I thought it was more important for me to look tough, or look fierce, or for someone to think I'm a jerk, or a clown or anything other than someone that needed help. Because I thought, once I did, people would pity me. Once they knew, like, OK, but it wasn't information I'd give up freely. "You know, I usually wouldn't tell people my mother had passed. But there might as well have been no one, as far as the feelings going on inside those walls," Sam says. "There were three bodies in there: me, my brother and my father. Sam retreated inward, in a home now overflowing with grief. That feeling of being other was accentuated when Sam’s mother passed away from cancer when Sam was just 10. You know, much of my family around then would change their names from 'Mahmoud' to 'Mike.' From 'Freidoun' to 'David.' From 'Farokh' to 'Frank.' " "He knew that - being how he looked - if he wore a cross, people would give him less grief. Not from the devil, but from people around him," Sam says. Sam had a cousin who wore a cross every day. It was a place where an Iranian American last name like Khandaghabadi was commented upon by students and teachers alike.
Sam was born in Alpharetta, Georgia, the youngest of two brothers in a white Southern town. The person Sam showed me now was different: less anxious, more open and far from a leading man. As we walked to grab dinner, the wrestler admitted that the character I had written about a half decade earlier was an illusion. Last November, I met Sam again for a profile in the San Francisco Chronicle. Sam took a pull from a cigarette, probably to hide a grin, as I excitedly scratched the quote into my notebook.
Seated on a couch, chain-smoking cigarettes in a leather jacket, Sam ran through a list of skills and credits that served as a kind of resume to start Hoodslam. Sam, skinny but strong, with a mess of dark curly hair, was more than happy to play my Vice Magazine story’s leading man. I’d arrived to cover Hoodslam, the ultra-popular indie Oakland wrestling show and to meet the wrestlers who lived there ahead of that Friday’s event. It’s a sprawling, beat-up building that looks more auto shop than home, surrounded by a fenced-in concrete yard, in a tough part of Oakland. I first met Sam Khandaghabadi in 2014 at the Victory Warehouse. Huckaby) This article is more than 2 years old. But, as he explains after a fight in Magdalena Culhuacán on the outskirts of Mexico City, still sweating and with a seriously injured jaw, he found that he could make more money playing an effeminate man for laughs.Īmong the audience, regardless of whether there's an Exótico in the ring, strong gay slurs always pepper the chants.Sam Khandaghabadi (left) founded Hoodslam, an Oakland-based indie wrestling show, in 2010. In fact, although most Exóticos are gay on and off stage, there are also fighters like Máximo, who lead a straight life out of the ring.
Ramos admits that without a doubt, it's problematic that Exóticos involve stereotyping of gays, and that homosexuality is played for laughs. The Exótico will pin down his opponent, or the ref, and plant a big, wet kiss on them.
But their technical skills are often overshadowed by their overt sexuality - and by the audience chants: Inevitably, as soon as an Exótico takes the ring, the audience begins to chant " Beso! Beso! Beso!" - demanding a kiss.Īnd they get what they ask for. Back then they didn't wear makeup, and they weren't as overtly sexual as they are today.ĭespite their antics, Exóticos fight like the best of them. He says Exóticos are nothing new: they've been around since at least the 1940s. They flirt with the ref, blow kisses at the crowd and come on strongly to other fighters.įilmmaker Michael Ramos recently made a documentary about them called Los Exóticos.
Young gay men wrestling in a ring full#
With names that might well be titles of Danielle Steel novels en Español - like Diva Salvaje, Pasión Kristal and El Bello Califa (Beautiful Califa) - they participate in regular fights, but wearing full makeup and often very feminine outfits. It's also an unlikely niche for Mexico's LGBT community.Įxóticos - or Exotics - are campy, mostly gay, male luchadores, or fighters. They make big threats and promise spectacular smackdowns. It's a sport that's generally associated with machismo: buff fighters with names like Nemesis and Aguila Imperial (Imperial Eagle) strut around in a rope-bound ring, wearing shiny spandex outfits and colorful masks.
Young gay men wrestling in a ring professional#
Professional wrestling, known as lucha libre - literally, freestyle wrestling - is a big deal in Mexico.