Photos by Gianni Cipriano

LONDON In the world of English rugby, Sam Stanley stands alone.

When the former Saracens F.C. player came out in a 2015 interview , he became the first active English rugby union player to come out publicly, joining a vanishingly small group of out male professional athletes in the U.K.

The 27-year-old, who comes from one of rugbys most famous families, also revealed he was in a relationship with a man 34 years his senior.

The response?

Horrible, really, said Stanley. One was the whole gold digger thing and people just jumped on that bandwagon.

He and his partner Laurence Hicks tried not to take too much notice.

For us, its great to represent relationships like ours. And from my perspective, I hope that it has shown the positivity of being a gay sportsman and showing gay youngsters that they can still achieve their dreams in sport.

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Coming from rugby royalty it was almost inevitable that Stanley would become a professional player. The game was in his blood. His brother Michael plays for the Samoan national team and he has three cousins who have all played rugby union at a professional level. His uncle, Joe Stanley, was part of the New Zealand All Blacks team that won the 1987 World Cup.

From there, my dad was always going to follow in his [brothers] footsteps and ended up getting his children into rugby, Stanley says. I guess it made my dad and his brothers realize that it was possible to make it to that level.

His Kiwi father and English mother relocated from New Zealand to the U.K., where Stanley was born in 1991. By the age of four, he was already a regular at the local rugby club, but as he began to fall in love with the game, he realized he was different to his siblings and friends. He was gay.

I was hoping it was just a phase, he says. Obviously when youre growing up people use the word gay in a derogatory manner. It was difficult to come to terms with it and try and be a rugby player, thinking that both didnt suit each other and that I couldnt do both - I had to be one or the other.

By the time he was 16, Stanley had moved out of the family home to attend the rugby academy at one of Englands biggest professional clubs, Saracens. It coincided with him trying to come to terms with his sexuality, but being an out gay man in the notoriously macho - and straight - world of rugby in 2007 was unthinkable.