My night oil wrestling with 1000 lesbians

It features in season five of The L Word (RIP), permanently altering the brain chemistry of a generation of queer viewers. Now, it’s found a new life in Lez Get Physical, the internet-famous sapphic spectacle drawing crowds of a thousand to warehouses in Brooklyn, LA, and Toronto to watch lesbian wrestlers slip, slide, and fight for their lives in an oil-filled kiddie pool. Combining elements of drag, burlesque, and MMA, the events are replete with a Jumbotron, live commentators, ring girls, and Costco-sized jugs of olive oil. There are recurring fighters, elaborate storylines surrounding the matches, ever-growing myth and lore. It is beautiful and absurd. 

My friend Zhane Stimpson, the 26-year-old lesbian community organizer and content creator behind Lez Get Physical, once told me she started the tournaments to give lesbians a chance to “experience a night outside of traditional norms. They’re transported into a different world.” She said, “A lot of people are like, This is the best event I’ve ever been to.” I attended the last wrestling match in my IRL capacity as a journalist; I reported on how, as political attacks intensify against queer and trans people, this year has seen a renaissance of queer live-fighting events, from T-Boy Wrestling to Lez Get Physical sponsored by Feeld, queer-owned boxing gyms, and more. But this time, I signed up to fight. 

Girllllll why, said some of my friends, and I joked that I am sort of homophobic and needed an outlet to express it; to others I explained, seriously, that it feels like an honor and imperative to participate in this innovative, explosive Gen Z lesbian and trans culture while we still can enjoy it. Plus, all year I have been fighting for my life on the lesbian streets. It is not unlike wrestling, dating women—getting into the ring, over and over, to confront the entirety of another person, whose wants and needs might be different than yours, to hold them in your hands. Even though signing up for Lez Get Physical was an impulse decision, I felt like I’d been training spiritually for some time. 

But the other reason, the private promise I made to myself, was to build strength and certainty in my own body. I’d been experiencing a lot of sexual harassment that summer, from men on the subway and the block to even women in the club and my DMs, and while I never take it personally, it is hard to ignore the reminder that I am small, an easy target, prone to being approached and gazed on and touched without my permission. I went into the ring to feel the aliveness of my body, the non-apology of it. 

Vanessa Nguyen and Jacqueline Tran

Fighting as performance

The night of the tournament was cold, the first portent of fall—I love this time of year, how, when the temperature drops below 60 degrees, I know the plot is going to thicken. The fighters’ call time was two hours before the match. In the green room we all were giddy, gorging ourselves on snacks, like theater kids before a show. We introduced ourselves by our fighter names, but our real names too, like admitting a secret. “Is this your first time?” people asked; old-timers gave bracing advice. Fighters helped each other zip up their costumes. Someone sprayed glitter on everyone’s skin; when the bottle ran out, the girls rubbed up on each other to share the love. “Mutual aid,” we joked. The producers, Zhane and Grace, had a team huddle to explain the rules, emphasizing safety, boundaries, and consent. This wasn’t real fighting, they reminded us—this, like queerness itself, was performance. That was why we slipped into campy and fantastic alter egos, leaving our real bodies behind. Mine, that night, was Curry Bradshaw, intrepid queer journalist, curious about what brings her fellow lesbians to the ring, and what queerness looks like for a generation discovering ourselves in an increasingly hostile world. 

Queerness, to me, is filled with erotic possibility because there is no script. When I was younger, I’d had a very binary view of gender, even among the non-men I dated. There were people who topped, and people who bottomed. Those who threw ass, and those who caught it. Only later, and especially during oil wrestling, did I discover the power of expressing your gender like a costume, one with breathing room, a role you play and modify each day. Fighters could show up however we wanted—alter egos included Stone of Arc, Kitty Whip, Pussy Piercer. “You’ve been handpicked to embody the D.Y.K.E. spirit, our golden rule and performance standard,” Zhane emailed us before. D was for Dominance: “Confidence. Presence. Power. Control the room without saying a word.” Y for Yearning: “Create tension. Build chemistry. Let the crowd ache for what happens next.” K for Kink: “Play safely. Explore edges with curiosity, consent, and control.” And E for Entertainment: “You are a performer first. Every movement, glance, and fall should make the audience gasp, cheer, or blush.”

