Zander Murray shares moving message from fan he inspired to come out
"You’ve been a massive inspiration for me to come out to teammates and family," the message reads.
Following his coming out, footballer Zander Murray has shared a heartfelt DM from a fan on Twitter and it’s heartwarming.
“Hi Zander, hope [you’re] doing okay. I just wanted to tell you that you’ve been a massive inspiration for me to come out to teammates and family,” the message to the Gala Fairydean Rovers striker begins.
“As a young footballer I find it difficult to be myself as it is but being gay and keeping it secret was so challenging,” the message continues. “It felt amazing when I told my teammates, they were super supportive.”
The Scottish footballer shared that this is just one of many moving messages he has received since coming out earlier this month (16 September) via a statement on the team’s website.
Murray is the first openly gay player in the men’s professional ranks in Scotland since Justin Fashanu with Airdrie and Hearts in the mid-1990s.
His coming out follows the referees Craig Napier and Lloyd Wilson in June, as well as footballer Jake Daniels in May.
In an interview on Lorraine Kelly’s Lorraine morning show on Tuesday (27 September), he shared that his coming out has been a “weight lifted off his shoulders.”
Reaching a point of self-acceptance where he had come out to his friends and family, Zander Murray notes that he thoughts he could be a “pillar of this community, follow the footsteps of Jake Daniels, Josh Cavallo, and Robbie Rogers, which I took great inspiration from.”
He shares with Kelly that Tom Daley reached out to him with congratulations: “He [Tom Daley] is an absolute icon like yourself. He messaged me while I was on my way back from football training in a car with four boys.”
“I had tears in my eyes seeing his direct message, and I messaged him back,” Murray adds. “I went ‘look I am in a car on the way back from football with four boys and I’ve got tears in my eyes and I don’t even care’.”
Murray shares that he was nervous to come out to his teammates, struggling with internal homophobia, but that being open and honest has only “strengthened the connections” between himself and the team.
He shares that while he is still very much focused on football, he also wants to get into working on a grassroots level in the education sector: “if it supports and empowers one person, it’s done its job.”
Check out the interview below: