Keegan Hirst is not your average gay icon—and that’s precisely the point. While the world was busy celebrating his 2015 coming out as Britain’s first openly gay professional rugby league player, Hirst was quietly spiraling.
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“I was doing interviews as well. That was something that I found really difficult internally at the time, I was being asked all these questions and touted as this role model and this, that and the other, and I was like, I have no idea what I’m doing,” Hirst admitted in an upcoming episode of the All Out with Jon Dean podcast.
It’s a confession that undercuts the polished image the public saw at the time. While many saw a symbol of courage, Hirst saw chaos: a man free from the closet but trapped in the suffocating expectations of newly minted role modelhood.
“I don’t know what I’m talking about. I dunno what I’m doing. I feel like a complete fraud here. All I’ve done is come out because I was at rock bottom. It was either that or kill myself, and they’re all now saying I’m a hero,” he said. “I feel like an absolute loser. So it was a bit of a weird time.”
Weird? Sure. Honest? Painfully so.
Since then, Hirst’s journey has gone from survival to self-ownership. These days, he’s co-hosting Happy Healthy Homo alongside his boyfriend, YouTuber Joel Wood. He’s a personal trainer, a life coach, a father of two—and most compellingly, a man who’s still learning to love the gay world he once feared.
When asked how he perceived the gay scene before coming out, Hirst pulled no punches.
“Flamboyant, effeminate, camp men – and I don’t say that in a derogatory,” he said, describing the image he once couldn’t relate to.
“For me, the pinnacle, which again is naive and wrong, was like Louie Spence’s gay,” Hirst added. “I remember when Louie Spence used to come on TV, I used to freeze or turn it off because I was so terrified of someone seeing in me, Louie Spence.”
The irony? The very flamboyance he once feared is now something he reveres.
“He was so comfortable in his own skin, whereas I was ashamed and repressed and in denial. Whereas now when I look at someone like Louie Spence, I’m like, fucking good work you are. You do you and don’t give a shit about other people.”
Hirst’s post-coming-out experience hasn’t been all Pride parades and rainbow-colored touchdowns. He quickly discovered that gay fame comes with its own awkward baggage—namely, fetishization.
“Once I’d come out publicly, I remember my mate saying to me, ‘You are literally someone’s fantasy, as in a porn search for rugby player’. And I remember saying to him, ‘I don’t give a fuck, if I’m getting laid and everybody’s a winner’.”
It was fun—until it wasn’t.
“I appreciate this coming from a very privileged position as I say this, but it just became very apparent that people just wanted to fuck me just fuck the rugby player. Fuck Keegan Hirst,” he said.
“At first it was like, yay me, I can shag who I want and do what I want. But then it became quite… I remember saying ‘I’m not a piece of meat’. It was more to me than that and it felt it more transactional. So yeah, that made me quite wary.”
The result? A refreshingly complex portrait of gay masculinity—one that doesn’t lean into stereotypes or sanitized narratives. Hirst isn’t trying to be a perfect gay icon. He’s not even trying to be inspirational. He’s just trying to be real—and that’s what makes his story resonate.
In a world still catching up to the full spectrum of queer experience, Hirst reminds us that coming out is never the final chapter. It’s the first messy, beautiful, terrifying page in a longer book called becoming.
And Keegan? He’s writing it in his own words. No edits needed.
Keegan is an inspiration. He has known the downsides of the closet AND the turbulence of the celebrity-coming-out media circus. He now has found a happiness he can life-coach to all worried and scared gays. I love his reels on Facebook (“NEEEEEXT!!”) and feel so happy for him in his life. (Just a thought here…. DOZENS of professional football teams and not ONE “out” gay. No wonder homophobia is still alive and sick!!)