Last Monday night, WWE wrestler CM Punk delivered one of the best promos since the WWE Attitude Era. (You can read our recap here)
He is far and away the best talker in WWE and his real life “Straight Edge” lifestyle is the perfect gimmick. When he is a good guy, the fact that he doesn’t drink or do drugs makes him a great role model (imagine Hulk Hogan with lots of tattoos and piercings) and when he is a bad guy, he uses the same facts to show how much better than you he is.
Now he has stirred up some controversy while on WWE’s Australian Tour after getting into a verbal altercation with fans at ringside. At one point during the fan’s heckling he utters the line “You have a vagina, you have a vaginaaaaaaa! Nice Faux-hawk you homo.”
Now as soon he delivers the line “you homo” you had to imagine the internet would blow up with calling it a homophobic slur. TMZ Picked up the story here and they are definitely playing up the homophobic slur angle.
Now CM Punk, who is very active on twitter, issued the following apology.
As you can see, he manned up to using a term he knows he should not have used. But we really should put this in context. WWE is a scripted TV Show. If a character on True Blood called somebody a “homo” nobody would bat an eye. But because of the athletic competition element and the fan interaction we sometimes forget that this is theater melded with sport. Sure, you can claim that this was a non-televised event, but this was still the character of CM Punk talking as CM Punk to a fan. If this occurred in the parking lot at the arena or as he was walking down the street on his personal time, then you could make a bigger deal about it. Then it is Phil Brooks (Punk’s real name) using those words.
As it is, this was just a guy who took his character a step to far and apologized for it. According to the TMZ story GLAAD has not responded to their calls. Lets hope it stays that way, and they just issue a statement saying it was bad but there are bigger fish to fry. (David Tyree anyone?)
Plus, should anybody rocking a mustache like that while wearing wrestling trunks be questioning another persons homosexuality?
