‘You just wanna be like everyone else’: exploring the experiences of gay, lesbian, bisexual and queer sportspeople through a languaging lens

Coalter claims that ‘while sport might provide the context for the development of positive experiences, the social process of participation is the key to understanding what is happening’. In this paper, I will draw on empirical data to describe ‘what is happening’ for gay, lesbian, bisexual and queer-identified (GLBQ) people who play club or team sports in Victoria, Australia. I will also build on Coalter's work by introducing the concept of languaging; ‘a social process in which we … construct realities for each of us to see, occupy and to talk into’. I will argue that it is the process of languaging within the context of a sports team or a club that can either (1) enable heterogeneous inclusion, where a shared love of sport exists alongside awareness and acceptance of heterogeneity in other areas of people's lives (e.g. ability, sex, ethnicity, religion and sexuality), or (2) constrain the space for inclusion through reinforcement of a dominant, assumed homogeneous, norm (in which difference represents a threat).