It is a balmy fall evening in Los Angeles. The Griffith Park Ferraro Fields are ever so slightly damp, field soft enough that the rugby players putting on their cleats won’t have to worry about hitting the ground too hard in a tackle. The sky is orange-gray with light pollution and big mosquitoes flit over the pitch. A low hum of chatter animates the square of grass while on other fields in the park, separated by a tall chain link fence, soccer and softball teams finish up their own practices.
It’s eight p.m. and these players are just getting ready to start. They’ll be here for two hours, well after most of the other pitches off of this little loop of parking lots by the Los Angeles Zoo are dark and empty. A few dozen players have gotten their boots on and sweatshirts off. They begin to stretch, rolling out ankles and tossing a couple of rugby balls around.
The difference between this practice and that of hundreds of other rugby clubs across the state isn’t the time, or the field, or the plays they practice – it’s the team itself. The L.A. Rebellion rugby club prides itself on being inclusive of all genders, all sexualities and all levels of experience.
“It was the year 2000,” said club founder Gabriel Galluccio, recalling the formation of the team. That was a tumultuous year for queer rights. Following waves of forward movement in the previous three decades, the United States began to see social, political and legislative limitations on LGBTQ+ progress.
Legislation was on the ballot in multiple states, most notably California, where Galluccio was in 2000. In March of that year, Californians voted to enact Proposition 22, a measure affirming the belief that marriage could only be between a man and a woman. Voters in states like Mississippi solidified homophobic legislation. It would be 15 years before same gender marriage was legalized across the United States.
There was also a response to this backlash from the LGBTQ+ community at the time: in April of 2000, the Millennium March on Washington saw tens of thousands of people flocking to the nation’s capital. Queer people found joy in community, Pride celebrations and – in the case of Galluccio – rugby.
Looking out over the players who have finished kitting up and are starting warmups, Galluccio continues, “I didn’t feel comfortable coming out – I wanted to play rugby and I didn’t feel that if I was going to be out that the guys on the team would be comfortable with me playing.”
Galluccio was playing soccer at the time, winning medals with his team, and he wanted that experience for a rugby team where no one on the team would have to be in the closet.
By fall of 2001, the L.A. Rebellion had enough players to register as a club. One day before 9/11, they registered the club; the next day, a San Francisco Fog player named Mark Bingham died crashing the plane into the fields of Pennsylvania to thwart the terrorism plot.
“Almost immediately, all the clubs start to get in touch. We’re about eight clubs in the world at that time, and really organize a new tournament under his name,” said Galluccio. Out of this tragedy, the Bingham Cup was born. That year, the gay-inclusive rugby teams marched in Pride holding photos of Bingham. “Mark was a national hero. And there was a great euphoria about it in the community because it validated it – it actually was a great doorway to start the community of gay rugby.”
More and more clubs formed: San Francisco, London, New York, Dallas. The organization International Gay Rugby has about 180 rugby clubs around the world now, Galluccio said.
The inspiration for an inclusive rugby team – not to mention a gay rugby league – lies in Galluccio’s past. He grew up in Argentina under a dictatorship. He says he had no concept of being gay, that he didn’t even know the words for it other than as a joke or an insult.
“When I was growing up … culturally in Argentina at that time, we were during a military rule. People were getting killed for political ideology,” said Galluccio. “There was no visibility of an option of being homosexual, other than being a comedic drag queen. And so I have no reference of the possibility of an athletic man being attracted to another man.”
His experience of being a gay was a “physical reaction,” one that he says was entirely biological. Galluccio holds himself as proof that being gay isn’t a choice or a decision – if it were, how would he have chosen it when he didn’t know the choice existed?
As a young boy, Galluccio was always athletic, playing rugby and practicing judo. After he left Argentina, he found himself first in Brazil and eventually in San Francisco. Even as he became more comfortable with himself and more understanding of his own experiences, Galluccio felt for a long time that he could not share this part of his life with his rugby mates.
