Author: wrestlebard

I'm a gay man with an active imagination.

The Price of Wrestling Porn

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I haven’t taken a poll, or anything, but I imagine that I support the gay porn industry just as much as the next man. I have friends whose video and DVD collections require whole rooms to house, so by comparison I don’t think that I qualify as a “fanatic” really. But I have my own little treasure in my closet, and I pitch in for a couple recurring subscriptions here and there. My porn fix is managed, and I don’t intend on increasing my tithe to the industry, particularly in these tough times.

Then along comes a nicely packaged new site that completely grabs my attention. YouTube teasers for Naked Kombat look promising. The website is attractive, the teasers are sexy, and the backstories (complete with transparent “rules“) add a nice touch to the homoeroticism. The wrestlers appear to be, on average, perhaps a little hotter than other wrestling video products. But the subscription price is premium, significantly higher than other gay wrestling companies. Also some of their links to other “kink” sites that they produce take me to shots of women, which I find immediately… deflating. What to do. What to do.
As I take shopping for porn way too seriously, it makes me think of the harsh backdrop that I paint when I write my wrestling fiction. When I started writing the Producer’s Ring, I conceived of the setting for my homoerotic celebrity wrestling fiction as an alternate world where the entertainment industry has become the basis for political and economic order, where everything and everyone is a commodity, where capitalism has run amok and marketing and profits are the first and last word in political dominance. This alternate reality seems ripe with possibilities for gay wrestling fiction, but I really don’t want the reality that I live in to actually drift that direction. Where more and more of our lives are given a price tag, I hope that we continue to work into the calculus the pricelessness of imagination, romanticism, justice and humanity.

Masked Muscle-Gods

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Why is it that masks can make a wrestling match that much sexier? On the one hand, there’s less of the athlete to see, and that seems like it would always be a bad thing. Yet masks on hot, hardbody wrestlers kick it up a notch for me. The history of Mexican masked wrestlers suggests that they harken back and somehow access the mystery and power of pre-Christian heroic gods (which is starting to sound hot). The unmasking of a pro-style wrestler is portrayed as stripping him of his power, laying him out entirely vulnerable (which sounds even hotter!). Masks are frequently worked into a thematic costume, which can be hot or distinctly not hot, depending. This guy could go either way, I think.

But for gay wrestling, or wrestling through the gay eye, I think the mask is more overtly sexualized. The hidden identity of the muscle-god who bares his body and pounds against another man seems to me to touch on the empowered oppressed seeking sexual liberation…. Okay, that may be a stretch, but you cannot tell that Marcus Bagwell wrestling as the Handsome Stranger wasn’t overtly a sexual object, employing his gorgeous body in the ring to dominate his opponent and then stepping outside the ring to be worshipped by fans reaching out to touch his muscles. And returning to that image of the self-empowered oppressed seeking sexual liberation, masks on the internet have become a device for sexual self-expression and body worship. Seemingly ironically, there are plenty of men ready to expose every other inch of their body in classic exhibitionism, behind the cloaked modesty and anonymity of a masked face. This impressively tooled hardbody on xTube hardly needs to be ashamed of his body, but perhaps it is precisely the mask that empowers him to stroke his cock and spank his ass for millions to see (okay, perhaps spanking his ass like that might be shame-appropriate, but I forgive him because of how enthusiastically he spanks his very beautiful monkey!).
I think that BG East has done some nice work with the sexualization of the masked wrestler. The Enforcer beating Brad Rochelle combines the sexy mysteriousness of a masked muscle-stud with the fantastic suffering of an astonishingly flexible jobber (later turned heel). The Enforcer’s return match against an oddly familiar Blueboy seals the deal of linking the mask to sex. Blueboy nearly conquers the clearly dominant Enforcer by applying strategic liplocks and grinding pelvises. But in the end, the dominant wrestler unmasks his prey, bringing us full circle to the frighteningly heroic muscle-god beating the mere mortal into submission and claiming his victorious prize.

My gay wrestling fiction is celebrity-based, so masks have seemed out of keeping with the genre. But as I mull over the masked muscle-wrestler motif, I’m thinking that it could be a very fun storyline to work in masks, unmasking, and the sexual domination of muscled talent in the wrestling ring.

What Turned Me Gay (again, not really)

