Ross: Oh, just hold on a second. I'm watching this rugby thing on ESPN. I don't know what the big deal is. I'm man enough to play this sport.
Joey: Dude, you're not even man enough to order the channel that carries the sport.
- Friends, The One With All the Rugby
I'm in a Philadelphia comics store. They guy at the register is having a heavy debate with a customer about soon-to-be-ex-Philadelphia 76ers guard Alan Iverson. I interject: "Iverson's wasted in basketball. He'd make a great soccer midfielder."
"Really?"
"Yeah, or maybe a rugby wing."
I have no idea what I'm talking about. I couldn't tell a wing from a tighthead prop. But bear with me. This is an experiment. And it generates the expected results: "Rugby? No way! Are you kidding? Those guys would kill him. They'd tear his guts out. They'd rip his little head off. They'd eat him."
Most Americans are in awe of rugby. They think of it as a sport played by gigantic lunatic cannibals "Tell people you play rugby and they think you're a psycho," says one American player. "It's really hard to explain that there actually are some rules and that you can't just start smashing someone in the face and gouging their eyes out and shit ..."
Every country has a sport that guards the gateway to hegemonic heterosexual masculinity. In Afghanistan it's polo. In the UK it's soccer - which is why so many of the cool liberal soccer dudes I played soccer with in London (some of them employees of the BBC and the Guardian) freaked whenever the possibility of playing with women cropped up. But in America - home to millions of female soccer players, coaches and officials and countless co-ed teams and pick-up games - Mike Newell's sexist outburst would be regarded as surreal.
In America, gridiron defines masculinity. All other sports are considered gay, feminine and effete by comparison - especially soccer. "My son is not playing soccer," promised commentator Jim Rome. "I will hand him ice skates and a shimmering sequinned blouse before I hand him a soccer ball."
All other sports, that is, except rugby. Rugby is obviously way butcher than American football. And gay rugby is a huge pink Trojan horse planted smack in the centre of American sporting masculinity. In a bar in Philadelphia, members of Philly Gryphons RFC participate in a beery post-match drinking song: "Thursday is a fucking day! Wednesday is a fisting day! Tuesday is a wanking day! Monday is a finger day! Is everybody happy?! You bet your ass we're happy. Tra-la-la-la-la-lalalalala." Then, following instructions published on the Gryphons' website, they all put their beers on their head "and spin in a circle acting all gay".
Gay rugby is undergoing something of a global explosion. Catherine Zeta-Jones is making a gay rugby movie set in Wales and the French national side have just released their latest Dieux du Stade calendar which, as usual, shows players relaxing in poses taken straight from gay porn. But it's in America that the gay game has really taken hold.
Gay rugby took off in the US after 9/11. Mark Bingham of the first ever gay US team, the San Francisco Fog, was among those who charged the cockpit of Flight 93 - the hijacked plane some believe was aimed at the White House. And his bravery is credited by some as being partially responsible for gay rugby's amazing growth. Today the Fog and the Gryphons are just two of 20 gay-friendly rugby clubs in the US and Canada. They form the bulk of the International Gay Rugby Association & Board (IGRAB) which started in 2002 with just five clubs worldwide. And there are more teams forming all the time - especially in America.
Meanwhile the North American gay gridiron scene appears to consist of a mere nine teams.
How gay is that?
