Long before HIV had a name, before the wrestling industry had even a hint of blood-borne pathogen testing, and years before Ryan White’s face was on the cover of every magazine in America, an openly gay, crystal meth-addicted territorial wrestler named Chris Colt was already walking around the locker rooms of the 1980s carrying the virus that would eventually kill him.
He is, to this day, one of the very first documented professional wrestlers in American history to die with HIV explicitly listed on his death certificate as a contributing factor.
Chris Colt: The First Documented Case
His legal name was Charles Faye Harris. His occupation on the certificate read simply: “professional wrestler.” He died on May 23, 1995, at age 48, found in a back alley or shelter in Seattle — depending on which friend is telling the story. No autopsy was performed.
Colt had been carrying the virus for an unknown number of years. Filmmaker Jack Fritscher, who directed him in two gay adult films in 1988, later said what every performer in that world already understood: you didn’t ask, and the models didn’t tell. Colt looked perfectly healthy on camera.
Born in Idaho in 1946, he was openly gay in an industry where that honesty could end a career overnight. He took his ring name from Colt Studios, an underground gay adult film company. His longtime tag team partner and real-life romantic partner, Ron Dupree, died of a heart attack in the mid-1970s. After that, Colt spiraled into cocaine and then crystal meth. He vanished from wrestling by the late 1980s. The virus finally caught up with him in 1995.
Adam Bueller: The Midwest Deathmatch Fixture
If you’ve never wandered into the basement-level world of Midwest deathmatch wrestling, you’ve probably never heard of Adam Bueller. But in that scene — from gymnasiums in LaPorte, Indiana, to small-town Ohio tennis courts — Joseph Adam Buell was a beloved, fearless fixture for fifteen straight years.
He debuted in February 2004, trained by Shark Boy, and wrestled at 6’0″ and barely 154 pounds. In a world of bloated deathmatch brawlers, he was thin as a razor and happy to take every punishing spot on the card. His peers called him “Sickness,” “The Antichrist,” and “The Unprofessional.” He won tag team titles, the PWK Northern States Extreme Championship, and entered tournaments like the IWA Mid-South King of the Death Matches and the Carnage Cup. He did barefoot thumbtack matches and literal Lego death matches.
In April 2018 he noticed a large growth in his armpit. The diagnosis: aggressive B-cell lymphoma. Complications piled up fast. While still hospitalized for lymphoma treatment, he developed severe pneumonia — the kind doctors associate with immune systems compromised by HIV. He tested positive. Doctors told him, based on his T-cell counts, that he had likely been HIV positive for several years without knowing it.
Bueller confronted the news with the same dark humor his fans loved. In a February 2019 interview he said, “Thank God this isn’t the ’90s anymore.” But he was mourning his career. In fifteen years of working Midwest indies — including deathmatch-heavy promotions with essentially no athletic commission oversight — not a single promoter had ever required him to take a blood test.
His HIV became undetectable on treatment, but the lymphoma returned and progressed to leukemia. He entered hospice and died peacefully on June 20, 2020, at age 36.
Billy Jack Haynes: The Chain-Match Lawsuit
Billy Jack Haynes was, for a brief moment in the mid-1980s, one of the muscular babyface stars WWE seemed poised to push to the moon. He stood 6’3″ and carried a reputation for intensity. He had five reigns as NWA Pacific Northwest Heavyweight Champion and even picked up titles in Florida before WWF came calling in 1986.
His biggest moment came at WrestleMania III in a battle of full Nelsons against Hercules Hernandez. The finish was a double count-out, setting up a series of chain matches. Chain matches in wrestling shorthand mean weapons — and in locker-room language, they often meant “double juice,” both men bleeding deliberately with blades that didn’t always stay personal.
Haynes left WWF in 1988 under murky circumstances. In 2014 he joined the wave of concussion-related lawsuits against WWE — but his filing had an extra wrinkle. He claimed he contracted hepatitis C directly through his work in those chain matches at a time when the company had no blood-borne pathogen testing and a locker-room culture that encouraged bleeding.
The suit was dismissed in 2016. Haynes has never wavered from his account. In a 2019 interview he said plainly that he contracted the virus “probably through the business of bleeding” in double-blood chain matches. He later underwent modern antiviral treatment and was cleared of the virus by 2020.
