My feelings about gay gimmicks in wrestling are complicated and sometimes uncomfortable for me to talk about, so of course I'm going to address them right here in front of everybody - and not for the first time. In my life as a fan, I have become simultaneously queasy and hard at the mere mention of the names
Billy and Chuck and
Ashton Vuitton. Vain, high-strung, and effeminate are often shorthand for homosexual identity even when sexuality is not directly addressed. I resent oversimplifications of this sort even while acknowledging they have some basis in fact - as do all stereotypes. Gay stereotypes abound in wrestling and other entertainments, but then pro wrestling reduces all groups to ludicrous caricatures - Wall Street investors, hillbillies, Arabs, evangelists, Olympians, ghetto gangbangers, surfers, you name it. The downside of being
included in wrestling is essentially you're going to be a joke.
I welcome the attempts to tone down the gay panic that gay wrestling gimmicks of the past were designed to stir up, but wrestling being what it is, it's difficult to remove it entirely without erasing gayness, however you choose to portray it. Wrestlers who are gay in real life - like
Darren Young - often don't make their sexuality a key element in their ring personae, nor should they have to. I'm happy to say that gay visibility is present in some of the regional shows I've started attending this year - with younger fans wearing gay pride T-shirts, loudly enthusing over upcoming LGBTQ events, and one wrestler recently brandishing rainbow colors on his gear. (Still, there are coded sexism and homophobia, too, as in jeers like "You punch like a girl.")
Rookie wrestler Dom Kubrick plays the gay gimmick in a way that both troubles and titillates, which, if I'm honest about it, is as exact a definition of my sex drive as I can think of. (I have no knowledge of Kubrick's actual sexual identification, which does not concern me.) To this day, I get a certain guilty thrill from the gay villain, whether in 007 movies or the squared circle. In fact, a part of me would actually like to be a gay villain - essentially a male villainess - so ultra-stylish, so seductive, and so evil! Dom's character is the stereotypical predatory gay - all handsy and physical, asking nobody's permission before touching the merchandise. Just 14 months into his career, he's sort of the Joey Ryan of gay gimmicks, often using his penis as a weapon in the ring. He also plays up the pleasure he gets from man-to-man contact - a line I have not seen crossed in similar gimmicks. Based on the YouTube events I've seen, he has attracted loudly vocal admirers, which is a sign of some sort of progress, I believe. He's not particularly outlandish in his visual presentation, but his entrance (to Pet Shop Boys' 1987 hit "It's a Sin") gets a little more fabulous with each new match. He's a good-looking young man, physically fit. His theatrical ring techniques definitely demand close study.
When I was a gay kid in the dark ages before the internet, Tarzan movies and TV wrestling were the closest thing I found to porn. And sex in general seemed to get a sidelong laugh in wrestling. Of course there were the gay gimmick wrestlers, beginning with Gorgeous George. But straight sex was a gimmick as well. There were often 'girl friends' involved in the stories,--remember 'Woman' in the early days of WWE or some such? And this continues. I have been a fan of Noam Dar since he was a new indy in English circuits, but his appearance in the big tine has been tied into some silly love triangle with a woman and another wrestler. At least Ashton Vuiton gets to kick ass. Sex as a sidebar to wrestling goes back at least to the Epic of Gilgamesh, but it seems almost always to be an object of satire.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you, Dale. In America, sex can be portrayed as buffoonish, but heaven help us all if somebody portrays it as actually erotic. And as I have stated in previous posts, the ancient Greek slang word for "to fuck" was "to wrestle." That bit of trivia I find enormously satisfying.
DeleteDefinitely a sexy man. This post was frustrating because I couldn't see some of the most intriguing sounding GIFs: " Signiture move..." and"Tapping out...." The first onne with Joey Ryan is a tease with no pay-off. I hope he laid Ryan low. Dom is so much more studly.
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