From the Inside Out Film Fest: The Twisty Gay History of Professional Wrestling and More
By Jim Slotek
When the 32nd annual Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival gets underway Thursday, one of the featured filmmakers will have sent his regrets on missing the opening night party.
Ryan Bruce Levey – director of the gays-in-wrestling documentary Out in the Ring – will be at Toronto’s Opera House club at a Lucha (Mexican-style) wrestling event.
“I’m sorry to have to miss it,” the film-publicist-turned-filmmaker says, “but there’s a fantastic Philadelphia-based trans woman wrestler named Edie Surreal who’s coming up to wrestle. I’ve never had the chance to meet Edie in person and I really want to see her.”
Charlie Morgan, the first wrestler to come out in the ring.
Levey comes by the subject matter of his debut film naturally. “I grew up in Alberta, so… Calgary Stampede Wrestling, right? My parents used it as a baby sitter. I’d flick on ITV in Edmonton and see ‘Champagne’ Jerry Morrow and Rick Patterson.
“And these were the local guys. Years later, these guys would become some of the most famous wrestlers in the world, like Bret Hart and Chris Benoit. I grew up watching that.”
But Levey, who realized his attraction to men early in life, was also exposed to the bizarre and often vicious fun-house mirror of gayness that professional wrestling depicted. From Gorgeous George to Adrian Street to Adrian Adonis to Goldust to the WWE’s infamous “gay wedding” between Billy Gunn and Chuck Palumbo (who called the stunt off at the last minute on-air, announcing that they were straight).
“There was so much of that, pulling the wool over our eyes, heterosexuals playing gay. I think of some of those guys, like Adrian Street, who was effeminate and a bad guy. In the ‘70s, he was dressed in hardcore leather. I don’t know too many wimpy leather guys. The WWE just didn’t understand the queer coding.
“How quickly these wrestlers would get their backs up if you called them on it. ‘It’s not gay!’ Well, it is pretty gay.
“You can’t really divide drag culture from wrestling the way they get into the ring, feathers and makeup and all of that. There’s so much of this stuff, you look back and wonder, ‘How do you not notice it?’ It’s all just built up to play on people’s discomfort around homosexuality and gender representation.”
Ryan Bruce Levey
And for actual gay wrestlers, it was a genuine struggle. The Canadian wrestler Pretty Pat Patterson – who trained The Rock - was closeted and had a partner for 40 years (“out” only to those close to him, including, ironically, WWE boss Vince McMahon). Women’s wrestling impresario The Fabulous Moolah had a history of firing women in her stable who admitted being lesbians.
When the WWE’s Darren Young came out in 2013, McMahon and company publicly supported him, but forbade him from being gay as his character in the ring.
The uplifting part of Out in the Ring is its discovery of gay and gender-fluid wrestlers performing outside the WWE, many of whom tell their stories in the film.
“Interestingly enough, when I started filming in 2017, I was hard pressed to find 10 gay or trans wrestlers,” Levey says. “Eventually, I found Charlie Morgan in the U.K., she’d been the first person to come out actively in the ring, as part of both her gimmick and her life story. The Effy story started to come out (arguably the most effective self-promoter in gay wrestling).
“And we cut to now and (the LGBT sports news outlet) Outsports has 200 wrestlers on the list.”
The WWE, he says, “have, like, three out wrestlers currently on their roster, all women, no men. No trans.
“Whereas everybody’s over at AEW (All Elite Wrestling). They’ve got Nyla Rose who’s a multi-racial First Nations trans woman who’s been world champion twice. You’ve got Anthony Bowens, who’s in the tag team division. They just keep bringing in this LGBQT+ talent. They signed Jake Atlas, Toni Storm, who left the WWE and who’s openly bisexual.”
Matthew Jeffers and Sarah Hay in Unidentified Objects.
A publicist and distributor for most of this century, Levey guesses he’s promoted 300 films, many of them on gay themes. “When I started my company, I got a grant from a gay business program. The first film I ever put out was the Margaret Cho standup comedy film. Then Straightman, which was also a queer film.”
He tended to gravitate toward documentaries, partly because, “the early 2000s was a period of some of the worst gay films you’ve ever seen. Awful, stereotypical, very Will & Grace films, that pandered to the straight audience, saying, ‘Look at us, we’re normal too!’ I’ve never been drawn to those stories.
“But docu-queer cinema mattered, and I wanted to know more about our history – films like We Were Here and Matt Shepard is a Friend of Mine, which I worked on.
“I want to make sure history isn’t forgotten in my community.”
Screening at the TIFF Bell Lightbox from May 26-June 5, with 128 queer-themed films from 28 countries, the Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival runs a gamut of genres.
The opening night film, Mars One, directed by Gabriel Martins, and starring Rejane Faria and Carlos Francisco is about the stresses of a Brazilian family in the wake of the election of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. It plays Inside Out in the wake of acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival.
The closing night feature is the first two episodes of The Lake, a Canadian comedy to debut on Prime Video June 17. It’s the story of Justin (Jordan Gavaris), recovering from a broken, long-term relationship, and trying to mend fences with his biological daughter (Madison Shamoun) who’d been given up for adoption.
One personal “discovery” this year is Unidentified Objects, a touching and funny road film about a misanthropic gay dwarf named Peter (Matthew Jeffers) with a fixation on the plays of Chekhov, and Winona (Sarah Hay) a sex worker on a mission to cross the border into Canada to reunite with the aliens she believes once abducted her. It’s a strange and resonant sort-of-a-love-story that, even on its DIY budget, may be one of the best first features I’ve ever seen.
Other features of note:
-Tramps!, director Kevin Hegge’s doc about the post-punk New Romantic movement in London’s music and fashion.
-Fire Island, Andrew Ahn’s romantic comedy starring Joel Kim Booster. Bowen Yang, Conrad Ricamora, and Margaret Cho and inspired by Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
-Compulsus, a “queer vigilante” film from Canadian writer-director Tara Thorne, about a woman who roams the streets taking revenge on behalf of victims of abuse.
-Phantom Project. From Chilean director Roberto Doveris, a “gay, urban ghost story.”
-Framing Agnes. Chase Joynt’s Sundance-winning film uses the talk-show format and a cast of transgender performers to bring to life six stories from the ‘50s, taken from the archives of the UCLA Gender Clinic.
CLICK HERE for a full list of Inside Out Films and ticket info.