Supplemental: The Toni Storm Love Triangle - Happy Pride

The following is something I wrote on my Facebook page in the lead-up to June 2024's Forbidden Door event, which featured a title match between AEW World Women's Champion "Timeless" Toni Storm and Mina Shirakawa. As my previous post is sort of a continuation of this one, I thought it prudent to re-run it over here.

It's Pride month, so I would like to talk about the hottest love triangle in the world of pro wrestling and how I, a straight cis male, feel about its impact on queer representation in nationally televised pro wrestling. Come along with me, won't you?

Around this time last year, a long-running favorite of Dixie's and mine, Australian Toni Storm, was in the middle of a solid if unremarkable second title reign as AEW Women's World Champion. After losing said title to Hikaru Shida in August of last year, Toni started losing her marbles a little bit. Her obsession with regaining the championship, combined with an errant knock on the noggin, transformed her into "Timeless" Toni Storm, a modern pro wrestler who thinks she is a classic Hollywood starlet, channeling Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard (she even has her own Max Von Mayerling in former deathmatch wrestler Dr. Luther). She generally acts drugged off her gourd, driven insane by her fading celebrity, and wrestles like she has a nonstop case of the vapors. Her catchphrase is "Chin up, tits out, and watch for the shoe." (She likes to throw her shoe at people. Not her shoes – her shoe.) She can't cut a promo without dropping at least one absolutely bizarre piece of bawdy sexual innuendo. She has taken to sniffing the leather strap of her title belt like it's a snack or a piece of bondage gear. In short, she is without question the most entertaining character in AEW if not all of pro wrestling right now.

What does any of this have to do with Pride? In November, AEW announced the signing of Mariah May, a young British wrestler who established herself in the Japanese women's promotion STARDOM as a member of the Club Venus stable. STARDOM, incidentally, also served years ago as a launching pad for Toni Storm, so during Mariah's first interview as an AEW employee, she immediately professed her admiration and worship of "Timeless" Toni Storm, hoping to meet her and be taken under her wing. Over the next few months, Mariah sort of flitted her way into Toni's orbit, existing basically as a young padawan for Storm to deliver "listen to me kid, and you'll go places" style wisdom and nonsensical bon mots, while barely really understanding that Mariah was even there. Mariah would wrestle a match and then run backstage to ask Toni if she had seen it; she hadn't. This kid was a wrestler? Huh, how about that.

Desperate to work her way deeper into Toni's orbit and win her approval, Mariah begins to wrestle her matches while cosplaying as Toni Storm's previous gimmick – a hair metal enthusiast ass-kicking Aussie. She wears Toni's old ring gear and comes out to her old hair metal-style theme music. (It's all very All About Eve, really.) And suddenly, Toni takes note, and starts watching Mariah's matches! And slowly but surely, Toni begins, in her own bizarre, Norma Desmond/Joe Gillis way, to fall in love with Mariah...to fall in love with herself, really, but I think there's affection for Mariah herself in there too, now.

At one point it's announced that Mariah May has earned her way into a match to determine Toni's next challenger, against Thunder Rosa (Rosa ends up winning, but that's not important right now). When interviewer Renee Paquette explains this to Toni, she spins and throws an accusing glare at Mariah. "Was this your plan all along? Is this what you've been plotting...for months?" (Spoiler: it IS what she's been plotting. Again, this is All About Eve here.) Mariah fears retribution, but instead, Toni plants a huge, Bugs Bunny-style kiss right on Mariah's lips, declaring "you magnificent BASTARD! You're a GENIUS!" It's a kiss heard 'round the wrestling world, and it happens to echo in the ears of one of Mariah's old Club Venus stablemates in STARDOM.

STARDOM vet and Club Venus leader Mina Shirakawa was already starting to make an appearance here and there for AEW and its affiliate, Ring of Honor. (Mina and Mariah also had recently had a quick reunion at a STARDOM show in Japan.) After Toni planted that smooch on Mariah's face, Mina suddenly started interjecting herself into Mariah's business, running to her rescue when Mariah was caught in a sleeperhold after defeating Anna Jay, and then punctuating the rescue with a champagne toast and kiss of her own. And it's all begun to snowball and spiral into a very silly, very slapstick love triangle. Toni has become very possessive of the young lady who has transformed into a younger version of her, while Mina has arrived to...well, I'm not sure really. Is she trying to rescue Mariah? Steal her back to STARDOM? Who knows, but since, in recent weeks, Toni has spent all of her interview time literally holding Mariah close to her bosom (Toni's actual words: "Mariah, come to my bosom"), Mina is now trying to do the same, which led to an amazing, hilarious sequence on Wednesday's Dynamite where both Mina and Toni were pulling Mariah back and forth betwixt both their bosoms. Appropriate for an AEW ring, where, as Toni stated earlier in the segment, "the breast (best) wrestle."

