10 Wrestlers Audiences Weren't Ready For

10. Goldust

Wrestling audiences, wrestling bookers, wrestlers themselves. There were a number of people that weren't ready for Goldust.

An increasingly-frayed Scott Hall had no interest in working with him during Razor Ramon's final months, not least when WWE went down a gay panic route between the pair. Sections of the crowd hurled slurs his way, and felt as if they'd been invited to as part of the show. Vince McMahon might have had to explain what "androgynous" meant to Dustin Rhodes before the son of a son of a plumber made the move north, but it was as if The Chairman didn't entirely know the meaning himself when it came to actually deploying the more controversial aspects of the character in 1995 and 1996.

Typically ten years (and then some) behind popular culture, wrestling wasn't anywhere near for a character that even played with homosexuality as a theme, let alone attempted to insert it directly as a character trait. "Mind games" was the typical safety hatch, but WWE knew enough of what they were whipping up before scaling things down.

As if to prove the hypocrisy at the heart of their rebuffed claims of homophobia, Goldust's 1996 babyface turn came when he proudly declared that he was straight. They weren't saying the quiet part loud, exactly, but they weren't whispering it either.