Hunky Queer Ally, French Rugby Superstar Antoine Dupont Would Stop Game Over Gay Slur

French Rugby superstar Antoine Dupont surprised many when decided to play for France at the upcoming Olympic Games and not the sport's biggest European event, Six Nations. Considered by some to be one of the sports' best players, his presence on the Olympic team has elevated France's hopes of winning gold in the sport.

Just this week analyst and reporter Philip Bendon from the site FloRugby named him #1 in the world.

"Dynamic, physical and creative, Dupont is the complete package and is head and shoulders above the rest as the best player in the world. Sucking up the gut punch of being dumped out of the 2023 Rugby World Cup in brutal fashion, the French maestro has led his club side Toulouse to the Investec Champions Cup and Top 14 titles in 2024 as well as taken the rugby 7s world by storm leading France to two titles ahead of the Olympics. Sitting comfortably in the pantheon of all-time greats at just 27-years-old, Dupont is this generation's Jonah Lomu."

He is also a trailblazer in queer rights. Just weeks ago he appeared on the cover of the French queer website Têtu.com, where he spoke as an LGBTQ+ ally. (Only one professional rugby star in France, Jeremy Clamy-Edroux, is out publicly as gay, writes PinkNews.) And promises action if he encounters homophobia on the field.

"From now on, if a player makes homophobic remarks on the pitch, I would stop the match because things have to change," he told Têtu.com.

"The goal is for all players to feel good about their sexuality and to be accepted by others. Even if rugby can be seen as macho, we are very open-minded, and today I think we are all capable of accepting others' sexual orientations."

While Rugby isn't considered as homophobic a sport as Soccer, a 2020 British study funded by a female Rugby team found that "almost half of male rugby players admitted to recently using homophobic slurs while over two-thirds had heard team-mates use similar language," SkySports wrote. "The study analysed data collected from randomly selected rugby clubs in the south of England in January and February of 2020.

"It found that the majority of male rugby players (69 per cent) had heard their team-mates using slurs such as 'fag' or 'dyke' in the last two weeks, while 42 per cent of players admitted to using this language themselves in the same time period."

Asked if he thought he was going to be teased for appearing on the cover of a queer magazine and website, Dupont said: "I think that it will happen to me. But precisely, we have to get over that and not be afraid of comments because we simply want to help stop homophobia in our sport. I am very relaxed about it, that is why I immediately accepted even though I knew that I would probably get a bit of teasing behind it. As long as the message has an impact, that is the main thing. Besides, the teasing will make the article even more talked about, so much the better! (Laughs.)"

He is also very adamant about inclusion. "The only active French player out there is Jérémy Clamy-Edroux. And I very much doubt that there is only one gay person on the field! So the goal is for all players to feel comfortable with their sexuality and accepted by others. And that should be the case for all team sports. Even if rugby can be seen as macho, we are very open-minded, and today I think that we are all capable of accepting each other's sexual orientations. So we really need to repeat it, communicate about it, so that everyone feels definitively comfortable with it."

And asked if over his career if he heard any queer insults in the locker room, Dupont says: "We always hear certain expressions, we know them, which can be insults or just said as a joke. Because we still associate rugby, which is a sport of strength, of combat, with this slightly macho side where you have to be a man, "a real one". But today, I think we have gone beyond all these constraints, and we have to be able to be open in our way of thinking and communicating. Because these little jokes, if there is a gay person in our team and he hears them, we suspect that it will not help him to speak and come out. So even when these remarks are not made with malicious intent, we have a responsibility, we have to be careful about what we say."

Check out pics from Dupont's IG: