Laurels and Sugar Daddies

On wrestling's homoerotic origins, sex trafficking, and the 92-foot Pride installation on the South Lawn.

The New York City Pride March kicks off in 14 days, but the nation’s biggest homage to gay history may be unfolding on the White House lawn.

Of course we all know that ancient Greek athletes grappled in the nude, their oiled bodies gliding smoothly as they brought their opponent to submission. But did you know this was the primary social space for wealthy men looking for toned and flexible young sexual partners?

And I’m not just talking about wrestling of old as just about the gayest thing on earth. I’m talking about the wrestling we grew up watching and that now positions its shaved and oiled self to the world as the pinnacle celebration of America’s 250th anniversary.

They may not be completely nude, and the wrestling is as fake as a $3 bill, but the intimacy is arguably even more deliberate. Now those men in very little clothing, physically intertwined for twenty minutes, must work together to tell a story through their bodies.

The work of pro wrestling is learning how to move with another man, how to make contact look violent when it isn’t, how to make the audience feel the weight of a body. That intimacy is inseparable from the craft. Guys who’ve done it for years talk about needing to trust your opponent completely, needing to know his body and rhythm.

It is also a drag show of epic proportions. The performance of hypermasculinity, the posturing, the exaggerated aggression, the over-the-top costumes, have always been the height of camp. Gorgeous George in his cape and bleached curls.

And WOOOO! Nature Boy Ric Flair and his outfits even Liberace found tacky.

Even the language of wrestling carries echoes of Polari, the secret slang used by some gay men and performers in 19th/early 20th-century Britain to talk without getting arrested. Back then, queer folks, circus workers, and stage performers often shared coded words to survive and to clock who was part of their criminalized community. As those performance circuits influenced and intertwined with U.S. carnival culture, that shared slang and showman’s patter helped shape the insider vocabulary we still hear in wrestling today: words like “gimmick,” “mark,” “work,” and “kayfabe.”

Trump has been in the wrestling business since 1988, when he hosted WrestleMania at his Atlantic City casino. He and Vince McMahon were two men who understood that a crowd doesn’t need to believe something is real to go all in on it.

Pat Patterson, the man who invented the Royal Rumble, came out personally in the 1970s and publicly in 2014. He spent decades as one of Vince McMahon’s most trusted creative minds. Taking the gay out of wrestling is like taking the wet out of water.

The same casino drew another man with the same vision. Dana White looked at nearly naked, nubile men fighting and saw limitless financial potential. Trump gave him a venue when 36 states had banned the sport and nobody else would touch it. Even if you don’t follow UFC, you may remember White as the man who repeatedly slapped his wife in public after trying to stop her from walking away from him but suffered no legal or professional consequences:

Vince McMahon is not there today. A former WWE employee has sued him for sex trafficking and sexual assault, alleging he made her employment contingent on sex and trafficked her to other men inside and outside the company. His co-defendant just settled with her and agreed to provide evidence against him. The man who built the Trump-wrestling pipeline is currently a disgraced figure whose lawsuit is being quietly moved toward confidential arbitration two days before the event he helped make possible happens on the White House lawn.

But Trump always takes care of his own. Linda McMahon, who built WWE alongside Vince, now runs the Department of Education.

And today, both sports landed on the same lawn anyway. UFC fighters in the cage. WWE favorites working the fan fest nearby. TKO Group Holdings merged them in 2023. While UFC fighters do not usually wear the outlandish costumes and makeup of their WWE brethren, they still find a way to bring the gay.

Not even COVID could dampen the pure delight on Dana White’s face during the legendary faceoff as men, strip down to their speedos to stare deeply and intensely into the windows of each other’s souls.

The White House lawn has been transformed by a 92-foot steel arch covered in light rigs and catwalks that looks, from any angle, like a Pride installation. Calling it The Claw only makes it sound like the latest leather bar to open near Dupont Circle.

And now, beneath it, those oiled men will begin their pageant as a crowd likely made up overwhelmingly of men and boys cheers the theatrical posturing of these modern heirs to those ephebic Greek lads who competed for laurels and sugar daddies.

Guurl, I’m sure it will be a sight unless threatening storms rain on their parade. But I won’t be watching the spectacle. I will focus my attention on the less gay environment of a WNBA game.