying, Oh, we don't want your sexuality shoved in our face, well, mate, you shove your heterosexuality in my face all the time. If we think about AFL in particular, we have engagements, wedding announcements, pregnancy announcements, girlfriends in the stands, grand final kisses after the match, wag culture, people talking about wives and partners in press interviews. Straightness is not hidden in AFL culture. It's celebrated every single day. And we call it normal. I think about Damien Hardwick constantly referring to Mrs. Hardwick in interviews whilst he was married to her. Nobody thought to say to Damien, oh, why is he bringing sexuality into football? Because heterosexuality is treated as unusual, as the default. So when people say, Oh, why do you need to bring sexuality into football? My response is it already is. They said. And they were talking about Pride Round and other rounds like the respect round that Carlton hosts. They said, These rounds are so theatrical, they're making us theatre guys envious. The pageantry is so strong, even if the reality reality is completely different. I'm gonna say that again. So, this person I was speaking to on Instagram, and we were speaking about Pride Round in particular, and how performative it is, they said, these rounds are so theatrical, they're making us theatrical gays envious. The pageantry is so strong, even if the reality is completely different, and that right there is the problem because the AFL has become very good at the theatre of inclusion, but we must remember that theatre is fiction, and that it's only safety that is real. You know, the AFL's very good at branding and slogans and PR and carefully and well-lit press conferences. Although I must say, if the AFL's listening, I would love for you to mic up the journalists at the press conferences for the coaches because I cannot fucking hear the question. All we hear is what the coach answers. That's a little sidebar. Theatre is not the same thing as safety, theatre is performance, safety is a reality. If queer men still do not feel safe enough to openly exist whilst actively playing Australian rules football at a professional level, then the industry has to ask itself a genuinely uncomfortable question. Who is Pride Round actually for? Because if it mostly functions to make straight administrators, sponsors, and organizers feel progressive and feel like an ally, whilst queer players still feel unsafe, then something's gone very, very wrong. Now I want you to compare what happens in the men's competition to the women's. Now I'm gonna have to say I don't have to, but we call the women's competition the AFL W, and I fucking hate that name, that acronym, because apparently women participating in football are required an additional letter to reassure everybody that we're dealing with vaginas. We couldn't just all compete under the AFL. The AFLW competition began in 2017, so 10 years ago. Uh nine, sorry, nine years ago. And openly queer women existed immediately that the competition was born. Just human beings living a normal human life. Which raises a really uncomfortable question for men's footing. Why did women create a visibly safer environment in under 30 seconds and have continued that now for nearly a decade, then men's football has managed it really is in more than 150 years? That is the conversation I don't think AFL culture really wants to have. So my question to AFL leadership, to Andrew Dylan, and to every AFL club: how are you creating genuine psychologically safety for your employees who run out on the field every week, try their fucking hardest, they train and their bodies to a standstill, most of them. How are you creating genuine psychological safety for your employees? Not rain bro branding, not themed rounds, actual safety, enough safety that queer men can live with the same openness and ordinariness and boringness that heterosexual players already do every single moment of every single day. I'm Catherine Redden, and this is the C word.