Vanessa Nguyen and Jacqueline Tran

I had spoken to my assigned wrestling partner, Bri, on the phone earlier that day. We planned out a few moves; we wanted to give the people a show. For the rest, we agreed, we’d let the spirit move us. It was like we were having elaborate phone sex except we were laughing very hard. 

Still, I became unbearably anxious before it was time to fight. I realized the line outside was going down the block. My friends were texting me good luck messages, and I started spiraling about horrific outcomes—seeing an ex. Having a nip slip—my digital footprint, God! Forgetting my moves. Doing Bri, my partner, wrong.

“Do you want to kiss right now?” Bri asked me, sensing my nervousness. We didn’t want our first time to be in the ring. “Yeah,” I said, and it was as simple as that. I felt my entire body sigh with relief. Then it was time to fight.

I’m not gonna lie: I blacked out in the ring. Partially due to the tequila sunrises that had been pressed into my hands by beautiful women to bring me luck before my match. Also, adrenaline—the very same fight-or-flight nervous system that my ancestors used to outrun tigers, or whatever, was now on overdrive before a screaming crowd. Those same ancestors channeled themselves through me, or maybe muscle memory took over. I remember things in snatches: locking eyes with and placing my cigarette into the mouth of a girl on the side of the stage. Slipping out of my fur coat, feeling the cold air suddenly kiss parts of my body that I rarely have exposed. A woman slipping a twenty into my bra, which I promptly lost. Accidentally spooking myself by looking at the Jumbotron, where my body was blown up to ten times its size. Who is that, I thought, like a bird banging its head against its own reflection. The crowd reminded me by screaming it back: Oh, right. I am Curry Bradshaw. 

Vanessa Nguyen and Jacqueline Tran

My partner Bri shimmered onstage next as her alter ego: the irresistible island fairy, Fine Gyal Tink. We’d planned some of the moves, although every ounce of preparation vacated my mind when we were covered in oil, the ring far slippier than I’d imagined. I rode her; she topped me. Brittney’s thigh, like a strobe light, sweeping, landed on me. I didn’t use a single brain cell. I was suddenly deeply grateful for my own body, how it always knows what to do. And I felt trust for my partner, too, even when she was pinning me down. This is what I love about lesbianism: that we can surrender to our softness like prayer. Is that submission? Or, like a portal, an opening? That we can make one another feel safe always strikes me as a precious thing.

For our finale, we kissed, and the crowd roar hit my ears like someone had popped a bubble, or unmuted a TV, and I suddenly remembered where I was. What is life, I thought. I am oiled up and making out in a Brooklyn warehouse to the adulation of literally one thousand lesbians. 

I did not end up winning the match. I succumbed to the tequila and a bad bitch—an honorable way to go. What’s more, my girl Bri defeated every competitor afterwards to achieve a well-deserved victory as that night’s lesbian oil wrestling champion. I tumbled off the stage into the loving arms of my friends, who didn’t mind that I was covered in olive oil, and made me feel like a winner anyways. A lot of people, brown girls especially, came up to congratulate me. I wondered if this is what it’s like to be a popular athlete in high school—it’s lucky I wasn’t, because if I got this kind of validation all my life, I would be a menace! Indeed, I achieved a long-secret dream I didn’t know I had of signing a woman’s chest.

Vanessa Nguyen and Jacqueline Tran

The truth is that outside of my wrestling alter ego, I am not always so confident. Sometimes it feels like all of my friends’ pontificating about lesbian sex, its erotics and pleasures, happens in an alternative universe, like Barbieland, or the oil ring—utopic realms where nothing hurts. In reality, my sexuality has been shaped by fear as much as desire. I am a sexual violence survivor, and though I’ve had a long, proud journey of reclaiming my inner sense of safety, sometimes I wish that dating could feel as easy as wrestling: a clear-cut discussion beforehand, deep trust and humor, agreement that it’s never much deeper than mutually feeling good. But that is the beauty, sometimes the gag, of dating: the feeling of vulnerability, of going into the dark. That is what takes strength. The thing oil wrestling trains me for.

I am getting more comfortable in my own body. Sometimes I feel fear like a third lung in my chest. I breathe it in and out. I’ve learned that when I breathe with my fear, I let it soften me. Open up new ways of living in my skin. I can do anything, even fight. In the lesbian oil ring, I understood that this body of mine, which I spent years taming, wrangling into submission, was available for me to love all along.

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