Sydney Sweeney’s New Lesbian Boxing Movie
This morning, Sydney Sweeney dropped photos of herself on Instagram showing off a new mullet and muscles to announce her latest project: a biopic about iconic lesbian boxer Christy Martin. “I’ve been immersed in training to bring to life the story of an incredible woman—a true champion who fought battles both inside and outside the ring,” Sweeney writes in the caption. “Her journey is a testament to resilience, strength, and hope, and I’m honored to step into her shoes to share her powerful story with you all.”
Indeed, Christy Martin’s journey is a testament to all these things and more — and her journey is a distinctly a queer one. I admittedly didn’t know too much about Martin prior, but when I texted my own coach and personal trainer (Autostraddle team writer Stef Rubino) the news, they enlightened me about Martin’s queerness and said they were pretty sure a documentary on Netflix from a few years back touched on it. Martin’s Wikipedia page currently touches on her queerness only briefly, noting only a few details about her current marriage to her wife and mainly focusing on her former marriage to her ex-husband and trainer James V. Martin, who is currently serving a prison sentence for attempting to murder Martin in 2010. But Martin’s story is very queer from the beginning, and if the upcoming film starring Sweeney stays true to her story as told in the 2021 Netflix documentary Untold: Deal with the Devil, well, we’re about to get an extremely sapphic boxing movie next year.
To best get to know Christy’s story, I recommend watching the documentary, which is part of Netflix’s sports docuseries Untold. But below, I’ll tell you about some of the major gay takeaways from the doc, along with everything we know about the film so far, which also stars Katy O’Brian, Merritt Weaver, and Jess Gabor.
The Real True Queer Story of Christy Martin
Christy Martin is a former professional boxer who competed from 1989 to 2012 and the first female boxer ever introduced into the Boxing Hall of Fame. Her rise in the world of professional boxing came at a time when women’s boxing wasn’t taken seriously, and her career helped bolster women’s presence in the sport. But that didn’t come without its challenges. While the documentary about her life is very much about the sexism and specific world of competitive boxing, it’s also an extremely personal and intimate look at how Christy’s queerness — and repression of it — played out in her life and athleticism.
While Christy didn’t come out publicly until much later in life, she opens up in the documentary about the early secret queer relationships she had, particularly with Sherry Lusk, the star of her high school basketball team. The girls played basketball together and formed a close friendship that blossomed into something more. Sherry is also interviewed in the documentary, and says there weren’t really resources for them to understand their feelings for one another; there was no internet, and they didn’t have anyone they could talk to. “Most everyone knew or suspected,” Christy says, but her parents were in denial about any possibility their daughter was gay.
In a particularly striking talking head moment, Christy says the following of her early years in the closet:
“I had to hold in who I truly am, and I was angry, but I’m not so sure if I didn’t have all this stuff inside of me that I could’ve become the fighter that I was.”
Christy continued to hide her true self as she entered the boxing ring and started training with Jim Martin, who was 25 years older than her. They married in 1991. As present-day Christy puts it, she felt like she was marrying boxing in her choice to marry Jim, whose controlling behaviors defined the entirety of their relationship. Married to Jim, Christy pushed herself even further into the closet. In fact, she became rivals with Lisa Holeywine, another boxer who was out as a lesbian, an incredibly brave decision at the time. Encouraged by Jim to do so, Christy was extremely homophobic and even transphobic toward Lisa, using her sexuality against her. The documentary features actual clips of all this happening, including one in which a commentator details how Christy would blow kisses at Lisa before fights to taunt her.
Spoiler alert: Christy and Lisa eventually get married. But a whole hell of a lot happened to get there.
At the time of Christy’s rivalry with Lisa, Jim did know about Christy’s past relationships with women, and she warned him that if she kept making fun of Lisa’s sexuality then it was possible someone from her past could pop up, someone like Sherry. But Sherry never wielded Christy’s past against her as Christy became more and more famous in the boxing world.
