This N.J. wrestler declared ‘I’m gay!’ on national TV. He changed pro wrestling forever.

Pink confetti and streamers showered the wrestling ring from high above inside Arthur Ashe Stadium in Queens. Nearly 14,000 fans rose to their feet and screamed at the top of their lungs during the dynamic 2022 iteration of AEW Dynamite: Grand Slam.

Anthony Bowens, short of breath and coated with sweat, hung his fatigued body on the ring ropes and managed a relieved smile as he gripped the gold-plated championship belt.

The former college baseball player turned professional wrestler had climbed to the top of All Elite Wrestling’s tag team division, just an hour from his hometown of Nutley.

As one half of “The Acclaimed” duo with partner Max Caster, Bowens had spent two years in AEW — one of the world’s premier pro wrestling promotions — carving out a bold and distinguished persona.

But that night was particularly important to Bowens for another reason: He had just become the first Black openly queer male wrestler in the company to win a championship.

“There wasn’t much representation when I was growing up,” Bowens said during a recent interview with NJ Advance Media. “There wasn’t much to look towards to be like, ‘I can really relate to that person.’ It’s cool to hopefully be that for folks.”

His victory marked another significant step in queer representation inside a wrestling industry once synonymous with misogynistic tropes and, at times, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. In the 1990s and 2000s, in particular, as WWE and WCW promotions shattered ratings and attendance records during the height of wrestling’s Monday Night Wars, so too did anti-queer ideology, as identifying people were used as the uncomfortable agitators in storylines, often to the point of humiliation.

Bowens’s ascent, as well as wrestlers like Toni Storm, who identifies as bisexual, and openly gay popular indie wrestler Effy, represent a generational shift, both in pro wrestling and society — 9.3% of the United States populationnow self-identifies as LGBTQ+. That figure has tripled since 2012.

“There’s a generational shift where, in the locker room, unlike even 15 years ago, maybe most wrestlers never knew an openly gay person,” said Wade Keller, founder and editor of pro wrestling website PWTorch. “Bowens is influential, but his decision to be openly gay is a result of the locker room culture changing to where that’s not only comfortable, but it’s almost a non-issue with everybody around him.”

Bowens — armed with his trademark electricsmile and neatly trimmed goatee — is helping confront the stereotypes. During a 30-minute interview in November, he spoke thoughtfully about his journey in discovering his sexual identity, which began in 2017, when hecame out as bisexual in a vulnerable essay for Outsports.com and later as queer in 2019. While attending college, he first came out to his best friend, Greg Seremba. Then, in a 2016 video titled “Try Not To Laugh Challenge,” his partner, MichaelPavano, a popular social media influencer, introduced Bowens as his boyfriend after six months of keeping their relationship a secret.

Hisin-ring persona and personal identity are now one andthe same, and that comfort inknowing who he is has only helped enable Bowens to become one of the sport’s biggest rising stars.

During a 2023 episode of the now-defunct AEW Rampage, broadcast nationally on TNT, wrestler Harley Cameron, a woman, flirted with Bowens in character.

“Did you just say you think I’m into you?” Bowens asked, amazed, to which Cameron replied, “Duh!”

Gesturing to his pink tights, Bowens proclaimed, “I don’t know if you can see my gear, lady. I’m gay!”

The crowd shouted back in jubilation, “He’s gay!”

“It was a seminal moment, honestly,” said OutSports.com staffwriter Brian Bell. “For someone who has had pro wrestling constantly tell them that you can be a fan, but we’re not gonna make you feel as comfortable as other fans, it’s one of the moments that gives me the most sense of belonging that I’ve ever had.”

And Bowens’ ascent to the top of pro wrestling has come at a harrowing time for manyin the LGBTQ community. In Hollywood alone, LGBTQ representation has dropped to a three-year low, and, in 2025, more than 850 bills were introduced seeking to dilute the rights of LGBTQ-identifying people, according to Truthout.

Amid it all, Bowens has led the way as a Black LGBTQ role model. During The Acclaimed’s pinnacle in 2022, Bowens would approach fans in the crowd and make a scissoring motion — conjoining their fingers together, both as a homage to the “A” in the tag team’s name and a nod to Bowens’ sexuality.

Even as he’s occasionally targeted with nastysocial media insults, Bowens has remained undeterred.

“Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in anything going on and to be stressed at work,” Bowens said. “Then I go, ‘I’m doing this for the people.’ What’s important is me going out there, being myself, putting on a great performance, and making people happy.”

