I sat up and took notice when Zip Zarella returned to the BG East ring last month in Ring Kings. Once again, he’s sinking his teeth into a fellow indy pro veteran trying to make that dicey crossover into wrestling for a discerning gay audience. There’s something straightforward and upright about how he stares down the classic beefsteak Joey King. Math rules, as they agree to 30 minutes in the ring to amass as many submissions as possible. When the bell rings at the 30 minute mark, whoever has dragged more taps out of his opponent is winner.

I’m always partial to competitive matches, so the concession that both of these sensationally equipped pros will likely score gets me hard before they lay a hand on each other. Truth be told, their hot bodies play a big role in that growing pressure in my pants, too. Joey’s got the body of a classic brawler from the 80’s. He’s like a young, much more handsome, fitter Arn Anderson. Full beard, a light coat of hair covering his pecs and stretching across his magnificent muscle gut to disappear down the front of his classic trunks. His ass is in serious need of getting grabbed. He’s handsome, with an air of inevitability about him, like a boulder rolling down hill. I like Joey. Quite a lot, actually. But for me he’s second fiddle in this match because he’s such the straight man in the scenario. He’s so upright. He’s so completely indy pro that I could just as easily get worked up watching him on TV doing the same character for the presumptive heterosexual audience. He’s such an 80’s beefcake that I almost feel like I need to keep my raging desire to shoot a load across that powerful, furry muscled gut a secret, like this is some guilty private pleasure that only I’m entertaining back in my adolescence, discovering what a turn on wrestling is.

Thank the homoerotic wrestling gods that Zip Zarella shows up and drags this hot contest into the light of day. In still frame, he’s simply gorgeous. I know some of my fellow fans don’t enjoy pec tats nearly as much as I do, but fu-u-uck, I love every artistic angle of Zip. He’s smooth to Joey’s hairy. He’s harder and tighter than his opponent, with sharper angles and muscle separation. He strikes a leaner profile everywhere except those magnificent legs. Fuck, his thighs are sensational, with thick, shapely quads and that fantastic bulge of powerfully built hamstrings that ebb and flow, muscle transitioning smoothly to muscle as the back of his legs meet his bulging, hard glutes. I’ve got a major crush on the boyish smile that stretches across his face when he’s coasting on top. I’d like to give his lovely, tight nipples a tongue lashing to make that pretty smile shine.

Joe coincidentally just wrote a post reflecting on Zip’s enigmatic character. I like Joe’s assessment of Zip as a sadist’s sadist. He “beams instead of glowers,” Joe argues, noting that Zip is almost too personable and pleasant to really qualify as a heel. I get that. I also think that a lot of what I like about Zip’s spirit is a little extra he brings beyond just a transliteration of straight indy pro to the BGE ring. When he’s wringing Joey out with a reverse bearhug, his hips thrusting forward into Joey’s meaty ass, he snarls, “You’re mine, bitch. Tap!”  The tap tallies trade advantage back and forth, but when Zip starts to get a little distance, he targets Joey’s hairy gut with knees and punches, driving him to the mat and standing on the back of his head, choking Joey across the bottom rope. “I’m in control now!” There’s ecstasy in Zip’s voice. When Joey tries to punch his way free from being trapped between Zip’s insanely sexy thighs, Zip dials the big brawler back into being his bitch with sensationally sexy nipple torture.

It’s every bit as competitive a match as promised. Joey is vicious. He repeatedly targets Zip’s balls with flailing place kicks. He leers down at Zip at one point as Zip tries to peel himself off the mat, tries to claw his way up to his hands and knees. Joey straddles his back, hops up and drives his juicy ass down into Zip’s lean, muscled lower back. Zip stubbornly keeps climbing up to his hands and knees, and Joey keeps using that bubble butt to pound him back down. Joey’s brutal and bitter and does a fantastic job of holding up his end of the suspense. But where Zip lays down tauntingly erotic subtext, Joey’s trash talk is flatly straight. He tauntingly calls Zip a geek, a preppy.  He promises to twist him like a pretzel. It’s fun and domineering. But it isn’t, on its own merits, sexy.

Zip, on the other hand, is just so fucking sexy.  I have no idea whose team he plays for on his own time, but his playful sadism dancing on the edge of homoeroticism makes me think that Zip understands that this audience is getting off on him. Some of the indy pro recruits in our homoerotic wrestling universe seem wooden and vaguely uncomfortable with the implicit nature and interests of the audience. But my intuition tells me that, at the very least, Zip is entirely cool with that. If anything, I’d guess that Zip enjoys being the object of our lusts. I can hope that, perhaps, our adoration might even get Zip hard in return.

When Zip indulgently strikes an aesthetic pose and flexes his gorgeous body in victory, he does it for you and me. For that, I’m a fierce fan. I hope we see Zip swim out into the deep end and take on more than just the brittlely upright indy pros only vaguely at peace with wrestling for a gay audience. Keep looking like you do, Zip. Keeping doing what you do. It’s all good.