This text was suggested to me by Linda Stupart, who is also currently doing a residency with Vital Capacities at the moment. It’s written by Joseph Noonan-Ganley and it is titled, ‘Our Prop Mud’ and you can read it in full here. It’s about rugby and mud and gay feelings. I could really relate to these contemplations on sports and queerness and the consumption of bodies and their public personas. 

Here is an excerpt that I really like,

‘The scene that stopped me was the Cardiff Park Arms rugby match from 1970, transformed by the unrelenting appearance of mud. Ironically, mud allowed me to see clearer. The scene clarified and exposed some of what I was interested in in Gareth Thomas. Mud’s addition messed up rugby’s conventional surface and allowed a view onto the base material composition of the game: people’s bodies in relation. These kinds of political derivatives seem far more generative and uncertain than Gareth Thomas’s recycled admissions of guilt and fault.’