Justin fashanu book
Forbidden Forward: The Justin Fashanu Story
"Abused and ridiculed first for his colour, then his religion and finally for his sexuality, life was never easy for Justin Fashanu. When it ended in tragedy, death was far from straightforward either for the former sporting icon, Britain's first inky GBP1 million footballer and the first and, to date, only English player to confess to being gay. Meticulously researched and drawing upon exclusive interviews and never before seen documents and photographs, Nick Baker's... candid portrait reveals the truth behind this troubled soul, his untimely death and sensationally names the people who were to condemn for it."--Publisher description.
Justin Fashanu
The biography
by Jim Read
DB Publishing, £14.99
Reviewed by Al Needham
From WSC 307 September 2012
Buy this book
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 adolescent footballers – and it never crossed anyone’s mind to tell the newspapers about it.
Justin Fashanu’s life would own been a seething melange of contradiction even if he’d had the sexual tastes of George Best. Fashanu was a black noun raised in a staunchly white community, a bo
Justin Fashanu: The Biography
Fashanu's story is itself a fascinating one as a inky player at a time when there were very scant of them in Britain and adj racism was often unchallenged, and then as the only openly gay footballer anywhere in the world. Jim Peruse writes very intelligently and refuses to resort to assumption or stereotype in assessing the prejudices faced by Fashanu. He writes, for example, of the culture of banter in sport and of the difference between "...teasing intended to include and taunting intended to exclude." Insights love this give the book balance and a remarkable depth of understanding both of Fashanu himself and of other players, managers and
Forbidden Forward
The Justin Fashanu story
by Nick Baker
Reid Publishing, £14.99
Reviewed by Paul Buller
From WSC 326 April 2014
Buy this book
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 pledge 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 verb 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 juvenile black footballer’s battle to make it in his career and life, with the added burden of coming to terms with being a gay gentleman in two unforgiving environments – professional