The Hammerstein Ballroom is a beautiful place to watch wrestling. The ring is surrounded on three sides by multiple tiers of scalloped balconies, blue with gold trim, a prestige-TV color palette. From the vantage point of the TV viewer, the audience looms over the action in ornate concentric circles—Dante’s Inferno for people who like a good German suplex. Seated on one of the venue’s upper levels, every seat feels close enough to the action for you to fall into the ring if you lean forward far enough. In events dating back decades, the independent wrestling promotions ECW and Ring of Honor helped make the place a mecca for the sport.

My 14-year-old kid, H, has heard me give variations on this spiel for over a year now. (They’ve also heard me explain it’s owned by the Moonies; they’re big on religious cults.) Now, the Saturday before Christmas 2025, they could finally see for themselves. By the time we made it up to our second-balcony seats for “Dynamite on 34th Street,” All Elite Wrestling’s now-annual holiday stopover at the Manhattan Center, however, H was mostly just winded by taking the stairs. They’re the kind of kid who was born to complain about having to run in gym class; they’ve told me repeatedly they’re physically afraid of volleyballs. We have that in common.

That’s always been part of the appeal of pro wrestling for me, ever since I got into it as an adult seven or eight years ago. It’s a sport for all kinds of people, people who don’t like sports among them. It distills athletic competition down to pure spectacle, staging genuinely impressive and difficult feats of athleticism in such a way as to heighten drama and tell stories of the triumph of good over evil. If, like me, you were raised by Yankees fans, it’s nice to have a rooting interest you don’t have to feel vaguely guilty about.

After catching their breath, H settled happily into people-watching mood soon enough. While I’ve never missed a single AEW episode in its six years of existence, H isn’t a TV-wrestling fan. They love the live experience: the crowd, the characters, the lights, the pageantry, the inventive audience chants. You don’t hear repeated cries of “THIS IS AWESOME! THIS IS AWESOME!” when Shohei Ohtani hits his 12th home run of the game or whatever, but you’ll damn sure hear it if Kazuchika Okada hits someone with an especially well-timed dropkick.

H and I have been going to AEW shows since 2021, when the company set its then-attendance record at the beautiful, punishingly inaccessible Arthur Ashe Stadium. (The NYPD sent me to the ass end of nowhere to park; H saved us from wandering around lost at one in the morning by remembering we’d found a spot near a Crab du Jour restaurant.) 

That pastime of ours had been on pause for over a year, however, since before AEW’s trip to the Hammerstein in December 2024. I wound up going to that show with a friend instead, because when your child is institutionalized with an eating disorder you’d never heard of before they were diagnosed, they don’t let you take them out on field trips to wrestling shows. I asked.

Last Christmas, my child was in a residential treatment facility for a little-known neurological eating disorder called ARFID, so we missed All Elite Wrestling’s Christmas show at the Hammerstein Ballroom. This year they’re healthy, so we went. I wrote about it all for Defector. Happy New Year, my wonderful readers and friends.

Mourning a coworker you’ve never physically met is a motherfucker. You grieve, and when people ask why you apologize instead of unburdening. Caveats, explanations, I can’t imagine what the people who were really close to her must be feeling. (The last of these, at least, has the benefit of being heartfelt.) Who am I, you ask yourself, to miss this person who was only ever a face on a Zoom call to me? To be this upset is stealing valor, you say to yourself. To be this sad is embarrassing. 

But to have worked with her, been inspired by her, felt in some way bettered by your time with her, and still somehow be embarrassed to miss her? It won’t do. No, it won’t do, if only because it’s so difficult to imagine Cecilia Gentili being embarrassed herself. She could not have amassed such a record of concrete accomplishment, in so many fields and on so many fronts, if she’d wasted her time apologizing for how she felt. If she felt strongly enough about something, in fact, the world would hear about it.

I wrote about Cecilia Gentili, a co-writer and colleague of mine in the New York Times trans solidarity letter campaign, for Defector. I’m very sad she’s gone.

