LGBTQ+: Keighley Cougars on their inclusive vision for rugby league
It's the mid-1990s and the West Yorkshire town of Keighley has been struck by 'Cougarmania'.
A young lad, lying awake in his room, thinking things that are all too familiar to many in the LGBTQ+ community. Yet with their lives in London and a successful business to run, that was about as far as the couple's association with the Cougars went - until O'Neill heard the club was in danger of shutting its doors for good."I knew what the club meant to the community. It had added so much positivity to the town and I could see that was what was missing.
"The bar was derelict, and the team manager came up and immediately gave me an invoice for kit for about £25,000," O'Neill remembers. "Keighley is a really unique setting - a former mill town in West Yorkshire where I'd struggled to come to terms with my sexuality," O'Neill says. The Cougars players wore a special kit that raised money for LGBTQ+ charities and a drag queen took to the pitch to entertain the supporters who had packed into Cougar Park.
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