The success of the wrestling tournament in Gay Games I created a wave of energy and change throughout the underground wrestling culture.

The hunger to continue the personal and athletic contacts made at the first Gay Games led to the emergence of legitimate wrestling clubs in other cities before Gay Games II. The New York Knights, the Boston Stranglers and the Philadelphia Spartans were just three of the many new clubs that

Scott Velliquette of Southern California Wrestling triumphed for gold in 1986.

While the gay freestyle wrestling community was organizing, university folkstyle programs were being dropped by hundreds of schools under Title IX. Straight wrestlers displaced by the Title IX cuts often found their way to the new "gay" clubs, which then were able to draw enough participation for regular practices. The close personal day-to-day contacts that developed destroyed stereotypes. Wrestling's institutional homophobic fears, fed by ignorance, were dealt a mortal blow.

Roughly 15 percent of the wrestlers registered for the current 2006 Gay Games in Chicago are heterosexual. Every Gay Games has had 10 to 20 percent heterosexual participation. Gay Games wrestling has always been about acceptance, not sexuality.

A sense of pride and camaraderie manifested itself in a lot of very definitive cult/club-coded T-shirts. Gay wrestlers used these to identify each other when attending mainstream wrestling events such as the Olympic Trials or the NCAA championships.

But the euphoria was tragically short lived. In the gay-ghetto cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, AIDS was cutting a deadly swath through the ranks of the emerging sports leadership. Within a few years of Gay Games II, GGWC coach Don Jung, SCWC coach Mike Rio, Gay Games founder Tom Waddell and hundreds of other leaders across the gay sports world were dead.

Ignorance, fear and hopelessness became the hallmarks of once thriving clubs. Don Jung committed suicide the day after his Gay Games II matches. Mike Rio and Tom Waddell followed a few years later. Many of the straight wrestlers would no longer practice with the clubs. Even the clubs' participation and volunteer efforts in local tournaments were no longer sought or appreciated. The years from 1985 to 1989 were the darkest period as many gay wrestlers disappeared off the face of the earth virtually without a trace.