Someone who has wrestled for both indy pro promoters and homoerotic wrestling producers once told me that in mainstream pro wrestling, making cash on the side by wrestling for gay eyes is considered a dirty little joke. Like, everyone knows that a lot of “legit” pro wrestlers do it, but it’s sort of an embarrassment that you aren’t supposed to talk about. I get the impression that it’s an “understandable” (to the straight gaze) side hustle, but it’s a roll-your-eyes-and-smirk sort of thing. Wrestling kink is the nudge-nudge-wink-wink punch line in an otherwise (still) hetero/macho dominated bro-y locker room culture. Playing up a gay trope in the ring has been around for generations. Openly gay wrestlers have been making a name for themselves in mainstream pro wrestling for a few years now, and while I’m sure it’s hardly easy sailing, it’s marketable enough for them to still get work. But having wrestled for BG East or W4H or Muscleboy or Weekend or any of the wrestling producers marketing not just to gay eyes, but to the homoerotic gaze turned on in particular by wrestling, isn’t something to be proud of.

Over the past 14 years of blogging, I’ve occasionally had wrestlers contact me to ask me to pull down images and reviews of them as they take a run at breaking into mainstream pro wrestling. Sometimes, it’s specifically more erotically-oriented wrestling that they’d like to expunge from the internet record. Sometimes it’s just the fact that they wrestled for a company that explicitly markets to a wrestling kink-oriented audience. In either case, I always do it; and it always feels a little like I’m propping up the erotic-shame machine that so many of us have had to come to terms with in one fashion or another. The only reason I can think that it would help a wrestler’s chances to catch a break in wrestling for a mainstream (<–read hetero) audience is that the audience and the producers figuring out how to squeeze their marks couldn’t see their wrestling talent through the blurry haze of social stigma and shame encircling them for having done their thing knowing full-well guys like me are getting off on it. It’s not how talented they can be in the ring or in front of the camera. It’s the scarlet letter “K” tattooed across their chest for having been stained by association with wrestling kink.

I’ve been mulling all of this anew lately because MeetFighers recently released, with some aplomb and fanfare, an announcement entitled “Welcome to: Dating, Erotic content, Porn, Fetish, Kink, and Sex!” (exclamation point and misused colon included). You can read it here, but what’s been provoking deeper thoughts from me about it is this careful line that the administrators of MeetFighters and related sites are drawing between wrestling (and other combat sports) and wrestling kink. Apparently, they’ve received a lot of feedback for a while asking for them to reconsider their “firm stance on erotic content limits, especially when it comes to avatar pictures.” As back story, publicly visible pics on MeetFighters cannot be “too” erotic, and especially avatar photos used for MeetFighters accounts. What is “too” erotic, as you might guess, is a matter for debate among wildly disparate points of view. Ostensibly, if someone might see similar content and body exposure on mainstream television, then it’s okay. However, I’ve spoken with several guys who’ve shared avatar pics that have been disallowed as “too erotic,” and honestly, I cannot tell what line they’ve crossed. No full frontal, but having a big package, for example, appears to trip the sensors (sorry, Mr. Joshua, I hope you don’t dare show your award-winning bulge around those parts). The approval process for MeetFighters is crowd-sourced, and for the past several months, I’ve been diligently reviewing photos and giving my feedback on how erotic they appear to me to be. After you’ve assigned a rating, you can later see how you rated a photo and what the “final decision” was based on other crowd sourced ratings, and, seriously, I seem to be some sort of raving libertine, always (always) rating content at least one or two standard deviations less erotic than they’re eventually deemed to be. Anyway, all of that simply to say that MeetFighters has apparently been trying to police the incredibly subjective moving target of eroticism for a long time, in ways that many have disagreed with and found frustrating, of course.

What catches my attention most in the MeetFighters announcement is the line that says, “Simply put, your public avatar and profile should represent the sport, not porn.” That is, there’s a clear and marked distinction between the sport of wrestling and kink. “The sport” refers to wrestling (and other combat sports represented on MeetFighters, but as far as I can tell, it’s predominantly wrestling-focused), and “porn” appears to refer to open acknowledgement of being turned on by wrestling. For context, when you sign up for MeetFighters and set up your profile, as I did a few months ago, there are several categories of preset, point-and-click options that the platform offers for you to provide your interests/reasons for having a profile:

One of those sets of potential interests is entitled (by MeetFighters) as “Fetishes,” in which you can click on preferences such as being interested in sex, wanting to “wrestle for top,” be interested in cock-and-ball torture, having an interest in jacking off with an opponent (among many others). That’s part of the built-in options MeetFighters gives for users’ profiles… and… “your public avatar and profile should represent the sport, not porn.” I’m not pointing this out trying to call anyone out for hypocrisy or point fingers, but simply to point out that there isn’t an objective, clearly identifiable demarcation between what is “wrestling” and what is wrestling kink, and disentangling the two is… well, I’ll just say that it’s obviously fraught.

