CFL promotes inclusiveness with sponsorship of Toronto Gay Football League

When Tim Winter was playing football growing up, he felt it was important to hide the fact he was gay.

“I was terrified to come out of the closet to my friends and especially my teammates,” he says. “I never wanted people to know I was gay in that locker room.”

Fast forward a few years and he’s the commissioner of a gay football league.

The Toronto Gay Football League is an eight-team flag football league – which has an adjoining four-team women’s division called Flags of Glory – entering its eighth season of play. Initially started as an email chain that grew out of control, it’s now a thriving safe social space for LGBTQ men and women in Toronto.

“Football is almost secondary to building that community and being able to meet and interact with one another,” Winter says of the league.

Over the years, it became significant enough to draw the attention of Paulo Senra, the CFL’s Director of Communications, who met with Winter to forge an extensive partnership between the two leagues.

For the first-time ever, the CFL will sponsor an LGBTQ-specific flag football league, providing branded Adidas jerseys for the TGFL and hosting a pre-Pride Parade brunch for the group at Strikers Sports Bar.

The bond between the two leagues is part of a major push by the CFL to promote inclusion and make sure it embraces all of its fans. Last year, the league hosted it’s first-ever league-sanctioned LGBTQ Grey Cup party and launched a line of You Can Play apparel. The year before that, then-commissioner Jeffrey Orridge became the first pro-sports commissioner to march in a Pride parade.

“We feel a responsibility to our all of our fans to make sure we’re being inclusive to everybody from every walk of life,” CFL SVP of Football Operations Glen Johnson says of the league’s LGBTQ inclusiveness initiatives.

As far as Johnson is concerned, that basic core value is what makes the CFL’s partnership with the TGFL such a natural fit.

“It aligns very well with our whole approach around inclusiveness, about being socially progressive as a league – which we have been for a very long time,” he says. “So we were very happy to get involved and support the program.”

For Winter, the relationship is important less so for the events or the jerseys, but rather the message it sends. He hopes having the weight of a professional sports league behind him will help get the word out to kids that there’s nothing mutually exclusive about being gay and participating in athletics.

“A kid that’s out there who’s 13 or 14 that’s trying to figure themselves out can see a relationship like this and know it’s OK to be themselves no matter what environment they’re in.”