“Still, I wasn’t able or I didn’t feel that I could tell my rugby mates that I played rugby with that I was gay,” he said. “I felt I had to keep it in the closet, because it was something that I wasn’t sure I could do. If they knew that I was gay …” He shrugged, helpless.
The “irony” of it, Galluccio said, was that when he played a former team with the Rebellion in 2003, his old rugby mates were simply overjoyed to learn that he had started this new club. He hadn’t felt safe coming to them just a few years before, but their reaction was positive, accepting, one of true rugby camaraderie.
The year 2000 was a different time, for all that it wasn’t that long ago. The Rebellion is seeing to it that the future of rugby looks different for people of all orientations, gender identities and experiences.
One of those people is Charli Gross, the incoming organization development and inclusion chair for the Rebellion. Gross is relatively new to rugby, having only started playing the sport when the pandemic began to ease.
“I was in a period of my life where I was trying to build more community, especially with like, queer men,” Gross said. “I have always loved working out and being physically active and stuff like that. I really wanted to do something that kind of held me accountable to some regular physical activity and that allowed me to be in the community at the same time.”
After Googling “gay sports los angeles,” Gross found the L.A. Rebellion.
“I looked at the website, because one of my big concerns is gender inclusivity – I identify as a trans man,” said Gross. “This was also my first kind of soiree into gay male community.”
Gross isn’t the only player who has found a home with the Rebellion. They also form a community for players who are queer, questioning or allies to be themselves in a space where they won’t feel judged.
And for all that they have a well-earning reputation for inclusivity, the Rebellion are first and foremost a rugby team. That means that they play games, and spend a lot of time training for them. Incoming fundraising chair Andrew Ortiz said that the Rebellion plays a range of western teams, from Vancouver to Phoenix. They play in two tournaments in alternating years; they had the North American Cup last year so it’ll be the Bingham Cup in 2024, which is being hosted in Rome, Italy.
“We may not be the most winningest IGR team. But we f—ing have fun,” said Ortiz, laughing.
Bryce Henderson is going on his third year with the L.A. Rebellion and his eighth year playing rugby. He plays center, often labeled a pretty-guy position by other ruggers.
“It’s not all just like, check our hair and make sure our uniform looks nice,” Henderson laughed – and welcomed the camaraderie of the team.
“I think, because so many of us share so many experiences and a lot of us come from certain ideologies of what sports are, I feel like we created a very safe space for people to sort of explore their opportunities with sports,” said Henderson. “I can be my most authentic self here.”
Galluccio gestures to the brand new players, ones that just started playing the game. They are lying on their backs, tossing a ball around, separated from the rest of the practice. There are quite a few of them circled around in the corner of the pitch, collecting grass stains.
One of the newbies is Kiko Suura. He’s been coming to practices since the end of the Rebellion’s last season and loves the sport.
“But I haven’t played a real game yet,” Suura, who is a trans man, said. He said he has moments of doubt (what if he passes the ball forward accidentally? Will he be injured in a tackle?) but he’s mostly excited.
“The rugby community has an inclination to camaraderie no matter where you are,” said Galluccio. “In fact, we have two halves in the game. And we have what’s called the third half, that is when we get together with the opposing team and we just drink beers and sing songs. And this is after the game, where we were really trying to hurt each other.”
Suura said, “[Rugby] has this kind of brotherhood that I always kind of wanted, because I grew up playing women’s soccer and it just always felt off to me. So it was – yeah, it just kind of felt right.”
He’s not the only one who feels the companionship of the team. “For me, I was in the Marines for eight years, and never did I think I would find another group of misfits that I would get along with like I have with this group,” said Ortiz.
The Rebellion offered these men a community within a community – becoming both ruggers, dedicated to the team and the sport, as well as being out queer, gay and trans men.
When Gross joined the team, he was looking for a way to join the queer male community as well, having only experienced being in queer female and nonbinary spaces before. “Because, you know, I had transitioned just a couple of years before the pandemic started and in that period of time, I wasn’t really exploring that community. I didn’t really feel part of that community yet, or, like, ready to engage with that community,” Gross said.
