Creator Backlash: The Black Reign gimmick. As Jay Hunter from OSW Review found out, mentioning it to Dustin on Twitter will get you blocked. It makes sense, really, as Dustin was in a very bad place when he portrayed Black Reign and most likely would like to forget it ever happened.
Screwed by the Network: The alleged reason for his firing in 2012. He called a spot where Darren Young and Titus O'Neil would perform a tag move on Yoshi Tatsu. The pair botched the move and dropped Yoshi Tatsu on his head. While Yoshi was not seriously injured, WWE allegedly placed the blame for this botch entirely on Goldust and fired him.
According to Gene Snitsky in an interview with Inside the Ropes, he and Goldust were slated to win the World Tag Team Championships (which would have been Goldust's second run as Tag Team Champions) against the Spirit Squad. Unfortunately, Goldust was released for no-showing an episode of RAW before their reign (much less, their tag team in general, according to Snitsky) could happen.
Goldust was supposed to be the first openly gay wrestler, and was portrayed as one for about a month (his first major feud was sending love letters to Razor Ramon). However, gay rights groups got upset over a gay person also being "evil," so Marlena was introduced to give the early impression he was doing "mind games".
Towards the end of 2020, AEW was planting the seeds for a feud between him and The Dark Order, starting with the faction trying to recruit him to their ranks as "7". This idea was cut short by the death of Brodie Lee and the Dark Order's subsequent Heel–Face Turn.
Several angles in which he was involved were inducted into WrestleCrap:
Seven (sometimes spelled Se7en), a very short-lived gimmick in WCW in 1999. He appeared in a few vignettes, then, when he made his WCW Monday Nitro debut, he renounced the gimmick and went back to being Dustin.note This was a bit of Executive Meddling, because he liked the Seven gimmick, but Turner Broadcasting executives hated it because they thought it looked uncomfortably close to child molestation. When Vince Russo became the WCW booker he had Rhodes drop the gimmick via Worked Shoot. The confusion was due to how the gimmick made him look like the title character of the movie Powder, whose director had been convicted of child molestation, and people seemed to mix up the director with the character.
