Michael O’Donnell’s silence set in when he was 13……..Puberty hit him with all its force and with it, the realisation he wasn’t like the other kids in his suburban Aussie rules football club in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs.

“I started realising who I was as a person,” O’Donnell tells Four Corners.

He didn’t see himself in the broader game either. There were no players, no coaches — no-one was openly gay.

The teenager felt bitterly alone.

“The change rooms and the football field [were] just not places that accepted me,” he says.

So young O’Donnell drifted away from the sport he loved. It was more than a decade before he felt comfortable coming back to footy.

Now 35, he’s broad-shouldered, handsome, articulate, and plays for UNSW’s Eastern Suburbs Bulldogs. He’s also out — a proud gay man.

In the elite competition of the AFL, the silence remains.

Not a single male player, past or present, has ever publicly come out as gay or bisexual. The AFL is the only major professional sporting code in the world where this is the case.

Warning: This story contains explicit language

Additional research by Mary Fallon, Sarah Curnow and Carla Hildebrandt………….Watch the full Four Corners investigation tonight on ABC TV and ABC iview.