It was 9:45 last Saturday night inside a normally abandoned office building on the far west side. An older man in his mid-to-late 60s, dressed in a suit coat and striped shirt, was standing at the front of a rowdy mob gathered outside a room on the third floor. “You must let me in!” he pleaded in a thick eastern European accent. “I pay money! I demand! You let me in!” A butch woman about 40 years his junior, her chin covered in tribal tattoos, stood with her arms outstretched across the doorway. “I don’t care who you know, man,” she told him. “You ain’t getting in.” Doors had been open for less than an hour and the place was already at capacity. A young woman on roller skates made her way through the crowd, her flashlight the only illumination in the dark corridor. “Coming through! Security! Coming through!” she yelled as she passed, limbo style, under the bouncer’s arms. The mob grew surlier, craning their necks to see past the bouncer, because just behind her women were about to wrestle in mud.
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The Mud Queens, a Chicago-based all-female mud-wrestling cabal, usually stages bouts only once or twice a year–and they tend to create havoc. This was their first appearance since the Around the Coyote Festival in September. Mud Queens organizer Meg Bell, 26, says she limited the amount of people let into the wrestling room “for safety’s sake” and, anticipating the overflow, set up a live video feed in an adjacent room to both accommodate fans and raise as much money as possible. All proceeds from Mud Queens events benefit the Young Women’s Empowerment Project, a local charity that seeks to help women and girls impacted by the sex trade and street economies. “It’s a benefit, and it’s only five bucks,” she says, justifying the setup. “If it was $15, we couldn’t do that sort of thing.”
There were seven matches scheduled, featuring 14 wrestlers. Announcer Billy Carter, of the Mud Queens’ house band, the Billy Carter Band, warned the crowd, “If you want to keep anything you are wearing, or ever wear it again, we suggest before the wrestling starts you take it off and put it somewhere far, far away, because it is about to get ruined.” The audience, which had little choice but to stay in the plastic-lined wrestling room all night–leaving meant forfeiting your spot–pressed closer to the stage. The knowing few had thought ahead and donned recycling bags or raincoats over their clothes; the others were either unconcerned or too drunk to care. It’d been nearly two hours since the local band Gays in the Military kicked things off, and the room smelled faintly of vomit because the singer for the Functional Blackouts, who also played, had barfed three times during his band’s set. Rather than clean it up, someone covered the puke with flowers that had been brought for the wrestlers, as if that would cancel out the stench.
Over the next hour and a half several of the Mud Queens exited the ring with their costumes ripped in half or off; spanking was deployed during submission holds; women in the front row pawed BT Bruiser, begging for kisses after her pummeling victory over Pippi Jawstopping; a pansexual make-out orgy took place ringside during the fifth match; people urinated in trash cans so as not to miss any action; and everyone in the front two rows got as soaked in mud as the wrestlers.
