Sonya Deville has a Jersey girl’s attitude about being the WWE’s first authentically openly gay wrestler in the ring. Deville (known as Daria Berenato outside the ring) has a no-nonsense attitude, a fighter’s spirit, and a friendly sense of self-deprecating humor, all of which make her a charming ambassador for scrappy gays everywhere. However, she didn’t necessarily intend to come out to the fans of such a major franchise — it just sort of happened, and what’s happened since is pretty remarkable.
Here’s what she had to say in an interview with Allure about her unexpected coming out to Triple H, what it’s meant for her career, the mascara that holds up during even her most knock-down, drag-out fights, and how there might be LGBTQ storylines in the pipeline for the WWE.
Her (Public) Coming-Out Story
The woman now dubbed “The Pride Fighter” came into the world’s best-known wrestling company through Tough Enough, one of WWE’s earliest forays into reality TV. Unlike more recent projects like Total Divas, Total Bellas, and Miz and Mrs., it wasn’t a Kardashians-style dramatic day to day; instead, it was a contest show that gave performers a chance onto the WWE roster and produced, perhaps most notably, The Miz (who went from MTV’s The Real World to WWE champion).
Deville was featured on the show’s sixth season in 2015, and her appearance came with a surprise for her: As she made it to the finalist stage, she expected some hard questions to put her on the spot, but she didn’t think she’d be asked about her relationship status.
She recalls receiving an unexpected question during the final interview process. “My first question from WWE execs was, ‘Are you in a relationship?’ Which, for any of the other contestants would have been a simple question to answer, right? So not threatening.”
“But for me, I wasn’t openly gay at the time. I had a girlfriend, but I never verbalized being gay,” she shares. “It was a weird, uncomfortable, unspoken thing that my mom and dad knew but not many other people did.”
“When I came out, I was freaking out and got super awkward,” she remembers. “I was like, ‘Yeah. I don’t have a wife yet, but I have a girlfriend,’ some cringeworthy answer. And Triple H started laughing and he was like, ‘Oh, now the whole world knows.’ I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’”
“I never would have intentionally came out like that, but it was almost like I had to because what was I going to do? Lie and say I’m single, in this house filled with good-looking men and women, and my girlfriend would kill me when I get home?” she asks now. She decided to be honest about who she was, and says of the experience, “It ended up being one of the best things that happened to me because I was almost forced to tell my truth, forced to face it at that point.”
Not everyone has to come out to a man nicknamed “The Cerebral Assassin” on a reality show, but high stakes have come with high rewards for Deville, and her identity has let her be a symbol for fans. When it comes to wrestling with her sexuality, she’s been forced into the ring and, as expected, is kicking any negativity’s ass.
“Over the last four years since that day, I’ve just been embracing and loving myself more and really just accepting who I am,” she says. “I’m at a point where I now use my platform to advocate for those who were in the shoes I was in four years ago — and to hopefully inspire and encourage younger people going through the same thing I went through and let them know: You should never be ashamed of who you are, especially not who you love.”
How Her Identity Influences Her Style
Deville’s gone from nervously coming out on TV to proudly representing herself and her community. Nowadays, instead of being caught off guard by people questioning her sexuality, she says she’s letting her style do some of the talking — or screaming.
“Five years ago, wearing rainbow or doing anything to scream ‘I’m gay’ would have been so uncomfortable for me,” Deville says. “A year ago, I got a tattoo on my bicep — me and my mom got it. It’s an equal sign for equality. I’ve had tattoos since I was like 16, but if you would have asked the younger me to get a tattoo that symbolized my sexuality, I would have told you no, because that’s how not okay I used to be with it.”
“Now I’m so comfortable with who I am, and I’m really just evolving as a person every day. It’s really cool to be able to represent it with the WWE,” she says. “I like to just have the little rainbow hankie in my back pocket or the shoelaces that I wear sometimes. It’s also just a subtle note to my LGBTQ community.”
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A self-avowed “total tomboy” who’s “a little more on the minimalist side” style-wise, Deville doesn’t have the high-glam reputation of WWE women’s division mainstays like Charlotte Flair, Alexa Bliss, or Nia Jax. But that’s not to say her looks don’t mean anything to her. Lately, as the WWE is selling Sonya merch declaring, “Put your hair up and square up,” she’s been using a hair tie to create dramatic tension.
“I hate, hate, hate doing anything active with my hair down,” she says. “I’ll come to the ring with my hair down now, but I’ll put it up either before the match starts or I’ll use it as an emotional moment in the match.”
Tasked with a demanding road schedule that only includes WWE’s legendary glam squad for one of the four nights she’s in the ring each week, Deville has had to bring a DIY spirit to her in-ring looks.
