‘Out in the Ring’ offers a much-needed queer history of pro wrestling

Ry Levey’s documentary explores lots of exciting angles about how the squared circle has treated queer topics over the years

If you’ve watched professional wrestling for any length of time, a couple of things are very obvious. In that case, the sport is naturally homoerotic, what with scantily clad people, nearly always of the same gender, rolling around on the mat. But at the same the wrestling world, until very, very recently, has been very institutionally homophobic, and even worse, same-sex abuse scandals have been far from a rare occurrence in wrestling history. 

All of that, and much more, is explored in Out in the Ring, Canadian documentarian Ry Levey’s long-in-the-works examination of the history of LGBTQ interfaces with professional wrestling. The film features interviews and a strong use of archival footage to tell that story. 

Throughout history, whether the WWF/WWE or its rival or indie promotions, wrestling has often depicted heels (villains) as effeminate, with the likes of Gorgeous George, “Exotic” Adrian Street, “Adorable” Adrian Adonis and Goldust depicted that way despite being played by straight performers. By the WWE “Attitude Era” in the late ‘90s, the idea of wrestlers being gay was mostly played for comedy. During his famous 1990s feud with Bret Hart, Shawn Michaels would try to draw chants of “Shawn is gay,” to which he would reply, “Why don’t you ask your momma and your sister how gay Shawn is?” 

At the same time, wrestlers who were actually gay, like the late Chris Kanyon, were encouraged to remain closeted, while various scandals entailed same-sex predation on behalf of promoters and other powerful people in the business. 

All of it, really, was encompassed in the figure of Pat Patterson. Patterson was a wrestler — the WWF’s first Intercontinental champion — and later a major behind-the-scenes presence, a Vince McMahon right-hand man both on and off screen who, among other things, came up with the idea of the Royal Rumble. 

Patterson, all along, was gay. This fact was seemingly known to everyone in the wrestling world for decades, including many fans, partly due to subtle jokes Jim Ross and other announcements would make during broadcasts. He was even once accused of sexual misconduct, although the film concludes that he was innocent. 

Patterson wouldn’t come out publicly until a WWE-produced reality show called Legends House, in 2014 when he was in his 70s, and he wrote a WWE-published memoir two years later called "Accepted: How the First Gay Superstar Changed WWE.” Patterson died in 2020, and Oliver Bateman’s obituary is worth reading.

Levey’s documentary follows all of this, while also concluding on a hopeful note, with modern-day gay and trans wrestlers interviewed about their experiences, many of them in independent promotions. While often critical of decades of homophobia in the wrestling business, the doc also shows great love and knowledge of that world. 

Unfortunately, the film appears to have been completed too soon to include a watershed moment from earlier this year: When Anthony Bowens, during an AEW promo, declared he was gay, leading to cheers and approving “he’s gay” chants from the crowd. Numerous gay wrestling fans, and Bowens himself, commented on how important that moment was for them, and how unimaginable it would have been years earlier. 

It’s always refreshing to see a wrestling documentary made outside of WWE’s auspices, and also outside the sensationalist framework of Vice’s Dark Side of the Ring. Out in the Ring is a first-rate examination of a previously under-explored topic. 

Out in the Ring debuted earlier this month on Fuse TV. My colleague Gary M. Kramer interviewed Ry Levey here.