Young transmascs find a home in Homme football club

“How can we reinscribe ourselves into our past?” It’s a question that Homme FC founder and creative director Areena Ang had in mind while developing Homme Apartment, a photo series that imagines what the transmasculine football team might feel like as a physical space.

Founded in May 2025, Homme FC began as a WhatsApp group for transmasculine people in London looking for a space to play football together. Since then, it’s grown into a community of around 80, meeting regularly for matches, group meals and hangouts across the city.

While football was always at the heart of Homme FC, Ang envisioned it as something larger. “We think football is the language and the vehicle of bringing people together here, but we’re definitely more than just a football club,” they explain. “I also viewed the club as an art project or as a materialisation of a ‘social practice’.”

That artistic side comes through in Homme Apartment, which was shot by photographer Indi Setyawan in an 1980s hospital wing in West London. The shoot imagines a fictional physical space where Homme FC’s players could pile onto sofas after practice, hunch over pool tables and lift weights in the sweaty locker rooms.

Homme Apartment pulls from a mix of references, including Ang’s own childhood spent watching American television and scrolling through Tumblr. “I always found the constructions of fantasy in American college culture really funny and aspirational, especially since it’s so aggressively heteronormative in popular culture,” they explain. Ang also points to gay and lesbian ephemera, including XY, the 90s gay youth magazine as references. “What I’ve always loved about the photographs XY produced is how it narrativised an alternative coming of age for young gay men,” they say.

That idea also speaks to the players who appear in Homme Apartment. “Most of the people in the shoot never got to experience adolescence while being recognised as themselves. So in some ways the photographs become a kind of alternative coming of age,” they explain.

But the project isn’t simply trying to recreate the images its drawing from. “What’s interesting is that those spaces have historically represented a very narrow version of masculinity – straight, cisgender and exclusive. Rather than rejecting those images entirely, I wanted to ask what happens if we simply place different people inside them.”

Setyawan and Ang worked without a budget to pull the shoot together. Initially conceived as a locker-room story, the unique location opened up a different direction: its wood-panelled corridors; dated, gaudy interiors and basement pool tables brought to mind college dormitories, allowing the pair to construct a fictional world where “these trans boys lived together, hung out after classes, played pool, borrowed each other’s clothes.”

One of the standout images shows a player, Helly, standing at the centre of the basement beside the pool tables. “I think Indi captured the grain beautifully in this image. The composition and the image itself feels cinematic to me,” Ang says, pointing to Gus Van Sant’s Elephant as a reference. “I was very drawn to recreating the yellow hair with the yellow shirt as a striking combination.”

Another favourite image for both Ang and Setyawan shows a player, Sara, in the building’s yellow bathroom, swinging from one of the cubicle doors. “I think this just so beautifully captures joy,” Setyawan says. “It’s boyish, young, fun and stylish all at once.”

The photograph also takes on a different significance amid increasing political scrutiny around trans people’s access to single-sex spaces in the UK. “Bathrooms are such politically loaded spaces for trans people,” Ang explains. “But in our photograph it’s just friends getting ready together, fixing each other’s hair, laughing.”

That sense of ease is central to what Homme FC wants to offer its community. “To have a transmasculine+ focused space is rare, and an opportunity to truly be seen,” Ang explains. Some members had never felt welcome in football, while others had stopped playing because of sexism, transphobia or a lack of pathways to continue. “It felt like there was a genuine need for a space where people could reconnect with that part of themselves.”

While Homme Apartment reimagines the past, the club is also looking ahead to what comes next. Homme FC has plans for more regular sessions and a new Camden pitch, alongside parties, a new kit and further creative projects. Eventually, they hope to build a permanent community hub for the club, much like the one imagined in the project. “Hopefully, in twenty years, someone can look back at these photographs and understand something about how we saw ourselves.”