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My sound, pre-teen logic? Why, all I had ever heard of was straight and gay! Gay guys only like guys and since I like girls, I was definitely not gay.Įven though I had started to have occasional daydreams about kissing many different genders, and seeing male celebrities and thinking “he's cute,” I would then angrily yell at myself to stop thinking like that, because it was weird and wrong. It was a combination of being raised around a combination of toxic masculinity and (sometimes less than) casual homophobia that left me around the age of 13 convinced of two things in this world: These developing differences were obvious to a great deal of people in my life, including a high school friend (who eventually became my first boyfriend), as well as my Mom - she graced me with the distinction of being the only person I know of to this day who has gotten the “you know I'll love you no matter what/I'm okay if you're gay” speech twice in their life from their Mom. Despite the wishes of my Dad, I preferred reading and watching old game shows to sports, and had a tendency to cry when I was upset, rather than, I don't know, punch a wall or eat ham, or whatever it is “real” men supposedly do with their feelings.
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![young gay men wrestling in a ring young gay men wrestling in a ring](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2012/05/24/sports/video-dakar-wrestling/video-dakar-wrestling-articleLarge.jpg)
To that point, a daily ritual for all four years of my high school existence was to have someone come up to me, call me a gay slur, and slap my textbooks/lunch tray/whatever I might be holding out of my hands, while their friends laughed and cheered.īeing raised in this environment, I was in severe denial about hints that I might not grow up to be exactly like the rest of my family. Why, one of the greatest insults one could hurl at one another at school - which was grounds for bloody fistfights - was to call someone…Īnd to be perfectly honest, it was a lot more common to hear extremely upsetting gay slurs being casually tossed around - nothing quite like casual homophobia taking the place of “You've got cooties!” “No, you've got cooties!” Especially when it comes to non-heteronormative people. I have no doubt I might get some pushback from some fellow Southerners on this, but in my personal experience, a great deal of the American South is, shall we say, less than open minded. Now, I did say that there was one adage that holds true about the South, and that was a bit misleading.
#Young gay men wrestling in a ring tv#
I had the good fortune to grow up pretty close to the home base of one of the factions of the Monday Night Wars (WCW) and one of the greatest nights of my young life was literally screaming myself hoarse and jumping up and down with my younger brother as we were witness to the all-conquering-killing-machine that was Goldberg tear through that no good bleached-blond menace of “Hollywood” Hogan.īefore me, and though he detested it when I was in my formative years, my Dad actually got to see Andre the Giant come through his small town in Georgia and run roughshod in a battle royal at the high school gym, while my Mom grew up in Louisiana and remembered going with her siblings to watch the Junkyard Dog do battle with the Freebirds in countless scraps. Mom was a lot more supportive of my love of wrestling, as seen by countless merchandise purchases, as well as taking my younger sibling and I both WCW and WWE TV tapings (the realisation that her hunky favourites Kevin Nash and The Rock were at these shows probably helped make an easy sale of going to said live events didn't hit until many years later, but that kind of ties into the whole point of this article).
#Young gay men wrestling in a ring professional#
There's a lot of stereotypes and misconceptions about the American Southeast, but one adage definitely holds true - it has been, and will always be, a hotbed for professional wrestling.