came out on the GayFL show on radio station JOY 94.9<\/a>, explaining he has been out to close friends for five years.<\/p>\n\u201cThere will be people though, if they do listen to this, it will be the first time they know about this; I\u2019m a very private person, so it\u2019s not all over my social media, and things like that, and that\u2019s fine,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt can be a bit of a shock to some people, they might not know what, but that\u2019s life right? In the end, the people who are nearest and closest to me know, and that\u2019s what\u2019s most important.\u201d<\/p>\n
North Adelaide\u2019s Leigh Ryswyk celebrates kicking a goal in 2017. Picture: Tom HuntleySource: News Corp Australia<\/p>\n
Ryswyk revealed his parents had been incredibly supportive when he revealed the news to them.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you come our to your family it\u2019s always a massive experience, there\u2019s a lot of things going on in your head\u2026 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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 \u2018I still love you\u2019, so for me, that was a wow moment.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen opening up to your dad\u2026 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\u2019t know what to expect, but he was like, \u2018I love you, it doesn\u2019t matter, as long as you\u2019re happy I\u2019m happy for you\u2019, that blew me away to be honest.\u201d<\/p>\n
He believes the first man to come out while active in the AFL will receive massive support.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the AFL, and the community, will wrap their arms around that player,\u201d Ryswyk said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the community itself, obviously the queer community, the fan base, I think in the whole they will celebrate that when the time comes.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former Brisbane Lions player Leigh Ryswyk has become the first past or present male AFL player to come…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":563373,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,85],"class_list":["post-563372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-afl","tag-afl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-football-league","tag-australianfootballleague","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=563372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563372\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/563373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=563372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=563372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=563372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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