Fifa referee Benevenuto: “I’m gay, and finally myself”

With these words, Igor Benevenuto, a 41-year-old Brazilian, is the first FIFA international referee in business to come out

“I’m gay, men attract me. Football is the sport I grew up in but that I hated deeply, because I couldn’t stand its environment, full of machismo and preconceptions. So, in order to survive, I invented a fake and ‘plastered’ version of myself. But yes, I’m gay, finally myself, but also a normal person, and you are no better than me just because you like women“.

With these words, in a podcast of the Globo network, Igor Benevenuto, a 41-year-old Brazilian with more than 50 direct matches in his country’s Serie A, is the first FIFA international referee in business to come out and openly declare his homosexuality. “Football is for men – her words -, many think so, but I knew from adolescence that I was gay. So I spent my life sacrificing myself to protect myself from the physical and emotional violence of homophobia. And I ended up in one of the most hostile spaces, football, towards homosexuals. But to have friends I had to show that I was straight, so I was playing my part. Family and friends took me to the stadium, but it was torture“.

“I’ve also tried having relationships with girls – the outburst of Benevenuto, who during the first wave of Covid in Brazil had temporarily left football to become a nurse – but I was fooling my instincts. And there was also the fact that religion was very present in my family, and in the Bible it says that a man who lies with another man is a sinner. That’s why I thought for a long time that there was something wrong with me, and I was a sad boy“.