Paige was raised in a wrestling family and even had her first match at 13 tagging with her mother no less, so you could literally say that wrestling is in her blood. It felt like nearly every day brought new additions to the family, more events celebrating LGBTQ identities and sections of the LGBTQ community raising their voices to speak directly to the faces of pro wrestling power structures.

Now, decades later, the defiant spirits embodying that openness and desire for visibility among wrestling’s lesbian community refuse to keep their identities in the shadows. People like Ashley Vox and Rebel Kinney wear their identities openly in the ring without apology. Charlie Morgan’s promo in which she came out publicly in the ring at a Pro Wrestling EVE event is forever immortalized for its raw reality and ability to usher new LGBTQ fans into a welcoming wrestling space. The match is really interesting, a 100% physical confrontation all based on muscles and power. You have rarely seen Venere forced to make such a great effort to give serious trouble to her opponent.

STONE RAGE COMICS

The country has made great strides with increasing awareness on the subject of homosexuality and transgender issues through PSAs and through advocacy groups educating the public. The movement by the LGBTQ community was centered on the desire not to be shunned for their differences but to be accepted as part of the fabric of society. It’s something that’s super important because I went through that same journey that a lot of people are going through in the LGBTQ community, which is struggling with my sexuality and being open about it,” Deville said on Outsports’ LGBT In The Ring podcast. “That’s the position I was in seven-plus years ago.” And when those ears didn’t understand or ignored what they were being told, LGBTQ people yet again proved that they don’t need them to build their own spaces within the field.

This isn’t about one generation. It’s about every single voice - past, present and future - stating that we belong and we are here, from the ring to the very last eyeball taking it all in.And in all that, you can still enjoy some spectacular and acrobatic moves that do justice to the skills and agility of the IFW girls! If you blinked in 2006, you may have missed this buxom beauty’s run in the WWE under the ECW banner. Shelly Martinez was signed by WWE in mid-2006 to be a valet for wrestler Kevin Thorn, a failed short-lived character who was previously another failed and short-lived character, Mordecai. Thorn was an odd vampire character and Shelly was his gothic, witch-like manager named Ariel. And the movement will surely welcome names we have yet to learn, those whose dreams of stepping between the ropes are just starting to form, thanks to the continued momentum and growing volume of queer voices in pro wrestling around the globe. Most people didn’t know Nyla Rose before she signed with All Elite Wrestling. She’d worked with promotions like Covey Pro, Warriors of Wrestling, and Sendai Girls, but she didn’t really have any national exposure in the US. That changed all at once with AEW signing and her debut at Double Or Nothing, where she faced Kylie Rae, Britt Baker, and Awesome Kong in a Fatal Fourway. As a member of the AEW roster, Nyla is the first transgender wrestler to sign with a major promotion, and this fall she’ll presumably be the first trans wrestler to appear regularly on TV. As a result of the growing public and societal acceptance of diverse lifestyles, more and more athletes and celebrities are feeling safe enough to come out and embrace their orientation proudly. The erroneous stereotypes of being gay meaning you’re weak or strange are being shattered every day and that is especially the case in the wrestling world.

Great is our new, extremely original listicle series where we take a break from snark and negativity to focus on the positive and list eight of our favorite examples of something great from pro wrestling. Matches, performers, shows — whatever is helping us enjoy wrestling in a particular week, that’s what this feature is all about. What was it like for you coming up and cutting your teeth in an era when women’s wrestling was so sexualized?I’d like to think that if Darren Young had debuted in WWE a few years later, things would have gone better for him. On the other hand, considering everything that still goes on there, it’s hard to be confident even in that. Young debuted in 2010 as part of Nexus, and publicly came out as gay in 2013. That made him the first WWE Superstar to come out while still actively wrestling. At the time, he was in the Prime Time Players tag team alongside Titus O’Neil. They briefly held the Tag Team Championship during a 2015 feud with the New Day, which was the only Title Darren held during his years in WWE. Kinney’s is the kind of passion needed not just to succeed in wrestling but also to inspire those watching, craving a figure in which they can see themselves. That desire was always there, but her journey in pro wrestling might have found its catalyst later, if not for a childhood VHS switcheroo. Some use their presence in the ring to shed light on other organizations that actively kept lesbian women obscured. The Great Bambina’s in-ring presentation is partially a radical response to the lesbian erasure perpetrated by the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, whose history was dramatized in the film A League of Their Own, Just like the PWI 500 and BW 500 lists that inspired this one, the LGBTQ community deserves exactly what others in pro wrestling have been afforded for years. If last year’s list of 100 proved that closing your eyes to what is happening isn’t acceptable anymore, 2021 represented a towering force that forced eyes open, focusing their gaze on a cultural revolution within an industry long overdue for it.