When Incredibly Strange Wrestling took on the Church of Scientology

69 Degrees, the Scientologist boy-band tag-team preach the word of “Dianetics” before entering the ring for an Incredibly Strange Wrestling bout at the Fillmore in San Francisco circa 2001. (Photo: Rog Franklin.)

Before Hoodslam won coverage in Vice and the New York Times by bringing raunchy pro-wrestling to drunks in Bay Area warehouses, there was Incredibly Strange Wrestling. Its star attractions were the tutu-clad El Homo Loco, a feminine powerhouse called the Poontangler, and El Pollo Diablo, who pecked around the ring in a chicken suit with horns. But even with a roster like that, the show was best known for encouraging the fans to throw corn tortillas at the wrestlers. The promoter, Audra Morse, handed them out before the shows figuring that her audience was going to throw something, and tortillas hurt a lot less than beer bottles.

ISW started in the SOMA nightclub scene in the mid-1990s, and had a successful-if-irregular run at the Fillmore in the early 2000s. As Count Dante, a motivational speaker with a passion for leopard print kimonos, I was a sometime grappler and full-time emcee with the outfit. I was also one of the people who came up with this shit, usually during boozy gabfests held at Annie’s, a punk-rock dive bar across the street from San Francisco’s criminal courthouse. One of the funniest concepts to come out of these late-night booking meetings was 69 Degrees, the Scientologist boy-band tag-team.

Now the name was pretty dumb, but it was comedy gold when Bad Boy Corey and Dancin’ Joey hit the ring holding up copies of “Dianetics” and rapping about freeing yourself from the reactive mind. While the concept may have been hashed out during those booking meetings, it was fleshed out (literally) by Daniel Martin, a good-looking suburban kid who could nail high-flying flips off the top rope, and Andrew Thompson, a bouncer from the CW Saloon who provided the muscle.

69 Degrees attempt gay conversion therapy using a “dehomexualizing box designed by L. Ron Hubbard himself.” (Photo: Rog Franklin.)

69 Degrees provided much-needed foils for El Homo Loco and the Cruiser, ISW’s gay tag-team. These clashes centered around 69’s attempts to convert El Homo Loco to heterosexuality by pointing plastic rayguns at a “dehomo-sexualizing box designed by L. Ron Hubbard himself,” which was just a spray-painted cardboard box. When that failed, 69 boasted a repertoire of ridiculous wrestling moves with names like the Tom Cruise Missile and the $40 Million Flop (named for the box office fortunes of John Travolta’s Battlefield Earth), which Thompson developed from careful study of Kid ’n Play videos.

This Scientology satire cruised under the radar while ISW stayed a San Francisco nightclub act, garnering only local press in the days before things really went viral. That all changed when ISW landed on the Van’s Warped Tour in 2001, taking 69 Degrees along with it. Rolling Stone included an item about ISW in their summer concert issue, and several regional newspapers ran pictures of 69 Degrees in their Warped Tour features, making it look like they were one of Warp’s musical acts along with Blink 182 and Flogging Molly. We all got a good laugh out of this back on the bus.

Our first encounter with actual Scientologists happened on the last leg of the tour in West Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C. We had indie wrestlers coming up to us all the time asking to join the show on that tour, so when this really big guy asked me if he could to talk to the promoter, I just pointed him to the merch tent. I figured he was a wrestler.

“(He) looked like Colonel Sanders at a Trekkie convention with white hair and red suspenders,” Thompson recalled. He offered to take 69 on a tour of the Church of Scientology in Washington, D.C.

“We wanted to go for video footage,” Thompson continues, “but we had an early bus time that night and couldn’t take him up on the offer.”

Even though the meeting was cordial enough, I had the feeling that if Martin and Thompson were allowed to go on that church tour that we’d never see them again. Half of my ideas for 69 Degrees matches came from repeated readings of “The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power,” Richard Behar’s 1991 Time Magazine Church of Scientology exposé that was a precursor to Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear. I knew the church’s use of intimidation and lawsuits, but at the time I just cravenly wondered how we could get publicity out of a clash with Tom Cruise’s cult of choice.

After West Virginia, the Scientologists kept coming. Thompson remembers the confrontations getting “weirder,” and two scientologists would be waiting for them at ringside after 69’s bouts with the Mexican Viking and Macho Sasquatcho as the tour made its way through the East Coast.

After a few tense encounters where scientologists had to be escorted out by event security, Thompson “did a pretty good job of avoiding them.”

“I changed in the tent and didn’t go through the crowd in costume,” Thompson said.

The Cruiser urges Dancin’ Joey to submit during an Incredibly Strange Wrestling bout that pitted out gays against Scientologists. (Photo: Rog Franklin.)

While ISW wasn’t hit with the thousands of lawsuits that Scientology chief David Miscavige threw at the I.R.S. in Going Clear, it wasn’t long before ISW’s official email was flooded with cease and desist notices from Hubbard’s church. We pressed on with 69 Degrees, usually having them lose by submission to El Homo Loco and the Cruiser, but we knew that it was pretty much the end of the line for the team even though they still earned really strong fan reactions wherever we went.

“Cheer up Dante,” Martin told me at the time, “Maybe I can become the Enrique Iglesias of Baha’i.”

We did exact some payback on the Scientologists when several of the wrestlers (myself included) barged into the Church of Scientology’s New York HQ on 42nd Street during a break from the tour.

“We were like an angry mob of maybe six or seven dudes,” Martin said before reminding me that I was “as drunk as shit.”

We clogged up their lobby, making absurd proclamations and asking really dumb questions about marijuana legalization. Martin and Thompson, whom the Scientologists had been after for weeks, kept to the back of the room, standing next to an enormous bronze bust of Hubbard that recreated the church founder’s chest hairs in alarming detail. After several minutes of this, a schoolmarm in an admiral’s outfit threatened to call the cops so we got the hell out of there. This was probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever been a part of, but it seemed pretty righteous at the time.

69 Degrees’ last appearance was at ISW’s Homomania in October 2001, which was both our triumphant return home and our final show at the Fillmore. Gigs dried up for us in that post-911 landscape, and opportunities for more tours had a way of falling through. ISW had gotten farther than it ever should have, but after watching Going Clear on HBO, I now can’t help but wonder if the church of Cruise and Travolta didn’t have a hand in cancelling our ticket.

Bob Calhoun used to wrestle men in Chewbacca suits while drunks threw food at him. He chronicled these glory years in “Beer, Blood & Cornmeal: Seven Years of Incredibly Strange Wrestling” (2008, ECW Press). You can follow him on Twitter @bob_calhoun.

Correction: An earlier version of this blog said that Dancin’ Joey dove off the balcony at the Fillmore. Upon further video review, it has been determined that it was actually Bad Boy Corey who did the balcony dive.