International Gay Rugby: Lancashire’s inclusive rugby pioneer Lawrence Howard on the magic of the Bingham Cup

“Ottawa was amazing,” says Lawrence, the Preston-based vice-chair of International Gay Rugby. “It’s been four years since we’ve had a Bingham, so to get everybody back together after a difficult time was a real welcome return for us. Seeing everyone from the other side of the Atlantic was fantastic too - there were plenty of new faces, which is always great to see.

“As soon as we all got back out there, it was like we’d never been away, which just goes to show what a big family the International Gay Rugby community is,” he adds. “After four years apart, the guys in Ottawa did a brilliant job to pull off an amazing tournament which hosted a few teams which didn’t even exist when the last Bingham Cup took place.

“We’ve had a real growth in non-traditional rugby countries like Norway, and Belgium, but we also had teams over for the first time from Ireland, France, and a handful of other countries,” continues Lawrence. “On top of that, we’ve got interest from people wanting to start teams in Spain, Israel, and Greece. It’s great.”

The story behind the Bingham Cup is the stuff of legend. The competition is named for Mark Bingham, a 6’4”, 102kg gay rugby player who turned out for San Francisco Fog, an inclusive team formed in 2000. In 2001, Mark was the last person to board United Airlines flight 93 on September 11th.

When terrorists hijacked the plane, Mark and three other passengers tried to intervene by storming the cockpit. They managed to prevent the attackers from targeting the Capitol Building or the White House, causing the vessel to instead crash into a field at 580mph. Nobody survived.

Inclusive rugby clubs from across the world now gather in Mark’s name for the iconic Bingham Cup, with his mother Alice Hoagland attending every match up until her death in January 2021. Some 83 clubs from 20 different countries travelled to Ottawa, with London’s Kings Cross Steelers becoming the first European winners after beating the New York Gotham Knights in the final.

But Ottawa also saw another British team return with a gong. Made up of players from smaller UK-based teams including the Preston Typhoons and Brighton & Hove Sea Serpents (hence the name), the Snakes on a Plane came home with the Challenge Cup, which is awarded to the best team to finish bottom of its pool.

“We didn’t have many teams from the UK there, so for two to bring back silverware was amazing,” says Lawrence, who featured for Snakes on a Plane himself. “It was wonderful to be back playing as well - it’s been a while and I’m reaching the end of my playing life now given I’m in my late 40s, but it was nice to be out on the pitch again.”

Australia and Italy are currently bidding to host the next Bingham Cup in 2024, and so with destinations such as Brisbane and Rome in the offing, I ask if Lawrence will be tempted to attend once again. “Probably,” he says with a chuckle. “Whether I actually play is another matter, but I’ve just qualified as a referee so I might be there as an official.”

It will be something of an end of an era should Lawrence hang up his playing boots. Having fallen in love with the game in the ‘80s despite attending a football-playing school which only occasionally saw fit to get the oval ball out, he understood the sport immediately. Where others saw chaos and confusion, he saw patterns. Everything made sense.

But he was also repelled by it. Rugby’s toxic ‘lad’ culture defined by faux machismo and homophobia forced him away, but - in the right environment - it also enabled him to construct lifelong friendships: Lawrence was mates with the five men who, in 1995, met up at a London bar and formed the Kings Cross Steelers, the UK’s first so-called ‘gay’ rugby club.

Over the decades since, Lawrence has been at the vanguard of inclusive rugby in the North West, playing for the Manchester Spartans, the Liverpool Tritons, and Typhoons RUFC in Preston, helping to found the latter two to boot. And, since being elected onto the board of International Gay Rugby (IGR) two years ago, his focus bas been making rugby more inclusive.

“IGR is continuing to grow, which is great, and we have new teams in formation all over the place,” explains Lawrence, 48. “We’ve just finished our first season of our integrated league structure and our first year of mixed-gender touch games, which have been great. But, overall, it’s been a hard two years.

“Our campaign to continue to allow transgender people to play rugby has come up against hard bans,” he adds. “The Welsh Union announced a hard-ban on transgender women, which is sad to see, especially as they didn’t announce it, just just popped it on their website, which strikes me as an act of cowardice - they didn’t dare face the backlash.

“And what are they accomplishing? There’s not a single transgender woman playing rugby in Wales,” Lawrence continues. “It’s just so sad, particularly with it coming off the back of England announcing their ban despite there only being two transgender women in England playing rugby. The worst part is that it’s ammunition for all the wrong people.

“Some people with truly dreadful views feel like they have permission to express them publicly. But we do make a positive difference through our work at IGR, though: so many people who would otherwise not have had the courage to get out there are playing rugby now, which is what it’s all about.

“And it’s not just LGBT people, we get a lot of people who for any reason want a slightly more relaxed and less intense environment to play rugby taking part in inclusive rugby,” Lawrence says. “It comes down to the environment: people are often faced with the question ‘why don’t you just go join the club down the road?’ The answer I always give is ‘we could’.

“But people don’t because they don’t feel safe,” he adds. “I’ve heard things in changing rooms which have meant that I simply won’t return to those clubs ever again. That these things still go on just shows that there still needs to be a culture shift in rugby away from the men in blazers and their archaic views.

“We talk a lot about rugby’s commitment to diversity, but look at the news which leaked recently about how England Rugby pays its international female players £400 a game while the men get £25k a game [the fee is actually £17k, but Lawrence’s point stands]. It just shows where we are.”

But, in the meantime, Lawrence is fighting the good fight, and there’s plenty to look forward to in the near future, including the Union Cup - the European-only version of the Bingham Cup - in Birmingham next year.

“It’s set to be the biggest Union Cup ever,” says Lawrence. “I’ve seen the plans, and it’s going to be absolutely huge. I can’t wait.”