I hope everyone had a shocking Halloween. I’m also hoping to get another photo report from our favorite homoerotic wrestlers who delight in dressing up and showing us their costumes. In the mean time, I was mulling over a topic I’ve touched upon tangentially in the past, that seems particularly relevant this time of year: terror.

I should confess I’m a terror movie junkie. I tend toward the mind-fuck variety of horror flicks, particularly the sacrilegious, but the raw, mass body count movies are also on my list. I like the extra heavy heart pump they inspire. Even when I know the outcome, I can feel the blood pulse harder through my veins when I’m watching good, terror inducing entertainment

So it’s a short hop to thinking about the element of terror in homoerotic wrestling entertainment. Just like in a good horror flick, terror is a delicate ingredient. You can’t throw in too much, too soon, or the escalating adrenaline drops from habituation. On the other hand, too infrequent, too improbable (hello, Paranormal franchise, I’m looking at you) and the heat doesn’t have time to reach a boil. And under or over sold, and the whole suspension of disbelief comes crashing down in a heap.

But in homoerotic wrestling, when done right, it’s incredible value added for my tastes. When a brave, cocky, impenetrable stud throws himself into the fray, gets outmatched, gets convinced that he could very well get broken, broken into, or crippled for life, the unfolding drama is sensationally arousing to me. He’s got to believe he’s going to make a respectable showing to start with. And then, incrementally, he’s got to be dragged to the despairing, horrifying truth that he’s getting owned, and his opponent is just nasty enough to seriously jeopardize life and limb. And then, that juicy, potent psychodrama has to play out on his face, in his eyes, in the rising octaves of his screams and choking sobs.

When done right, I get that same adrenaline pump I do when I’m watching fine horror. That, paired with hot, hard bodies and the inherent eroticism of grinding, crushing, dominating wrestling, and I’ll swing for the fences every time.

Interestingly (for me, at least), I occasionally stumble across this ethical dilemma in seeking out terror-rich homoerotic wrestling fare, when I come across the implicit threat of rape. On the one hand, rape is not sexy. In real life, it’s vile and destroys lives. I don’t enjoy it, and don’t get aroused by it in gay porn. Frankly, it creeps me out. On the other hand, in addition to being terrorized by threats to life and limb, homoerotic wrestling terror at least occasionally drifts into the psychodrama of sexual violence. Threats that revolve around “what I’m going to do to you when I’ve beaten you to a pulp,” start down that path. Hell, every so often there’s the pretty explicit dialogue about how a victor will fuck his cowed conquest like the spoils of war. And, all that I just said on the first hand notwithstanding, I fucking get off on that.

Of course Naked Kombat pretty much is all about sexual domination as the spoils of erotic wrestling. But there’s an implicit contract in the fighter’s opening introductions. They’re signing up for this. They know the stakes are win or be fucked, so it’s more like high stakes gambling than actual rape. The loser my not enjoy it, but the bitterness and brutality are mostly about the humiliation of the loss, not about being involuntarily fucked. And the more recent post-match testimonials almost always make explicit that the everyone involved had a grand old time.

Can-Am has come pretty close to explicitly centering a narrative on wrestling as pretense for sexual assault. Their Wrestle Bait release made me check my political correctness credentials a few times, for example. The plot, as I remember, is that a sadistic jail guard (Jobe Zander) gets his psychojollies off on forcing inmates to wrestle for fuckstakes and freedom. Jobe literally holds a gun to their heads and coerces them to strip, beat the shit out of each other, and then have the winner force fuck the loser. If they don’t fight hard enough, he threatens to shoot them. So, guns turn me off. The threat of watching someone get shot turns me way off. The implication that the losers in each Wrestle Bait match are getting fucked against their will tugs at my conscience. But despite myself, even as I question my moral compass, I’ve pounded out dozens of times to that shit. In my defense, it was the first time I ever saw Rusty Stevens or David Taylor.

But I don’t have to have boundaries crossed for the terror ingredient to spice up my favorite homoerotic wrestling fare. It’s the terror itself, rather than any questionable-consensual sex act, that’s the common thread. So when it dawns on one gasping hunk that he’s got no shot of winning, and in fact has a very good shot at spending a few nights in the hospital, and that recognition visibly washes across his face… fuck.  When a sniveling pretty boy literally tries to flee the scene, crawling on his hands and knees in a primal effort to distance himself from his natural predator, I’m so sold. When he chokes and quivers on the fear, when he weeps and begs, abandoning all pretense to dignity, when he out and out screams because he’s certain he’s about to break for real, that will top me off every time.

So today, I salute the homoerotic wrestling scream queens who toy with my moral compass and somehow shove their hands right down my pants by selling out and out terror as a device for propelling a wrestling match to a screaming, pleading, magnificent conclusion.

Keep me cumming, boys.