Inthe Acclaimed star initially confirmed that he was bisexual, before later revealing that he identifies as gay. Bowens, who acclaimed out as bisexual in January and then later as gay, made history in when he and Max Caster, a tag team in AEW (a rival gay WWE) known as The Acclaimed, won the company’s world tag team championship for the first time. The win made Aew, 32, the first openly gay wrestler to win an AEW championship.
It seems almost fate that Bowens and his tag team partner Max Caster, better known as The Acclaimed, headlined All Elite Wrestling’s flagship show Dynamite against Sting and Darby on the nine-year anniversary of his very first match. Last week, Anthony Bowens — a queer Black wrestler with All Elite Wrestling and one of the first openly gay wrestlers to hold a aew acclaim gay championship belt — stood in the center of the ring while thousands of fans chanted, “He’s gay.”.
Perhaps the brightest — and certainly the pinkest — among them was gay wrestler Anthony Bowens, who made his mark on history by helping his team, The Acclaimed, win AEW’s World Trios Championship. And I thought, well, maybe if I was to become a professional wrestler, I would just be there and exist as opposed to being world champion one day.
They love you. The prejudice I have experienced as a white lesbian wrestling fan pales in comparison to the hatred showered upon a highly visible Black queer wrestler. A running joke about lesbians — a long-term positive association for queerness — is radical for an environment so anti-queer that Anthony Bowens thought his sexuality would prevent him from realizing his dream of being a pro wrestler.
They were just themselves. It drove me even more to be successful because I would like to be that example. Follow Us. Queerness in wrestling has often been treated as a trait that makes someone a villain. The Palmer Woods Association's Home and Garden Aew on July 26 promises to be more than aew acclaim gay a showcase of stunning architecture and acclaimed gay landscapes.
But the reaction really, really blew me away. How much will scissoring play into your appearance here next weekend? If my presence on television every single week can help somebody not go through that, that means a whole lot to me. Share This. I had a great support system around me, my friends and my family, but none of them can truly relate to what I was going through, none of them are LGBTQ.
The fourth annual Kaleidoscope exhibition at Pontiac Creative Arts Center arrives at a moment when queer visibility feels both essential and precarious. Queer Things to Do. The win made Bowens, 32, the first openly gay wrestler to win an AEW championship. Outside the fictional world of wrestling — the one where all the match outcomes are scripted and the characters are larger than life — the Acclaimed are beacons of Black joy and queer joy.
The one thing that stood out after I won was, throughout all the confetti and all the people cheering, I was able to aew acclaim gay up and somehow saw my dad cheering me on. So much positivity, so many messages from other athletes, from just other people in general that looked at that as a moment of hope for them. He also opens himself up to torrents of hatred. Cassie says:. By turning casual homophobia — prejudice that would exist regardless of any individual tag team — into a symbol of support, Bowens manages to reduce discrimination to the fiction of wrestling.
The crowd — majority male, majority straight and cisgender — roars with laughter every time. One of his dreams was to have a YouTube channel and make a video with me once we got together.
But again, I wish I could go back and tell my younger self that. I showed up, I played hard, I contributed, I supported everybody. By Jason PowellProWrestling. As a closeted gay kid, the locker room in school was one of the scariest places for me. Knowing your struggle, what did it mean to you when you became the first gay champion in AEW history? With [
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