“I kind of had to master doing my own makeup, which at first was so terrible that it was a sin,” she says. “I didn’t know how to put on fake lashes. I would glue them a quarter-inch above the lash line. It was a nightmare. But I like to think that I’ve almost mastered it now.” That’s not to say her in-ring glam isn’t without its challenges these days, though. While she knows how to find her lashline now, it’s still a challenge to keep her falsies in place.
“I think the goal through any match is to keep the lashes on,” she says. The tag-team partner working with her lashes each match is a Trish McEvoy mascara that she swears by: “It comes off in little plastic particles. No matter what you do to the mascara, it will not smear,” she shares.
Her mascara isn’t the only thing working hard. Lately, labor conditions for pro wrestlers have been in the news, spotlighted by HBO’s Last Week Tonight With John Oliver just ahead of the WWE’s flagship pay-per-view, WrestleMania, taking place earlier this year in April. When I ask Deville if she’s seen any response from within the organization, she deflects.
“Personally, I know what I signed up for. It was something that I chose to do, and I made the sacrifices I had to make. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else,” she says. “It’s a lifestyle, living and working on the road and being away from your loved ones, but it’s what you sacrifice to do what you love. I get to see the entire world while I do what I love to do, which is wrestle.”
The WWE Women’s Evolution
A trustworthy mascara is key as Deville finds herself in the midst of the WWE Women’s Evolution, which has given the ladies of the WWE unprecedented chances at WrestleMania main events and massive cage matches. Following in the freshly laid footsteps of the Four Horsewomen — Charlotte Flair, Becky Lynch, Sasha Banks, and Bayley (who all went from WWE’s minor league, NXT, to its main roster) — Deville finds herself riding a surging wave of interest in the WWE’s women.
“The Women’s Evolution was just starting as I was getting into Tough Enough,” she remembers. “I’ve always had great role models coming in and watching the Becky Lynches and the Charlottes, the Bayleys, the Sashas move that movement and then being able to be part of it.”
Much like the friendship of the Four Horsewomen, Deville has been shoulder-to-shoulder with a work wife all her own: Mandy Rose. The duo first met on Tough Enough, came up together through NXT, were the muscle of a group called Absolution, and now take to the ring together as Fire and Desire.
“Mandy has been my best friend since literally the first day of Tough Enough tryouts,” Deville tells me. “I totally judged a book by its cover, and I thought she was going to be this high-maintenance beauty queen.”
“I was expecting her to be like valley girl like, ‘Hi, I’m Mandy.’ She turned around and was like, ‘Yo, what’s up?’ I was like, ‘[gasps] She’s cool.’ Literally, in that moment, we became best friends,” Deville says. The duo has been able to share their success together now too. Last year, Bayley told me her relationship with Banks has been instrumental in her success. It seems it’s much the same for Deville and Rose.
Since that moment they met on Tough Enough, the duo has gone on to become a force to be reckoned with in the women’s division, featuring prominently in unprecedented women’s Elimination Chamber matches as both solo competitors and a tag-team. Their involvement in high-concept cage matches and battle royales where women weren’t always allowed to compete has forged a friendship for the ages.
“We’ve been a part of so many firsts coming in at the time that we came,” Deville says of her partnership with Rose. “The roller coaster ride that we’ve been on together is an irreplaceable friendship.”
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Just a month after Fire and Desire appeared to tease a possible romantic storyline, Deville tells me that Rose gets along “great” with Deville’s real-world girlfriend.
For Deville, the strength of her partnership with Rose is emblematic of the power in the women’s division right now. “Everyone has contributed to the Women’s Evolution in their own way, and I hope that my message can just be it’s okay to not look like the rest, it’s okay to not fit in, it’s okay to be yourself and be different.”
She’s also been fortunate that her fellow performers haven’t ever given her a hard time. When I ask about whether or not her sexuality has ever made her stand out among the other wrestlers, she tells me, “I’ve never dealt with really anything negative in the WWE as a whole, in the locker room, anything.”
“The girls have been nothing but supporters of me since I started,” Deville explains. “I would say I got in my own head when I first started overthinking things and thinking, ‘Are they not going to support me? Are they going to judge me? These were all insecurities that I had but I, luckily, was proven wrong and none of that was true.”
The Potential for Future LGBTQ Storylines in the WWE
An appreciation for the truth might not be what you’d expect from a professional wrestler for a lot of reasons — not least of which being the ways the company has used identity in the past. In all actuality, identity angles are one of several types of gimmicks that have a long history in pro wrestling and the WWE, and it hasn’t always been a happy one.
The Iron Sheik, who would bring an Iranian flag to the ring, was one of Hulk Hogan’s greatest rivals, playing heel (villain) to Hogan’s babyface (hero) and being framed as the bad guy against others wrestling angled as American heroes. More recently in 2006, the company introduced the Punjabi Prison Match — which takes place inside a giant bamboo cage — originally to feature the seven-foot wrestler The Great Khali from India.
