Six months ago, Mitch Brown was sipping an Aperol spritz on an Italian beach with his partner Lou, half-listening to a podcast. The topic: how no male AFL player had ever publicly identified as queer. In a competition with roughly 129 years of history and an estimated 15,000 men who have pulled on a guernsey at the top level, that felt, to Brown, like an uncomfortable silence that needed breaking.
"It was a 'f**k this' moment," Brown told ABC News. "I was just like, 'This is not good enough.'"
Three days after that beach conversation, he reached out to Sam Kowslowski, co-founder of ABC iview's LGBTQIA+ content hub and a host of the podcast in question, with a straightforward message: he was Mitch Brown, he had played for the West Coast Eagles for a decade, and he was a bisexual man who wanted to chat. The rest, as Brown puts it, "was history."
Now he is co-hosting the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade, broadcast live on ABC TV and ABC iview from Saturday 28 February at 7:30pm AEDT. It is a long way from the change rooms of Subiaco Oval, and Brown seems to be enjoying every moment of it.
Look, the road has not been entirely smooth. About three months after going public, Brown was approached by a media staffer at a Lady Gaga concert who told him flat out she did not believe he was bisexual. "'I think you're in it for the fame. You're really just gay, aren't you?'" Brown recalled her saying. He found himself trying to justify his identity to a complete stranger before catching himself the following morning and recognising the interaction for what it was: blatant biphobia.
That kind of experience, he says, is exactly why visibility matters. Brown had privately come out to friends and family several years before going public, and many of them encouraged him to say something openly. He was hesitant, weighed down by his own doubts about whether he was the right messenger.
"I didn't feel like I had a voice because of my own insecurities around bisexuality and my insecurities around my platform as a football player," he said. He had imagined the "right" person to break this particular barrier would be a current star, someone walking the Brownlow Medal red carpet with a male partner. The inner critic is a familiar opponent for plenty of athletes, and Brown was no different.
What changed was the relationship he built with Lou. "She created a safe space, especially at home and in our relationship, to be able to bring up my full self," Brown said. He is quick to point out the complexity of speaking publicly about sexuality while in a straight-presenting relationship, and quick to credit her equally for the courage it took. "People go, 'Yeah, Mitch, you did it,' but it was very much a 'we' thing."
I reckon that honesty about the collective nature of the decision is one of the more underrated parts of Brown's story. Big moments in sport are usually framed around individual bravery, and there is bravery here, no question. But the support structures behind the bravery matter just as much.
On where the AFL goes from here, Brown is measured rather than scathing. He believes the code can do considerably more to uplift players who model healthy, inclusive versions of masculinity. "There's a lot of players that are good men and are doing amazing work," he said. He wants calling each other out, on homophobia or anything else, to be seen as leadership rather than weakness. "It's no longer remaining silent and letting things blow over. It's now standing up for what your values are, it's owning your mistakes. That's what strength is."
He draws the thread wider than football, too. The same dynamics he describes in AFL change rooms play out in school yards, on construction sites, in pub group chats, and in the stands at local grounds every weekend. That is a fair point, and one that sits well beyond partisan politics.
Brown has drawn confidence from other athletes who came before him, including soccer players Isaac Humphreys and Josh Cavallo, who he now counts as friends. He frames his own role modestly: making it a little bit safer for whoever comes next, and then a bit safer for the person after that.
"These feelings of shame, these feelings of being anxious, looking around, trying to feel if this is a safe place or not, they're only temporary," he said. "And the things that shame you most will eventually be the very thing that you're most proud of."
Fair dinkum, that is the kind of line that lands. You have got to hand it to Brown: six months in, he is handling a genuinely unprecedented situation with a lot of grace, and a pretty decent sense of where the work still needs to happen. Saturday night's Mardi Gras gig is one thing, but the longer game is what matters most, and he seems to know it.