Gay rugby film gets Cork screening

A RUGBY film with a difference airs tonight at the Cork Film Festival. Walk Like A Man follows the Sydney Convicts and the San Francisco Fog as they prepare for the Bingham Cup, the World Cup of gay rugby.

“We see it very much as a sports film with a twist,” says producer Patricia Zagarella. “We hope it challenges people’s perceptions of what it means to be gay, to be a man, to be a rugby player — but it’s a sports film.”

One of Zagarella’s friends played for the Sydney Convicts: “I was taken by the fact that he was playing a hard-core game like rugby, and the apparent contradiction of gay rugby.

“As the story unfolded I learned more about Mark Bingham and the Bingham Cup, and that showed me there was a lot of heart to the story, the inherent rivalry between the Sydney and San Francisco teams, for instance.”

Growing up in Australia, Zagarella was familiar with the sport but saw it “as a private school sport, and I went to a public school. I knew it as a rough and tumble sport and what compelled me was the apparent contradiction involved, I was fascinated by people’s reaction to those two words, ‘gay rugby’.

“People saw it as a contradiction in terms, but the reality was this wasn’t a group of poofs running around a field, these were hard-core rugby players. And once we got into it, what really came out of it was that these teams became families for these players, some of whom had given up sport because they were gay. So the teams provided them with something they’d let go.

“But the Mark Bingham element also helped to show that these were two worlds that could be reconciled — that you could be gay and play rugby, which came together through these teams.”

Mark Bingham, after whom the gay rugby World Cup is named, died on September 11 2001, one of the men who fought the hi-jackers of Flight 93.

The film was aired in Australia at the end of July and received huge mainstream press attention, which was overwhelmingly positive.

“I guess because it hits the sissy-gay stereotype over the head,” says Zagarella. “The mainstream media has really embraced it.”

The producers have sold the film to Sky’s New Zealand rugby channel and to a Canadian channel and are looking to sell it to European buyers, including Ireland and the UK, but next month they are self-distributing the DVD from the film’s website, therugbyfilm.com.

* Walk Like A Man, 5pm, Triskel Arts Centre.