Her inclusion on the company’s reality show Total Divas provided the most genuine look into LGBTQ identities ever to grace WWE programming. Names like Mercedes Martinez and Sonya Deville gives lesbian members of WWE’s audience figures to latch onto.ĭeville, the first out lesbian wrestler ever to sign with WWE, created a lot of those in-roads specifically for WWE fans. The Great Bambina’s in-ring presentation is partially a radical response to the lesbian erasure perpetrated by the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, whose history was dramatized in the film A League of Their Own,Įven WWE, nearly 20 years removed from the initials “HLA,” now has prominent lesbian voices among its roster that are a driving force in pulling the company slowly into acknowledging LGBTQ identities. Some use their presence in the ring to shed light on other organizations that actively kept lesbian women obscured. Charlie Morgan’s promo in which she came out publicly in the ring at a Pro Wrestling EVE event is forever immortalized for its raw reality and ability to usher new LGBTQ fans into a welcoming wrestling space. People like Ashley Vox and Rebel Kinney wear their identities openly in the ring without apology. Now, decades later, the defiant spirits embodying that openness and desire for visibility among wrestling’s lesbian community refuse to keep their identities in the shadows. They may not have reached the highest stages in American pro wrestling during their careers, but they became the foundation for what was to come. Most people that watched them in the ring never knew, but that didn’t mean they hid who they were. Parker became the first out LGBTQ world champion in wrestling history. Names like Susan Green and Sandy Parker defied women’s wrestling gatekeepers like The Fabulous Moolah that did their best to outlaw LGBTQ wrestlers’ public expression of their identities within their stables. These depictions were damaging in their ability to define lesbian identities to wrestling audiences, but they also masked the industry’s actual lesbian history. The wrestling industry hasn’t shown a ton of kindness to the LGBTQ community as a whole, but its treatment of lesbian identities specifically ranks high in the same ways that all forms of media have historically: a cocktail of overt sexualization and expendability with a splash of societal othering and obsessive dispositions.Įxamples are ample, from WWE storylines depicting Mickie James and Victoria holding queer-veiled obsessions toward Trish Stratus to multiple “Hot Lesbian Action” segments that ended in men assaulting in-character lesbians and WWE writers broadcasting their fundamental misunderstanding of LGBTQ identities (see Eric Bischoff’s “bisexual lesbians” line). Pro wrestling has never really had a positive, healthy understanding of lesbian identities.
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January 2023
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