I’m at the airport as I type this, waiting for my flight to Toronto. I’m a little nervous. Traveling always makes me a little nervous, but this time, I’m also nervous because I’ll be participating in WrestleFest Canada, my first WrestleFest experience. Getting together with dozens of wrestlers (current count at 80 confirmed) is both super intimidating and super exciting at the same time.

I grew up feeling way isolated. First, I was isolated as a gay kid in a small, working class town with absolutely no representation in sight. My only points of reference for far too long were offensive jokes in which “fags” was the punchline. I remember coming across references to same-sex sex in science fiction (big, big, big sci-fi geek here), and combing through books to learn more. All the while, wondering to myself if I was the only person in the world who experienced attraction the way I did. I’d linger at the magazine rack in the grocery store to ogle the muscle hunks on the cover of fitness mags, desperately turned on, but under the (certainly mistaken) impression that the content there wasn’t intended for a male lustful gaze like mine. I carried this inner world around with me, growing to understand myself more and more as someone aroused by men, and under the impression that was extremely rare, perhaps to the point of unheard of. Like, am I the only one?

Once I started owning (internally for the most part, at first) that I’m a guy who gets turned on by guys, I then grappled (pun intended) with what it means to be a gay guy who really gets off on wrestling. I remember my first boyfriend making a snarky comment about weirdos who get off on watching guys wrestle. Like, it was something laughably freakish to him that someone’s primary hot spot is wrestling, significantly more so than just sucking and fucking. I sort of melted inside a little, thinking, fuck, there must be something really off about me… though I was intrigued that my boyfriend had heard of other guys with a wrestling kink. But I figured that maybe I was one in a million, at best. I pictured myself going through life knowing there might be a handful of others out there, but being pretty likely to remain in my own head, watching pro wrestling, providing the erotic subtext with my imagination, trying to figure out how to navigate how “gay” I am as opposed to how much into wrestling. I dated guys and never told them about wrestling, even though it was often imagined scenarios of wrestling that fueled my erections. It felt really isolating to be filtering the outside world and its rules of engagement (in and outside of gay culture) through my experience of myself and my orientation toward wrestling.

Finding gay wrestling companies online was a MAJOR epiphany for me. I mean, fuck, I’d discovered my supplier of masturbation content that didn’t require me to imagine an erotic subtext to hot guys wrestling. But more than that was the realization that there’s a market for homoerotic wrestling. I’m a target demographic, not an unheard of anomaly. This is a going concern, and I’m on a mailing list, meaning, holy shit, there’s A LIST!

I consumed as much BGE, BG, Can-Am, On Top, and other wrestling as my income would permit for many years. I poured over the mailers like a quarterly version of the Sears Christmas catalog, fantasizing about just how hot these matches might be. It was a further epiphany to realize that I DIDN’T get turned on by all of the content, but there was still all that diversity of content, meaning… fuck, there are different tastes represented on that mailing list. We don’t all like precisely the same things, even if we’re all clearly turned on by erotic wrestling in general. I started mentally cataloging what my tastes were, what kind of wrestlers and pairings turned me on, what gear and context and type of matches pushed my buttons. About 15 years ago, I started blogging, not even really sure what I was planning on blogging about, but wanting to put on the outside all of that internal world I’d been so immersed in on the inside for so long (not sure if that makes sense, but hopefully you get what I mean). I blogged about hot guys who turn me on and wrestling, which, let’s be honest, meant hot guys I wished wrestled, and all things wrestling.

I don’t know if you’ve picked this up about me, but I tend to color in the lines. I tried for a while to blog about homoerotic wrestling videos without using any copyrighted images from producers, so as not to piss anyone off and violate anyone’s rights to their creative work. But, FUCK, I wanted to show pictures to illustrate what I was finding so hot about matches, because getting off on wrestling is so fucking visual for me. I was SO nervous when I reached out to info@bgeast.com, hat in hand, asking if I could have permission to occasionally post images of the matches I was blogging about. When Kid Leopard himself wrote back to me, saying that he’d been reading my blog, liked my writing, and gave me permission to use their copyrighted images (with specific parameters explained… this is KL, after all), I would just sit and stare at that email over and over again for days. It was my first direct, 1:1, personal contact with someone who not only did I get off on watching wrestle, but I was 99.9% convinced that he, too, found wrestling a core turn on. I’ve reached out to all of the companies I’ve posted images for over the years for matches I review, and everyone has given a green light (some more generously than others), but it was that email-to-email point of contact with KL that really opened up my world.