MeetFighters new move in this chess game of social propriety is to create a new, separate platform. This new platform is called Lustfinity.com, and “promises to be an inclusive sanctuary for every imaginable fantasy and kink.” The roll out of Lustfinity appears to be all about kinks and fetishes, with nary a word about wrestling. It feels a lot like… well, like everything else that’s part of the erotic-shaming industrial complex, that says, “Your erotic interests in wrestling are not a wrestling interest. Don’t sully recreational meet-up wrestling with too much open discussion of your motivation being about how turned on you are by wrestling, by watching wrestling, by wrestling other guys, by talking about it and writing about it and sharing what you find hot about it. That’s a conversation about lust, not wrestling.” And those who are interested in meet-up wrestling and also clicking the “not interested in fetishes” preset option in their profile, apparently may be scandalized by the not-so-well-kept secret that a whole lot (a WHOLE FUCKING LOT) of MeetFighters profiles are for guys deeply invested in one or more homoerotic aspects of wrestling. These are all, ostensibly, adults, mind you (you have to be to sign up for an account). Of the 20 newest accounts created just today, as I write this, 16 of them list specific fetishes they’re interest in under “fetishes” or describe erotic scenarios they’re interested in as part of their introduction. I have no idea how representative of a sample that is of MeetFighters as a whole, but… that line between being turned on by wrestling and “the sport” is not objectively discernible.

The social project of policing the erotic (not just sex, but what is erotic) has a long, complex, and pretty insidious history. The “shame industrial complex,” as I described it above, reinforces all sorts of structures of social power that disenfranchise some and privilege others in concrete ways. MeetFighers’ Lustfinity project isn’t the first effort, and certainly won’t be the last, to distinguish eroticism from more socially acceptable topics, even when everyone reads the erotic subtext long coded into those socially acceptable topics (especially when everyone reads the erotic subtext!). I don’t think there’s any singular nefarious actor or tsk-tsking church lady to blame, because we’re all swimming in this same stream of history, in small ways and big ways going with the flow (and thereby making the flow that much more compelling for everyone), or, occasionally, swimming up stream, and bumping into and irritating the majority of folks who’d just rather be swept along with the subjective, changeable, ultimately unequally apportioned opportunities that come with the status quo.

But all of this makes me think of a couple of things about my own swimming strokes. One of the things that has consistently surprised me from blogging about my homoerotic wrestling interests has been the number of individuals who have reached out to say, “I thought I was the only one!” I think that’s the way the shame industrial complex works, really. Silencing the erotic leaves most of us questioning why do we have these feelings? Why do we react this way? If it’s not heteronormative erotic-romanticism force fed to us in popular media, then we’re left under the mistaken impression that our experience is novel, niche, marginal, and aberrant. So, stumbling upon someone naming something that propriety defines as out of bounds for acceptable conversation feels revelatory. I can’t tell you how much back channel feedback I got about my recent post about growing up keying off of wrestling and fitness magazines, from so many readers who had the same experience, or close enough of that experience to feel seen by me writing about my experience. I’m proud of that, and it’s something that keeps me investing in writing more posts. I think that Lustfinity and other kink-positive corners of the internet offer some of that normalizing atmosphere. But I also think that a kink-ghetto probably advances the shame industrial complex at least as much as it works against it. The aspect of it all that says, “you aren’t into wrestling, you’re into your kink, so take that conversation elsewhere” probably isn’t 100% oppressive or liberatory, but I think it’s a little more the former.

The other thing that this has led me to reflect on more deeply is the ways in which I buy into the shame industrial complex. I disclose A LOT on here about myself, but strategically don’t disclose everything, in order to try to bifurcate my life into what is and isn’t socially proper. A lot of people in my life who could know that I’m into homoerotic wrestling don’t, because I haven’t chosen to have that conversation in all of the places where people might otherwise casually talk about their erotic interests. I don’t exactly know where even I think the line ought to be between how I engage in the world as someone who participates in erotic interests and as someone who participates in any of the other interests that define me. My hunch is that shame tends to lean on that line more than I’d really like it to or am aware of. And when I don’t disclose with friends at the same level they do with me about what they find attractive, titillating, provocative and sexually exciting, I’m doing my little part to hold the whole edifice of shame and social power up. Like we all do, whenever we get tired of swimming against what feels like an irresistible current.

I’m not sure what my point is here, other than to say I’m into wrestling. Maybe not the way you are, or for the same reasons. I’m into wrestling, and it’s a primary turn on for me. In into wrestling, and its homoerotic text and subtext give me a lot of pleasure. I’m gay, and turned on by wrestling, and turned on when I’m wrestling. I’m into wrestling, and I reject anyone else trying to tell me to pipe down and take that “naughty talk” out back. I’m into wrestling. Deal with it.