Keighley continue to break down barriers with unique Pride event

Nestled on the edge of the Pennine countryside, not too far from Bradford, Keighley is hardly the first place that springs to mind when you think of the Pride movement. But on Sunday, the small West Yorkshire town stages one of the biggest parties it has ever thrown.

A rainbow flag permanently flies outside Cougar Park these days but Ryan O’Neill remembers what life was like growing up in Keighley in the 1990s when he was coming to terms with his sexuality while supporting the town’s rugby league team. “I was totally in the closet when I used to go watch,” he says.

“Back then, people would say things on the terraces and you wondered how you could ever be yourself at a rugby match if you were gay.”

Keighley Cougars were owned by O’Neill’s father, Mick, in their boom period of the mid-1990s and often attracted crowds of 5,000, around an eighth of the town’s population at the time. It was dubbed “Cougarmania” but when the club were refused entry into the first Super League season, in 1996, the club went into decline and in 2019 were on the verge of going out of business as they languished in the third professional tier, League 1.

That is when O’Neill and his family saw an opportunity not only to step in and revitalise the team’s prospects on the field but change attitudes off it, too. By 2019, O’Neill had relocated to London and married his long-term partner, Kaue Garcia. They became Europe’s first openly gay owners of a professional sports club and one of their first goals was a bold one: stage a Pride event alongside a rugby league match.

“Growing up in Keighley I had a difficult teenage life, when being gay wasn’t exactly something you shouted about,” O’Neill says. “I remember hearing about an LGBT group meeting above a