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"Chris Colt was the best wrestler that nobody ever saw,” said Jim Cornette, the legendary pro wrestling manager and historian. Until about a year ago, Chris Colt’s life and career were shrouded in mystery. What little was known about him came from snippets found on a handful of pro wrestling message boards and online articles. Footage of Colt’s matches — from the 1960s through the late ‘80s — are also rare, and what few are available are from the end of his career when age and substance abuse left him a shell of his former self. In 2024, an episode of the Vice docuseries Dark Side of the Ring (2019–) shed some light on Chris Colt’s remarkable life, yet swaths of his career remain shrouded in undeniable mystique. What we know for sure is that he was not only a wrestling trailblazer who pioneered techniques and styles more than a decade ahead of his time, but he was also unapologetically bisexual in a business that would never accept him.

The man who would become Chris Colt was born Charles Harris on June 22, 1946, in Orofino, Idaho. But it wasn’t long before Colt’s family life circled the drain — Drain, Oregon, where they moved when he was still a child. According to Colt’s niece, Rhonda Rondeau, her mother and uncle grew up in a household marred by their alcoholic parents’ violent relationship. She told Dark Side of the Ring that every weekend, Colt’s parents would bring home a case of half-gallon jugs of whiskey that led to inevitable drunken brawls. Their children were caught in the middle. One Saturday, when Colt was about 10 years old, he came home to find the house ransacked and his mother slumped on the couch, her face pulverized and a broken revolver on the cushion beside her. Colt’s father had pistol-whipped her so severely that he broke the handle. Colt and his sister helped their mother into the back of the family car so they could drive her to the hospital. When his father emerged, Colt told him that he hated him and wished he was dead. In response, his father hit him on the side of the head hard enough to break his eardrum. The man brandished another gun at the car as Colt’s sister sped away with the boy and his mother in the backseat, firing at his wife and children as they made their getaway. Like many victims of domestic violence, Colt’s chaotic upbringing led him on a self-destructive path.

Colt needed an escape from his family’s turmoil and found it in professional wrestling. As a boy, he and his mother would go to the wrestling matches held at nearby Roseburg, Oregon, and before long, becoming a pro wrestler was the only thing Chris Colt thought about.

After dropping out of high school, Colt took the first bus to Chicago to pursue his dream. However, he soon learned just how difficult becoming a wrestler was going to be. In the early 1960s, wrestling trainers were reluctant to take on new students for one very big reason: they didn’t want to reveal to the many aspiring wrestlers who walked through their doors that pro wrestling was staged. Up until the late 1980s, everyone involved in the wrestling business feared that if the public knew it was simply a show, complete with predetermined outcomes, fans would stop attending or tuning in to the events. So trainers weeded out applicants by putting them in painful holds or just flat-out beating them up until only the most dedicated students remained. Then the secrets of pro wrestling would either be revealed to them late in their training or often right before they had their first match.

Colt didn’t have any means to make a living during his training, but upon striking up a friendship with a male prostitute, the 18-year-old Colt decided to become a sex worker until he was ready to wrestle full-time. To that point, he’d never had a sexual relationship with anyone. Throughout his career, it was widely assumed by those in the wrestling business as well as some fans that Chris Colt was gay. However, Dark Side of the Ring revealed that Colt, writing in an unpublished autobiography, stated that he was bisexual, but more attracted to men (which might be scored a four or five on the Kinsey Scale). He would later take his wrestling surname from Colt, an early gay pornographic magazine.

Part of the reason Chris Colt’s career has been so hard to document is because he wrestled under nearly a dozen different aliases, including Jim Dillinger, Maurice Chevier, the Magnificent Chevier, and Don Juan the Magnificent. Colt also wrestled for smaller regional promotions that did not receive coverage from any major wrestling magazines, and he never stayed in any of these promotions for long. Being openly attracted to men almost certainly prevented him from securing jobs in bigger venues and becoming a main-eventer, despite his talent. Chris Colt’s biggest career impediment, however, was his notorious alcohol and drug abuse.

In 1964, Colt made his pro wrestling debut in Boston where he met another wrestler Ron Dupree (real name Russell Groves). The two men formed a tag team with Colt taking the name Paul Dupree. They portrayed themselves to fans as brothers, however, they were in fact a romantic couple and made no attempt to hide the nature of their relationship from their fellow wrestlers. In 1967, the duo went to wrestle for Big Time Wrestling, which ran shows in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula and parts of Ohio. The Duprees adopted a new gimmick to match the changing times. They called themselves the California Hell’s Angels after the biker gang of the same name, a symbol of the darker side of the late-1960s counterculture. The two men bleached their hair blond and wore all-leather outfits with the Hell’s Angels logo stitched on the back of their jackets. They quickly established themselves as quintessential rulebreakers by theatrically cheating their way to victory in the ring. The Duprees were also early pioneers of the hardcore wrestling style with their use of weapons like chairs, belts, screwdrivers, chains, and a litany of other objects.

Chris Colt (pictured left) and Ron Dupree (pictured right).

In 1967, Colt was 21 years old, and according to Dark Side of the Ring, like most young outsiders from his generation, he was enamored with the counterculture emanating from San Francisco and traveled there to partake in the free love (and sex) lifestyle. While exploring the city, he met a woman drinking a bottle of wine on a stoop. They got to talking and shared a drink. Afterward, Colt went into a shop a couple of blocks away and saw the same woman on a poster promoting an upcoming concert. It was Janis Joplin. Colt went back to Joplin and asked why she didn’t tell him who she was. She said she just wanted a friend who wasn’t there just because she was famous. And the two did become friends, spending much of their time together partying and getting high. Colt adored Joplin, and when she died at the age of 27, he told his friends he wanted to live fast and die at 27 just like her. In fact, so many celebrities died at 27 that they later came to be collectively known as the “27 Club.”

In 1968, Colt and Ron Dupree began wrestling for the Arizona Athletic Association during the winters. When the local chapter of the Hell’s Angels caught wind of their act and demanded they stop using the Hell’s Angels name and iconography, the duo changed their team’s name to the Comancheros, still clad in biker garb but without the Hell’s Angels’ patches. The Comancheros ignited even bigger problems when they set the American flag on fire during a broadcast of the Arizona Athletic Association, resulting in the show being canceled.

In 1970, Dupree had a heart attack and was told by doctors in no uncertain terms to retire from wrestling. He transitioned to managing Colt and a rotating cast of new tag-team partners. However, the allure of the spotlight proved too strong, and Dupree stepped back into the ring with Colt. Dupree’s health declined, and in 1975, while working as a ring announcer in Tacoma, he suffered another heart attack. Colt rode with him in the ambulance to the hospital, but Dupree died en route, his hand in Colt’s. Same-sex marriage would not be legalized for another 40 years, but Dupree’s death essentially made Chris Colt a widow, and he sank further into addiction to cope with his lover’s death. According to one of his former tag-team partners, Bill Anderson, Colt couldn’t perform in the ring while sober and could only perform while drunk.

Colt had already been basing his wildly flamboyant wrestling persona on Janis Joplin’s onstage performances, but he leaned into the rock and roll aesthetic even further after Durpee’s death. He began styling himself after Alice Cooper, wearing black makeup drawn to look like spiders around his eyes. Colt’s use of makeup didn’t just make him stand out among his peers, it was groundbreaking, predating face-painted wrestling superstars like Sting and the Road Warriors (and their many imitators) by over a decade. He also stuck clothing pins in his scarred forehead in addition to radical facial piercings. But Colt’s unheralded trailblazing didn’t stop there. His finishing move was a top rope elbow drop, a daring maneuver in those days when body slams or a suplexes finished most matches. Chris Colt and Macho Man Randy Savage wrestled for Big Time Wrestling in Detroit during the mid-1970s, and it’s not much of a stretch to assume that Savage adopted his famous elbow drop from Colt.

The greatest example of Colt’s creative genius was his use of entrance music, something wrestling fans take for granted today. In the 1970s and ‘80s, Colt came out to songs like Alice Cooper’s “Welcome to my Nightmare”, AC/DC’s “Back in Black” and “High Time We Went” by Joe Cocker, Colt’s favorite singer. It wouldn’t be until the 1980s when the WWF (now WWE), World Class Championship Wrestling, and Jim Crockett Promotions (later WCW) began using entrance music for their wrestlers.

