The Wrestling Closet

A strapping young man was once asked if he liked wrestling to which he responded, "No thank you I prefer heterosexual sports." Now that Chris Klucsaritis, a.k.a. Kanyon, has come out of the closet it continues to beg a question that used to get answered very clandestinely or as part of a gay joke. It's no joke to many gay people. It's practically a lifestyle.

In recent years Professional Wrestling played and preyed on the general discomfort with male homosexuality with varying storylines from Gold Dust to Lodi to Chuck & Billy and usually came down on the wrong side of everything.

When Klucsaritis decided to come out many fans thought it might be just another story line. It turns out that he's the real deal and spoke about his travails in an exclusive interview in Chicago's Windy City Times' March 29th issue. His story like other coming out journeys needs to be told, especially from the perspective of the macho world of "sports entertainment." He is to be applauded. There are other gay wrestlers. Yet, this grand revelation has happened with little fanfare.

Could it be that "in the life" the homoerotic nature of wrestling both as an amateur/collegiate sport and as professional exhibtion, before Vince McMahon et al. sucked the life out of it and turned it into acrobatic cartoons with Soap Opera-esque story lines is considered a given? Could it be that it is difficult to acknowledge the obvious?

Early television wrestling performers like Gorgeous George and Ricky Star addressed effeminacy in their performances to engage the general public's love for spectacle. Ricky's performances were much more erotic. George's were flamboyant and egged the crowd on to hate him as they would hate an affected mincing man in the 1950s. Ricky tended to be more sympathetic as a persona. His schtick revolved around ballet and his skill as a ballerino.

Wrestling is considered the oldest sport and many opinions consider it the ultimately natural test of strength -- something like Sumo. By and large, however, most real wrestling is grappling and a very intimate experience. In both the manufactured storylines and the real life ones the gayest of sports is not acknowledged as such. There are, of course, the outright pornographic productions that play up on fantasies, e.g. the wrestling coach in the locker room, but those are not what the eroticism in wrestling is about.

There are such things as fight clubs and most of them are gay. Some have evolved into lucrative gay wrestling video vendors where often it is the wrestling in and of itself that provides the prurient interest. This is one of those elephants in the room that people want to ignore even when liberating one's self of the restrictive closet.