Last year a two-day amateur boxing competition was held in Sydney, attracting participants and spectators from all over the country and the world. The setting, WorldPride; the event, the first World Gay Boxing Championships.

The competition brought together members of the LGBTQ+ community with allies and the country’s best judges – thanks to support from Boxing Australia and Boxing NSW – as well as boxing champions Gairy St Clair and Kate McLaren. It was the brainchild of Martin Stark, and the culmination of years of work to combat homophobia in the sport and create an international LGBTQ+ boxing competition, after the sport was cut from the Gay Games.

Now Stark is going global – he’s taking the WGBC to the US in June – and he wants to work with other combat sports to increase their efforts in tackling homophobia. Thanks to the abundance of LGBTQ+ leagues and clubs in the US, the support for hosting the WGBC in Chicago has been huge, but you don’t have to look far to see how homophobia remains in the industry.

Recent outbursts from UFC fighter Sean Strickland, and a lack of public condemnation from others within mixed martial arts, indicate there is still a long way to go, Stark says.

“When there’s nobody saying this is unacceptable, you’re signalling that gay men are in some ways subhuman,” he says. “And that language of hate isn’t being challenged enough … What’s the message to the community? Is homophobia now an acceptable behaviour? What’s next?”

Stark says the more he sees homophobia in combat sports, particularly in high-profile and influential competitions like the UFC, the more he wants to “step in and speak up” because he knows it doesn’t align with the values of the vast majority of fans and participants.

“The upside of taking action against homophobia is growing the sport,” he says. “Getting more women involved in UFC, in mixed martial arts, growing the fan base with millennials and Gen Z … getting more young people into gyms where all of those gym owners can grow their business with a part of the market which may have felt excluded.

“I think in the long term, [homophobia] will damage the sport and it will damage the brand. That’s a long-term risk.”

Driving Stark to switch his life’s focus to advocacy and the WGBC is the knowledge that homophobia, and even just a lack of visible support for inclusion, actively deters people from participating in combat sports and means they miss out on the mental and physical benefits they offer.

“[Sport] also offers an important social connection whether you are a participant or fan,” he says. “Sport does that in such a universal way, and that’s why it’s important that we still have events like the World Gay Boxing Championships.

“I want to get to the stage where there is more visible representation of LGBTQ+ people in boxing and other combat sports,” he says. “So people no longer feel they have to come out, they can just be themselves and be supported wherever they are in the world.”

One fighter who took to the ring at the first WGBC at Sydney WorldPride was Sze Sze Rowlinson, a professional Muay Thai fighter who turned to boxing after an ankle injury sustained in a motorcycle accident forced a break from her main sport. The fight was her first since the accident a year earlier, and looking back, she realises it was significant for another reason too – it was the first time she had allowed her identities as a fighter and a queer person to become one.

“It felt like it was meant to happen in some weird way,” she says. “I never actually outwardly promoted that I was some sort of queer fighter [before the WGBC]. I was always trying to just say, ‘I’m a fighter’. Moving through the [martial arts] space, my identity, my sexual orientation or whatever, never really came up.”

But in the midst of her recovery from injury, that began to change. Missing being able to connect with people in the gym, Rowlinson started to reflect on the benefits Muay Thai and martial arts had brought her over the years – the confidence, the lessons, the friends – and realised that, unlike in a lot of team sports, there aren’t the same support networks to help you get through when all of that is stripped away.

So she created the Queer Combat Collective (QCC) – a group that could not only provide support for people already involved in martial arts, but that could also encourage members of the LGBTQ+ community to give it go, when they may have previously felt it wasn’t a safe space for them. As well as putting on some “come and try” events, Rowlinson wants to help gyms become more welcoming.

“A lot of the gyms that I’ve been to are quite friendly,” she says. “But they are very busy, they can be very loud, and a lot of them are catered towards people who might want to spar or compete and what I’m trying to do is get people in the stage before that.

“I’m trying to create a space that people are comfortable in giving some sort of health and wellbeing activity ago … using it as a physical practice rather than coming with all of these connotations of having to be hyper-aggressive or having to fight at the end.”

When Rowlinson launched QCC she didn’t want to be the face of it, but realised she couldn’t do it anonymously if she wanted people to engage with the group.

“I needed to step out of my own shell …” she says. “[I had] to come to terms with taking that step and being like, ‘OK, this is also me, I’ll promote this as part of my identity – I’m a fighter, but I also run this Queer Combat Collective thing.’ It’s something that’s new for me.”

And her invitation from Stark to be part of the WGBC was “perfect timing” for that shift. “That was a really interesting turning point for me personally because it felt like that was the first time my identities merged.”

So as Stark builds inclusivity at the professional end of the scale, Rowlinson sees her work in grassroots martial arts as a crucial link in the chain – getting more people through the door in the first place.

“Not everyone wants to be a fighter, but unless you participate and get a little taste for it, how would you know that that’s something that you’d want to pursue,” she says. “You can’t be what you can’t see and it’s a bit of a cycle that like.”