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WrestleFest Wrestling

August 3, 2023August 3, 2023 wrestlebard5 Comments

As I mentioned in my last post, my goals for myself at Wrestlefest Canada could be summed up this way: 1) learn more about how to wrestle, and 2) explore what I like and don’t like with an open mind. Right out of the gate, group matches (which a big gathering like Wrestlefest lends itself to) were an awesome way tackle goal #2. Groups were also an intense, fun learning experience, but they weren’t as well suited to really learning mechanics. With goal #1 in mind, I sought out some experienced veterans of meet-up wrestling for 1:1 matches. I was upfront with them about my lack of experience, counterbalanced by my vast enthusiasm for wrestling and learning. And those 1:1 (mis)matches were sensational in helping me make quality progress toward learning more about how to wrestle.

Wrestlefests are for learning (among other things).

I’ve seen the advice often for MeetFighters newbies to start by looking for guys with a lot of experience and good recommendations. At Wrestlefest Canada, I had 1:1 matches with three MF veterans that were AWESOME opportunities to learn and explore. Between the three of these guys, they have a combined total of more than 1,270 MF opponents (not a typo; that’s 1,270!!!)! They also have hundreds of recommendations from past opponents offering testimony that was helpful for me in knowing what to expect from each of them. To varying degrees, I’d interacted with all three of them ahead of time, so that by the time we met for 1:1 matches, we had pretty clear expectations and a plan for how to have fun and use our time well. All of them were generous coaches, sharing pointers, teaching holds, and being game to let a messy rookie give it a go with them. I bumped into a few super-newbies (even newer than me!) at social events at WF, including guys who had never indulged their longstanding interest in erotic wrestling up until this weekend (and I think they deserve trophies for showing up and joining in on the WF fun!). I heard a few of them say that they wished there’d been some wrestling demonstrations or formal coaching sessions at WF to help them dip their foot in the pool. Maybe future WFs might want to consider something like that, but in the meantime, if you’re ready to take the plunge for the first time, look for nearby guys with a lot of matches over at least a few years. Read their recommendations (some of the recommendations will be more detailed and transparent than others, so read several). And read their profiles to see if their interests seem to line up with yours. Some of them will be really clear that they welcome inexperienced opponents (and some explicitly don’t welcome newbies). Get the info you need and make good choices for yourself.

Scott can confirm. I already had headscissors in my repertoire before WF.

I made some AWESOME choices in opponents to learn from, if I do say so myself. My first match was with Txwresl, who has 259 credited matches and has the fifth most recommendations of any wrestler on MF. We messaged and talked on the phone several times before WF, so I felt a lot of trust and rapport by the time we were facing each other. We laughed, grunted, and sweated a whole lot. Txwresl showed me a half dozen specific holds and moves, including some counters and escapes. Things hurt, but never in a way that felt dangerous. It was a fun mix of practice and play, with some great philosophy thrown in about negotiating matches and navigating the diversity of wrestlers, bodies, skills and interests of those looking for meet-up wrestling. I enjoyed the tips and notes, and the playfully hot body contact, and his awesome, strong pecs. It was thoroughly fun, and I enjoyed going out to dinner with him afterward and sharing our respective journeys through wrestling. By the time we were both at the “upperclassmen” group meet up later in the week, it felt like I was hanging out with an old friend. And, like an old friend, he pulled me out of my shell at that group and got me on the mat for what turned out to be sensational fun!

TxWresl reminding me to control as much as possible in any one hold

My second 1:1 opponent goes by Mattz4fun, and he’s ranked 3rd for having the most past opponents on MF (currently 563, but that number keeps going up by the hour!). My session with Mattz4fun was mostly serious coaching. He walked me through some really important lessons in logistics (like, put pillows over any nearby sharp corners, if you’re wrestling on a hotel bed), and talked me through the mechanics and some anatomy and physiology of wrestling holds. It was super cerebral, honestly, which, it may come as little surprise to learn, I was totally into. I felt like I was learning chess, starting with how the pieces move, and advancing so far as to just begin to consider game strategy. Mattz4fun is wicked hot, so it says a lot that I spent a good 75% of the time zoomed in on the lessons and not his pecs and abs (10% each for those, and the remaining 5% of my attention on his ass). He shared with me that he’d talked with a few wrestlers who mentioned plans on meeting up with me in 1:1 or group matches this week. I asked him if the talk included cursing my name (me trying to make a joke). Maybe they’ll be cursing your name after you kick their butts, he said. Holy fuck, now that’s coach!!!

