Wrestler Goldust in 1995. Image: WWE, reproduced under Fair Dealing provisions
My first email address was [email protected]. It was my wrestling-obsessed 13-year-old self’s nod to the World Wrestling Federation’s Mick Foley and his three wrestling alter egos; Mankind, Cactus Jack and Dude Love.
As a young person, I lived two lives. Outside of school I was a prodigious basketballer with dreams of making it a career. I played multiple times a week, throwing free throws late into the night. On weekends I mopped up the sweat of the mid-90s premier women’s basketball team, the Sydney Flames—who drew crowds of up to 6,000 at the Sydney Entertainment Centre. After the game, I watched the players, in their civilian clothes, waited on by fans and friends by the bar. It was my first glimpse at queers—women in high-waisted blue jeans and black leather jackets. Some had peroxided hair gelled back and held the hands of hot femmes. My nebulous queer identity was finding its form.
When I wasn’t playing basketball, I was watching or thinking about wrestling. I was reading ghost-written wrestling autobiographies and ordering magazines in the post. I was spending evenings at the local library on one of two computers that had the internet. I paid ten cents a page to print wrestling stories from the web, sputtered out line by line from the inkjet under the librarian’s desk. My bedroom walls were lined with posters: Chyna, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Brett ‘the Hitman’ Hart.
Mum recounted the story of telling my dad. She said he blamed himself, making a connection between my sexuality and penchant for sport.
Back in the 90s, wrestling was not a readily available indulgence. You watched it on cable TV or you hired the latest Pay Per View WWF main event, three months out of date, from the New Releases section of the video store. My favourite thing, age 13, was to sit cross-legged on the threadbare blue-grey carpet of Video Ezy, lost in VHS wrestling covers.
My other life was spent at Narrabeen Sports High School being bullied relentlessly. Year 10 girls hovered in the toilet doorway shouting ‘This is the GIRLS’ toilet!’ and ‘DYKE!’ Once, one pushed me over when I tried to sneak in under their arms.
‘What’s a dyke?’ I asked mum through tears. Surreptitiously, she’d been attending the local PFLAG for years and had been trying to convince my dad to come along too. Having an undercut in 1997 was apparently a gay giveaway.
I later learnt I was in fact a dyke, and later still, that I was a faggot too—traipsing a transness I had no language for.
Mum recounted the story of telling my dad my coming out news. She said he blamed himself, making a connection between my sexuality and penchant for sport. Basketball. Too much quick dry. WNBL lesbians. And somehow—wrestling too. All those gay enablers.
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There are things that we do to settle the nervous system. We meditate, go for a swim, phone a friend. Wrestling served as a way to regulate my nervous system battled by bullies and confused about gender and sexuality. For me, wrestling was a comfort that was knowable. Like Masterchef, like Married at First Sight, like Survivor. Predictable and safe. Cosy, easy and warm.
I don’t know if dad believed the story that wrestling ‘made me gay’, as we’ve never spoken about it. I imagine it was hard as a parent in the 90s not to be influenced by the casual homophobia and transphobia that simmered underneath almost everything. To hold some warped belief that only people who failed at parenting ended up with gay kids—because being gay was somehow failing at life. I didn’t know what to make of the idea that somehow indulging things that were slightly masculine, things that ‘boys’ enjoy, had some impact on carving out a sexuality. These loose connections speak more to the ways we internalise social myths, how gender has been constructed—binaries strengthened by language and norms displayed all around. Of course, it is misguided, but I can piece together the reasoning.
And wrestling was so gay.
There was Goldust, who minced toward the ring in a shoulder-length white wig, ceremoniously wrapped in a fluffy floor-length golden robe. His theme song played and glitter dripped from the ceiling. Once in the ring, he’d pull, slowly the golden gloves from each hand, drop the robe to revealing a glittering golden head-to-toe full-body leotard. Goldust was trans, I think. His character caught so much flak for being ‘weird’—subtle transphobia peppered announcers’ descriptions of Goldust—‘bizarre’, ‘an absolute freak’. Under the wig, his head and face painted black and incandescent gold. Black lipstick. Black eye-liner.
I didn’t know what to make of the idea that indulging things that ‘boys’ enjoy had some impact on carving out a sexuality.
There was The Macho Man Randy Savage who wore leopard print tanks three sizes too small—sometimes with his midriff showing.
There was The Ultimate Warrior. Streamers ringed around his steroidal biceps and his boots, pink and green and blue. He’d slip under the bottom rope, rise and pull the top rope, using it to steady himself, gyrating his hips back and forth toward the sky.
