With WrestleMania 39 kicking off April 1, and the new book from Polygon contributor Abraham Josephine Riesman Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Fall of America set to enter the ring on March 28, we spend the week wrestling with pro wrestling – and all that has shaped it.
My bullies were all into pro wrestling.
It was the spring of 1999, we were 13-year-old kids in a public school in the Chicago suburbs, and every day at recess they harassed me. While I long ago wiped my memory of specific insults, the general theme could be summed up as, “Look at this fagot.”
I was a flawed boy: I sang in the halls, wore flared jeans, had platonic friendships with girls, and always jumped at the chance to play a woman in a class skit.
They were Real guys: burly, cackling, anti-intellectual and always ready to identify a gay.
I loved mid-century musical theater and weird British comic books.
They loved the World Wrestling Federation.
As they tormented me every day, the faces and slogans of their favorite wrestlers lurked from their T-shirts: “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, The Rock, The Undertaker. There’s a special little humiliation when you’re gay beaten by someone wearing a jersey that – in the words of WWF team D-Generation X – invites you to “SUCK IT”.
I didn’t exactly have one politics object to the WWF at that age. It was just what the guys who hated me liked, and that was enough to put me off.
Then a strange thing happened: my only male friend, Jonathan, caught an episode of the WWF’s weekly flagship show, Raw is war, while surfing channels. He was amazed at what he saw and immediately demanded that I look at it with him. I trusted Jonathan – he was not a bully. So I tried.
I fell in love.
I should have known by now that “professional” wrestling was resolved, more of a scripted art form than a legitimate sporting competition. I absolutely didn’t care. I was entranced by how these people, these Gentlemen, challenged anyone who stepped in their path. It was my demographic’s visions of ideal masculinity, and suddenly I wanted nothing more than to have their confidence.
I started watching WWF programming religiously, first with Jonathan, then with a small group of guys, most of whom I had never seen up close before. A kid’s parents had a huge finished basement, and that’s where we gathered for the hallowed viewing of pay-per-view events.
At one of those events, I was surprised to see one of my bullies in attendance. By then, the school officials and our parents had stepped in to serve some sort of high school restraining order, so I was prepared for the meeting to be awkward. But instead, we just did what we came for: we watched and talked about wrestling. In the end we were on the same side. We were the same: just fans. Just guys.
Photo: Getty Images
As the weeks and months went by, this group became a tight-knit cohort—the first group of male friends I’d ever had. We watched the rampant homophobia, misogyny, racism, transphobia and various other provocations, and we loved it. We learned that this was what it meant to be a man – to be safe, to be superior, to be powerful. The bullies had taught me that I had to be a man to be worth anything. Wrestling taught me that being a man was worth everything.
My fandom waned after a few crazy years. But in early 2020 I started working on Ringmaster, a biography of WWF owner Vince McMahon. To report it, I dove back into McMahon’s product, the visions of manhood I’d digested with such desperation as a kid — including McMahon’s turn as the villain protagonist the crowd loved to hate and hated to love.
This time, however, I was an adult and the toxicity was hard to ignore. Over the past 20 years, even as the WWF’s popularity waned, the attitudes and resources it championed have spread to every aspect of our civilian lives. McMahon’s close friend Donald Trump repeated McMahon’s hero/villain act on the national stage as he hired McMahon’s wife into his cabinet, backed by a generation of voters who had accepted McMahon’s version of masculinity. This time I no longer wanted to be accepted by this nation of bullies. I wanted to defect earlier, to separate.
But I also saw something I had never seen before. Wrestling is built around masculinity, but in its own way it crosses borders – even weird. Men in wrestling wear bright colors. They touch other men intimately in public. When connected, they speak of each other in the warm terms of life partners; when they disagree, they utter ambiguous sexual threats such as “I want your ass.”
The main thing is that they show pain.
The essential, irreducible element of a wrestling match is the ability to show suffering – the very thing that every boy in high school has drummed out of his mouth, if not before. It is the heart of the art form. It doesn’t matter how skilled a wrestler is technically it doesn’t count at all unless they can make the audience believe they are hurt. Every wrestler must spend a significant portion of each match in nothing but raw, visceral agony. They must show their secret face, the most vulnerable of them all.
Wrestling is an art form, one that also seems to have planted seeds in my mind about how much fun it is to dress up, show tenderness, be vulnerable, and do the things you’re not supposed to do.
A few days before handing in the finished version of my book, I told the world via Twitter that I’m not a man. I choose to live as a trans woman. I’ll go by “she” now. This is the conclusion I would have come to all those years ago if my bullies hadn’t terrorized me out of it. Wrestling showed me how to be a man. But it also gave me a second message, one that finally… Finally – has reached me. Wrestling taught me to be cis when I was 13, and then I learned to be trans when I was 36.
Vince McMahon, at age 77, still operates in an industry riddled with machismo. Last summer, he faced a wave of sexual misconduct allegations, including an allegation that he raped a female referee, and made a surprising move: he stepped out of the spotlight. But it was a brief moment; McMahon hates looking like a loser. So he used his influence to reinstate himself as head of the company and now rules it again with an iron, manly fist.
But McMahon only has so much time left. Wrestling will outlive him. And when I think of the wrestling fans who are the most to get what makes it work I think of all my queer and trans compatriots watching and performing it. There’s been an explosion of queer-oriented indie wrestling in recent years, driven by artists who can hear the undertones of the art form. They make the implicit explicit, and that’s wonderful to see.
I’m not sure what the people who bullied me are up to today. We were all children, driven by ideas of masculinity that made us miserable. I’m unlearning them now, and I hope their travels have brought them this far too.
Being a fan of queer and trans wrestling means inverting and expanding the industry we all love to hate. Not everyone is on the ride. One of the virtues of wrestling is how much it can bring disparate people together – which means there are still plenty of bullies out there watching wrestling. But I chose to opt out of that demographic. I have separated. I showed the world my secret face. And I haven’t looked back.