Not long ago someone mentioned the classic homoerotic wrestling pinup boy, Tommy Lopez.  I immediately had a complex Pavlovian response that involved salivating, heart pumping, and crotch swelling, which inspired a breathy “Yum!” from deep inside me.  As I thought about it, however, it occurred to me that I haven’t actually given any love to the curly-haired beauty here among these pages.  Let me rectify that oversight right now and think a little more about why he may not have shown up much prior.

I have to confess that I haven’t seen Tommy in action.  My appreciation for him has arisen entirely from admiring him in still frame.  There’s a generational conversation to be had, I believe, about the relative salience of still frame vs video in igniting homoerotic wrestling lust.  To start, let me just say that like a good book, homoerotic wrestling pics have always had the capacity to tweak my imagination just right, and I’ve fallen deeply in lust (and, truth be told, naively in love a few times, as well) over and over again with stop frame cues that I’m more than capable of splicing into my deeply satisfying homoerotic wrestling spool running through my mind.  That said, this retrospective testimonial of my affection for Tommy is inspiring me to add his catalog to the south wing of my home known as my homoerotic wrestling library.

Tommy’s resume demonstrates that he did wrestle plenty outside of my imagination as well.  He was an early Private Bouts battler at BG East, grappling with other iconic forefathers like Kid Leopard, Sailor Rob, Thom Katt, and Scott Rogers. There’s something graceful and captivating about his body in the shots from these vintage matches.  Paired with a snarling, cocky game face, that’s pure gold as far as I’m concerned.

Believe me when I say I’ve combed through the still-frame galleries I can find of Tommy for evidence that at some point someone grabbed those cherubic, curly locks and dragged him around by them. That head of hair screams for dirty, no good pulling to make his beautiful face twist in insulted agony.  So far I haven’t seen this maneuver captured on film, sadly.

I get the impression that Tommy was a delight to get your hands on because from a company notoriously reticent to tape rematches, aficionados like Kid Leopard and Dark Rogers faced beautiful Tommy more than once.  On opposite sides of a tag team confrontation now available in KL’s Classic Spotlight, there’s a strong whiff of lambs to the slaughter.  The much finer photography and delightful study in the erotic beauty of wrestling is the photo story of KL and Tommy doing one-on-one battle in some unfinished room.  This match either wasn’t videographed or no longer available, but the stunning photos are breathtaking.  Both wrestlers look like they got their licks in, but it’s the shots of KL working his heel magic and angelic Tommy contorted like a twist tie and inches from being broken in half that make my heart race fastest.

The same unfinished basement (?) is the setting for another photo story of Tommy in babyface white trunks getting manhandled hard (and I mean HARD) by hairy-chested italian hunk Gino Gentry.

There are full throttle naked scenes in Tommy’s library.  There’s plenty of evidence of the meat stick regularly struggling to wrestle its way free from Tommy’s trunks, so just believe me when I saw it’s as stirringly beautiful as every inch of the rest of him.  Better yet, look it up yourself in BG East’s Arena and marvel more of what Tommy was bringing to the mat that inspires my Pavlovian responses.

He wrestled live in a match that was videographed in front of a live audience and now available from BG East as part of their Live at San Francisco vintage release.  This was the rematch of Tommy taking on pre-Dark Scott Rogers, who I have well-documented for my deep, lustful infatuation with.

Another photo story that appears to not have a video mate is a dizzyingly hot living room battle between Sailor Rob and Tommy (again, you’ll need to check it out in BG East’s Arena).  If you’re looking for two lean, luscious, fully aroused grapplers in full bloom, make sure you put this one on your itinerary.  Sailor Rob is ripped and roaring and Tommy is quite clearly stoked hot and very bothered by Sailor Rob’s hands-on, unapologetically erotic offense.  I was just remarking the other day that I’m missing more naked wrestling in my diet, and the shots of Sailor Rob and Tommy hard as granite and locked in combat is precisely what I’m talking about.

So while I am putting Tommy Lopez in my cue of videos to own, I’m also making a pitch here for something that video can’t always deliver.  Tommy is on a pedestal in my homoerotic wrestling lusts because of the entirely satisfying wrestling he has starred in in still frame, translated expertly, directly into the moving pictures that only my mind’s eye can see, but is nevertheless perfectly erotic, pitched precisely to my tastes, and scratches an itch that more literal homoerotic wrestling action only occasionally hits so perfectly. Again, I will preempt the inevitable comments that will warn me against leaning too heavily on nostalgia, but I will also insist that there’s a pleasure to the still frame as well as the written word that can, and often does, satiate my homoerotic wrestling hunger more satisfyingly than the mountain of videos I delight in regularly. The respondent conditioning that makes me spring to life and break out into a sweat at the name of Tommy Lopez is deeply compelling, and its the alchemy of my active imagination and the visual stimulation of lovingly shot photography that puts Tommy at the head of the class before many of the hot hunks who I’ve fallen in lust with on video.

That handsome face, the lickably smooth skin, that rocking ass and surprisingly meaty legs on such a lean babyface don’t exactly hurt Tommy’s case either.