Jake Jenkins has captured the hearts and stoked the crotches of countless homoerotic wrestling fans in the past few years. His charms are both obvious and subtle. He’s gorgeous to look at under any circumstance. But he’s also prolific and varied in his delivery of wrestling drama. So I’ve strolled through the many splendored thing that is JJ’s wrestling filmography and finally arrived at the really tough part of the alphabet. Some of these final entries in Making Jake are weak, I’m the first to admit. But cut me some slack. The options for descriptors that start with the letter X are x-tremely limited.  From U to Z, here’s my take on Making Jake…

…unconscious. Perennially dangerous and with inexhaustible tenacity, many opponents have been simply stunned by the energizer-bunny quality of Jake. Even when you’ve got him down, just try counting him out. With the muscle and the body awareness he’s got, he’ll slip out of your fingers 9 times out of 10. What’s an opponent to do to once and for all not just put, but keep him down? An elite few know you very well may have to make Jake unconscious!

…vertical. Jake fans know that his athleticism is second to none. JJ flies. He does handstands. He flips and twists and slams and stomps. He’s perfectly balanced between grace and brutality. That goes for both pitching and catching. Opponent’s can do astonishing things with JJ’s incredibly fit, flexible, agile, compact muscle body because he’s in such incredible shape he can take astonishing beatings and live to tell the tale. For example, Jonny Firestorm managed to contort JJ’s body into positions and shapes I’ve never seen before, each one more breathtaking and beautiful than the last. There’s something just awe inspiring about watching that moment when an expert heel doesn’t just control Jake’s body, he doesn’t just hold JJ’s life in his hands, he makes Jake vertical.

…wet. I’ve got a major thing for wrestlers that work up a heavy lather of sweat, and Jake can definitely get there. When droplets make his muscles twinkle and his bulges glisten, Jake is transported into another realm, joining a pantheon of immortal gladiators demanding to be worshipped as celestial beings. As Ethan Andrews proved, JJ also looks damn good with a bottle of water poured onto him in the middle of the ring, piling humiliation onto defeat. Thankfully it’s never come to this, but it just wouldn’t be a full on JJ match if his opponent didn’t make Jake wet.

…x-rated. Okay, so here’s where you must cut me slack, because I know full well that Jake’s wrestling filmography is PG-13, at best, and that’s only if you have a fundamentalist Christian prude on your ratings board. True, JJ did dally briefly under another name in some full frontal solo work for a beefcake company, but formally speaking, that wasn’t “Jake.” But thank the wrestling gods JJ has been wrestled out of his singlets and trunks on just a few occasions, leaving him in nothing but a sweat soaked jock strap. The briefest glimpse, barely more than innuendo, of his exposed hole exponentiates JJ’s overall homoerotic sexiness across the board. There’s not an inch of him that doesn’t deserve awed worship, but there’s something just for gay wrestling fans when a match makes Jake x-rated.

…yelp. I’ve said it before, but let’s review it again. Jake is a cool customer. He’s got a sharp wit and a razor tongue, but the quantity of what comes out of his mouth in a match is perpetually restrained. He sells pain most often silently, or at most, with anguish welling up behind a wall of ironclad self-control. So it’s a special treat when an opponent not only drives Jake to the edge of busting through that wall, but managed to squeeze just right and make Jake yelp.

…zealous. Jake embodies many different characters. At Rock Hard Wrestling he started as a brutal heel. At BG East, he’s been a beautiful babyface, a stern initiator and a stunned jobber in various combinations. There’s something achingly hot, though, about Jake as a valiant jock, as certain in the virtue of hard work as he is in the scales of justice tilting his way in bringing victory as reward for his earnestness. On just a couple of occasions, JJ has flashed that wide-eyed, broad smile, wrapped himself in patriotism, and flung himself face first into harm’s way trusting in the rightness of his convictions to weather the storms of dirty tricks and dastardly deviousness hurled back at him. That earnestness is misplaced, of course. This is professional wrestling we’re talking about. But there’s something deeply evocative when a certain gear choice, or a particular partner, or specific opponent manages to make Jake zealous.

Well there you have it. I struggled to select among many excellent option for most letters of the alphabet in attempting to capture the range and depth of Jake Jenkins, so I may very well go around the circuit all over again some day.  But first, there’s a certain 3-time homoerotic wrestler of the month who has his own parallel series that I need to pay attention to. Now that I’ve found Eli Black’s most recent work at UCW, I’m obsessed with exactly what it is that evokes the enthralling essence of Eli.