"I thought, you know what, f- you, I'm going to finish this film as a response to him, in a way." Then, in 2019, Australia's Israel Folau spouted his infamous anti-gay comments on Instagram, saying "hell awaits" gay people.Īshton-Atkinson opened the drawer and started the edit again from scratch, and turned it into the unconventional documentary it has become.
Frustrated, he threw the hard drive into a drawer for a year. Ashton-Atkinson forgot to back-up the 45-minute edit he had been working on for months when reformatting his computer. The film itself almost didn't come out at all. Mark Bingham: The rugby player and his legacy "I always come back to, 'Why do you need a London Scottish or London Irish team' - people have a shared history, want to be around and with familiar people." There's still a lot of trauma around the LGBT community in sport. Steelers club chairman Matt Webb goes even further, telling ESPN: "I think that still ties in to the need for people to come together in the same community who have shared lived experiences. "That's a thought that does go through your mind, and while it's generally a positive there are still pockets of homophobia." "We all need our community and a place where we can just be ourselves and in sport in particular there still is huge levels of toxic masculinity, so if I wanted to play at a straight club, I would have to question is it safe to come out? Will people treat me differently? Will things be said behind my back? "People say, 'Shouldn't you just play for a straight team?' And I guess that's the whole point of the film," he says. "I became very insular and cut off from my family and so all those things took a long time to repair to the point where I join the club and for me that was the final healing I guess I needed from all those experiences."īut, if it's easier to come out now, then why do we need gay rugby clubs? "That whiplash is what caused me the depression because I grew up always being bullied everyday relentlessly, and that meant I struggled to form friendships and didn't know how. We've gone from having these horrible experiences which had left so many big scars to now just being like, 'Well everything is ok so you should just get on with it and be grateful,'" he explains.
"It's about that whiplash that a lot of LGBT people have where we are celebrated now, but 15-20 years ago we weren't. Ashton-Atkinson, now 34, vividly tells his story about being bullied at school. Though being gay in 2021 in western society is often unremarkable today, you don't have to go back very far to find traumatic stories. "She's got a certificate for the highest coaching level, and since she left the Steelers she's been consistently overlooked and not even shortlisted than men who are less qualified and less experienced than her, which is heart-breaking and disgusting," Ashton-Atkinson says. The former Wales international explains the frustration of being underestimated and overlooked in her coaching because she is a woman coaching a men's team. The film, released in late 2020 in Australia, also highlights the challenges women in the rugby world face, through the team's then-director of rugby Nic Evans. "I've never done this before, I just knew there was a good story there to be told, but I didn't really expect such a great reaction and I was surprised that allies in the straight community really connect with the film." "It's a story about a gay rugby club, but it's also a story about human struggle, and people using sport and their sense of community to help each other, which is universal," Ashton-Atkinson told ESPN. Although the stories in the film are related to the struggles of coming out, depression, and a history of bullying for being gay, they're are told in a way which wider audiences can empathise with. The film Steelers is about London-based Kings Cross Steelers, the world's first gay rugby club and one of over 60 such sides world-wide. When Eammon Ashton-Atkinson, an Australian television reporter, decided to film his rugby club as they went to the biannual Bingham Cup in 2018, he could never have imagined the positive reaction a documentary about it would receive. Heard of the Steelers? No, not them, the gay rugby team from London
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