When I decided to resurrect the blog here, I thought about what I enjoyed most about the exercise. I’m planning on leaning into the pleasure, in the interest of maintaining a healthy, long-term relationship with the task of putting my homoerotic wrestling thoughts into text. As a result, you can count on seeing more wrestling fiction, more guessing games, and, yes, I strongly suspect you’ll find me obsessing about hot news boys. One of the countless little value added elements to homoerotic wrestling for me is a hearty yank on an opponent’s trunks, and thus the tradition of Trunk Pull Tuesday.

I’d go so far as to suggest that trunk pulls were one of the first subtle elements in professional wrestling to ignite my homoerotic imagination. Ostensibly, a wrestler grabs his opponent’s trunks for leverage. With next to nothing else adorning the wrestling body, a wrestler uses the trunks as a handle to snap that snap mare, to drag him into motion in order to pound him that much harder with a fist, or a knee, or a clothesline.

Of course, that’s not the only thing I saw, as a kid growing up watching hot bodied hunks wrestling on television. I saw alluring glimpses of skin and tan lines normally discretely covered by modest patches of fabric. There was a fleeting view of a little more ass cheek, a tantalizing flash of lower abdomen, implicitly drawing attention away from the wrestling text and toward the erotic subtext just beneath the surface.

It remains a particularly titillating element in homoerotic wrestling, as far as I’m concerned, when, wrestling for gay eyes, a grappler yanks on his opponent’s trunks. Even when it isn’t prelude to stripping gear off entirely, it automatically bridges the narrative of combat and the story of sexual arousal. There’s still a third layer of eroticism for me when I can tell the puller gets it, that he knows how sexy this is, that he is, like I am, turned on not just by the competition for falls, not just the pleasure of spoiling a ripped opponent’s modesty, but that he feels the gravitational pull of the whole thing drawing him, and his opponent, and his audience into an explicit story of sexual attraction with the turbo boost of wrestling for erotic position.

The driving momentum of all those homoerotic wrestling punches and headlocks and spladles and scissors is heading toward a story centered on what happens in the geography underneath the trunks. There are endless recipes involving various quantities of aggression, narcissism, brutality, contempt, competition, ego, and lust, but the trunk pull is a tried and true ingredient for turning up the erotic heat, at least for the gay wrestling fan, if not for the combatants themselves.

Okay, I’ve banned myself from searching for more tasty trunk pulls. For now. Until next Tuesday. Keep yanking, wrestlers (and fans).