There was JR and Jerry ‘The King’ Lawler, the announcers—joking and gesticulating. Lawler, an ex-wrestler, wore a crown and robe, open at the front exposing his naked rosy chest and JR, in his cowboy hat with his Texan drawl. They were favourites too, threading into matches storylines we’d forgotten, priming audiences for the next event.
Even Hulk Hogan, looking back, was quite gay. His blond hair and his manicured blonde porny moustache. His yellow tank top with its purposely holey back—perfect for when he reached the ring and slowly ripped it in half and uncovered, bit by bit, his chiselled hairless pecs.
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The Royal Rumble is a 30-wrestler melee, one of the WWF (now WWE)’s tentpole annual events. Each wrestler comes out at timed intervals. Initially one is in the ring and then another runs out, then another—until it is mayhem. The winner is the last one standing.
In 1998’s Royal Rumble, all three of Mick Foley’s alter egos brawled—albeit at perfectly timed intervals. Cactus Jack, Foley’s most bloodthirsty alter ego, and also known as ‘the world’s most dangerous wrestler’, was the first to enter the ring. Cactus Jack, his signature outfit, a shirt emblazoned with his own wanted dead or alive poster, was famous for his ability to withstand pain and inflict brutality. He’d mastered his craft in Japan’s hardcore scene, taking part in Japanese Death Matches, some of which involved barbed wire ring ropes, thumbtacks dusting the ring onto which Jack would back-slam opponents into bloody submission.
The magical thing about wrestling is the suspension of disbelief.
After one had been tossed from the ring, another would come, minutes later, tearing down the entrance, dive under the bottom rope. Mankind was the most successful of Foley’s alter egos. He was a chubby, hairy creature who wore a Hannibal-esque leather mask. A crazed loner from an asylum. He suffocated his opponents with his signature move, the mandible claw—where he pulled a sock puppet, Mr Socko, out of his tight brown leggings, choking them until they passed out.
The last to enter was Dude Love, a seventies, tie-dyed, reflective-spectacled bohemian—after a third sweaty costume change.
The magical thing about wrestling is the suspension of disbelief. Wrestling and its fans, complicit in a dance of suspended reality—both indulging in and maintaining a space of make-believe. You knew Dude Love, Cactus Jack, Mankind and Mick Foley could never face off in a match, be anywhere at the same time. We believed it because we wished it to be real.
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In my twenties, I had my own gay identity crisis. Was I a lesbian or was I a gay man? At the time, I’d returned to wrestling, re-watching old matches on my laptop. I was curious about a life in the middle. What I felt was a constant ebbing and flowing across gender.
Wrestling fostered in me deep curiosity about bodies, gender and sexuality. This idea of being many things simultaneously.
For a long time, I denied myself the space to acknowledge that I might be trans. It took me years to openly acknowledge the changes I had long desired for my own body. Only recently, while in the middle of writing this, my therapist asked me how I felt, physically, about my transition. She says I talk myself out of things I desire that might afford me a more comfortable sense of self. She sees me scuffing my shoes on the ‘rug of tolerance’, kind of shovelling things under there—living some kind of self-effacing half-life.
Wrestling fostered in me deep curiosity about bodies, gender and sexuality. This idea of being many things simultaneously.
I spoke for the first time about thinking about not having breasts anymore. I wanted to look like the wrestlers in my childhood posters, I told her. To fit into a white ribbed singlet without the need to bind tight with elastic. For a small amount of hair to sit, neatly, above my top lip. Maybe a small tuft of chest hair, rising and inching toward the banner tattoo that sits along my clavicle that reads wrestling with feelings—bookended by images of intertwined embracing wrestlers.
Up until recently I had not mentioned these desires aloud to anyone. I have told the people I love the most that I don’t mind having breasts. They are tiny anyway. They can be hidden. I worry that those I love, who have the pleasure of enjoying them, will be sad about their departure, if that is what I choose.
I have been fortunate to live among queer family in which there is culture of affirming one another. In this world, not unlike that of wrestling, there is the expansion of belief—a world of multiple realities. Queers make their own stories, defy norms—live lives permanently in the middle.
Mankind, Cactus Jack, Dude Love—they were all parts of Mick Foley. I drifted to these wrestlers because I too was many things at once, and wished to be understood as such. The suspension of disbelief that came from Foley’s adoring fans upon his entry into the ring as all three of him—I wanted that for me. For people to acknowledge the various ways in which I knew myself. People shouted and cheered for each version of Mick Foley and each sat, neatly and acceptably alongside each other. He was, for me, the first model of the possibility of the multiplicity of identity. I am grateful for wrestling—and, yeah, for how it made me gay.
