Brock Lesnar’s In-Ring Character Was Initially Pitched to be Homosexual

According to the latest edition of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, former WWE World Heavyweight Champion Brock Lesnar’s in-ring character was initially pitched to be homosexual by WWE creative team members. Stephanie McMahon recently claimed that Darren Young, who is homosexual in real life, does not play a “gay” character on WWE programming.

This statement from McMahon prompted Meltzer to investigate the claim that there was to be a scripted homosexual character on WWE programming in 2002. What he found was that this character, was supposed to be played by The Beast Incarnate.

Meltzer writes,

“In last week’s issue, regarding the note about debuting a gay character in 2002 who would be a tough guy, that would out himself as being gay, do none of the stereotypes and be portrayed as a kick ass main eventer, we were told that the idea was for the person to be Lesnar when he made his debut that year.

The idea originally came from two of the magazine writers, one of them Brian Solomon (who just wrote a book about pro wrestling history called “Pro Wrestling FAQ”), who pitched the idea directly to Stephanie McMahon that year. The pitch was that it would blow away the fan base and everyone to have an unstoppable hyper-masculine ass kicker revealing himself to be gay, and be pushed as a top babyface.

The idea was to make sure he never did anything in or out of the ring that would make fans uncomfortable. It would be the anti-gay stereotype instead, and instead it would be the heels that would use his being gay in their promos and get their asses kicked, and making everyone using negative terms as far as being gay come across like heels.

The idea was also thinking it would get huge support from the gay community (the problem of course is that eventually it would come out Lesnar wasn’t gay, so it would only be a character and not an admission the real person was) and get positive support from the media as a progressive character. What’s notable is that the people who pitched it first, never heard another word about it, and didn’t know until this past week that it had gotten into the writers room where some of the older agents thought the idea was terrible and it was dropped, and eventually that led to the Billy & Chuck thing.

As it turned out, the Lesnar character ended up doing pretty well for itself.”

Editor’s Note:

Can you seriously imagine what kind of different impact Lesnar would have made upon his debut if he were a “gay” character?