And then, holy shit, people started reading the blog. I mean, I checked the stat counter from the start, wondering if I was pissing into the wind, and was truly amazed when this blog would get over 100 views in a given day. But when readers began commenting, it was just fucking wild. It was wild enough to have readers just sharing their opinions, bitching about my taste in men, agreeing with me about a particular hold or wrestler, etc. But when comments started showing up from people saying things like, “I never knew someone else experienced what I experience,” that my blog was that glimpse of person-to-person connection for someone else who’d wondered, once upon a time, if they were the only person in the world who got off so particularly to wrestling… fuck, that was wild. I was nervous about sharing an email address publicly, the first time I offered it, and I instantly started getting email messages from even more guys who wanted to compare notes, reflect on our respective kink(s), etc., even if they didn’t want to air it publicly in the comments section on the blog. I was recently trying to clean out my email archives, and found (and kept) hundreds of those messages that I’ve received over the years. Even the haters, even those guys who’ve been so offensive in insulting particular wrestlers or match styles or my tastes that I’ve not allowed their comments to get posted, even those guys sort of blow my mind, because they’re just as passionate as I am about the erotic power of wrestling (even more so… some of you guys are fucking over the top, even for me).

I’ve written about this relatively recently, so I won’t go into too much detail, but when writers started reaching out to collaborate on homoerotic wrestling fiction, that was yet another level of shared passion for homoerotic wrestling. It’s INTENSE going line by line with someone in describing a wrestling scene that turns me on, turns them on, turns us on, sometimes not even for the same reasons. I’ve watched homoerotic wrestling with a few guys, which is similarly intense, but actually writing it, co-creating and building a shared narrative vision… fuck, there’s sort of no hiding there. We’re naming something that moves us deeply, literally putting into words what our bodies respond to instinctively. My current writing partnership with AR is, by far, the most intense and rewarding experience in that vein, for all those reasons, but especially because we’ve explored our kinky edges that we haven’t really named for anyone else before (even me, 1,675 posts into this blog!). I’m not alone, not even close.

If you’ve followed this blog, you know that it was just a few months ago that I took this to another level and tried meet-up wrestling myself. Credit where due, Drake Marcos was the first hottie to drag my ass into a wrestling match and let me start exploring who I am not just as a a voyeur or writer, but as a wrestler. There was about 8 years between my super hot match with Drake and my venturing into meet-up wrestling again just this year. My last couple of posts document how that journey is going (short story: it’s going FUCKING UNBELIEVABLE!!!). Scott texted me a few days ago, letting me know that he was getting together with a whole cadre of wrestlers I’ve lusted over on the pages of this blog, namely Brad Rochelle, Jonny Firestorm, Shane McCall, and him. I think that Scott may even be angling for a second run at taking me on, after he got a bit more than he may have bargained for when he faced his #1 fan the first time (anytime, tough guy!).

And now, I’m going to my first WrestleFest. Getting ready for it has opened me up to just how NOT alone I am still more. The organizers use both MeetFighters and a devoted Discord server to help participants connect with one another and set up matches. Through my friend Scooter, who I technically met online only 6 months ago, but somehow feel like I’ve known for years (true story, we’re pretty sure we were probably on the same dance floor at a gay club 28 years ago or so), I was invited onto another Discord server of several dozens of great guys all exploring their wrestling fetishes and comparing notes with one another. I’m on those servers all the time, because it’s not just a bunch of isolated guys not wanting to be isolated any longer… it’s a community. Scooter is fond of calling us all brothers, because there’s a camaraderie and mutual support about all sorts of things that feel real… like health and fitness, negotiating wrestling meet-ups safely and sanely, lusting after random guys we encounter online and in the course of our lives. And all things wrestling. We don’t all have the same politics or preferences. We’re spread across geography, and diverse in age, race, and even sexual orientation (I’m fascinated by connecting with bisexual guys around all this!). But it’s community, in the exciting, reassuring, difficult way that it is to be part of community.

But holy hell, WrestleFest is next level for me, my friends. At this moment, I have a total of 3 matches under my belt in my lifetime (starting with Drake), and I am scheduled to more than double that in the coming few days. I’m especially excited for opportunities to meet and talk with guys off the mats, like at the bar social on Friday, and a couple of lunches I have scheduled just to talk with really interesting, cool guys who, like me, get off on wrestling.

I won’t post about every detail of this week, because I don’t want everyone I meet and/or wrestle to be worried what I’ll have to say about it on the pages of this blog. Though… I may ask if guys are okay with me sharing some details that I expect to be hard for me NOT to share. I’ll only share details with permission of all parties involved… yeah, let’s put it that way. I honestly don’t necessarily know what to expect, or how I’ll feel, or what I’ll enjoy or not enjoy. But I’m deeply excited to be part of a community, a brotherhood of sorts, of guys from around the world who probably think differently than I do about all sorts of things, but, in their midst, I won’t be alone in enjoying my passion for homoerotic wrestling.

Wish me luck!