Mitch Brown spits Gatorade into a pop star's mouth and calls out the AFL

The league's first publicly bi player stars in a queer footy video with Ian Roberts, and says the code still won't let players come out.

Told by Paige Turner · 18 September 2026

So Mitch Brown, the AFL's first publicly bisexual player, is now spitting blue Gatorade into a pop singer's mouth on camera, and somehow that's less homoerotic than what happens in the sheds every Saturday.

Brown stars in the new music video for Australian artist ANDY's single Can't Wait, a steamy, queer-awakening film set against Australian contact sport. He appears alongside Ian Roberts, the former Australian Test prop who came out as gay while playing for the Manly Sea Eagles in 1995 — still the only Australian male rugby league player to have done it during an active career, thirty-one years ago, which tells you everything you need to know about what's happened since.

The video depicts a younger version of ANDY (full name Andy Cook) in a boys' locker room, afraid to explore his sexuality. By the end, the captains of each club — Cook and Brown — kiss, electrolyte drink is spat, and other side characters follow. It's deliberate, it's sweaty, and it reclaims the homoeroticism that's already there: the tackling, the huddles, the bodily fluids all over each other, the shared drink bottles. Brown called it out directly. "In sports … you are putting your bodily fluids all over each other in the huddles and tackling, and that is like spit, and you're sharing a drink bottle," he told the Sydney Morning Herald. "Why are [players] comfortable with that, but not when it's, in a sense, that in a different environment?"

Cook, who grew up in Manly in a hyper-masculine, Catholic, all-boys rugby culture, described the changing-room environment as one where "the line between homophobia and homoeroticism was invisible", leaving him caught between "fantasy and fear". Wrestling, wedgies, shared showers, headlocks, girth checks, sack whacks, gay chicken — all fine, all part of the game. A kiss? Controversial.

Brown came out as bisexual last year, after retiring. This is his first public display of his sexuality since then, and he used it to call out the AFL for not providing a safe space for queer players to exist in. "The AFL is the last professional men's space in the world that has had no queer players who have ever actively played and come out whilst they're playing," Brown said. "There's defence forces, there's mining industries – there's all these industries that arguably have worse stereotypes than the AFL, but yet they've got queer men in those industries that the AFL seems not to have." He went further: "Do I think the AFL and the clubs are providing a safe place and have the systems in place for a gay person to speak up? Well, if I'm going by the statistics, I would say no ... I've been one of them that played and remained closeted."

Roberts, now a queer-rights educator working with the NRL and other sporting leagues, said there's still an underlying current in contact sports that being gay translates to weakness. "To be attracted to other men if you're a man is almost feminised somehow," he told the Herald. "I do [education] with the NRL. I do a lot of stuff with the other major sporting leagues and, like, I don't know why … like, it's still uncomfortable to say this, but particularly with men, it's still an awkward conversation."

The video was inspired in part by former Roosters enforcer Kane Evans, who came out as gay in June. Evans said in an interview with Nine's 100% Footy that denying his sexuality from the age of 15 had weighed on him so much that, once his NRL and Super League career ended, he made taking his own life a personal goal as he spiralled into addiction. Cook told the Herald he wanted the video to reflect that reality: "I didn't just want it to be a locker room of queer people; it needed to be straight people, gay people, a whole boiling pot of people who are showing up authentically as themselves, and that doesn't take away from anyone."

Brown said advocating for queer communities and women's rights as a retired sports player feels lonely. "In terms of being a man and standing up for a better AFL culture, it's quite lonely. It's extremely lonely. It makes you feel like the AFL men's players don't care sometimes because you're just, like, where are your voices?" He said he'd struggle to name one current player who spoke up in support of women's safety after the Sydney Swans situation. "It's again on these other issues that don't necessarily affect them; you don't hear from them."

Cook's single Can't Wait leads the visuals for his nine-track EP &e, due in October 2026. The video was directed by Harry Welsh, who said Roberts and Brown gave the project "the gravitas it deserved". Welsh's central creative idea: "footy is already wonderfully queer, we were just capturing it with a fresh, hungry lens."

Thirty-one years between Ian Roberts and the next one. That's not a safe space, that's a wall.

Correction, 27 September 2026: this story said Ian Roberts came out twenty-nine years ago; it was thirty-one. Quotes from Mitch Brown, Ian Roberts and Andy Cook are now credited to the Sydney Morning Herald, which interviewed them.