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Forbidden Forward

326 FashThe Justin Fashanu story
by Nick Baker
Reid Publishing, £14.99
Reviewed by Paul Buller
From WSC 326 April 2014

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How much is there left to say about a man of whom so much has already been said? This biography of Justin Fashanu will certainly not be the last. The sleeve notes of Nick Baker’s Forbidden Forward promise more detail than ever before and to identify “those who are to blame for his untimely death”.

That salacious hook thankfully fails to live up to its promise and is a distraction from what is a comprehensive insight into Fashanu’s life, from birth through to the moment he took his own life aged just 37, with intimate contributions from those acquainted with him along almost every step of the way.

Described as “a hero to some, a conman to others and an enigma to most”, Fashanu’s story is that of a young black footballer’s struggle to make it in his career and life, with the added burden of coming to terms with being a gay man in two unforgiving environments – professional football and evangelical Christianity.

This could be the story of many a young player: catapulted to stardom as a teen, treated brutally by a new manager (Brian Clough), terrible with money but fond of the high life. But it’s the mix of circumstances that make Fashanu’s tale so engaging. He was a striker of supreme ability with a penchant for on-field violence; an intelligent, gentle, well-spoken young man off the pitch who was both introvert and extrovert, aloof and needy, avaricious and generous.

It’s a shame then that what should be a fairly fluid tale jars at regular intervals. The story of his early idyllic life in sleepy rural Norfolk, where Fashanu grew up boxing and playing endless football, is brought to a screeching halt by clunky metaphors and segues: “While other kids his age were down the arcade or hanging out on street corners smoking, Fashanu was perfecting his punch and smoking opponents” is but one of many that get in the way.

The author feels the need to remind us too often that life will not always be as rosy as the early years: portents of the doom are waiting at every opportunity, mostly at the end of chapters in what feels like an unnecessary plea for us to keep reading.

Baker also occasionally offers his opinion on Fashanu’s state of mind and the treatment he received as a black and openly gay man but it’s more pub psychology than insight. When we’re treated to a graphic description of how the book’s subject took his own life we’re told, twice, what he was thinking as he he did it. Fashanu was alone at the time, left only a simple note and told no one of his intentions, yet the author writes as if he was there.

In the end, no one is blamed for Fashanu’s death, but don’t take that as a spoiler. Beyond the publisher’s hype and some slack editing, the book gives an insight into a tumultuous life that remains as intriguing now as it did when Justin Fashanu was alive.

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Justin Fashanu

307 Fash The biography
by Jim Read
DB Publishing, £14.99
Reviewed by Al Needham
From WSC 307 September 2012

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By all accounts, and even by the standards of the pre-AIDS gay subculture of the early 1980s, Nottingham’s La Chic: Part Two was a hell of a club. According to an article in Notts magazine LeftLion: “On a typical night, you might find Su Pollard whooping it up to the latest American imports, while a regal Noelle Gordon wafted around, flanked by stage-door johnnies. You could even avail yourself of the services of a resident chaplain, after you’d made use of the pitch-black sex room.”

The most shocking aspect of the club, however, was that for over two years, it was patronised by one of the country’s best-known young footballers – and it never crossed anyone’s mind to tell the newspapers about it.

Justin Fashanu’s life would have been a seething melange of contradiction even if he’d had the sexual tastes of George Best. Fashanu was a black child raised in a staunchly white community, a born-again Christian (converted in a Nottingham car showroom) in a country that saw that sort of thing as a bit American and odd, and a teetotaller at a workplace where everyone from the boss down went out and got battered. So discovering that he actually preferred other men to the fiancée he’d brought up from Norwich reads like just another contradiction to add to the pile.

As this meticulously researched book spells out, Fashanu was (and is) impossible to pigeonhole. For starters, like his brother, he wasn’t afraid to put himself about, and there’s a great story of him confronting a group of National Front supporters in a pub and breaking the jaw of one of them.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for a stoic sexual-equality pioneer, he wasn’t your man, displaying an arrogant sense of entitlement that put noses severely out of joint, making up affairs with Julie Goodyear and Tory MP Steven Milligan, and using his sexuality to cash in whenever possible.

Crucially, the author could have laid on accusations of institutionalised homophobia with a trowel, but – while making it clear that things are much better now than then – he also points out that the majority of Fashanu’s peers didn’t give a toss who he was shagging, as long as he was playing well. The book also gets as near to the truth of the circumstances surrounding Fashanu’s rape charge in the United States and subsequent suicide in London as readers are ever likely to get.

After you’ve read this extraordinary story – and you should – you can’t help wondering what a 20-year-old Justin Fashanu would be like today. He wouldn’t be the only non-boozer or born-again Christian in the dressing room, he’d be allowed to be as petulant as he liked, and a Twitter feed, invitations to celebrity game shows and Hello and OK sniffing round his house would sate his need for publicity.

But you can’t shake the feeling that there would still be an agent in his ear putting a monetary value on keeping his mouth shut and his trousers on, and a forest of arms brandishing iPhones greeting him outside NG1, Nottingham’s barn-sized gay club. We like to think that, as a society, we’re ready for the next openly gay footballer, but this book spells out exactly why we’ve been waiting so long since the last one.

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Notes on a scandal

wsc302 Cameron Carter analyses the different reactions to football’s many controversies

Just as there must statistically be teatime programmes on the BBC that do not feature Alex Jones or John Barrowman, so we must assume that there are gay footballers out there somewhere in the universe. In Britain’s Gay Footballers (BBC3, January 30), Amal Fashanu, niece of Justin, daughter of John, quested for a gay man among the 4,000 professional players registered in the UK.

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