Sherry did pop up again though, reaching out to Christy during the dawn of Facebook. Sherry and Christy started messaging, catching up, a flame rekindled. By then, Jim’s dominance over Christy had become violent. She kept telling him he knew she was a lesbian, so why not just end their sham of a marriage? But Jim used things like cocaine, constant surveillance (unbeknownst to her, he was audiotaping and videotaping her regularly in their home), and threats to keep her tethered to him. He would tell her he’d kill her if she left, and he also told her everyone in the boxing world would reject her for being gay. Her whole career, he played up her femininity and role as his wife, pitting her against other athletes like Lisa, who were derided for being too “masculine.”
In 2010, Christy did try to leave and reconnected in person with Sherry, who said their first reunion was like stepping into a time machine taking them right back to high school. “I could barely breathe,” Sherry says in the documentary.
Why Did Cindy Martin’s Husband Jim Try to Kill Her?
Jim tried everything to get Christy back. He started calling everyone she knew, including her family, telling them she was a lesbian, blackmailing her with photos and videos he’d taken of her wearing a strap-on, which she’d done at his request. When Christy did eventually return to the home she shared with Jim, he tried to kill her, stabbing her multiple times and shooting her in what became a national news story. Headlines played up the fact that Christy was leaving him for another woman, reducing her life and identity into some sensational story. Christy miraculously survived, escaping the house when Jim got in the shower after the attack and flagging down a stranger who drove her to the hospital.
The Palm Beach Post // West Palm Beach, Florida // Thu, Dec 2, 2010 // Page C002
Sherry stayed with Christy through her recovery at the hospital, and it was a painful time for them both, as Christy’s mother blamed Sherry and their queerness for the attack rather than directing that blame at Jim. Sherry wanted Christy to stop fighting, but the second Christy was out of the hospital, she wanted to train again. With a bullet still in her back, she re-entered the ring. She broke her hand in her first fight back and wanted to keep going, but her ringside physician called the fight. During a complicated surgery on her shattered hand, she had a stroke.
Sherry and Christy split, but when Christy had been in the hospital after Jim’s assault, who had come back into her life? Yep, former rival Lisa Holeywine. The two fell in love and got married. The woman Christy used to bully for being gay! Due to her own internalized homophobia and outside pressures to perform a sort of femininity! In the end, they both get to be their real, true selves and be BOXING WIVES. It’s a truly lovely ending to the documentary, which also doesn’t downplay the very real and severe after effects of trauma and abuse Christy still grapples with and admits she’ll have to grapple with her whole life.
When Christy came out publicly after her attempted murder, the opposite of what Jim had threatened would happen came true: Fans embraced her for who she was. Fellow boxers didn’t care about her queerness. She could do the thing she loved and still be herself.
“One thing’s for sure, I didn’t creep out of the closet,” Christy says. “I pretty much kicked the door down and said ‘I’m here.'”
What Do We Know About the Christy Martin Movie So Far?
Okay, so now you know the real queer story. What can we expect from the movie?
Well, I think it’s safe to say we can at least expect it to be very gay.
We don’t know a TON yet, but the casting details so far are VERY INTRIGUING. For starters, we’ve got Sydney Sweeney bulking up to play Christy Martin. And then Katy O’Brian of Love Lies Bleeding fame will be playing Lisa Holeywine, Christy’s rival-turned-lover. Jess Gabor from Shameless will play Sherry, Christy’s secret high school girlfriend who she reconnects with in adulthood and leaves her abusive husband to be with, even though it means risking her life. Merritt Wever will play Joyce Salters, Christy’s mother, who is a complicated figure in the documentary but who ultimately does come around to Christy’s queerness and her relationship with Lisa. Ben Foster will play Jim (who, by the way, also contributes talking heads to the documentary from the prison where he’s currently serving out his sentence).
The film is supposed to cover the beginning of Christy’s career and her ascendency in the 1990s through the attempted murder. It’s being directed by David Michôd who also directed Animal Kingdom.
If the film is committed to telling Christy Martin’s faithfully and with the depth it deserves, then it’ll be very, very queer. The documentary digs into her queerness even more than I anticipated and covers a lot of ground in its 77-minute runtime, Christy herself very open and vulnerable about her life and journey to come out and into herself.
