Saúl Armendáriz grew up in one of the world’s weirder double cities: El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Born in El Paso, he lived, always, on both sides of the border. “I went to school in El Paso, but on Friday my sisters and I would run over the bridge to Juárez,” he says. The fun and the family were mostly in Juárez. At the top of the fun list, for Saúl, was lucha libre—the flashy, popular Mexican brand of professional wrestling. Every barrio had a small arena where masked heroes (técnicos) and villains (rudos) grappled and whirled and tossed one another around on Sundays. Saúl loved the gaudy costumes. He loved the rowdy, passionate crowds. He idolized the larger-than-life luchadores. He was not a big kid, but he was athletic and quick and in desperate need of an alter ego.

“Being gay is a gift from God,” Armendáriz told me recently. That was not his experience as a child. He remembers being brutally punished, at a very young age, for playing patty-cake, a girl’s game, with a like-minded boy at school. His parents, particularly his father, were mortified by his effeminacy. “My dad was a machista,” he said. “He did not want a gay son.” His father, a truck driver, drank; he beat Saúl’s mother. They divorced when Saúl was thirteen. Other kids were also rough. “Boys in the neighborhood, including my own relatives, used me as a sex toy,” he told me.

Armendáriz, who is forty-four, stood at a dressing-room mirror in Los Angeles, putting on green-glitter eyeshadow, while recalling these horrors. He did not seem notably detached from, or perturbed by, what he was saying, but somewhere in between. “I am not a victim,” he said firmly. Then he gave a small sigh and started putting on lipstick—fire-engine red. “But I am still so damaged.” He glued on a pair of false eyelashes. He was transforming Saúl into his lucha character, the fabulous world welterweight champion Cassandro.

He quit school at fifteen and apprenticed himself to a lucha trainer in Juárez. He made his professional début, at seventeen, as Mister Romano. That character was dreamed up by a well-known Tijuana luchador, Rey Misterio, with whom Armendáriz had, as a promising student, gone to train. Mister Romano was a gladiator-themed rudo. He wore a scary black-and-white mask and costume and had a wicked dropkick off the top rope. Working his way up the match cards in arenas along the border, he lasted less than a year.

“It was Baby Sharon who encouraged me to step out of Mister Romano,” Armendáriz said. Baby Sharon was an exótico—a luchador who wrestles in drag. Exóticos have been around since the nineteen-forties. At first, they were dandies, a subset of rudos with capes and valets. They struck glamour-boy poses and threw flowers to the audience. As exóticos got swishier and more flirtatious, and started dressing in drag, the shtick became old-school limp-wristed gay caricature. Crowds loved to hate them, screaming “Maricón!” and “Joto!” (“Faggot!”). The exóticos made a delightful contrast with the super-masculine brutes they met in the ring. Popular exóticos insisted that it was all an act—in real life, they were straight. Baby Sharon was among the first, according to Armendáriz, to publicly say that, no, he was actually gay.

At his début as an exótico, Armendáriz wore no mask. “For my entrance, I wore a butterfly blouse of my mother’s. I wore the tail of my sister’s quinceañera dress. And then, to wrestle, a woman’s bathing suit.” He was billed as Rosa Salvaje, but the match was in Juárez, where everybody knew him. It was a terrifying night. “I thought it was a secret that I was gay, so I thought I was coming out. But everybody already knew. I was the only one who didn’t know.” Still, people yelled, “Kill the fag!”

Rosa Salvaje, like Mister Romano, was quick and tough. No limp wrists or squealing. Maybe a brief bump and grind after hurling an opponent from the ring into the first row of seats. Maybe a shock kiss on the mouth for some stud he had in a submission hold. The crowds adored the act. But some older wrestlers didn’t want matches with Rosa. They particularly didn’t want to lose to him. It was 1989, the height of H.I.V. and AIDS hysteria. Armendáriz’s mother, Maria, began coming to his matches. (His father has still never seen one, except on TV.) She did not let the drunken calls for homophobic homicide pass. “That’s my son!” she protested. No cry could give more pause to a Mexican heckler.

Rosa Salvaje often fought alongside another talented exótico, Pimpinela Escarlata. They kicked hetero butt up and down the state of Chihuahua. Were these legitimate wins? In sporting terms, no. There is a reason the Nevada Gaming Control Board would never allow betting on pro wrestling: outcomes are predetermined. But the fix involves a “story line,” in lucha libre just as in U.S. pro wrestling, and winners must be, at the very least, convincing athletes. Rosa and Pimpi fulfilled that requirement.

And the course of a story line isn’t determined only by promoters. When Armendáriz decided to change his stage name, he took a lucha de apuesta (“betting match”) against an exótico called Johnny Vannessa: the loser would forfeit his name. Rosa, as crooked fate would have it, lost, and Armendáriz fought his next match as Cassandro. The name came from a Tijuana brothel keeper, Cassandra, whom he admired. Cassandra was known for her generosity to the poor. With the profits from her bustling business, she helped street kids, and she had done the same, it was said, in her younger days as a high-priced prostitute. Cassandro found her blend of talents and sympathies inspiring. Maybe it was possible to be a bawdy entertainer—scandalous, sexy, successful—and a good person.

Once, in Guadalajara, an old woman stabbed him during a match, after the bout overflowed, as lucha libre often does, into the seats. Why did she do that? Cassandro shrugged. “I was beating up one of her heroes. She got me right here, under the rib cage.” In Juárez, another old woman once threw a cup of green chilies on his back. “I told her to calm down,” he said. “She was going crazy. I told her she was going to have a fucking heart attack. She did it anyway. My back was all sweaty. Those chilies really, really hurt.”

The most frenzied crowd I’ve seen at a Cassandro match was in Juárez. But that seemed to be a frenzy entirely of adoration. This was in March, at the Arena Kalaka. It had been a difficult night, I thought. The evening’s promoters billed it as lucha extrema. Children under twelve were excluded, ostensibly. Luchadores with more grit than finesse had been assaulting one another with steel chairs, boards wrapped in barbed wire, fluorescent light tubes of different lengths, a guitar wrapped in barbed wire, and, most alarmingly, a battery-operated power drill. The drill turned out to be fake—its application to the skulls of downed fighters was pure pantomime—but after half a dozen matches broken glass from the light tubes was everywhere, and the blood pouring off the wrestlers was real. It was hard not to see the festivities as a communal exorcism, considering what Juárez has endured in recent years—a scorched-earth street war between rival drug cartels that killed more than nine thousand people in one four-year stretch. The city’s murder rate, which was the world’s highest, finally began falling in 2011, but the post-traumatic stress runs deep and wide, and the ramshackle neighborhood around Arena Kalaka, which is in a battered old warehouse, has a ravaged, deserted, battlefield look.