Former Brisbane Lions player Leigh Ryswyk has become the first past or present AFL player to come out as gay.
He joins former West Coast Eagles player Mitch Brown, who publicly came out as bisexual last year.
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Ryswyk played one AFL game for the Lions in 2005, his second season at Brisbane after being taken with pick 67 in the rookie draft.
After being delisted at the end of 2005, he moved to South Australia and had a stellar career in the SANFL, playing 226 games for North Adelaide and winning the premiership in 2018 after suffering a rib injury.
He has since been inducted into the AFL Queensland Football Hall of Fame.
In a historic move on Wednesday, Ryswyk made the announcement on Joy 94.9’s GayFL, revealing he had been out to friends for five years.
“There will be people though, if they do listen to this, it will be the first time they know about this; I’m a very private person, so it’s not all over my social media, and things like that, and that’s fine,” he said.
“It can be a bit of a shock to some people, they might not know what, but that’s life right? In the end, the people who are nearest and closest to me know, and that’s what’s most important.”
Ryswyk said his parents had been very supportive of him.
“When you come our to your family it’s always a massive experience, there’s a lot of things going on in your head … it took me a little while where I was comfortable enough to do this, probably a three-year period to be honest, so there was a lot of the mental side of things going through at the same time,” he said.
“I had the opportunity to sit down with mum and talk to her about it, and let her know, which was massive. She obviously was crying, I was crying, and she goes ‘I still love you’, so for me, that was a wow moment.
“Then opening up to your dad … now that experience was one of the biggest things for me, but his reaction was something that blew me away, to be honest. I really didn’t know what to expect, but he was like, ‘I love you, it doesn’t matter, as long as you’re happy I’m happy for you’, that blew me away to be honest.”
Ryswyk said the first man to come out as gay while playing in the AFL will be inundated with support.
“I think the AFL, and the community, will wrap their arms around that player,” he said.
“I think the community itself, obviously the queer community, the fan base, I think in the whole they will celebrate that when the time comes.”
