WWE: Dana Warrior’s Pride Month tribute is a mess

Dana Warrior, the wife of the late WWE Superstar, The Ultimate Warrior, took to Twitter on June 13 to post a message of solidarity with the LGBTQ community in celebration of Pride.

You can assume that Dana Warrior meant well, but in an amazingly tone deaf decision, she chose to include a photo of herself wearing her husband’s famous face paint.

Warrior’s public stance on homosexuality was made clear during his lifetime. During an infamous speech at the University of Connecticut in 2005, the man born as Jim Hellwig startled the crowd by announcing, “Queering don’t make the world work.” The statement was caught on video and quickly spread online.

In 2007, Warrior would post derogatory remarks about protesters at a speaking engagement at DePaul University:

"One of the premises that I put forward in my speech being that the fundamental difference between the ideological sides is “thinking vs feeling,” the most enlivening emotional outbursts erupted when homosexuals were offended by my use of the word “queer.” One guy without his husband and two physically-repulsive butch-dykes slurping on one another’s tongues (really) on the front row had a real hard time cozying up to my principled heterosexual obstinacy. So, in an act of pure selfish pleasure the guy got himself physically thrown out by the masculine security guard, unmistakably loving every single masochistic, man-handled moment of it. And the dykes, well, they ran out screaming and yelling like speared wild boars that I was a homophobe for making my remarks. Rumor has it that they decided to exit more because I was not getting stimulated by watching their poorly performed two-nightcrawlers-in-heat act."

In 2008, following the death of Heath Ledger, Warrior would again post to his website. The screed was a confusing mess that featured Warrior praising the movie Brokeback Mountain and saying the love scenes “sucked me right in and I had no choice but to give myself over to the passion of its wide open range, if you get my drift.” But at the same time he called the movie “Bendover Brokeback” and referred to Ledger as “Leather Hedger” while finally coming to the conclusion that Ledger’s death was deserved.

I would link you to the direct source of these two website entries, but the site has been scrubbed from the internet to the point of even having been excluded from the WayBack Machine on the Internet Archive. The video of the UConn speech has also been removed from YouTube due to “copyright claims by Ultimate Creations, Inc.”

Of course, that isn’t actually surprising. Dana Warrior has done her best to erase the worst of her husband’s bigotry from the public eye. Bigotry that didn’t limit itself to homosexuality. When VICE Sports did a piece on Warrior’s statements following his death, they reached out to Dana for comment and shared her reply:

"I will not be disloyal to my husband’s memory or speak ill of a man who is not here to defend himself. I can, however, tell you his heart was changed by conversations with his two daughters. The true testament of the man behind the character is his ability to evolve. My husband did just that."

I deeply want to believe that this is true. That Warrior, after living a life of personal struggles, did find some kind of peace for himself that led to growth.

Maybe he did. Maybe Warrior’s views on homosexuality changed and because of his untimely death he never had a chance to make amends. Maybe that is part of what he planned to do following his return to the public eye in WWE.

But all of these things are, unfortunately, just “maybes.” The fact is that Warrior didn’t do these things sooner, so the portrait we are left with publicly is a man who was filled with a hate for anyone in the LGBTQ+ community.

If Dana Warrior wants to continue doing good in her husband’s name, then at some point, she needs to address the ill he did while he was alive. I cannot imagine how difficult this must be, but it is necessary. Simply sweeping his prior statements and actions under the rug doesn’t suffice. It comes off as hypocritical and false.

I believe that Warrior himself felt The Ultimate Warrior was something bigger than him. That the character of the The Ultimate Warrior was something symbolic and powerful. It is something he addressed in his final promo on the April 7, 2014 edition of Monday Night Raw. “I am Ultimate Warrior. You are the Ultimate Warrior fans and the spirit of Ultimate Warrior will run forever.”

But while bogged down in the legacy of a man filled with such hate, the Warrior’s spirit can’t be free. And it absolutely isn’t welcome at Pride.