But other angles, like the Nation of Domination’s black power styling or Eddie Guerrero’s “Viva la Raza” entrance music, allowed fans to tap into an aspect of identity. In Guerrero case, even if he was originally framed as villainous, he eventually won over crowds by sheer charisma.
This is the context Deville finds herself in now. It’s been 15 years since a gay wedding (officially a “commitment ceremony” to play off language from the marriage equality debate of the era) on SmackDown, one of WWE’s two weekly broadcasts, was derailed in horrendous fashion. WWE legend Billy Gunn and his tag team partner Chuck Palumbo revealed at the last possible minute that they, in fact, weren’t gay, eliciting massive cheers from a stadium that clearly didn’t want to see them married. (This detail is conveniently edited out of the WWE version of the event currently on YouTube.)
As an 11-year-old fan in 2004, I was just starting to discover how my gender and sexuality might not exactly be the norm. In a town where pro wrestling was popular, Billy and Chuck had given me something to hold on to, even if they were played as heels at every turn. Their wedding ending the way it did (even prior to the massive beatdown that took place) broke my heart worse than any steel chair ever could’ve. And there was only the problematic Golddust there to pick up the pieces.
Deville seems conscious of this when I ask her if she has any kind of relationship with WWE’s creative team, who crafts the storylines in-ring performers play out (and which reportedly also includes Pat Patterson, a WWE legend who came out as gay after his days in the ring). She actually has some potentially great news for any LGBTQ fans who might hope to see more authentic representation on Monday Night Raw and SmackDown.
“I’ve been talking with GLAAD and WWE over the past two years and really have developed a great relationship between the three of us,” she tells me, highlighting a joint float in New York’s 2019 World Pride Parade and a rainbow photoshoot featuring WWE Superstars. She explains that the partnership has created room for LGBTQ stories to be told down the line, saying, “I am a firm supporter and believer that it’s important to have that inclusion in our programming in the right, most appropriate, tasteful way.”
“I realized — and I think I learned this at a young age — that anything that’s worth anything, you’re going to take a risk to get there and it’s not going to be easy,” she says when I ask about the challenge of bringing inclusive LGBTQ stories to states where public opinion and current law might not be 100% friendly. “If you’re getting hate along the way I think that means that you’re doing something right and that you’re creating change.”
She continues, “By doing this, yeah, I would be putting myself out there and I would be almost like the guinea pig for this kind of revolution. But I am willing to do something like that to make a social change and to really pioneer this movement in the right direction. Somebody has to do it, right?” In a recent promo for the upcoming season of Total Divas on E! (which will premiere October 6), Deville announces boldly, "I'm the first-ever openly gay female in the WWE," making it clear from the start that she's not shy about talking about her identity.
She’s already winning over one fan; Deville says she’s gotten her girlfriend into wrestling, telling me, “She’s become a fan watching me and supporting me, but she didn’t know anything about wrestling when I met her.”
Deville clearly has something to offer the WWE: Authentic gay representation in an era of prevailing social headwinds favoring authenticity. But like in many other areas, talking about representation in the WWE can’t begin from a utopian framework; if we don’t account for the way things are and have been, we can’t accurately imagine how they might be.
The company has been criticized over the past decade for making its content more kid-friendly; that has often meant a move away from more hard-core match styles and characters, rather than a greater sensitivity to younger generations including more people who don’t identify as exclusively heterosexual. But despite this statistic and the SJW stereotypes of millennials and Generation Z, LGBTQ acceptance may also be in decline among younger demographics, even as it remains stronger than in other age brackets.
Fans know that, historically, the WWE typically plays off of the larger cultural zeitgeist to guide its narratives. That’s how the Iron Sheik saw his greatest success as a villain in the early to mid-1980s, as U.S. tensions with a revolutionary government in Iran were high. Guerrero, aka Latino Heat, made his name as a liar, cheater, and thief in the early 2000s, while the U.S. federal government was reshaping its entire apparatus for policing immigration, with the southern border central to the issue then as it is now.
The question then is what the WWE will let Deville’s storylines be: A cruel joke like Billy and Chuck’s wedding? A win for representation like Kofi Kingston’s WWE title reign? Something in between?
Time will tell. But it’s clear that if Deville is allowed to stay, she could accomplish things more important than any title belt.
Read more stories about identity on Allure:
- The Complicated Benefits of Coming Out
- Why I Marked “F” as the Gender on My License Even Though I’m Nonbinary
- Coming Out as Transgender Only Made My Relationship Stronger
Now, watch seven people share the stories of their scars:
