The San Francisco Bay Guardian has a big cover story on San Francisco alt/indie pro wrestling that doesn’t contain a single mention of Incredibly Strange Wrestling. Making matters even worse, their cover image is of a Los Angeles based lucha show (Lucha VaVoom!), not a Bay Area one. While not every article on today’s Bay Area wrestling scene need mention my old dog and pony show, I felt that the Guardian’s take, promising a history of non-mainstream pro wrestling in San Francisco, was left with a gigantic hole made by its exclusion of what was the Bay Area’s most successful alternative wrestling show. (The classic Roy Shire promotion that’s mentioned in the article was mainstream wrestling in Northern California during its pre-WWE heyday.) Below is my letter to the San Francisco Bay Guardian editorial staff, pointing out their oversight followed by some additional thoughts on the article:

Dear Andre Torrez, Tony Papanikolas and SFBG editorial staff:

It was strange, maybe even incredibly strange to see an SFBG cover article touting "pro wrestling's past and present stronghold on the Bay Area" that didn't contain a single mention of Incredibly Strange Wrestling. ISW ran from 1995 until about the mid-2000s and was the first promotion to run alternative wrestling shows that played with "the politics of mainstream wrestling" in both the Fillmore and the DNA Lounge. We also had GLBT baby faces (good guys) and grown men wrestling in chicken suits long before Lucha VaVoom brought its LA based show to our old stomping grounds. A picture of ISW "softcore" champ El Homo Loco standing triumphant in the middle of our rickety ring still hangs among the framed photos of rock legends in the Fillmore's lobby. The reporting on Fog City and LVV in your two pieces was good, but any look back at SF's history of envelope-pushing pro wrestling shows without a sentence or two on ISW is wholly inadequate.

Regards,

Count Dante AKA Bob Calhoun
former Incredibly Strange Wrestling ring announcer and performer
and author of "Beer, Blood and Cornmeal: Seven Years of Incredibly Strange Wrestling"

In the Bay Guardian piece, author Tony Papanikolas reports with a sense of surprise that the Fog City Wrestling grappler Angel the Hardcore Homo “is clearly the hero in the contest, reconfiguring some of the mainstream's predictable gay panic tropes into a slapstick offensive that plays off his opponent's increasingly comical discomfort.” While Fog City Wrestling is commendable for being willing to play with the paradigm here, Papanikolas and the Guardian make it sound like this is something new when ISW was pushing El Homo Loco as it’s number one fan attraction over a decade earlier (albeit also “minstrelsy” as Papanikolas says of FCW’s Angel).

Papanikolas also notices “a sizeable number of bohemian types” while scanning the audience at an FCW show at the DNA Lounge and again seems surprised by their attendance although ISW sold out both the DNA and the Fillmore with “bohemian types” as a large part of its fan base. Papanikolas hedges a little as he writes, “San Francisco doesn't seem like the kind of community that goes in for (nonironic [sic]) professional wrestling.” The use parenthesis is his and the word “nonironic” is his only thin reference to any previous Bay Area wrestling entertainment that may or may not be ISW. And that’s always the knock by other wrestling promotions (that do make use of thematic irony whenever it suits them) against ISW – that it was ironic. It wasn’t “real” professional wrestling, whatever that is.

It’s sad that the Bay Guardian is so quick to cover up or ignore San Francisco’s homegrown, underground, subversive, DIY wrestling show. Sure we had our moments of utterly craven tastelessness (which I write about regretfully in “Beer, Blood and Cornmeal”) but we also brought matches that tackled religion, local politics and gentrification and we did more than our share of  “reconfiguring” of the “mainstream's predictable gay panic tropes.”

In closing, I leave you with this shaky footage of ISW’s gay panic trope the Cruiser dropkicking and violating an effigy of Mayor Willie Brown in front of San Francisco’s city hall while Tim Amiano, Kirk Hammett and Green Day watched from the side of the stage. It’s doubtful that the workers of Lucha VaVoom or Fog City Wrestling will ever find themselves so politically active. For those of you who feel more than slightly nervous at the sight of a white man abusing an effigy of a black politician in this age of town hall disruptions, please remember that The Cruiser was the original tea bagger, in the traditional sense of the word: