The much-beloved Mexican wrestling style features sweaty, grappling men and women in Lycra masks, lace-up boots, and tights that leave little to the imagination—and that’s the sport at its most hetero. For decades—since the 1940s, less than a decade after the first professional league for the sport was formed in 1933—lucha has had a queer streak running through it. This vein of flamboyance is known as the exóticos, lucha libre’s gay-playing wrestlers who may or may not identify as LGBT outside the ring. The exóticos are typically rudos, luchadores who play bad guys. They’re conniving in their flouncing and have no qualms in using their character’s sexuality to score one on the bros. An exótico may psych out an opponent by propositioning them in the ring, or distract them by a particularly well-turned hand flourish executed before landing a blow. (…) Why do the exóticos exist in Mexican lucha libre? Anthropologist Heather Levi gives much thought to this matter in her 2008 book, The World of Lucha Libra: Secrets, Revelations, and Mexican National Identity, citing a theory that Mexican culture, even with all its machismo, is more tolerant of open homosexuality. The exóticos, or “men who have abdicated their masculinity,” in Levi’s words, duck out of the traditional chingón/chingado (fucker/fucked) dichotomy, by making their status in this binary of masculinity a forgone conclusion. Levi says when a gay luchador is in the ring, the space’s status as a masculine world is complicated. Exóticos, she writes, “do nothing to challenge the notion that a maricón is a bad thing to be. On the other hand, by their very presence in the ring, they mock the system that they are supposed to ground.”