In the mid-1970s, Chris Colt was back working for Big Time Wrestling where he became friends with photographer Brad McFarlin, who sold his pictures to wrestling magazines and photographed rock concerts for the Detroit-based CREEM magazine. McFarlin used his connections to get Colt backstage at Joe Cocker’s concert at the Toledo Sports Arena. According to McFarlin, Colt smoked weed in the apartment he was sharing with two strippers before they left for the concert and brought a whiskey bottle. Upon meeting Cocker, Colt offered him the whiskey, which Cocker declined because he was already drunk. McFarlin snapped a picture of the two. Colt and McFarlin snuck into the front row and Cocker stumbled onto the stage, sang three songs while using the microphone stand as a crutch, then vomited on McFarlin.

Chris Colt (pictured left) and Joe Cocker (pictured right). Source: *Slam Wrestling.*

The most notorious incident of Chris Colt’s career took place at Madison Square Garden (the one in Phoenix, Arizona, not in Manhattan) on April 9, 1975. Booked to wrestle in a cage match, Colt decided to change up his usual rematch routine of getting drunk and instead dropped acid before the bout. When the LSD kicked in during the match, Colt began hallucinating that giant spiders were trying to get into the cage. In response, he frantically escaped the cage and began punching every fan in sight. The fans reacted in kind, pummeling Colt and smashing bottles over his head, but he was so far gone he couldn’t feel any pain. Eventually, the police had to come to break up the riot. Colt was fired for the incident.

Chris Colt spent the remainder of his wrestling career as a journeyman, mostly working for promotions in the Pacific Northwest. He was fired from one of these when a local newspaper ran a cover story about the annual Pride parade Colt had been photographed at. By the late 1980s, the WWF had put most of the regional wrestling promotions out of business. The few that remained were on their last legs, and none wanted to hire Colt. Moreover, substance abuse and a hard bumping wrestling style had taken an immense toll on his body. Colt wrestled his last known match in 1987. After he retired, he is said to have worked at an adult bookstore and as a cab driver, spending most of his money feeding his drug addictions, which now included cocaine and methamphetamine. According to Dark Side of the Ring, when Colt didn’t have enough cash for drugs, he’d pose as a police officer and rob drug dealers at gunpoint. Eventually, friends and family stopped hearing from him, and his whereabouts filtered down to them only as rumors.

In 1988, Colt reached out to filmmaker Jack Fritscher to express interest in starring in one of his films. Fritscher didn’t make the kind of movies that were nominated for Oscars. He owned Palm Drive Videos, which produced gay porn films featuring performers with a rugged, blue-collar look. Fritscher was already familiar with the world of pro wrestling, having written about it for Drummer, a gay S&M magazine where he was editor-in-chief. Each a fan of each other’s work, both were eager to collaborate. Colt starred in two Fritscher videos, Uncut: Pro-Wrestler Chris Colt and Sex Aggression: Colt’s Wrestling Academy, both released in 1988. Fritscher said years later that Colt was motivated to make the videos as a way of getting back at the homophobic wrestling industry he felt had held him back. He also did it to anger his straight homophobic wrestling peers and closeted gay/bi wrestlers. These were Colt’s only adult videos.

“He was a specialty act,” Fritscher said, “He wanted to see himself in a new way on screen.” Fritscher also recalled the strange fascination men who purchased Colt’s videos had with him. “Chris had perverse appeal as the brutal man who is so ugly that he is sexy.” Fritscher added that Colt was a pleasure to work with.

It’s unknown what happened to Chris Colt in the years between his brief career in the porn industry and his death. It was rumored that Colt died from AIDS in a Seattle homeless shelter in 1996. Jack Fritscher said he assumed all the performers he worked with in the 1980s either had AIDS or eventually contracted it. Rhonda Rondeau put all the rumors to rest in Dark Side of The Ring, revealing that her uncle was found dead in an alley in Seattle. According to Chris Colt’s death certificate, he died on May 23, 1995, of pneumococcal pneumonia at the age of 48. HIV and substance abuse were listed as contributing factors in his death, though no autopsy was performed.

Pro wrestling has always been a haven for the renegades, outlaws, and otherwise unemployable people who would never be accepted in polite society. Chris Colt was a wrestler’s wrestler — an outcast in an industry of outcasts because of his sexual orientation. But he never let that stop him. Colt lived hard and fast because he didn’t know of any other way to be. Had he been otherwise, he wouldn’t have been Chris Colt — pro wrestling’s unsung pioneer, original bi bad boy, and a true American original.

Published Feb 12, 2025