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Khandaghabadi called the night Femmed Out, and invited fans “to get ‘femmed out’ with us, whatever that means to you.” She wanted to create a show that was inconceivable to the conventional wrestling world. “I knew it was a good idea because I had never seen it done before.” Sometimes I like to do things that scare me like that specifically,” she says. “I felt like it was good and it was time. She’d been wrestling as female characters more often during Hoodslam shows and had heard some other wrestlers mention they were interested in trying it as well. She’d yet to find herself.Īt the end of 2014, Khandaghabadi had an idea. By 2010, she’d convinced a handful of her wrestling friends to move to a warehouse in Oakland and start an underground show. Is it obvious?”Īfter graduating, Khandabadi started meeting kindred spirits in the independent wrestling scene. “I was a bit of a character in high school.
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I had other personality traits that were kind of overpowering,” she says, starting to grin. “People, at that point, didn’t see me as Middle Eastern. But by the time she reached high school, she says, her grief and her heritage were no longer the things that made her stand out. He asked if Khandaghabadi would want to host a Hoodslam event monthly, as part of Oakland’s First Friday block party.Īs a preteen, she’d been teased about her strange Iranian last name. But soon after, in June 2011, Khandaghabadi brought Hoodslam to “Tourette’s Without Regrets.” The wrestlers performed for 20 minutes during the four-hour show, but it was enough to catch the eye of the Oakland Metro Opera House’s owner. Perhaps too steadily: A year in, the landlord told her the crowds and after-parties were attracting police attention and had to stop. From there, the show - in wrestling terms, the promotion - grew steadily. In April 2010, she borrowed a ring from a friend and hosted the first Hoodslam during an underground metal show at the Victory Warehouse. She wrestled as Persian Tiger and then the Shadow and then, as so often is the case for Iranian American wrestlers, as a villainous sheik.Īfter a rough year in Florida trying to “make it,” Khandaghabadi returned to the Bay Area. She graduated in 2003, and worked odd jobs to make rent for nearly a decade. Khandaghabadi started wrestling on the independent circuit while she was still a student at Albany High School. (Jessica Christian / The Chronicle | San Francisco Chronicle) Sam Khandaghabadi (second left), known in the ring as Dark Sheik, chats with fellow wrestlers backstage while handing out paychecks before the start of a Hoodslam event at Oakland Metro Operahouse in Oakland, Calif. The wrestler now lives openly as a trans woman. A half decade later, the person Khandaghabadi shows me is different: less anxious, more open - and far from a leading man. “It’s a bit embarrassing now, but that was exactly how I wanted you to see me,” Khandagabadi says of that first meeting, as we walk to a nearby deli to grab dinner. In November of 2019, I meet Khandaghabadi again, at an apartment a few blocks north of the warehouse. At one point, while trying to explain the resume needed to start Hoodslam, Khandaghabadi told me, “I’ve done theater, I’ve done high school wrestling, I’ve done martial arts, I was in an erotic film - I’ve done a lot of things.” Khandaghabadi took a pull from a cigarette, perhaps to hide a grin, as I scratched the quote into my notebook. The wrestling event, which begins with Joe “Broseph” Brody pouring booze in fans’ mouths and telling everyone to “check your f- at the door,” is just as likely to feature a cocaine-fueled character named Drugz Bunny as grown men wrestling as Super Nintendo characters. It was pitch-perfect for Hoodslam: dirtbag rock ’n’ roll mixed with more than a dash of nerd-culture ephemera. Khandaghabadi, who founded the vulgar, nerdy, transgressive wrestling show in 2010, wore a leather jacket and chain-smoked cigarettes on a couch.