And now, I’m on my way home from Wrestlefest Canada, sitting in the airport at Toronto waiting for my flight, and reflecting back on a busy, provocative, exciting week. I had originally thought about posting updates during the week, but holy hell, there was just too much going on to stop and reflect! I’m a little hyper self-conscious and self-analytical (as if you couldn’t tell). So, being so engaged in everything happening this week that I couldn’t spend much time in my own head was refreshing. Okay, not going to lie, it was a little nerve racking, too, but just needing to be present, in the moment, and ride the wave of excitement in meeting new people and wrestling and swapping wrestling stories (among other things) felt liberating.

I’ve been trying to decide how to try to write about my experiences at Wrestlefest Canada. I think I’ll best be able to wrap my head around it in pieces, though the experience of it was a lot happening all at once. So, for this first debriefing session with you, I’ll pick up where I left off in my last post on the way to Toronto, and think about the community that I was part of this week. I met SO MANY fucking people! I’m an introverted-borderline-shy guy under most circumstances, and things like going to a bar social with everyone there in wrestling gear was… a stretch. Honestly, I was hedging my bets up until the very last second as to whether I’d feel brave enough to take off my street clothes and hang out in the singlet I wore underneath. The venue was the Black Eagle bar in Toronto, who had advertised locally that they were hosting the WrestleFest mixer. They set aside a corner of the rooftop patio for our gathering, but we weren’t the only patrons there. I walked through a crowd of non-WF civilians to get to the sexy herd of singlets I could see in the back, feeling the appraising gazes of clearly curious bar patrons. I had just a moment of thinking, Oh hell, no, I’m not stripping down to my singlet in front of all of these non-wrestlers. But then I saw the welcoming faces of new friends I’d already made over the previous couple of days, almost everyone in gear, looking sexy as hell. And the community lent me the courage to live my wrestling kink out loud. Well, okay… I took off my shirt and showed off my low cut singlet top. I kept my shorts on; mostly because singlets don’t have pockets for valuables. But walking back and forth through the crowd to the bar, catching locals checking out my chest in my Tauwell singlet, I felt delightfully conspicuous and an integral part of a sexy, bold, fierce community.

I’ll save more debrief about the wrestling itself for my next post, but suffice it to say that I enjoyed the intense experience of strangers-transformed-into-intimate-friends over and over again over the course of having matches. A couple of the smoking hot Canadians who were first to welcome me to the mats the day I arrived were at the bar on Friday. Just two days earlier, I’d met them in person for the first time. Then we wrestled. And two days later, I’m excitedly rushing up to hug them in greeting like old friends. Hell, just meeting guys who I had not wrestled, but who I’d met around the gay village over the several days, felt like a homecoming. It was warm (not just because it was Toronto in late July), and I felt seen and welcomed in a way I don’t know that I’ve ever really experienced before. Is this starting to sound like hyperbole? It’s all still way fresh as I write this, but I don’t believe it’s an exaggeration.

It was more than just the feel of a pop-up community. There were regular points of reference to the larger homoerotic wrestling community we’re securely embedded within. For instance, the WF organizers arranged with the Black Eagle to play wrestling videos in the background at the bar on Friday. Seeing Scott Williams‘ fine, fine body rolling around on the screen in one of his classic BG East matches was an incredible nod to the ways that these 80-100+ WF participants were part of something much bigger, and, at the same time, with so much pre-existing shared intimacy. On the spot, I texted Scott with a photo of him on the screen, with the message “Playing RIGHT NOW at the Black Eagle bar in Toronto’s gay village, Williams vs Warren, in honor of Wrestlefest!” In relentlessly authentic Scott style, he replied, “GODDAMNNN!! I love it!!!!” Yeah, there was no doubt about it. I was in the right place, with the right people.

BG East boys weren’t just playing on the screen at WF, either. On another night at an impromptu “social,” in walked Ben Monaco. Ben. Fucking. Monaco. Every bit as handsome and sexy as hell, but thicker and more heavily muscled, in all the right ways, than I’ve ever seen him before. I interviewed Ben twice in 2012, because once just wasn’t enough. The first time was almost the blink of an eye after his debut BG East release in the inaugural Mat Rookies, after I caught wind that Ben was already a reader of this blog. The second interview (during which I learned that Ben and I share affection for Scott Williams, and we chatted quite a bit about the power of the gay wrestling community to bring people together) occurred after his Gazebo Grapplers 14 match against trust fund baby Damien Rush, and we’ve exchanged occasional messages back and forth in between then and now. But we’d never met in person. So, when we were introducing ourselves, needless to say I didn’t actually need him to tell me who he was. In trying to be heard over the pounding bass of the bar music, he thought I called myself Bart (happened A LOT this week), and he gave me a friendly hug of greeting. When I shouted out the clarification that “I’m Bard!,” he made a mental correction, and then suddenly his face lit up, and he wrapped those fucking gargantuan arms around me and bearhugged the air out of my lungs (seriously). Fuck, that was nice. And that was precisely the vibe. Like, you’re in, and you get a hug, just because you’re drawn to erotic wrestling. Oh, and we’ve talked online before and admired each other’s writing and you’ve fanboyed all over my published wrestling videos? THAT deserves the fucking bearhug that I KNOW you’re going to appreciate.

