“WE can’t change the fact that the Andre Gray incident has happened. What we can do is use that as an opportunity to have some good come of it.”

That was the view of gay Burnley fan Kevin Robinson when he began getting contributions for a podcast looking into homophobia in football. Was it still one of the game’s last taboos?

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It was a subject that Robinson had considered exploring previously, but unfortunately the catalyst came when Gray’s tweets from 2012 came to light after he scored his first Premier League goal in August.

The No Nay Never podcast explores not only Burnley’s reaction to that incident, but LGBT issues generally within football, and whether enough is being done to combat homophobia within the game.

As well as speaking to Clarets chief executive Dave Baldwin and head of community Neil Hart, Kevin and co-host Jamie Smith also spoke to Kick It Out’s Paul Mortimer and Robbie de Santos of Stonewall, as well as gay football fans.

And Robinson sees plenty of good work going on at Turf Moor, even if he believes there are also areas for improvement.

“I think Burnley are doing a lot of good stuff in the community. Neil talked a lot about the things they do in the community with LGBT people, which is all fantastic,” he said.

“I’m not sure the club completely get the issue, I’m not they’re aware how big an issue it is and I think there’s a lot more they could do publicly not just to get rid of homophobia but also to encourage LGBT people who might be concerned about going to games or who haven’t even thought about going to games due to that disconnection between football and the LGBT community.”

Hart told the podcast that the club are planning on doing more within the community this season. “We will be doing, this forthcoming season, an LGBT awareness game,” he said.

“We want to do meaningful work which changes people’s lives and actually makes people think differently, and more importantly, behave differently.

“We could have very easily got Andre out across lots of different activities. But we’re not going to do that because we want to do that when that’s right.”

Robinson insists ‘the game is going in the right direction’ and added ‘attitudes as a whole seem quite positive and supportive’.

But the disconnect between fans and homophobic issues is made all the starker due to the lack of openly gay footballers within the game, especially in the UK.

“One of the most interesting interviews was Paul from Kick It Out. You got a look into what goes on in a dressing room,” he said.

“Football’s a public business now but what happens in dressing rooms is almost a private world. It was interesting that attitudes in the dressing room are drilled into players through the youth development system which can subconsciously influence the way players think about the issue.

“Players aren’t exposed to gay people and I think it’s the same with some fans as well. Because there’s no gay figure within football it’s a lot less humanized, so you can’t relate that homophobic language in football to a person. If there were more gay people in football then I think people would think twice about some of the words they’re using.”

The next step at Burnley could be the creation of an LGBT supporters club, something that both Baldwin and Hart said they would support.

This is a debate that began with Gray, and Baldwin told No Nay Never that Burnley, while backing the striker’s contrition and his developments as a person over the past four years, were looking into making changes to their policies around social media.

“Would we have been happy to have discovered this earlier, dealt with it appropriately and been clear on our position before it’s escalated? Of course we would. But we are where we are,” said the Clarets chief executive.

“We will make improvements to our policies going forward when it comes to the screening of social media content.

“In terms of the player de-activating his (Twitter) account, the player was not forced to do that, it was his own decision.

“It almost demonstrates the mindset of Andre in relation to his statement of apology because the reality is he didn’t hide away from his error. He held his hands up and demonstrated that’s not the person he is today.

“We recognise the individual and that he is not the person of 2012. Andre Gray in 2016 is a man who has substantially changed the direction of his life and he’s become a positive role model.”

Click here to listen to the podcast.