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If I wasn’t gay before I saw my first Tarzan movie (I was), surely that would have put me over the top. As a kid, the old Tarzan movies ran on Saturday afternoons. It was another genre within my pre-porn collection. I always hoped for the house to be empty when I could sit in front of the TV and enjoy a private moment with the Edgard Rice Burroughs‘ character. I became somewhat of the connoisseur of Tarzans by the time I was an adolescent. Buster Crabbeplayed the part around the same time as the more popular Johnny Weissmuller, but for my money, Crabbe’s Tarzan was far sexier and more entertaining. Denny Miller’s sole project as the “ape man” was memorable… well, Miller in a loincloth was memorable. When I first saw a Mike Henry portrayal of Tarzan, I was instantly in love. Henry played a more “intellectual” jungle man, but his loin cloth was astonishingly brief, his muscled legs were stunningly long, and his hairy torso was incredibly hot. But I believe my favorite and most lusted-after Tarzan had to be Gordon Scott. He didn’t have quite the hard body that Henry had, but there were more than occasional bare-ass shots as Scott’s loin cloth rode up his crack. He perhaps wasn’t quite as handsome as Crabbe, in my book, but he was totally adorable. Although bondage and wrestling seem to have been regularly occurring themes in many of the Tarzan movies, the image of Scott captured and bound is seared in my memory and cherished in my mental collection of homoerotic images. Of course much later portrayals of Tarzan featured gorgeous boys. O’Keefe’s wrestling scene in the 1981 Bo Derek movie can still inspire a hands-free orgasm for me most days.
Two things I have to mention looking back on my early education in homoeroticism worshiping at the feet of Tarzan. First, the whole concept of the man raised as an animal without the inhibitions of “civilized” propriety was all one HUGE metaphor for male sexuality. So who could be surprised that a gay kid like me would be instantly aroused. He was the totally sexualized man, perfectly matched to the hormone-saturated, pre-adolescent gay boy. Second, as a white, gay kid, I marvel today at the (terrible) lessons that those movies taught me about race. Although the villains were often also white (poachers, usually), there were almost always “primitive,” cannibalistic, violent, terrifying black African characters who Tarzan, the great white champion, had to conquer. White women were invariably threatened by horrific (and actually quite hot) dark-skinned menaces who might be about to eat them, rape them, or enslave them. Decades later, I think I’m still trying to live down those early racist lessons.

Reading is Hot

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In a world where video is accessible from your mobile phone and millions of photos and graphics are clickable everywhere, it makes one wonder what will be the future of text. The moment between desire and gratification seems to be collapsing exponentially. Text requires a little patience, at least a little investment of time. Will there be a place for text, literature, erotica, poetry in the unfolding future?


I hope so. My own gay wrestling fiction, Producer’s Ring, is fun to write, and my hope is that it might be fun to read for others as well. The celebrity wrestling fiction by Savage, Arena Island Celebrity Wrestling, is also great, sexy fun (take note that new material has migrated to Yahoo… check out the public portal Rants, Roids & Wrestling for directions). And speaking of ranting and roiding, Rants and Roids blogger Erik writes a couple fiction blogs, of which I’m getting a kick out of The Snow Boy (have I mentioned I love the Scandinavians?). I hope that there will always be people like me that find some of the most erotic experiences are found in the texts that spark the imagination, transport us into new possibilities, and draw us into the erotic act of reading.

Two Thumbs Up… Two Thumbs Down

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Have I mentioned that I think the porn-dude Mitch Colby is beautiful? Again, just to remind you, I am not stalking him, just casually searching the net for more about Mitch. In addition to enjoying finding his MySpace page, I’ve become a fan of his wrestling videos with BG East. I’m already a big, big fan of his new wrestling release with BG East, pitting Mitch against another sentimental favorite of mine, Derek Da Silva (who also has a MySpace page… not that I’m obsessing or anything). In this new release entitled Crotch Crushers 1, it appears that Mitch and Derek spend their match torturing one another’s balls, in various states of undress and embrace. Both men excel at getting sweat-soaked (love that), and the initial pics from this release suggest that their action is once again wet and sticky. While I find watching cock-abuse a little distracting (can’t help but wincing), this looks fun.

On a related note, I also see that Muscle Adonis has released a photo shoot of Mitch in full frontal self-stimulation. While in theory this totally works for me, the teaser photos are NOT Mitch’s best. Seriously, these wouldn’t be flattering camera angles for anyone. For Mitch they make some things round that should be flat, and flattened out some things that, to Mitch’s credit, should be round. And he’s got a vaguely cerebral palsy look about him (not that there’s anything wrong with that, if you, in fact, have cerebral palsy). I hope that Mitch has an opportunity to vet his photographers and videographers a little more thoroughly in his future work. He deserves to have someone holding the camera that truly appreciates his beautiful body and displays it in the most flattering fashion. (hear the “click, click” of my Olympus in the background?)

…when it all changes…

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I’m just catching up on the new season of Torchwood from the BBC. Just the occasional shot of John Barrowman’s ass walking away would be enough to keep me a loyal viewer. Add to that the love affair between Barrowman and David-Lloyd’s characters (don’t get me started), with lots of snogging, and that just cements it as a gay-fave for me. Imagine my surprise to discover still one more object of my obsession in the first episode of the new season! Rik Makarem totally lit up the screen. Gorgeous face, stunning eyes, and we get just a hint that he is quite a fit young lad. I’m finding scandalously little on this beautiful man, so I’d love some help learning more. His modeling agent gives us the provocative information that he has a 38 inch chest and a 32 inch waist on his 6 foot tall body. That will come in handy should he need to audition in the Producer’s Ring. An interview with the Sunday Mail reveals that he’s also a martial artist, and he’s single. This is just getting better and better. So I now know way too much about this hottie now to know so little. I’m supposing Indian or Pakistani descent? Where are the shirtless photos? Rik Makarem is due for a lot more exposure!

