Lindsay Perrin organized a spontaneous lesbian mud wrestling event at Lollapalooza to foster queer joy and community

NEED TO KNOW

• Lindsay Perrin organized a spontaneous lesbian mud wrestling event at Lollapalooza to foster queer joy and community
• The event, Scissor Slam 2K26, went viral online and drew hundreds of festivalgoers, including LGBTQ+ and straight attendees
• Perrin says the experience highlighted the importance of creating joyful spaces for queer people amid challenging times

Lindsay Perrin yelled “lesbian mud wrestling” three times into a muddy Lollapalooza field, and within seconds, hundreds of festivalgoers had formed a circle around her.

The scene had begun as a joke just hours earlier, when the 38-year-old Indianapolis mother was walking with a friend who showed her a video of the festival’s rain-soaked grounds. Perrin, who is a lesbian, immediately saw an opportunity to make the most of the messy conditions.

“This would be a great opportunity for lesbian mud wrestling,” she recalls saying.

As Perrin continued thinking about the idea, however, it began to feel like more than a passing joke. Festivalgoers were already going to spend hours standing in the mud, she reasoned, so why not transform it into a memorable experience that brought people together?

The impulse was a natural extension of Perrin’s broader passion for building community. After divorcing, she began dating women at 33 and publicly came out on May 1, 2022, on her 34th birthday. Since then, she has organized queer events around the country and spontaneously brought people together online.

“Community building is one of the biggest passions in my life,” she says. “I came out later in life, so I know what it feels like to spend years wishing you had a community that understood you. Once I found mine, I wanted to help create that feeling for other people.”

Realizing the event could combine three of her favorite things — queer community, live music and women’s sports — Perrin created a quick Instagram graphic around lunchtime and invited festivalgoers to join her for Scissor Slam 2K26, a lesbian mud-wrestling contest later that day.

Although she suspected the post might attract attention online, Perrin had no idea whether that interest would translate into an actual crowd.

“Before I even got to Lollapalooza, it had already been viewed well over 100,000 times,” she says. “By that evening, what started as a joke had become Scissor Slam 2K26.”

“Honestly, I had a feeling the post would go viral on Instagram, but I had absolutely no idea how many people would actually show up, let alone how many would want to participate,” she adds. “I would have been happy with 10 people. I was elated when hundreds showed up.”

Perrin began to grasp just how widely the word had spread shortly before the contest, when she visited a Lollapalooza speakeasy and asked a woman nearby whether she planned to attend. The woman, whom Perrin did not realize worked for the festival, immediately pulled out her phone and showed her that the post had already been shared in a staff group chat.

“That was the first moment I thought, ‘Oh wow. Word has really gotten out. People ARE going to show up,’ ” Perrin recalls.

Before the contest began at 6:30 p.m., Perrin positioned herself in the muddiest section of the festival grounds, near the white balloon she had referenced in her Instagram graphic. Wearing a bright blue shirt so she would be easy to spot, she posted a video showing attendees exactly where to find her.

Perrin then approached two people standing nearby and asked whether they had come for the contest. After telling her they had heard about it on social media, they asked to appear in a video with her. Perrin began recording and called out the name of the event, prompting festivalgoers to rapidly form the circle around her.

“The next thing I knew, I was standing in the middle of this giant circle of people,” Perrin says. “I started making announcements and looking for our first participants. A girl named Eve quickly stepped forward and said she’d do it. Then another girl named Sarah volunteered, and suddenly we had our first match.”

“I’m telling you, it felt like we went from zero to 200 people in about 30 seconds,” she adds.

Before the match began, Perrin gave the two participants a quick reminder to play nice. When Sarah asked, “How do we know who wins?” Perrin responded, “Whoever taps out first loses!”

“That was the extent of the rulebook,” she says.

Once the contest was underway, Perrin began livestreaming on Instagram while simultaneously refereeing the matches, making her the organizer, referee and camera operator all at once.

As she stood at the center of the enormous crowd, the scene reminded her of the Britney Spears song “Circus” and its lyric, “All eyes on me in the center of the ring.” The experience, she says, brought an adrenaline rush unlike anything she had felt before.

“Toward the end, The Neighbourhood started playing, and I stood in the middle of the circle, took a video of everyone who was still there and thanked them for coming,” Perrin says. “I looked around and saw hundreds of people, photographers, reporters and official Lollapalooza staff, and I remember thinking, ‘Wow. I really did this thing.’ ”

Even as festivalgoers began moving on to other performances, Perrin could see that Scissor Slam had become more than a spontaneous spectacle. Attendees exchanged contact information, struck up conversations with those around them and continued finding one another in the comments on Instagram and TikTok after the festival.

Perrin also made several new friends, including fellow Indianapolis residents who told her they wanted to become more involved in the city’s queer community.

One particularly memorable connection began when she introduced a wrestler to one of her friends. The two hit it off and watched Olivia Dean perform together that night before returning to the festival together the following day, even though Perrin’s friend had not originally planned to attend on Sunday.

“Who knows? Maybe they’ll fall in love, and I’ll be officiating their wedding at Lollapalooza next year,” she says.

Since then, footage of Scissor Slam has continued spreading online, and Perrin has begun receiving messages from wrestlers and attendees describing what the experience had meant to them. One of the first came from Max Moroz, who wrote, “Thank you so much for lesbian mud wrestling. I’ve never seen me and my friends so happy.”

Another meaningful message came from Perrin’s friend Ali Klein, who reflected on her ability to transform an impromptu idea into an experience that brought strangers together.

“You created one of the most memorable and talked about parts of Lollapalooza that will be talked about for years. How does that feel? You truly have such an impressive and unique ability to create connections and unite people. It’s admirable. I never know what you’re going to do next. You don’t know what you’re going to do next. But I know it’ll be something,” Klein wrote.

Perrin was especially touched by a message from Kristina, the mother of one of the wrestlers, who found her on TikTok after seeing footage of her daughter participating.

“That’s my daughter mud wrestling. She had the absolute time of her life… There I was worried about her feet getting blisters,” Kristina wrote.

“That line cracked me up,” Perrin says. “As a mom myself, I could picture exactly what she meant. Meanwhile, her daughter was out there wrestling another woman in a mud pit at Lollapalooza.”

“Seeing a parent so genuinely proud of her daughter for doing something joyful and unapologetically herself honestly brought tears to my eyes,” Perrin adds.

For Perrin, those reactions reinforced why creating spaces for queer joy feels especially meaningful right now.

“It’s not always easy being a queer person in 2026,” she says. “There is so much heaviness surrounding the LGBTQ+ community right now. So many of the headlines are about legislation, our rights, conflict or people debating whether we should even be allowed to exist as ourselves. Those conversations matter. But so does joy.”

“And it wasn’t only queer people. Yes, the girls, gays and theys showed up, but straight people showed up too,” Perrin says. “Some people intentionally came because they’d seen my post, and others probably had absolutely no idea what they’d just stumbled into. They saw this huge crowd surrounding two women wrestling in the mud and wanted to know what the hell was going on.”

“For those 30 minutes, nobody needed to make it deeper than that,” she continues. “People were laughing. They were cheering for strangers. They were getting dirty. Some of them jumped into the mud themselves. Everyone was just having a good time together.”

#Woman #Organizes #LastMinute #Lesbian #Mud #Wrestling #Lollapalooza #Drew #Crowd #Hundreds #Exclusive