Ben wasn’t my only star sighting. I had the amazing pleasure of also meeting Masked Menace, who is devastatingly handsome sans mask, and sports that fabulously hotly muscled body I’ve crushed on repeatedly in his wrestling videos. I had the intense pleasure of meeting Sunny DeLeon, who’s been heating up the BG East mats recently. Sunny is one of those guys who’s so stunningly hot that I immediately retreat so deep into my insecurities that I can barely talk. It was further INSANE that the circumstance under which we were meeting was a group wrestling event… but I’m keeping that powder dry for my next post (fuck, I’ve got so many words!!!). And then my last night at WF, by complete happenstance, I also had the pleasure of running into Ollie Watts, the phenomenal wrestler for BG East and UK Wrestling Hub, who was somehow even hotter in person, and adorably humble. I told him how excited I was to get to enjoy this star-sighting, and he demurely disavowed the status of “wrestling star.” Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t get to make that call, and I’m thrilled to confirm Ollie is a total star, sexy, charismatic, and wicked clever. To be honest, one of main anxieties about attending WF had been not having already met, in person, anyone who would be there. Somehow, the BG East guys left me star struck and made me feel right at home. I hadn’t met any of them before, but they’ve been featured on screens in my home for a long, hot, steamy time!

I got to meet and exchange war stories with fellow homoerotic wrestling fiction author (writing as) David Evans. His reflections on his writing process, the role of the pandemic in calling out the literary imagination, and the push and pull of having an audience holding him accountable to carrying a narrative through to climax, echoed a ton of my own experiences. We’ve had different journeys to get where we are, different pathways leading us to invest our creativity in constructing words about the wrestling kink. But we share so much of the same drive to describe and document with words the visceral experiences of being drawn to and turned on by the intimacy of wrestling. I told him he should blog. He insisted that he’ll leave the blogging to me, and then graciously comped me copies of two more of his books I didn’t yet own (you should check them out).

Guys I’ve grown virtually close to over the past couple of months, both on the WrestleFest server and the Shack server, I was suddenly in the same room with, shaking hands, exchanging hugs, and sometimes even grappling with. Scooter, who I interviewed about Wrestlefest NYC back in early April (and who gets most of the credit for inspiring me to come to Wrestlefest Canada), feels even more to me like someone I’ve known for years and years after hanging together a lot this week. But so many other virtual connections were also made real and embodied, and it sort of blows my mind that none of them were disappointing in the least. Careful readers may be happy to know I DID take Aust10 up on the offer to tug on his beard when we met at the Black Eagle (that’s not a euphemism… I literally tugged on his beard). With all of the hype and expectation and worry (I worry needlessly a lot, you may have noticed) about what it would be like to meet these guys in person, every new face-to-face introduction simply felt like connecting the dots between the cool guys I’ve gotten to know from a distance and the hotties standing in front of me in person in Toronto.

In the interest of keeping things real, I also want to acknowledge that community can be hard. Hell, community IS hard. It takes work, and it’s built just as much on repair from missed connections, misunderstandings, and differences, as it is on feel good moments of simpatico. While Wrestlefest was overwhelmingly a positive experience for me, there were points of friction. I think that’s part of the definition of genuine community, frankly. Not everyone who wanted a particular match got it. I know this based on public conversations on the server, but also because a few guys reached out to me to set something up spontaneously, who I had to decline (for various reasons, but mostly because I was worn the fuck OUT by all of the excitement I had already planned). The sources of heat that divide us in the rest of the world in terms of age, race and ethnicity are fault lines inevitably lying underneath this wrestling community. Community is always in the process of being constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed. Although I really have only good things to say about my experience of the community at Wrestlefest Canada, I know for a fact there were somewhere around 80 to 100+ other sets of experiences of the same event, probably reflecting a mix of excitement and disappointment, validation and frustration. My account here isn’t meant to imply it was the same for everyone, and all of our different experiences are indisputably equally true at the same time. That’s the delight and diabolical conundrum of community.

Finally, on the theme of community, I want to offer my enthusiastic gratitude and praise to the local organizers of Wrestlefest Canada. I am NOT an event planner. I don’t have those skills. But I recognize and appreciate them when I see them in others. The Meetfighters event infrastructure creates a primary portal for pulling together an international gathering like this. Wrestlers from all over Canada and the U.S. were joined by guys from France, Thailand, the U.K., and Germany (those are just the ones I knew about), so something this complex can’t just happen with good will and high hopes. I know that my cousin Scooter offered a lot of consultation, and he shared lessons-learned from his work with helping promote Wrestlefest NYC this past February. But the team of Canadians who hosted and moderated the Wrestlefest server, constructed the AMAZING Wrestlefest website, made local arrangements with hotels and event spaces, helped us out-of-towners navigate transportation options in Toronto, and were just all so remarkably generous with their time and patience and organizational skills… they successfully pulled off an amazing experience.

And that’s not to mention the wrestling… (to be continued...)