Finding Out
Sports Memoir Gay Studies LGBTQ+ Biography Coming Out Story Australian Football Masculinity Studies 1990s Cultural History Motivational Memoir
Finding Out: What It’s Like to Be the Toughest Man in Australian Sport—and Gay
Signed first-edition hardcover of rugby league enforcer Ian Roberts’ 1997 memoir, complete with illustrated dust-jacket and 325 crisp, tight pages. Very-good condition, no inscriptions, no ex-library marks—just the author’s own bold signature on the title page, making this the collectible copy fans and pride-history buffs hunt for.
Roberts’ story is the blueprint every coming-out narrative borrows from: a working-class Kiwi kid who became the most feared forward in Australia’s hyper-macho NRL, then risked it all by saying “I’m gay” on the cover of the country’s biggest magazine. Told with unfiltered honesty and locker-room candour, the book charts the collision of sport, celebrity, violence, self-loathing and, ultimately, self-acceptance. Readers get locker-room anecdotes, grand-final bruises, media witch-hunts and quiet moments of vulnerability—exactly the blend that makes the memoir a crossover hit with young adults searching for role models and adults who remember where they were when the headline broke.
What makes this copy irresistible to collectors is the combination of scarcity and cultural significance. Signed Roberts hardcovers rarely surface in Australia, let alone outside it; the 1997 print run was modest and most copies disappeared into sports libraries or beach bags. As the first major sports figure in the southern hemisphere to come out while still playing, Roberts changed sponsorship deals, TV ratings and playground slurs overnight. Owning the signed edition places the buyer at the epicentre of that seismic shift—an artefact of both sporting and LGBTIQ+ history that continues to appreciate as inclusion in sport evolves.
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