My kid is not a vocal viewer. Actually, as they’d be the first to tell you, they are a weirdly un-vocal viewer. Together, and largely at their insistence, we’ve marathoned all of The Golden Girls and Cheers and are currently working on Seinfeld; as they themselves are quick to point out, they’ve laughed out loud at these, three of the funniest shows ever made, maybe four times. Mostly they just smile and nod affirmatively. Yes, they are aware of the Seinfeld episode about the woman who just says “That’s so funny,” and are looking forward to it. For people like them it’s so rare to see yourself represented on screen.

So their reaction to the most brutal sequence of torture scenes they’ve seen in their young life gave me pause. It happened in the sixth episode of the second season of The Wheel of Time, showrunner Rafe Judkins’s adaptation of the monolithic epic fantasy series by the late Robert Jordan and his literary heir Brandon Sanderson. The episode is called “Eyes Without Pity,” and for good reason. 

In the storyline at the center of this episode, the character Egwene al’Vere—a young woman whose nascent magical powers make her one of the show’s co-protagonists—is imprisoned, enslaved, physically and psychologically tortured, and finally broken. As a lowly damane, she is being turned into a living weapon by her overseer, or sul’dam, Renna—an agent of the brutal, American-accented Seanchan empire, a colonial power that spends the season wreaking havoc in the land our heroes call home. 

The gist of it is simple. Egwene has been fitted with a magical collar, linked to a corresponding magical bracelet on Renna’s arm. As long as she’s wearing the collar, she can do no harm to Renna; the mere thought of reaching for a weapon sends agonizing waves of pain throughout her entire body, and should she manage to land a blow against her tormentor, she will receive multiple times the pain herself. (The BDSM influence on all this is unmistakable, undeniable, well explored by the fandom, and confirmed by Jordan himself, so no, you’re not crazy.)

Now Egwene has a simple task: She must pick up a pitcher of water and pour Renna a cup. Unless and until she abandons all hope of escape and any belief that she’ll be able to use the pitcher as a weapon to hurt Renna, the magically induced pain makes so much as touching the pitcher impossible. No matter how many times Renna says “Pour the water, Egwene”—a mantra along the lines of The Marathon Man’s “Is it safe?”—it simply can’t be done.

Until, finally, Egwene breaks. She reaches for the pitcher. She pours Renna the water without pain. And immediately, after day upon day of this torture, Renna dumps the water on the floor. “Good girl,” she tells Egwene.

My 12-year-old kid turns to me at this point and says, “This is a good show.”

This is the opening of the long interview I conducted for Defector with actors Madeleine Madden and Xelia Mendes-Jones about their work as Egwene and Renna in the central storyline of The Wheel of Time Season 2. It was my kid’s first exposure to what I (and they) would consider great television drama, and it involved two actors of color, a woman and a nonbinary person. I thought this was exciting, and my nonbinary kid did so too, so I had to dig in. This is very personal to me, and I hope you enjoy it.

Pollo del Mar wants to be hated. As a bad guy (or heel) in the NWA—the National Wrestling Alliance, a professional wrestling company owned and operated by the Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan (no shit!)—it’s her job to get heat, i.e. the boos and jeers and chants that separate professional wrestling’s villains from its heroes. There’s just one problem: She’s a drag queen, and it’s made her too popular. 

“I would love to be a true heel in the world of professional wrestling,” says Paul Pratt, Pollo’s real-world alter ego. “But it’s ultra-challenging, because the moment I walk through the curtain, people erupt. They know that drag queens are supposed to be sassy and bitchy, so even when I say horrible things to people, they’re like ‘Yass, bitch, read me for filth! The library is open!’ It’s so frustrating. I just called you a piece of trash! You’re not supposed to like it!”

For my Defector debut, I spoke with pro wrestlers Pollo del Mar, Nyla Rose, Anthony Bowens, Sonny Kiss, and Kidd Bandit about how they, and professional wrestling in general, are handling the anti-LGBTQ+ moral panic.