Can Rugby League and Drag Queens Coexist? A U.K. Mill Town Finds Out.

Europe|Can Pro Sports and Drag Queens Coexist? A Mill Town Finds Out.

Kaue Garcia and Ryan O’Neill had owned a sports team for no more than six months when they decided the time was right to shake things up. What they needed more than anything else, they felt, was a drag queen.

They were not entirely sure what the reaction would be. Keighley Cougars, the English club they had bought almost as an act of mercy, was not an obvious place to start pushing boundaries.

Keighley is an old textile town, surrounded by the windswept moors of Yorkshire’s Brontë Country. The scars of postindustrial decay remain livid here: spectacular scenery that houses some of the most deprived areas in England. And the Cougars play Rugby League, an especially brutal iteration of a famously bruising discipline.

Largely the exclusive preserve of old pit towns in northern England and northeastern Australia, Rugby League involves 26 musclebound players charging into each other at full speed for 80 minutes. Think N.F.L.-level collisions, but without all the helmets and padding. It is a tough game, played by tough people, in tough places.

The plan hatched by Mr. Garcia and Mr. O’Neill, then — to arrange a Pride-themed day at Keighley’s stadium, and to employ a drag queen as the pregame entertainment — seemed ambitious.

“We were worried nobody would come,” Mr. O’Neill said. His husband feared an even more stinging rebuke. “We’d put a drag queen on the middle of the field, have a big party, and everyone would just disappear,” Mr. Garcia said.