It all started so swimmingly, when I first laid eyes on young Drake Marcos, prior to his on camera debut for BG East. He appeared in a mix of photos from Kid Karisma’s pics from a weekend of wrestling for BG East. I called out the then-unknown handsome stud; Drake reached out; I hit him up for an interview instantly; he repeatedly chided me during the interview for being too complimentary, too flattering, which was just not the case because I think the stud is devastatingly handsome. But somewhere, something went awry. Oh, let’s be honest, there was a very particular point at which Drake turned chilly toward me. It was when I was enjoying a threesome interview with both Drake and Mason Brooks, during which I commented that he has a fan following as a “sweet jobber.”

Of course, I thought I was being deferential, complimentary, even, when I asked young Drake about being a rising fan favorite jobber at BG East. Clearly, that’s not the way my question was received, however, because the Cheshire Cat’s irrepressible smile disappeared in an instant and the earnest grappler bristled. His string of early career squashes aside, Drake promised that he was honing his craft and improving every day and every match, and I should be prepared to bank on the promissory note that he would cash in the day he scored his first, decisive match victory. Then, of course, Drake made another promise last Christmas, apparently still bristling (though with that dimpled grin back on his handsome face), when he told me he had “a present” under his tree particularly for me to open.

In the subsequent months, more words were exchanged. A rookie no longer, Drake continued to issue the vaguely threatening invitation to come on down and see the “present” he was dying to deliver to me as, apparently, his chief blogger and critic. Critic!? Me?! I’ve been fawning over his Fugelsang-esque hot looks from before I ever knew his name or saw him in square cuts. However, no amount of deference or flattery could sway young Drake’s intent on unwrapping for me some of what he perceives to be retribution for my flagrant audacity in lauding his jobber cred.

Honestly, I’m not sure the young stud quite knew what to say when I pointed out a while back that I would be in the vicinity of BG East’s south campus around the same time he would this fall. The jobber stuttered more than a little, but caught in a web of his own making, Drake eventually agreed that the time had come to set aside childish taunts and schoolyard threats and sort out just what it was he felt obliged to “deliver” with a real, live, hot blooded homoerotic wrestling blogger standing in front of him.

My recent rendezvous with Drake Marcos marked what feels like my second pilgrimage to the holy sites of homoerotic wrestling. My first pilgrimage I documented about 3 years ago, when I had an opportunity to spend time in the Boston area and even scored myself an invitation to visit the Boss himself where so much magic has happened and continues to happen. Not nearly so perversely hotheaded or constitutionally delicate as his online persona, this pilgrimage to BG East’s Florida campus was hosted by a genuinely gracious Drake Marcos who devoted a ton of time and attention to showing me the holy sites while other BG East regulars all happened to be out of town.

Prior to opening their newest wrestling facilities in the area, many BG East Florida matches were filmed at a particularly picturesque, canal-side bungalow with a screened in pool and carefully kept gardens. The grounds themselves pulse with the echoes of so many beautiful BG East boys posing dockside.

I had a momentary impulse to lick the very palm tree that vicious Bobby Horton momentarily tied Mitch Colby to in Backyard Brawls 5, bashing the fitness model fantasyman like a tormented St. Sebastian, before Mitch turned that shit right back around and threw Bobby to the grass, flexing his hot, muscled, tanned body in the young hunk’s face.

We know the matches that have taken place in that pool and poolside, including this summer’s Wet & Wild 7 tourney which earned fiercely hot Trey Dixon July’s homoerotic wrestler of the month title here at neverland. Lobolito got the full-on Kid Vicious bash-rinse-repeat cycle in Wet & Wild 4, tortured with such an exquisite intensity in those same waters that I swear I could almost hear the screams of pain still echoing off the pool deck (seriously, has KV ever looked hotter than muscled up and dripping wet in that match!?).

So many sizzling matches have taken place on wrestling mats set up poolside, such as Kid Karisma dragging Christian Taylor’s lovely, long body in, then out of the pool in Wet & Wild 5, working Abercrombie-boy Christian over until both studs had to retire indoors for Kid K to savor the spoils of victory in air conditioning. I’ve spent so many hours watching footage from that screened in pool that it felt like I was cozying up in profoundly familiar surroundings.

And speaking of those indoors, I also got a long, lingering look at the sunroom, the site of a dizzyingly hot catalog of matches that are never far from the top of my cue. Right here’s where Mitch Colby and Derek da Silva, one of the hottest combinations in history, absolutely crushed one another’s balls until both were writhing in pools of sweat and ecstasy in Crotch Crushers 1. Here’s where Mitch also confronted the only wrestler to compete with him as the longest running title holder of my favorite homoerotic wrestler title, Rusty Stevens, leaving me apoplectic for weeks afterward with the sheer hotness of the score settling in Breaking Point. BG East fans will be unsurprised to hear me say that the sunroom is tight quarters. Most every sunroom match I’ve seen has involved catching inadvertent glimpses of the film crew reflected in the wall of mirrors on one end. There’s an architectural intimacy that I think explains why just about any pairing of hardbodied hunks there has an extra hit of sexual tension.
Drake was ridiculously charming, solicitous even as we toured the place. I was beginning to think the young buck’s bluster and ballyhoo online was thinly veiling a genuinely sweethearted gentleman. He was kind and attentive, anticipating my questions and interests, playing a gracious host and placing my need to reverentially soak in the setting of so many homoerotic wrestling fantasies deliberately and lingeringly at the forefront of his priorities. In other words, it wasn’t long before I was convinced all over again that young Drake Marcos was, indeed, a dyed-in-the-wool, hardwired, cradle-to-grave jobber, through and through. However, when the tour continued on to the newest BG East facilities not far away, I started to suspect that there may, indeed, be more to this adorably dimpled Cheshire Cat.