‘A testament to the journey’

His first love was baseball.And it began when his father took him to Major League Baseball games when he was a kid. Bowens started playing Little League in Nutleyat age 11, modeling his game after his favorite player, San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds.

Even at a young age, Bowens’ dedication to improving his game stood out to his hometown coach.

“He was hard-working and easily coachable,” said Domenick Tibaldo, Bowens’s former Nutley baseball coach. “Anthony always tried to improve and make himself better. He always had that attitude.”

As a sure-footed outfielder, Bowens played 11 years in total, becoming a star at Nutley High and then overtwo seasons apiece at Seton Hall University and Montclair State University. But an injury in his senior year derailed what Bowens oncesaw as a potential career path.

Bowens soon discovered his baseball training — especially at an elite college program such as Seton Hall — prepared him well for a future transition into wrestling.

“They worked us very hard in terms of making sure you’re mentally prepared to play every single day, pushing your body to the limit, and figuring out how to get through tough times,” Bowens said. “It’s some of the most grueling training I’ve ever done in my life.

Nutley,a working-class community in Essex County, has a rich history with pro wrestling dating to the late Luke Scarpa, a WWE Hall of Famer who performed under the ring name “Chief Jay Strongbow.” He was inducted into the Nutley Hall of Fame a year after he died in 2013.

“Wrestling superstarsGorilla Monsoon, Bruno Sammartino, and Haystacks Calhoun all came to Nutley and stayed at the Scarpa house when they were wrestling in Madison Square Garden,” said Tibaldo, also president of the Nutley Historical Society.

Bowens said he became fascinated with wrestling in 1997, watching Sting — sporting black and white face paint and all-black attire reminiscent ofthe1994 movie anti-hero from “The Crow.” But he never considered pursuing wrestling until a chance encounter with then-WWE wrestler Santino Marella while working out at a Belleville gym in 2012. Marella put Bowens in contact with Pat Buck, a trainer and current AEW producer. Bowens then began training at Create A Pro Wrestling Academy in Hicksville, N.Y.

Bowens wrestled his first singles match in April 2013 in Nutley for the Independent Wrestling Federation. The following year, Bowens won his first championship at the IWF 17th Annual LOUD n’ PROUD Spring Spectacular, defeating Marc Corino for the IWF Junior Heavyweight Championship. The cramped and intimate Rec Center in Nutley was a far cry from the stadiums Bowens would be wrestling in a decade later. Seven hundred fans sat intently, gasping and waiting for the hometown hero to pull off an upset.

In the16-minute match, Bowens and Corino played out classic wrestling psychology. Corino, the bad guy, or “heel” in pro wrestling parlance, dominated Bowens for most of the match. Bowens, or “the face,” mustered enough big moments for the crowd to hang onto the belief he could pull off the upset.

When Bowens managed the win, the hometown crowd erupted.

“I went from the rec center in my hometown to Wembley Stadium with 81,000 people,” Bowens said. “It’s a testament to the entire journey and all the work that I put in.”

‘Hip, edgy and cool’

Bowens had all the physical tools to succeed in the wrestling business — speed, power, and agility. But knew he had work on developing his character.

He tried out for WWE’s developmental brand, NXT, in 2015, where he was told he had “four of the five” traits they were looking for. But hewas cut becauseproducers saidhis promo work selling his character needed to be stronger. To strengthen his storytelling muscles, Bowens looked outside of the wrestling industry, including improv classes, commercials, and sketch comedy shows.

He then started a YouTube channel with Pavano, his partner, in 2016. The popular channel, where Pavano and Bowens satirize pop culture events and figures, including Paris Hilton, has over 230,000 subscribers. The skits helped Bowens get acclimated to being himself in front of an audience.

“I’ve come a long way,” Bowens said. “The YouTube channel helped a lot, where we were just sitting in front of a camera and learning how to talk without it feeling awkward.”

The hard work culminated when Bowens and his eventual tag team partner, Caster, signed with All Elite Wrestling in 2020 and were dubbed “The Acclaimed,” a name given to them by CEO Tony Khan. Before each match, Caster would begin their entrance with a rapfreestyle, belittling their opponents with lines referring to pop culture events and wrestling inside jokes.

Bowens was the energetic hype man, often punctuating Caster’s jabs and antagonizing the crowd. When the tag team gradually became crowd favorites, Bowens shifted to engaging with fans directly with their “scissor” trademark, joining fingers together, shouting out the city, and proclaiming, “The Acclaimed have arrived!”

“At the height of their popularity, The Acclaimed was one of the most creative and compelling tag teams in the world of pro wrestling,” said Bill Bodkin, editor-in-chief of The Pop Break newsletter. “They were hip, edgy, and cool, while also having an incredible chemistry.”

