Kikyo wept when the final bell rang on Sunday night.
Real tears cut glossy tracks through the blood (also real) that caked her cheeks. Her opponent, and winner of the match, Su Young, lay sprawled out on the mat next to her. The two women shared a brief moment of stillness at the end of a night of frenetic violence. Broken tables, doors, and chairs… all innocuous household items by any other context, lay shattered around them in a dragon’s nest of befouled domesticity. The crowd inside Morrison Market was on their feet. Shouts, chants, the pounding of fists on the ring apron, the cacophony of exultations varied in content but were unified in meaning: All hail the queen.
Such was the scene on a night in late summer following the climactic final match at DOA Pro Wrestling’s Queen of Thorns tournament—a yearly event featuring an all woman and non-binary line-up.
Having femme-centered events often feels radical in both art and sports. It feels extra crucial in pro wrestling (a medium of both art AND sport), where the dominant culture for years was plagued by the most toxic of masculinity. The Fallen Flower Kikyo is the Seattle-based wrestler who lost to Su Young in the finals of the tournament. Here’s how she says things have changed for women since she started in the industry in 2009: “We were still doing bra and panties matches,” she said. “(Women’s matches) were the bathroom breaks at shows.”
When Kikyo began there were only about three other women in the PNW competing at her level. “I was told: you’re fat so you have to be the bad guy in every match. Now you can be whatever you want.” She’s quick to acknowledge the women wrestlers who came before her, who scratched and clawed for the changes she now celebrates.
This year’s tournament champion, Su Young, who has fought in almost every Queen of Thorns (QoT), has seen DOA and the tournament itself grow and change since its inaugural show in 2019.
“Looking at the lineup of this tournament, we had the most diversity of any in the tournament’s history,” Young said in a rare out-of-character phone interview the day after the tourney. “Diverse talent within people, age range, and level of experience… some people just starting out and others having been on TV. I felt like a proud mom, I’ve seen all of them grow.”
One potent way in which that diversity could be felt was the abundance of queer talent on the show’s line-up; with at least six of the performers being either trans or non-binary. Young elaborated on the importance of this representation, saying “Every single person who wrestled in that tournament represented something that someone could watch, and be like ‘wow, I feel so motivated, I feel inspired… I’ve changed my perspective, because I just saw this person do something that altered my mind a little bit, opening it to seeing the bigger picture’.”
It’s clear that an increased diversity in the ring has correlated with and likely precipitated an increased diversity in the audience. At the peak of the art form’s popularity, misogyny and homophobia were so pervasive in mainstream wrestling that many people still hold on to the stereotype of a wrestling fan being a belligerent straight man with repugnant social values. At last month’s DOA show, packs of stylish trans women rubbed elbows with aging, working class white men who were sitting in the same rows as families with wild-eyed children cheering on their local heroes. As someone who has been an active part of Portland’s night life and performance art scene for over a decade, it sometimes feels like a wrestling crowd is one of Portland’s only true melting pots.
Wrestler Lucy Luxx, a Black trans woman who slaughters opponents alongside tag-team partner Zelda Fox, knows the importance of these changes first-hand.
“Being able to represent a part of the population that is actively being targeted and spoken against by every level of power in the country—especially as an athlete—it feels great to just be accepted and recognized in my womanhood and it not be debated,” Luxx explained to me in a phone call as her cat, Salem, loudly petitioned for an early dinner in the background. “I’m tired of having to justify and explain myself, and it’s nice to have spaces where I don’t have to. I did not expect professional wrestling to be that space, but it’s great and important that it is.”
These sea changes would be notable if only confined to the sport side of wrestling. But behind the scenes, DOA is going even further in pioneering pop culture change. The Queen of Thorns event not only features an all woman and non-binary lineup. The production employs an almost exclusively femme and non-binary crew; from the referees, to the production team, to the people operating the merch table. Many of the women working the ring crew and the merch table at Queen of Thorns are currently in training to be wrestlers themselves.
DOA has a reputation for elevating voices from all backgrounds, so in some ways the work of adding more women to the production was already done before the planning for this year’s tournament even started.
Iszy Bonney, who co-leads the company’s video production team, had this to say about her crew’s inclusion: “We didn’t need to turn over anything we were already doing, we’re a three-person team, two of whom are female or non-binary.” Iszy’s team plays a crucial part in presenting the narrative of any given show. Wrestling walks the fine line between sport and art, story and spectacle. While the outcomes of the matches are predetermined, much of the violence is very real, and the verisimilitude is in many ways shaped by the live streaming video version of the show.
Iszy, who got into wrestling after finding the notoriously prolific wrestling fan fic community in the mid 2010’s (search “Ambrollins” on Archive Of Our Own if you want to go down a lurid rabbit hole), is known throughout the PNW wrestling scene for her singular ambition and vision. She started offering her services to film shows for local wrestling promotions starting in 2020.
“So much of what happens its local wrestling gets lost to the annals of time,” Iszy said. “That’s something I noticed when I came out here and heard people talk about the days of Roddy Piper… some of them are gone forever. My greatest honor is to make sure there is an archive of what happened here.”
The local wrestling scene now lauds Izzy as a tent poll of the community, and Izzy can feel it.
“Wrestling has given me my life on so many levels… it’s given me my community. I can’t imagine my life without it.”
Young sums up the scene by praising this part of the country for its forward lean.
“The Pacific Northwest is really special,” Young said. “I hope more eyes are on the area, because what we bring to the table is so unique, so diverse, so special… you don’t find this style anywhere else. I like to use the word ‘raw’— we do a lot of art out here.”
DOA Pro Wrestling runs monthly shows around the Portland area. Upcoming lineups and tickets can be found at DOAprowrestling.com.