Sean Waltman (X-Pac): The Kliq Member Who Beat the Virus
Sean Waltman is a two-time WWE Hall of Famer — once with D-Generation X, once with the New World Order. He is the only man to have held the TNA X Division, WCW Cruiserweight, and WWF Light Heavyweight Championships. He was the fifth man in The Kliq and helped define the Attitude Era as X-Pac.
For roughly a decade of that career he was quietly living with hepatitis C. The diagnosis came around 2009 or 2010 during his return run to TNA. When he was booked for a tag match at TNA’s Lockdown 2010, the Missouri Athletic Commission refused to clear him. He was pulled from the card and written off television.
Rather than hide, Waltman stopped blading entirely. He continued wrestling independents wherever he could be safely cleared. In late December 2020, on his own podcast, he dropped a quiet bombshell: he had been cured. Direct-acting antiviral treatment — taken once a day for a matter of weeks — had cleared the virus completely. The treatment cost approximately $100,000. He felt no side effects and said he felt great.
Waltman returned for a handful of matches, including a 2022 GCW run, before officially retiring from in-ring competition on March 31, 2022.
Abdullah the Butcher: The Legally Proven Case
For more than fifty years, Abdullah the Butcher staged slaughters. He stabbed forks into foreheads — his opponents’ and his own. He carved his signature crisscross scars into his face until the grooves were deep enough to fit coins. He was the single bloodiest wrestler ever to work in North America, Japan, or Puerto Rico.
In 2011 WWE inducted him into its Hall of Fame. For roughly two of those decades, multiple reports indicate he was carrying hepatitis C while continuing to blade without telling his opponents.
The court-validated case comes from Canadian independent wrestler and promoter Devon Nicholson. On May 26, 2007, in Cochrane, Alberta, they wrestled a match that spilled into the crowd. According to Nicholson’s later lawsuit, Abdullah had taped a razor blade to his finger, cut himself, and then cut Nicholson with the same unsterilized blade without consent. Both men bled heavily.
Two years later Nicholson failed a WWE physical after testing positive for hepatitis C — the exact same rare genotype 2 strain Abdullah carried. Medical experts concluded infection from any other source was highly unlikely.
In 2014 an Ontario Superior Court judge ruled that Abdullah had cut Nicholson without consent and transmitted the virus. Nicholson was awarded approximately 2.3 million Canadian dollars. The judgment was upheld in Georgia, where Abdullah resides. Abdullah has consistently denied the claims.
Superstar Billy Graham: The Man Who Inspired a Generation — and Survived the Virus
Superstar Billy Graham dethroned Bruno Sammartino on April 30, 1977, to become WWF Heavyweight Champion and held the title for nearly ten months — the longest reign for a villain in company history at that point. He headlined 19 sold-out Madison Square Garden events. Hulk Hogan, Jesse Ventura, Ric Flair, Scott Steiner, Triple H, and countless others have credited him as their direct stylistic inspiration.
He was diagnosed with hepatitis C in the 1980s during pre-operative blood work for hip surgery. He traced the infection back to the wrestling practice he would later despise: blading. For decades the virus sat quietly in his body, slowly destroying his liver.
By 2002 cirrhosis forced him onto the transplant list in Arizona. He received a liver from a 23-year-old woman named Katie Gilroy who had been killed in a car accident. In 2016 he underwent a three-month course of modern direct-acting antivirals and was officially cured by spring 2017.
Graham spent his final years as one of wrestling’s loudest critics of blade sharing. When WWE inducted Abdullah the Butcher in 2011, Graham publicly protested and demanded his own name be removed from the Hall of Fame. He passed away on May 17, 2023, at age 79.
The stories above are not isolated tragedies. They are the visible tip of a much larger, largely undocumented crisis that ran through professional wrestling’s locker rooms for decades — a bloody, unsanitary, ungoverned backstage reality where blading, shared blades, and zero medical oversight were simply “how things were done.”
Some survived. Some did not. And in at least one court-proven case, the virus was passed deliberately.
The business has changed. Testing protocols exist now. But the scars — and the stories — remain.
