Thu 4 Aug 2016 In: Our Communities View at Wayback View at NDHA
Brendan Barraclough Brendan Barraclough, based in Cambridge, is a gay man who works in the Waikato equestrian sector providing body treatment therapy to horses which ranges from working on aches and pains to trimming hooves. On Monday he and two friends went for a soak at the Okoroire hot pools near Matamata. It's a stunning spot where for a $10 fee people can walk down a bush track to three pools of different temperatures in a natural bush setting by a river. o one other than the Chiefs team was at the pools when Brendan and his friends arrived.“The Chiefs seemed respectful guys,” he says. But as the trio started to head away from the pools “just one person started yelling: “Here come the gays, here come the gays, come on my face, come on my face! Here come the gays!” “We didn't react at all at the start, we just hopped in the car and started talking about it and realised, yes, that was what he was saying.” Barraclough says the yelling didn't affect him personally. “You just ignore that kind of crap, you just get over it. But what if it was someone who isn't as strong as I am and can't ignore it?” “I think he had had some drinks and he was trying to be cool in front of his mates or whatever...” He says neither he nor his friends saw how the other Chiefs players were reacting to the abuse. Barraclough's personal reaction to such abuse is pragmatic to say the least. “What their issues are isn't my problem, just because they're yelling at me that's not my issue. You just get over it, I don't know that person and they want to act like that then that's fine. I walk away. I walk away, I don't need to be affected by what they are saying. Why take it on, why make it my issue... I wouldn't say it's happened to me before but you're always going to get those little comments in life, as a gay man, that's how it is. It probably shouldn't be like that.” He may not have taken it to heart himself but eventually he was angry enough to post about the incident to his friends on Facebook. “The reason I put it on Facebook is that the person was someone who's looked up to, a leader in the community... I was just being me and he just pissed off the wrong person. Simple as that.” Barraclough says his post was “just venting, just letting my friends know what dicks they were.” He was soon contacted by Chiefs management and the media. “I think the Chiefs have been amazing, they got onto it really very smartly. And the player, identified as lock Michael Allardice, 24, has done well for stepping up... I told the Chiefs I would have preferred he didn't go public saying it was him, just because I thought it could put him in a very awkward position on the street as well. I said all I want is an apology from him so it was his decision to say who he was. But they've handled it very well.” Barraclough believes we have a homophobic culture running just under the surface in NZ. “We're always going to have it too because we're human beings, everyone's got their own brain, you're never going to be able to tell people 'you can't think like that, you can't talk like that'. We're humans, with our own personalities and we're allowed to think what we're going to think. All people have got to remember is you don't have the right to go and try to purposely humiliate someone because of how you think and how you feel. And he's unsure if Allardice's yelled slurs were a conscious attempt by the player to degrade gay men. “I don't know... I'm sure straight guys say that to women as well, I just think the context that he said it was wrong.” Do he think we have a macho, bravado attitude in NZ that can lead to targeting people like gays and others who are 'different'? “Yes. And you're always going to have it because people are allowed to think what they want to think. You can fight it as much as you like but, as I said, we are human beings with our own brains and minds.” As a footnote, Barraclough is unhappy that the general media have focussed exclusively on the gay slur aspect and not aired his belief that he believes his reaction would have been the same had he experienced any minority being denigrated. “I mentioned to other news outlets that this is not just about being gay, it's also about being offensive to age, race and all of that, it's not just about the whole gay thing. Discrimination of any sort is not on. But they cut it out and it pissed me off a little bit." Footnote: The Chiefs chief executive has not been available to us for an interview today due to having to deal with fallout from an allegation by a stripper that she was hired to entertain the team and was touched inappropriately by team members on the same evening as the gay slur incident. Jay Bennie - 4th August 2016