This has all been very silly, and very slapstick, and very fun, and it's of course going to end in tears for Toni Storm when Mariah eventually completes the All About Eve storyline and supplants Storm as AEW Champ. Just a couple weeks ago at Double or Nothing, Toni was defending the title against technician Serena Deeb and was locked in a submission hold so tightly that Mariah nearly threw in the towel – something valets and managers can do from ringside that counts as a submission on behalf of their competitor in the ring. Luthor stopped her from doing it, but just as he ripped the towel away from Mariah, Toni escaped the hold and dove to the ringside area, where she saw Luther holding the towel and accused HIM of nearly costing her the match. At some point, Mariah is going to reveal her true colors fully and somehow betray Toni to become champ, but that's some time off in the future. For now, we get hilarious all-lady love triangle action.

What I love about this entire angle is that while a lesbian love angle has been added to the mix, it's not the centerpiece of the entire storyline, and it hasn't been presented as sheer titillation. While a lesbian love triangle is certainly entertaining for a male gaze, this is very explicitly not intended solely FOR the male gaze. The sexuality has been very broad, very comedic, and not sultry at all. And most importantly, it hasn't been played for exploitation one bit. Those of us who have been watching wrestling for decades know that this is a VERY recent, and of course overdue, development in the wrestling biz.

For years, the presentation of queer-coded wrestlers has been centered on pushing homophobic buttons in the audience. Being gay in wrestling was a gimmick, not an identity. Wrestlers like Adrian Street, Gorgeous George, Adrian Adonis, Cassandro and the Exoticos of Mexico...whether they were gay or not, they presented as flamboyant, feminine characters in order to anger and threaten fans who thought men fighting men should be MANLY, dammit (ironic because let's be real...can anything be more fucking gay than the act of wrestling? It's ancient Greek grab-ass, for god's sake). I remember very vividly sitting in the crowd at the Brown County Arena in Green Bay during a Monday Night Raw taping in 1996 while the entire arena chanted a certain f-word at Goldust, while i sunk in my chair embarrassed to be a wrestling fan amongst such a homophobic fan base. This is how wrestling was for years, and this is how people saw wrestling fans, both inside the industry and out.

But that's changed. Nyla Rose is an AEW star who happens to be the first transgender woman signed to a national wrestling company, and that fact isn't driven into our brains every time she's on TV. The Acclaimed are a runaway hit tag team for AEW and team member Anthony Bowens is out and proud, hilariously rejecting a lady heel's advances by saying, "uh, lady...in case you didn't notice...I'm gay." (The audience erupted with cheers and began a sweet and affirming "HE'S GAY!" chant.) Being gay isn't a gimmick for these wrestlers, it's just a part of who they are. There's a slew of openly queer lady or non-binary wrestlers in AEW who don't make it a big deal: Diamante, Kiera Hogan, Abadon, Leyla Hirsch, etc. Even allies have gotten in on the action: a few years ago at a New Orleans Wrestlemania, straight wrestler Finn Balor made his entrance in rainbow gear with a slew of LGBTQ+ New Orleans fans by his side.

As recently as the early 2000s, WWE Raw featured an angle where General Manager Eric Bischoff spent every week trying to "boost the ratings" for Raw with a weekly segment of what he called "HLA," or "Hot Lesbian Action." It's one of the things that actually turned me off WWE for a couple years in the early to mid-2000s. It was crass, it was gross, it was base, it was everything embarrassing about pro wrestling. This love triangle between Toni Storm, Mariah May, and Mina Shirakawa is somehow featuring girl-on-girl kissing, ladies shoving their boobs into other ladies' faces, and yet it has managed to hit a tone that is more silly than sexy, more PG than R, and definitely more accessible than crass male gaze titillation. It probably helps that Toni Storm is actually bisexual and that women are actually having creative input into their own storylines, as opposed to WWE with its years of a writers' room that was writing for a now-expelled 70-something dirty old man (and exposed sex offender and trafficker).

The Forbidden Door PPV is coming up in a few weeks, and in Toni's words, her "Forbidden Door is WIDE open." She will be defending her AEW Women's World Championship against Mina Shirakawa in a match that will also ostensibly be for the heart of Mariah May, although Mariah seems like she would just like everyone to get along and all take turns holding each other to all their bosoms. That's definitely a sentence that I just typed. And yes, at some point Mariah is going to break Toni's heart, but for now...it's Hooray for Hollywood. Chin up, tits out, watch for the shoe, and Happy Pride.