Show Response: TBoy Wrestling Day 2

By Noa Rui-Piin Weiss

TBoy wrestling rolled through New York City like a hormone-fueled carnival and left me sweaty and sore and nursing a massive crush.

This will not be a complete reflection on the event by any means, I wrestled on day 2 and spent an hour before I went on chugging water and nervous peeing instead of watching the matches. The event did still change my life.

Some background for the uninitiated: TBoy wrestling features performance wrestling, folk wrestling (think varsity sports-style), and matches with a combination of both. There are judges and cash prizes but mostly people come to scream “KISS!!” at trans guys as they throw each other to the ground. Often, there is kissing.

Throughout the 10 hours I spent at 9 Bob Note last Sunday, I chatted with people I had seen at sex parties and people who were friends of friends and people who had fucked people I know. This is the persistent power of live performance: it drags us out of isolation and forces us into proximity. You must show up and you must mingle, or at least make some eye contact. What you never realize in the moment is that these points of connection are an investment in a shared future—these are the people who will look out for you for the rest of your life.

Community is not a word I use often because I feel like it ignores the loneliness that bubbles up when you stand in a crowd of people who are supposed to be like you. So I won’t call TBoy wrestling a community, but it is a place where I, and it seems many other people, felt loved.

Exercise and physicality are vulnerable things, and masculinity only makes it worse. We carry insecurities from the outside world into any place where we’re expected to perform feats of strength: am I strong enough? am I cut enough? will people pity me when I get my ass handed to me? But instead of the burning shame of failure and estrangement so familiar from gym class and high school sports, TBoy wrestling gave us a gentle sense of unity. We said nice things about each other, we threw each other smiles, we gave endless compliments. Our bodies were not strange; everyone was there to celebrate us.

A terrifying network of violence floats behind this event. Every wrestler at TBoy wrestling has felt those moments of stinging fear–in a locker room, in a competition, in a doctor’s office, in bed with a stranger or a lover. We came to this event for positive vibes, but we were also driven there by the danger that pervades our existence.

For the most part, people kept it light and fun. Performance wrestlers worked the crowd, tore off their tank tops, pulled out silly props, and spanked each other. The winning performance duo, a match between Beefcake and The munch, brought a third performer on the stage for a dip into a three-way kiss. The folk wrestling was largely good natured, with opponents smiling and clapping each other on the back after matches. My wrestling partner cove and I did an enemies-to-lovers number to Sugar We’re Goin’ Down where cove swung me around the ring and I proposed to him. Every performer was making the world they want to live in: one where trans people can participate in sports without anyone blinking an eye, and everyone is gay for each other.

But the utopian attitude shifts at the finale.

The judges carry Dallas Havoc into the ring with his hands bound behind his back and a hood over his head, then dump him on a folding chair. He’s our action hero, bloodied and captured with no way out. Atlanta Proper appears on a balcony above the crowd in a catsuit. They’re the assassin, the shadowy hand of state power ready to take out our hero. The plot thickens: Atlanta receives a call that “transgenderism” has created a rupture in our social fabric, and the government has a gender morpher in custody. It’s Atlanta’s job to annihilate him.

It should be corny, but it isn’t. I feel my throat catch when Atlanta enters the ring and slides a fake blade over Dallas’ scars, yelling “YOU’RE NOT A MAN.” My heart tightens when Dallas screams back “YES I AM” through a bloody fabric gag.

It’s eerie to have another trans person play the heel, but Atlanta’s performance shows how useful camp can be. By taking on the role of the villain, they’re saying “The fear you feel is real. I can reflect the danger back to you because I face it too.”

What follows is an unreal smackdown. Heads grabbed between the thighs and slammed against the mat, tumbling passes into pins, a classic folding chair smash. And just when you think Dallas has won, Atlanta comes back and punches him in the gut. They pull out Dallas’ packer and dangle to the crowd, disgusted. All is lost. Until the triumphant return, when Dallas whips his entire body around Atlanta’s neck, springs back into a handstand and crashes Atlanta to the ground.

Atlanta and Dallas took the high camp of wrestling and alchemized the fear we’ve all been feeling—that the government will stick its hand down our pants and say “what is that thing?”—then turned it into a James Bond-style drama. They gave us a spectacular theatrical container to experience the triumph, the despair, the feeling of fighting for your life only to get the shit kicked out of you. They turned the low hum of constant threat up to 10 and gave us a cathartic ending.

But underneath the spectacle are two trans people with undeniable trust between them working through wild feats of momentum and impact to put on a great fucking show. Every act of bravado is also an act of care—Atlanta smacks their chest to show Dallas that they’re ready, and to give Dallas a moment to prep before the next move, all while playing the cocky villain. Dallas stomps his back foot every time he slams Atlanta’s head into the corner of the ring, sending momentum through his legs instead of his arms, letting Atlanta control their head and providing noise as cover for the fakeout move.

Everyone knows wrestling is theater but TBoy wrestling proves how powerful theater is. It lets us be hokey, silly, and indulgent while laying out the depths of our feelings. We’re horny and angry and scared and we desperately want to put our hands all over our friends. We want to be bigger, stronger, faster than we actually are. And whatever insecurities we may have about ourselves, we’re willing to go to the mat for each other.

There are many nuanced debates about whether transness is a useful political category, but the cruel fact is that our bodies and our choices are the targets of an organized campaign of violence. It is still radical to love trans people, and to love them as their strangest, most unreadable selves.

I guess what I’m saying is that I live in one of the places where it’s easiest to be a trans person and I still feel a deep, pervasive sense of alienation from most of the world. And even though TBoy wrestling was a tiring, sweaty 10 hours of my life, in many ways it felt more like home than any other place I’ve tried to put myself.

It was not utopia. But I felt a weight lifted off me that I didn’t know I had been carrying.

all photos screenshots from video taken by Weiss

TBoy Wrestling is organized by The Print Shop.