Effy hopes that wrestling will continue to embrace diversity so the genre can continue to flourish and give new performers and fans another way to enjoy it.
Effy recently appeared on AdFreeShows’ One-On-One with Jon Alba and spoke about how diversity in wrestling has improved in recent years.
“It’s kind of this fun world where I’m learning more every day even as someone who is a gay man, even as someone who’s in the LGBTQ community, there’s so much we’re learning about each other, about ourselves where we’re not trying to segment each other but we’re trying to understand each other better. So, it’s almost like, ‘hey if this box and this box can help you understand me, I’m not living exclusively there…’ but it helps people communicate better and within our little realm,” Effy explained, “I’ve often joked that a lot of insiders kicked out the outsiders but it turns out that there were more outsiders than there were insiders all looking around going ‘uh, the outside is everyone now.’
“So now seeing not just the growth and diversity of being able to platform new wrestlers that may not have had a spot before — and I want to say this because I don’t want to not give myself credit but truth is, I’m not the best, most compassionate, most caring of all, I’m just the loudest and I can’t shut myself up. And if I’m gonna machete through the jungle here, y’all come along and eat as many berries as you please, but I get first pick because I’m over here yelling. But the expansion of people and their identities here, it expands what we can do in stories and it expands what we can do in matches. It expands the different little nuances and layers that the fans who are coming to wrestling shows now want and expect and are interested in keeping up with those details, the minutia,” he explained, “and we’re offering a completely new perspective.
“We’ve had different struggles, we’ve had different ways of getting here, we haven’t fit in here completely until a little bit recently but it’s because we’ve culminated our world where our people feel safe performing and coming but we’ve made it an attractive world where people are going, ‘But it’s also just good wrestling, so maybe I should just be watching this too and finding out that like wrestling is wrestling.’ Whoever’s there, whatever nationality or race or gender or lack of gender or whatever you want to be,” he added, “your truth is yours and you get to come show that on a stage where there’s familiarity to pro wrestling but now we get to use that familiarity to explore stuff that we hadn’t had the people here open enough to explore.”
Effy went on to speak about past representation and how it wasn’t presented in the best light, more often than not in a demeaning or negative way. Effy then offered some advice from wrestling manager Pollo Del Mar as to why performers not only put up with the practice, but how things have progressed.
“It’s different now. I’m going to say a bit of a Pollo Del Mar quote, if you’re not familiar with Pollo Del Mar, she’s a very talented drag queen from California but she’s also been managing Jamie Senegal in NWA, she’s been doing hosting duties at my shows, she’s been writing articles and doing podcasts. She’s fully in on wrestling and the way she kind of puts it is that yes, we weren’t presented the best way, we weren’t always shown in the best light but when the only thing you can eat is schlopp, you eat the schlopp until you can make a steak. We are now at the point where we’re like, ‘hey, we’ve eaten a lot of f-ckin’ schlopp, it’s fine and it fed us, but we can make our own food now.’
“We are in the position to do these things without being necessary sort of… there’s always been these gates. You needed cable television, you needed a bigger company, you needed this and now people are seeking us out because at first, they’re finding out that we’re with them, we’re different, we fit in with them but also because they’re going ‘I didn’t even know wrestling was like this.’ You bring up wrestling and they’re still like ‘oh, Hogan, oh Austin, oh The Rock,’ you know they’re stuck 25 years in the past because wrestling today has not progressed past that.
“We are still telling the same stories, we are still telling the same, ‘this is why they’re feuding, they’re feuding because they’re mad at their brands, they want their brands to win’ and they’re often surprised when we go, ‘hey, we told a really weird, nuanced story about someone being possessed by a demon and me having to give their soul back’ and they go ‘that’s so stupid!’ and I go, it wasn’t though because we told the story we needed to tell and they’ve been afraid to take those risks because they got bitten a little,” Effy explained, “like they put their toes in the water with some things and they didn’t do it correctly and we bite. You don’t ever want to put your feet back in the water again and instead of going, ‘hey, the last time we went in the water, it wasn’t good, you’re a water guide, can you lead us in?’ Of course, they went, ‘we’ll never stick our feet in the water again, no matter if that costs us money’ because we can’t risk f-cking up, instead of going ‘hey can we’re trying to approach this as good as possible.”
Effy went on to say that there’s a whole new audience of wrestling coming in and by holding on to the “traditional” view of wrestling instead of trying to make the program better, companies will be missing out on so much that’s out there.
Read More: Effy On The Evolution Of Professional Wrestling: It’s Okay To Let The Bang Out
