Dark Side of the Ring – Vice TV
Chris Colt: Welcome to My Nightmare
Chris Colt contacted me in 1988 with an idea he’d been carrying for a while: he wanted to make a film that pulled back the curtain on professional wrestling’s best-kept secret, not the fixed outcomes everybody already suspected, but the homosexuality and hustling that ran underneath the sport. Palm Drive Video’s homomasculine aesthetic — gruff, blue-collar men, leather, fetish — suited him exactly, and Chris made two films with us, Uncut: Pro-Wrestler Chris Colt and Sex Aggression: Colt’s Wrestling Academy, before deciding wrestling promos and porn were different enough careers that he’d stick to the one he knew.
Chris was born Charles Harris and spent decades in the ring under names like “Magnificent” Maurice Chevier and “Paul Dupree,” tag-teaming with his real-life partner Russell Grobes through the ’60s and ’70s without ever hiding what they were to each other, even in territories where that could get a man killed. When Grobes died in 1976, Chris rebuilt himself — new name borrowed from a porn studio, new look built on piercings, Gothic makeup, and a willingness to burn every bridge the business offered him. He wrestled some of the biggest names of his era and never got near the spotlight they did. He died in 1996, addiction and, according to his death certificate, AIDS having caught up with him by 49.
VICE TV’s Dark Side of the Ring finally gave Chris the reckoning he wanted, devoting a 2024 episode — “Welcome to My Nightmare” — to his life, and I sat for it as one of the talking heads who actually knew him. On camera I said plainly what I’d always believed: that pro wrestling has always been softcore porn for gay men, and that Chris, better than almost anyone, knew he was a fetish object the moment he stepped into the ring. The full episode and a companion piece from Slam Wrestling, which goes deeper into Chris’s wrestling life, are linked below.
“The Dark Side of the Ring: Chris Colt – Welcome to My Nightmare” full episode on YouTube.com
Slam Wrestling: Chris Colt – by Jonathan Plombon 13th May, 2021 also as PDF