Woah. 2023. WOAH!?

This has been a year and a half… maybe two… squeezed into one! Maybe I was making up for what was put on hold due to the pandemic? Or is this what a homoerotic wrestling fan mid-life crisis looks like? “Crisis” doesn’t really fit how this year landed for me, though. It was all good. It was relentlessly exiting and fun and validating.

Plugging away at this blog has been a mostly solitary endeavor over the past 14 years. I’m sure that’s one reason why I’ve always enjoyed so much doing interviews. For the most part, though, this is me dictating my inner monologue to a virtual/theoretical audience that I never meet in person. But 2023 was all about community. It was about exploring and enjoying all aspects of homoerotic wrestling with so many like-minded wrestling fans. Last year around this time, I was marveling at having made a new online friend in 2022, AR. My creative collaborations with AR grew more extensive and intense in 2023. He and I have explored so many hot wrestling fantasies through our text and his artwork, it’s a little difficult to describe just how productive we’ve been this year! I posted a few of our completed projects over the past several months, but that’s been just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve got more of our finished works in the queue to share with you all in 2024, but it’s been the process, not the product, that’s made creating with AR such a fun. We almost, but didn’t quite manage to meet up in person, but our time spent collaborating online was intense, hilarious, and one of the hottest celebrations of homoerotic wrestling in a year packed with celebrations.

AR also offered a ton of invaluable moral support as I prepped at the beginning of 2023 for my most anticipated adventure, wrestling Scott Williams. Well, AR’s moral support was of the harsh “you’d better work out more or Scott’s going to kick your ass” variety. I accused AR, at one point, of being on Scott’s payroll to keep me questioning if I’m ready for this. And, based on Scott’s bluster and trash talk in the comments here on the blog, I was excitedly anticipating a serious challenge from the hot hunk who I’ve been calling the “man of my dreams” for years. Last summer, after so much back and forth, so many threats and promises, I answered a knock at the door to find none other than the man of my dreams there, an actual homoerotic wrestling fantasy materializing in the (hot) flesh. The journey from discovering Scott starring in his BG East matches years ago, to blogging about how remarkably he pushes my buttons watching him wrestle, to interacting with him in the comments on the blog, to actually wrestling him, was almost surreal, and most certainly one of the standout highlights of 2023!

Related to prepping for that wrestling fantasy-come-true with Scott, 2023 also marked my venturing into meet up wrestling with others. There were a lot of factors that propelled me to explore meet-up wrestling. I first got connected with my friend/long lost cousin Scooter at the beginning of the year, when he reached out and asked if I’d help spread the word about the Beer Blast social event at Wrestlefest NYC in February. It was largely Scooter’s encouragement that prompted me not only to try meet-up wrestling for the first time, but to jump right into the deep end by attending Wrestlefest Canada in Toronto in July. And I’ve had so many amazing in-person connections, both on the mats and off, with dozens of incredibly cool wrestlers and wrestling fans. In Toronto, I got to fanboy all over Ben Monaco, Masked Menace, and Ollie Watts at the socials. I developed a friendship with BobbyBenCarter on Discord, then wrestled him in Toronto, then got together with him over dinner this fall when I was out of town at a conference. At Wrestlefest Canada, I got some amazingly generous wrestling lessons from stone cold hotties like TxWresl and Mattz4Fun, and have enjoyed staying connected with them since, because they’re just cool guys I like. I clicked so hard in an unscheduled match with SeattleFight that we just kept wrestling again and again that week in Toronto, and, similarly, have stayed in touch ever since. One of the wild aspects of this part of my adventure in 2023 was encountering a ton of blog readers who seemed excited to meet me in person. I felt like a legit celebrity at times, with total strangers knowing a lot about me solely from reading me. Lest I think too much of my celebrity status, there were also plenty of guys I met at Wrestlefest Canada who’d never heard of the blog and were clearly unimpressed if it came up in conversation. But just discovering the reach of the blog, outside the scope of my own head and into the awareness of guys from around the world with similar interests in homoerotic wrestling, really blew my mind.

I didn’t blog about it, but it was definitely a highlight of my year offline to get to reconnect in person with the Boss and the sexy captains of the homoerotic wrestling video industry at BG East. We met over lunch a few months ago, when Scooter was in town to talk Wrestlefest business with them, and I was reminded again of how much I understand about myself and what turns me on about wrestling that I owe to their world building and influence.

I’ve renegotiated my relationship with social media a few times over the past couple of years, and in 2023, I found a virtual community that’s been more positive and validating than just about any other I’ve tried. The Discord server created by my cuz Scooter, called the Wrestle Shack (in a self-conscious send up to BGE), has been a constructive and supportive point of contact with homoerotic wrestling fans and wrestlers from all over the world. It’s got a much more explicit and open vibe than the corners of mainstream social media I’ve seen carved out for us, and it’s more playful, body-positive, and explicitly validating of the diversity of guys into homoerotic wrestling than I’ve encountered pretty much anywhere else.

My unsolicited advice to homoerotic wrestling fans for the coming year is build your community. I’m sure it’ll look different for each of us, but find someone to share your wrestling imagination with like I’ve found with AR. Find friends who will make you feel good about yourself and encourage you to live your truth, like my buddies in the Wrestle Shack. If you’re into it, find some sexy wrestlers who are excited to explore with you the sensationally hot pleasures of wrestling, who respect your boundaries and are eager to find the ways that your pleasure and theirs line up. Hell, I really wish for you all to find someone who looks at you the way Scott looks at me when his head is trapped in my scissors, his face turning beet red, all of his hot, hard earned muscles just not enough to make his escape, and he sighs that deep, ragged sigh of resignation before bitterly tapping out, swearing, again, that it’ll never happen again.

Here’s to many more adventures in 2024 for all of us!