“No matter who I met, I would refer to myself in a way that would appear I was straight.” “When I first started training I made the decision to get into wrestling as a straight male,” Atlas says. Jake Atlas promo photography // Photo by Jon Washer
While today he is one of the most in-demand wrestlers in the country, when Atlas first decided to break into the business back in 2014, he worried that his sexuality would hinder any potential opportunities. One of those wrestlers is Jake Atlas, a Mexican-American wrestler from California who is one of the hottest prospects in wrestling today, and just recently signed with WWE to join their performance center this coming year. It wasn’t until later when I saw other LGBTQ wrestlers who were being successful that I decided to really go for it.” “I started out wanting to be a wrestler, but I didn’t think I could succeed because I was gay.
“Growing up I didn’t see anyone on TV who represented me or who I could relate to,” says Monroe. That’s why it shouldn’t come as a surprise that gay wrestling fans felt like there weren’t any performers who they could identify with. As recently as the late 90s and early 2000s, wrestlers like Goldust, who was one of the most hated bad guy wrestlers due to his infatuation with fellow male performers, and the West Hollywood Blondes, who caused protests from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation who claimed the team was portrayed in a way that encouraged people to hate and inflict harm on people who were openly gay, were presented on weekly television in front of millions of viewers. In fact, being gay was often one of the easiest ways for a character to garner “heat,” or the outpouring of negativity from the crowd.
Monroe is just one of many up-and-coming performers blazing a trail and changing the stigma of LGBTQ wrestlers in the evolving landscape of professional wrestling.įor generations, pro wrestling has been regarded as a straight-man’s world. Devon Monroe making his entrance to a F1rst Wrestling match // Photo by Knocked Out Entertainment