He also loves the physicality of the sport. The fact that a player can hit as hard as they like in a tackle without worrying about injuring another player is freeing. And the culture of rugby means that the atmosphere is not malicious or cruel, said Gross. After the game, during the third half, Gross will approach that player that he tackled and ask if they’re okay and whether they want to share a beer with him.
The level of sportsmanship in the game is comforting to many of the players, too. “I’m someone who thought I had to be – I didn’t think I had to be toxic, but I thought that masculinity was a certain way. And so with that came the toxicity,” Suura said.
There’s still a long way to go in terms of acceptance and inclusivity, but things are changing, both in rugby and the greater world of sports. “Especially in the last three years [the tolerance] has kind of increased regarding the queer community because when I first started it was very misogynistic, very bro-y,” said Phillip Khommarath, CFO and treasurer for the Rebellion.
Kommarath plays with the team as a utility player. He bounces around the forward pack but mostly sticks to prop and lock. He said he hopes that it is a sign that the “climate of the global landscape” is changing to be more inclusive.
The Rebellion and other inclusive teams are making a marked impact. They provide a space for players to express themselves while playing a sport that champions camaraderie and, for lack of a better, gender-neutral word, brotherhood.
Remembering the moment he realized he wanted to join the Rebellion, Gross recalled a crude joke he made during his first practice when another player asked about rugby balls: “And I made the silly joke of, ‘Oh, I think most of us probably have two balls.’ And then someone else, of course, not knowing that I’m a trans guy was like, ‘Well, you know, not all of us are gonna have that. We’re an inclusive team, and we include trans people on our team.’”
Gross laughed. “It called me in at that moment. And that was the moment where I was like, ‘Abso-f—ing-lutely.’”
Being part of the Rebellion has settled well with Suura, as well. He feels that the toxic masculinity present in a lot of male sports is absent on this pitch.
“Whereas, because I think with, let’s say football, American football,” said Suura. “There is kind of like this toxicity. Maybe it was just in high school or whatever. But we’re just like, you’re kind of striving to be really tough and like just getting in these fights all the time. And I feel like I haven’t sensed that at all here.”
The Rebellion, although it was the first inclusive rugby team, is not nearly the only team to lack this toxicity that Suura describes. Neither is it the only rugby team to encourage camaraderie – far from it. As a culture, rugby creates a supportive community for its members. That’s one of the reasons Galluccio was so drawn to form an inclusive rugby team in the first place. He can see that inclusivity now.
“I can see people in [this practice] that have been playing with the club for almost a decade and I see people that are just starting,” Galluccio said. “But it’s lovely to see how many people from different generations come. Then at our events we also have a lot of people that are from prior times who have stopped playing that come and join us and are still with us.” The level of intergenerationality that he can see in the rugby league makes a world of difference, especially given that in the not-so-distant past, an inclusive team like the Rebellion would be a pipedream.
Galluccio was politically active during the AIDs crisis, during which he said queer people had fewer options in terms of expressing their identities. “We have a diversity of choices that I would have never imagined that would have happened at that time,” said Galluccio.
Even in the arguments that the LGBTQ+ community is having now, Galluccio sees hope and progress. In the last 40 years, he believes the community has come so demonstrably far, especially considering how little queer life was even acknowledged, let alone accepted. The progress, he said, is “significant.” Galluccio believes that progress is important and should not be forgotten.
One way it can be measured is just by looking at Galluccio’s Rebellion and the success of the International Gay Rugby league. In the last quarter century, the movement has ballooned into an enormous accomplishment, all rooted right here in Los Angeles.
“The movement has grown so big. We have trans players, we have nonbinary, we have people of color, we have everything,” said Galluccio. “And for me, it’s a great joy to see that because honestly, my motivation to start it was that gay people didn’t have to hide any longer, and we have grown past anything that I’ve ever imagined that it could have.”