‘Coded as predators’

Despite recent strides pro wrestling is making with the LGBTQ community, the industry has long been known for its at-times offensive and stereotypical tropes.

One example was Dustin Rhodes’ 1995 WWEcharacter “Goldust.” Decked in a gold wig and jumpsuit, Goldust often quoted old Hollywood films and flirted with opponents as a means to rattle, either before or during matches.

Rhodes’ character cracked the door open for queerness to be represented, but he was initially portrayed as a villain or a “heel.” And Goldust was portrayed in a similar light to Adrian Adonis in the 1980s — a flamboyant, stereotypical gay wrestler, dressed in flowers and played up for audiences to jeer.

“The Goldust character was important not just to me but to a whole lot of queer people growing up in that era,” said Bell, the OutSports writer. “On the positive side, at least one character on that roster was portraying some form of queerness. We also understand that it is a character that is written from a cis white male perspective with no real idea about the community.”

Troubling incidents continued in the early 2000s, one of which infamously involved WCW wrestlers Lenny Lane and Lodi, known as the “West Hollywood Blondes.” The duo sparked outrage from GLAAD and wasultimately taken off the air for portraying false, exaggerated stereotypes, including skipping around the ring and crawling suggestively over opponents.

“These characters were coded as predators who are out there to mess with these manly men and threaten them with a kiss or something like that to get one over on them to be able to win,” Bell said.

Another low point came during a 2003 WWE segment involving the late wrestler Chris Kanyon. The wrestler emerged from a box dressed like singer Boy George, only to be viciously beaten with a steel chair.Kanyon, who came out in 2004, alleged both in a 2006 Howard Stern interview and his book, 2011’s “Wrestling Reality: The Life and Mind of Chris Kanyon, Wrestling’s Gay Superstar,” that the segment itself and his release from WWE in 2004 were due to his sexuality. WWE Hall of Famer The Undertaker, who was involved in the segment, stated on his 2024 podcast that he did not know Kanyon’s sexuality and that the chair shots were customary for the snug style of the time.

In 2001, the WWE tag team of Billy Gunn and Chuck Palumbo was depicted as a same-sex couple that was supposed to accuminate with a life partnership ceremony in September 2002. However, when the angle aired, Gunn and Palumbo claimed it was all a stunt in storyline - angering GLAAD, who initially worked with the company to craft the story.

“The key is more exclusion than inclusion in terms of let’s exclude the characters that portray somebody who isn’t straight into a freak show,” Keller said.

Over the past decade, as older fans aged out of pro wrestling, replaced by a younger generation, LGBTQ acceptance has shifted, experts said. In October 2015, Shamong Township’s Sonya Deville became the first openly gay woman in WWE. Then, in 2019, AEW launched and made its first signings: queer wrestler Sonny Kiss and Nyla Rose, the first openly transgender wrestler to sign with a major promotion.

When it comes to fan reaction, Bowens saidhe receives almost exclusively respectful interactions — a far cry from the atmosphere two decades earlier. Any negativity is mostly confined to social media or ugly comments at the bottom of his and Pavano’s YouTube channel.

“Social media is social media, and there’s always gonna be crazy, hateful people on there,” Bowens said. “I’m numb to all of that. Thebest thing you can do is stay positive and keep moving forward.”

‘Where I can be myself’

AEW returned to the Prudential Center in Newark last month for their annual November pay-per-view, Full Gear. Bowens also returned, though this time not as one of The Acclaimed, but reluctantly partnering with Caster, with a $200,000 prize on the line. Officially splitting in January, the duo has since forged an uneasy alliance at Khan’s behest, the CEO.

Bowens began the match with a flurry of counter moves against Austin Gunn, one-half of the Bang Bang Gang. Later, Bowens and Caster joined together with their trademark scissor-hand sign to the cheers of roughly 10,000 fans. But then Bowens was rolled up and pinned by Juice Robinson, the second half of the Bang Bang Gang.

He lost the match, but his career is still moving forward. After the split from Caster, Bowens forged his own path as a solo wrestler, dubbing himself “The Pride of Pro Wrestling.” It’s both a nod to his new persona and to his orientation.

Fans have taken note, his popularity has remained high, and now he stands alone, looking for his first singles championship in AEW.

“I’m lucky that I work at a place where I can just be myself every single week,” Bowens said. “Existing successfully in a sport that historically hasn’t been very accepting of queer people is very cool. I hope it continues for others who can relate to me.”

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