Like many of those similarly afflicted, I don’t know West Ham without my dad, or my dad without West Ham. My earliest memories of Saturday afternoons are of crackling football commentary on a transistor radio, as his tea cooled in a 70s brown and orange mug – a familiar place of safety and happiness. Like our shared big noses, my support for West Ham wasn’t something I could really choose of my own free will. As a teenager I was still listening to matches on the radio while I did my homework, but gradually the emotional pull of football waned. The son of one of mum’s best friends, who was the same age as me, was murdered in an incident connected to Scottish football sectarianism. I rolled my eyes at the naff jingoism surrounding the 1996 European Championships. Above all, the sport seemed at odds with my growing confusion about my sexuality. During the 1990s, it was a pillar of the homophobic lad culture that I encountered at school, in the media, on the stands when dad and I went to Upton Park, and in the brutal treatment of the gay footballer Justin Fashanu, who died by suicide in 1998. I felt excluded from football, and music took over as my life’s passion. Over the years, however, I couldn’t keep my love of West Ham down. I kept track of the Hammers’ (mis)fortunes and watched the occasional game. I was an out bisexual male and closet football fan. This all changed when, a few years ago, I found West Ham’s LGBT+ fan group, Pride of Irons. Made up of members who are gay, lesbian, trans, bisexual, non-binary and straight too, it provides a space that offers the rest of society a lesson in how to get through thorny issues with dialogue, humour and acceptance. Whether or not people have boycotted the Qatar World Cup, for instance, has been approached without judgment. I don’t get to go to pre-and-post match meet-ups as often as I’d like, but the 2019 Pride march in London, riding in a bus accompanied by West Ham’s Hammerhead mascot, was a total hoot, and the Pride of Irons WhatsApp group is the only one I haven’t left. When my son was born in late January 2022, I was surprised that for the first time in years I felt confused about my identity. I was a new dad in a monogamous relationship with a member of the opposite sex. What could be “straighter” than that? Was I letting everyone else down? Bisexual people are frequently erased from the LGBT+ community and I’d grown up with prejudice from gay men as much as I had from the straight world. Would Pride of Irons be accepting? On a Saturday morning in February I left my boy snuffling in his mum’s arms to go and stand in the cold outside the London Stadium as part of a Pride of Irons protest in light of the new Saudi owners of Newcastle United, who West Ham were playing that afternoon. We practised unfurling banners for the cameras as we kept our eyes open for the arrival of the Newcastle team, with a few false alarms as their supporter coaches drove past in a blur of “wanker” fists. One of the other POI members congratulated me on having a baby, asked how it was all going, and why I hadn’t mentioned anything to the rest of the group. I explained my insecurities. He told me I was being daft, spoke about his own kids, and said that I was as welcome or valid as anyone else. Of all the pieces of encouragement anyone has given me over the past 10 months since my son was born, this has meant the most. The next week, when my mate Grant gave me his spare birthday present ticket to the fancy seats for a solid 1-0 win over Wolves, he took this photo of me in front of the Pride of Irons banner at the London Stadium, feeling as sure of who I am as I have ever been. I often croon the club song, I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles, to my boy as a soothing lullaby: “… fortune’s always hiding, I’ve looked everywhere”. It’s probably for the best to get him used to it early. If his dad and grandad have now endured over a half century of disappointment then I am afraid it’s his destiny too, whoever he turns out to be. Luke Turner’s second book, Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945, is out next year