The story of Jason Ball’s coming out is not one story but hundreds of stories. As the most well-known male Australian rules footballer to come out as gay, his story has multiple layers that add up to him now being within striking distance of taking the Liberals’ blue-ribbon Melbourne seat of Higgins for the Greens at the next federal election.

His story starts in his family home at Christmas Hills in one of the tall eucalyptus forests that border Melbourne’s north-eastern suburbs. He grew up knowing what it was to see wombats and echidnas in the wild. He was fascinated by the prehistory of Australia – he says that reading, as a child, of the extinction of the Tasmanian tiger “broke my heart”. He visualised the dinosaurs that once walked the earth. Now 30, he says: “I grew up in a wonderland.”

He also grew up with his father’s passion for the Collingwood football club. Ball was good at many sports, but it was football he loved the most. When he was 13 and “the hormones kicked in”, he found he wasn’t attracted to the people he was meant to be attracted to. “I was terrified.” As his father David says, “I think he went through a few years of internal conflict before we knew about it.”

Ball was initially worried about coming out but his Yarra Glen teammates have supported him all the way. Photograph: Chris Hopkins/The Guardian

At school, he did ballet and dancing – “Dad told me that’s where [Essendon champion] James Hird got his balance and smooth skills from” – but then the boys in his class told him only girls did ballet and dancing and he gave up both. He drifted away from the boys in his class and spent more time with the girls. Because he was a good footballer, the boys suspected nothing and credited him with being “a womaniser”. By the age of 15, he realised he had three alternatives: “I could live a lie and be miserable, I could come out and live an authentic life or I could end my life.”

At 16, Ball was picked up by the Eastern Ranges and thereby offered a pathway into the AFL, but he chose to go to the US on a school exchange program “to escape”because he didn’t believe he “fully fitted” in football culture. “In footy culture, being called gay or a ‘poofter’ was an insult. It meant there was a weakness in you, something disgusting.”

He found himself on the border of Kansas and Colorado in a community largely defined by religion. “I met a succession of very lovely, deeply prejudiced people.” He was the only kid in the school who believed in evolution. The youth pastor at his host family’s church assured him the world was only 6,000 years old. During this period, Kansas overwhelmingly rejected marriage equality.

He threw himself into the study of the science-versus-religion debate. It seemed to him that “religion was knowledge derived from dogma, while science was knowledge derived from observation”. He returned to Australia at 18 an atheist. Doing an arts degree at the University of Melbourne, he pursued his interest in the philosophy of science while also studying cinema and political science.

Ball returned to football too, playing senior football in the ruck – the game’s most punishing physical position. Quick, athletic and determined, he grew to be 190cm tall and weighing 85kg.

In 2012, Ball’s performance against the competition’s leading goalkicker was credited with getting his local club, Yarra Glen, into the grand final. The following weekend, he came out in the Sunday Age newspaper as gay. A friend associated with change.org had asked him to do so for the sake of an anti-homophobia campaign. By then, he was a way down the road towards coming out but not as far as he was later that day when four television crews turned up to the Yarra Glen football club training to interview him.

The media had searched for years for the first gay AFL footballer. Jason Ball thought because he was not a gay AFL footballer but merely a gay footballer there would be no interest in him. Wrong. In 2010 Brownlow medallist Jason Akermanis, then with the Western Bulldogs, had written a newspaper column saying AFL players would not be comfortable with a gay teammate. Suddenly, two years later, Jason Ball was big news – there was a lot of interest in him and also in what his teammates thought of him.

Jason Ball has told the story of his coming out many times now. He’s told it in schools, in footy clubs, in factories. “Sometimes you can hear a pin drop. People get it because it’s a footy story. They recognise it.” Hearing it for the first time put me in mind of a spy novel. The narrator is a young man with a hidden self. External events are playing out at some deeply internal level he desperately hopes no one else can see. In his early teens he had made himself a promise he would never act on his feelings but at university – and therein lies another series of sharply observed tales – he came out to certain people. One of them then turned up at Yarra Glen football club and assumed “that if everyone at uni knew Jason was gay, everyone at the footy club would too”. If they did, they weren’t saying.

The situation climaxed a few weeks later when, one night after training, the player changing beside him asked, “Ballie, do you have a partner?” He’d lived a double life so long he had invented a language to deal with it. “I tried not to lie, but I couldn’t always tell the truth,” Ball says. “I avoided conversations to do with socialising or relationships.” He said, yes, he had a partner. The teammate responded, “What’s his name?” This was it: the moment he had both feared and secretly wanted. “James,” Ball said. “Why don’t you bring him along to the footy?” suggested his teammate. At that moment, says Jason Ball, “my heart nearly jumped out of my chest”.

I want to be the role model that wasn’t around for me when I was growing up

Over the next few weeks a number of his teammates told him to bring his partner to games. Ball’s father was by now the club president. “The younger blokes didn’t have a problem with it,” says David Ball. “Some of the older people were a bit shocked and surprised.”

When the four television crews turned up to ask the Yarra Glen team how they felt about playing with a gay footballer, they replied, in the words of coach Dean de Munk, that they had “no problem with it – not at all”. “We all knew he was gay,” says De Munk, “he just hadn’t told anyone.”

Following the affair in the media, I was impressed by Ball’s calm demeanour, cheerful grin and the relationship he had with his teammates. That year more than half the Yarra Glen team walked with him in the annual St Kilda Pride March.

He did a lot of work with the AFL, taking the LGBT message with him wherever he went. But he grew frustrated. The AFL wouldn’t actually employ him and “missed opportunity after opportunity”. By now he had received the first of several overtures from the Greens, asking him to run in Higgins, a seat they thought they had a chance in. “I was drawn to the Greens’ policies on marriage equality, climate change and their more compassionate approach to asylum seekers,” Ball says.

Jason Ball campaigns for the Greens during the 2016 federal election with leader Richard Di Natale. Photograph: Melissa Davey/The Guardian

He still wanted to work for the AFL but, after telling him they had no job for him, two AFL executives advised him not to go into politics. Each, individually, said to him: “You’re too good for politics.” That stuck with him, really stuck with him. “Politics needs the best people,” he says.

Ball got a swing of 8.5% at the 2016 federal election and the Greens leapfrogged Labor to finish second to the Liberals with 42% of the vote after preferences. His extended family – none of whom knew he was gay until they learned of it through the media – came out to support his campaign. In 2017, he was named Victoria’s Young Australian of the Year.

Round 21 of the 2016 AFL season had also included the first Pride match for premiership points, played between Sydney and St Kilda. Before the match, Ball walked out through a guard of honour formed by his Yarra Glen teammates with the US ambassador, John Berry, to toss the coin. Berry must have been impressed because Ball was subsequently invited to the US as part of the prestigious International Visitor Leadership Program.

And so it happened that he was in Washington DC in March this year when the March For Our Lives rally took place. “It was the biggest crowd I’d ever seen – 800,000 people,” Ball recalls. “Trump’s America has the makings of a fascist society, but I’ve seen the resistance. The young people aren’t going to accept it. They’d taken to the streets because their lives literally depend upon it. Everyone was telling them it’s impossible – America’s too conservative, the NRA’s too powerful. There is so much optimism and hope in seeing that many people not taking impossible for an answer.”

Jason Ball is running hard in Higgins, knocking on doors each weekend. “I want to create a world I wish I was born into. I want to be the role model that wasn’t around for me when I was growing up.”