Both were contestants on the show along with Deville’s close friend and former tag team partner Mandy Rose. We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. Some use their presence in the ring to shed light on other organizations that actively kept lesbian women obscured. These depictions were damaging in their ability to define lesbian identities to wrestling audiences, but they also masked the industry’s actual lesbian history.

None of this is to say that the current position of lesbian representation in pro wrestling is where it should be. PARENTS, PLEASE BE ADVISED: If you are a parent, it is your responsibility to keep any age-restricted content from being displayed to your children or wards.Furthermore, you represent and warrant that you will not allow any minor access to this site or services.

Her signing made her the first out lesbian pro wrestler to sign with the company in its 70-plus-year history. Smith is sports’ jackass, and he doesn’t want to talk about an NBA player’s gay or bi encounters that he himself sought out and reported. Names like Mercedes Martinez and Sonya Deville gives lesbian members of WWE’s audience figures to latch onto. The LGBTQ “Pride Fighter” commented on that long journey to gold in a Twitter post alongside a picture of the two with WWE chief content officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque. But there is no denying that the seeds on undeniability Parker and Green planted are now being harvested by today’s growing population of out, proud lesbian wrestlers.

The excitement in her voice perfectly matched with the joy on her face is both a landmark and an image that no one with knowledge of any mainstream pro wrestling programming from 1995 onward ever thought they would see. The match ended after the two teams exchanged near falls, leaving an opening for Green to hit her Unpretty-Her finisher followed by Deville hitting a running knee and securing the pinfall victory. Deville now joins Shayna Baszler, Indi Hartwell, Piper Niven, Pat Patterson, current New Japan Pro Wrestling star Fred Rosser and current AEW star Saraya as the only out LGBTQ wrestlers to win a WWE championship. 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. It worked to destigmatize lesbian relationships while giving Deville herself a vehicle to hold nothing back in her expression of who she is.

Her inclusion on the company’s reality show Total Divas provided the most genuine look into LGBTQ identities ever to grace WWE programming. Deville and tag team partner Chelsea Green defeated Liv Morgan and Raquel Gonzalez to win the WWE Women’s Tag Team championships on Monday’s edition of “Monday Night Raw. 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. Green and Deville’s connection ties back to WWE’s 2015 revival of its reality competition show “Tough Enough. Names like Susan Green and Sandy Parker defied women’s wrestling gatekeepers like The Fabulous Moolah that did their best to outlaw LGBTQ wrestlers’ public expression of their identities within their stables.

The image of Deville running through a Pride celebration on Total Divas exclaiming “I’m gay” is a GIF that plays on repeat in the minds of many (including me). They may not have reached the highest stages in American pro wrestling during their careers, but they became the foundation for what was to come. Even WWE, nearly 20 years removed from the initials “HLA,” now has prominent lesbian voices among its roster that are a driving force in pulling the company slowly into acknowledging LGBTQ identities.