Queer Pro Wrestling Body-Slams Its Way Into San Francisco Street Fairs

Leathermen, drag performers and nudists wandered the grounds of last month's Bearrison Street Fair in SoMa, but the main attraction on one afternoon would have felt familiar to any fan of old-school Wrestlemania: a professional tag-team match with title belts on the line.

The bout pitted local duo Money Power Re$pect, made up of Marco Mayur and Fabuloso Fabricio, against MyloBoo Barbie and Barbie Boi, who traveled from Malibu. Money Power Re$pect had issued an open challenge after beating every other tag team in the Bay Area, and the prize was Full Queer Wrestling's championship belts.

After a series of body slams, some carefully timed calls from the referees and plenty of loud trash talk, the visitors won. The swelling crowd treated it as a major upset. "People underestimate me, but I'm the Mac Daddy," MyloBoo told The Standard afterward. Barbie Boi, still catching their breath, added: "She's the boss. I'm the fun one."

There was little time for the losing side to recover. Money Power Re$pect, who have wrestled together for a year and a half, were due that night at a steel-cage match in the Central Valley city of Oroville, where they planned to use moves such as the Burning Hammer and the Glam Slam. The duo is managed by drag performer and longtime wrestling fan Pollo Del Mar.

Wrestling has also become a highlight of both the Bearrison and Folsom Street fairs. Today's version looks different from the era of Hulk Hogan and Ric Flair, when they were winning Royal Rumbles in the 1980s and '90s. It is raunchier and more flamboyant, with gender parity at the forefront, and the West Coast now has numerous wrestlers whose matches raise their own profiles and the sport's.

Queer and gender-nonconforming people appear to be drawn to the sport in significant numbers. This year, Mayur and Fabricio were invited to Chicago to take part in Effy's Big Gay Brunch, which marks a high point for queer wrestling at present. Mayur describes the craft as "live-action theater" that delivers drama on the scale of Shakespeare or the Greek epics, expressed through choreographed fighting.

Some viewers may be uneasy watching staged violence against women, however consensual or empowering. Mayur said that when it is done correctly and respectfully, he sees no difference. Citing the X-Men, he noted that nobody would tell Jean Grey to sit out a fight so the men could handle it. The key word, he stressed, is "professional," and he likened wrestling's storytelling to improv comedy's "Yes, And" principle.

Mayur, who is Peruvian American and works in the mortgage department of a large bank, has performed under several names, including "Marco Mania" and "LlamaJack," a pun on lumberjack that nods to Peru's domesticated camelid. On Halloween, he also debuted "They-Ra," a nonbinary take on She-Ra. He turns to LlamaJack when he needs to give audiences something different, which he described as "the ultimate volume, cranked way up."

Hooked on televised wrestling since age 6 or 7, Mayur has trained for only the past three years at Stoner U in West Oakland, a cluttered dojo decorated with wrestling memorabilia and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles posters. He said the trainers help wrestlers improve their moves, characters and ring psychology.

Matches are partly scripted, though promoters may or may not have a finish in mind. When two wrestlers click, Mayur said, their moves build the drama until one makes a deliberately cheap play and the other answers with overkill. Though he once wanted to be a "super-good babyface," he has grown comfortable as the "heel," or villain, since boos beat no reaction. Even so, he once stopped unzipping his singlet and shouting "Sexy time!" when fans began cheering. "I'm not doing my job if they're cheering me," he said.