A few of you have told me that you don’t agree with me when it comes to my take on the gay panic story in homoerotic wrestling scenarios. Personally, I find it a turn off when a homoerotic wrestling story depends on gay panic to make sense of the combat. When one wrestler finds himself enraged by some overtly erotic moment in the match, causing him to tap into a seemingly desperate wave of vicious brutality, it all feels like so much internalized homophobia.
So when halfway through Thunder’s Arena’s No Holds Barred 7, when Cameron Matthews plants an aggressive, adamant kiss squarely across the lips of Ace Hanson, it’s no wonder that a red flag flew in the back of my mind to watch Ace’s reaction. Ace tosses Cameron all over the place like a rag doll, grabbing his fight gloves to signal that he’s all business now. “You done crossed the line with that one, buddy!” Ace snarls.
The spike in my anxiety that this truly delightful homoerotic wrestling match is turning homophobic slowly evaporates though. I was already fully on board with being turned on by the Ace v Cameron face-off. Both boys are total work horses for Thunder’s Arena, bringing their gorgeous bodies and their respective skill sets in high quality homoerotic wrestling entertainment.
There’s a lot of mutual admiration that happens early on, and I like that. Both boys do a little trash talking, but mixed with some grudging respect. Ace acknowledges that Cameron has been putting on a few pounds of muscle lately. When they initially lock up, Ace can’t help but admit that Cameron is impressively strong.
Thunder’s Arena is becoming the master of the double entendre, and Cameron and Ace are certainly two of the most accomplished practitioners of sexual innuendo out there. When Cameron slaps on a double arm bar, for example, displaying Ace’s beefy physique to perfection, Ace gasps in pain, startled at the decisiveness with which Cameron is dominating him. “Uh!” Ace grunts with a note of panic. “You got that one in pretty deep!”
“Oh, I can go deeper,” Cameron snarls behind him. A little later, when Cameron has Ace uncharacteristically on his back and suffering, Cameron congratulates himself. “Oh man, I love taking big men down.”
Both boys take turns cranking hard on face-to-crotch headscissors, with accompanying trash talk that completely works for me. When inevitably outmuscled, Cameron evens the playing field with some nasty-looking ball claws that I completely buy. The boys hold my attention and tell a very fulfilling story of a muscle-on-muscle battle for domination, with two big egos slapping down extremely attractive sharp wits.

But then there’s that moment when Ace seems to be tapping into his inner Dan White. All my built up excitement from the action thus far begins to waver. Are these guys just another couple of straight boys hating on the very audience that buys this shit in the first place?
Ace flings Cameron’s sweet body all over the place, as Cameron tries to de-escalate the big man’s ferocity. “I didn’t mean it!” Cameron gasps desperately. “You’re not even my type!”
Surprisingly, though, Ace and Cameron never waver from a homoerotic true-line. It appears that the line that Cameron has crossed hasn’t tripped Ace’s inner-homophobe so much as Ace’s dominating muscle lust. “You wanna get freaky, huh!?” Ace barks at Cameron. Shoving Cameron’s face in his crotch in a tit-for-tat humiliating head scissor, Ace crows, “Is this what you like so much!? Here, let me show you a little closer.” Cameron taps Ace’s ass frantically in submission, but Ace refuses to let him up. He slides his hips backward, grinding his crotch into Cameron’s as he stretches his sweat-soaked, muscle torso overtop of his smart ass opponent, pinning him helplessly underneath his gorgeous bulk. “Stop squirming Cameron,” he mutters as he swivels his hips slowly. “You’re just like my little sweat towel,” he says almost lovingly as he wipes the sweat from his forehead onto Cameron’s face. Slapping a cheek-to-sweaty-cheek sleeper on, Ace moans passionately, “Come on… come on….”

Cameron groans, “I’m coming…” Ace returns the favor for all that ball torture Cameron treated him to earlier. Some truly gasp-worthy maneuvers include one of Ace’s hand clawing at Cameron’s testicles, the other wrapped around his throat, military pressing him overhead. Some incredibly high impact and all-in power squashing happens here that’s undeniably hot.

But what finally sells me is Ace. As he systematically crushes Cameron, ignoring submission after submission in order to beat his boy relentlessly, Ace starts to take full possession of his opponent. With Cameron trapped flat on his back underneath him, yet again, Ace strokes Cameron’s muscles and squeezes his left bicep, marveling that Cameron is hard and pumped from all his exertions. “Feel a little lower,” Cameron mutters, suggesting that it isn’t just his bicep that’s hard and pumped. The grin on Ace’s face grows bigger as he strokes and massages Cameron in hold after hold. He squeezes Cameron’s pecs and thighs. He comes back over and over to Cameron’s impressively big biceps that so many homoerotic wrestling commentators have been admiring lately.
Yet again, Ace has Cameron pinned on his back underneath him, crotch-to-crotch. Ace presses their torsos together and rests his face, cheek-to-cheek on top of Cameron, their lips a fraction of an inch apart. “Is that what you like?” he snarls down.
Cameron mutters, “Yes, actually.”
Ace groans again, “Just like my towel, look at you all wiped up with my sweat. Now you’ll smell like me. Maybe girls will talk to you.”
Without skipping at beat, Cameron groans, “Girls have cooties.”
So, this is quintessentially Thunder’s Arena. Cameron and Ace (mostly Cameron) have extremely entertainingly sharp wits, giving high powered moves and blows a playful, fun-n-games feel about them. But I offer an unqualified recommendation for No Holds Barred 7 mostly because, in a Thunder’s way, this is awesomely erotic. Neither of these gorgeous hunks flinch from the homoerotic sexual innuendo. While Ace appears to grow particularly concerned about Cameron’s indulgent, full-faced kiss, it seems to be only an invitation for Ace to up his game and take more and more delight in exploring and owning Cameron’s hot, hard body. This match is entirely about you and me, with a story told with a lot of humor, a lot of innuendo, a lot of hard, amazing muscle wrestling, and, perhaps surprisingly, a whole lot of respect for their audience.