London’s Kings Cross Steelers, feels the same way.“When I was around 16, I’d just started playing men’s rugby and a guy at my rugby club had come out and this was a pretty big thing,” he says. “And the guys reacted in a way that I just didn’t expect and I didn’t like, there were comments whenever he appeared, it was ‘Oh quick lads, Johnny’s here, backs to the wall!’ That kind of homophobic slur manifested itself throughout the rugby club.”Schmitz found the culture so unbearable that he quit rugby in his university years and did not return until a friend took him along to a Steelers training session.