The Art of Gay Wrestling

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I wish that I had talents in graphic arts. I’m so impressed with people with a good eye, particularly those artists who work in the gay wrestling genre. As an adolescent, I tried my hand at drawing the sort of bodies that I found beautiful. I kept notebooks of sketches. Drawing the beautiful men of my imagination became an obsession for a while. The sense of mastery, possession, ownership that came from the act of creating a gorgeous hunk was quite a turn-on. The exercise of posing, displaying, and directing the performance of a lustful work of art was very sexy. I think it’s not far removed from the sexuality of wrestling dominance and submission, to control (and be controlled), to manipulate (and be manipulated), to conquer (and be conquered). Sadly, my adolescent work was crap, and it all got lost at one point or another. Happily, there are more accomplished artists on the net these days producing the work that I only aspired to in my youth. Marc has a wonderful new site for his growing collection of graphic Gay Wrestling Art. The graphic lead for this post (used here with permission from the artist) is one of Marc’s original pieces featuring an unfolding storyline between Superman and Superboy (a subject for a future blog: the subgenre of superhero gay wrestling). As I’ve mentioned before, Savage at Rants Roids & Rasslin’ has a very fun original series of superhero wrestling comics, as well as a group site for several more comic-style wrestling stories. Of course there are the classics, like the Tom of Finland collections, but I particularly appreciate the non-commercial works of sincere artists sharing their talents and inspiring my homoerotic imagination.

Newsboys

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As I’ve mentioned, adoring Chris Cuomo is a morning ritual for me. Last Monday, he bragged about catching a 25 pound fish over the weekend. This image from his Twit shows his shirtless moment of glory. Oh my God. Again, I say, Good Morning America, indeed!!!

Tracking news hunks is a hobby of mine. There are the obviously stunning newsboys, like Cuomo, Lauer, Cooper. There are the slightly less exposed objects of lust, like Marciano, & Engel. One of my wild card favorites is Carter Evans, who appears to be on the payroll at CNN, but also does remote coverage of Wall Street for local affiliates. The emphasis on making newsboys into hunks (vice versa, really), is probably bad news for journalism, but fantastic news for shallow gay men like me that tune in for the beefcake. Since we NEVER see enough of these fine looking men, I’ve written a whole wrestling division devoted just to them in my wrestling fiction.

What Turned Me Gay (again, not really)

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So I definitely knew I enjoyed the look of an athletic male body before I saw my first Soloflex ad, but I believe that original ad campaign was my first introduction to body worship. The original Soloflex boy, Scott Madsen, was stunningly displayed. Clearly, he was featured as an object to be adored, envied, lusted after… The faceless shot of him pulling his t-shirt over his head drew the observer’s attention away from the “person” in the photograph, and instead focused our gaze on the muscles, the bellybutton, the incredibly narrow waist, that one visible nipple. The intent of the photograph is clearly sexually provocative objectivication of the athletic male body. And boy, did I get the message. I remember being a pre-teen getting a hold of a magazine with that ad in it. I studied it. I obsessed over it. I traced it on paper in order to get a sense of the shape and the feel of it. I cut it out of the magazine and treasured it in my dresser drawer. No, the Soloflex ads didn’t “turn me” gay, but they fired up my youthful, lustful imagination. I collected images of beautiful male bodies after that. I practiced (without much success) drawing the male body. Eventually, I graduated to collecting muscle magazines, then later gay porn and wrestling videos. The bodies of lovers always fill me with a sense of awe that not only gets me hot, but also leaves me just a little blissfully lost in the beauty of any fit male form. The classic images from my childhood, like the Soloflex ads, continue to take me back to that wonderful moment of discovery and self-discovery, when I recognized that the male body could enthrall me, entice me, and arouse me.

Domination Fascination

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As one of many gay men who find wrestling a turn on, I ask myself, why? Besides the obvious allure of scantily clad men pressing and grabbing each other’s sweaty bodies (and that would be enough), I think there’s something more about the sexually provocative nature of wrestling for many gay men. Wrestling also plays to the sexuality of power, domination and submission. Perhaps there’s a primal connection between sex and domination, but it plays a special function for gay men, I believe. As the more testosterone-fueled half of the species, men pitting their strength against one another aggressively is probably rooted in evolutionary behavior of male competition for mates. The strongest, fiercest, and dominant males in most species end up passing along their genes as a result of besting other male rivals to claim their sexual prize (typically females). To physically dominate another male is often the immediate precursor to sex. For gay men at this point in the evolutionary stream, perhaps that primal connection between physical competition and the sexual prize is simply translated for many gay men today. We get off not only on the bodies and their proximity, but also on the exchange of power, the domination and submission, and our genetic coding that ties together one man’s domination and another man’s submission to sex. Of course, this little theory may be totally wrong. But I’m certain that there’s more than just hot bodies and groping that makes wrestling a major genre for gay male porn. It certainly gets my blood pumping to see not only hot bodies battling, but one of them controlling, dominating, possessing the other. The cocky stud, the humiliated hunk, one gladiator clearly toying with another… the story itself is incredibly sexy. All the gay wrestling productions work the angle of domination and submission. Though not strictly gay, the French wrestling video company W&L also does a nice job of telling the domination story.