My last veteran 1:1 happened organically after I met SeattleFight at a group match on Friday morning (see details from my last post). SeattleFight has the 4th most past opponents on MF (454, right after Mattz4fun). This guy is handsome as hell, with a stare that stops me in my tracks and immediately turns me on. Literally, we were at a couple of different large group meet ups, and fuck, he’d just look at me and all I could do was mutter out loud, “Fuck.” I overheard MadeinCanada, who hosted the Friday morning group, refer to SeattleFight as “one of the beasts,” and, indeed, he’s fierce on the mats. I watched him scrap with seriously skilled wrestlers with boatloads of experience, and he’s got this gravitational pull that just sucks pretty much everyone into his crushing bearhug. Huge fucking arms. Mountainous pecs. Yep, if he wrestled for a company (he doesn’t) I’d be shelling out cash hand over fist to get off on watching him wrestle. But no, not at Wrestlefest Canada. Everytime I’d lose myself watching him grunt and flex and tractor beam opponents into his clutches in groups, he’d catch my eye, smile slyly, and call me over with a crook of his finger. And despite knowing he could crush me like a bug on a windshield, it’s not like I was going to say no!

SeattleFight applying this camel clutch to the Bard: “How’s your rhyming couplet now, bitch!?”

After that group match where we first met, I was back at my room, planning on resting and recuperating, when SeattleFight messaged me to tell me that we needed a 1:1. See my comments above about my inability (aka, total lack of interest in) saying no to this handsome hunk. And then after the upperclassmen group, we had yet another round, because I couldn’t get enough of him. And, holy hell, it turns out he couldn’t get enough of me! Like, fuck, I loved that discovery of mutual attraction and keen interest in scrapping again and again. Unlike my first two 1:1 opponents, I had absolutely no interest in taking notes or practicing mechanics. This was not cerebraI , and most definitely not a chess match. It was visceral and totally embodied. I just wanted to roll, squeeze, be squeezed, and experience this muscle beast as best I could. Yeah, I’d seen what he could do to wrestlers with a ton of experience and considerably more muscle than I have. If this were competitive, it would’ve been over in under 30 seconds (and that’s being generous with myself). But it wasn’t, and neither of us wanted it to be. I learned lessons from SeattleFight, but not exactly the ones I’d expected to learn. My matches with him were intense and fun, hot and sweaty, exhausting and exhilarating, and they left me feeling powerful, confident, aggressive and attractive. It’s not like I “won” our matches, but it’s also not like we were keeping score. I walked away every time feeling more like the person I want to be, and distracted less by the insecurities and uncertainties that too often hold me back (not just in wrestling).

The bruises are fading, but the memories remain vivid!

Now that I’m home again, my well-earned bruises are fading. Routine obligations are walking me through my day totally divorced from who I am as a wrestler turned on by wrestling. But I’m not the same person I was before Wrestlefest Canada. And I’m glad for that. I’m grateful for all of the outstanding, sincere, gorgeous, hot and fierce hunks I had the pleasure to meet in Toronto, including the ones I had the distinct pleasure to wrestle. I wish I could have met more guys and had the stamina to wrestle more. Hell, I wish I’d been doing this a long time ago. But no regrets. I’m grateful for all that I learned at Wrestlefest Canada, about wrestling, about navigating meet-up wrestling, and especially what I learned about myself.

WrestleFest Groups

August 2, 2023 wrestlebardLeave a comment

In my life prior to going to Wrestlefest Canada, I had watched thousands of hours of homoerotic wrestling videos (not even an exaggeration) and written more than 1,670 posts here, pouring over every detail of what turns me on about wrestling, but had really only wrestled 3 times. Well, there were a few sessions in my early teen years, wrestling a friend, trying to pull off that this is seriously competitive, all the while attempting to hide my erection. And, then yeah, there were frat house scraps in college, 80% fun and lightly competitive, 20% attempting to hide my erection. But scheduling multiple matches to happen over 4 days in Toronto felt like kicking this experiential side of wrestling for me into overdrive. I set some intentions for myself, mainly to focus on learning more about how to wrestle and exploring what I liked and didn’t like with an open mind. I know other WF participants who had different intentions, like wrestling as many matches as possible, or recording matches for WatchFighters, or wrestling particular types of matches (group, tag teams, oil, etc.). As my buddy Scooter is fond of pointing out, WF can be what you make it. I was aiming to focus more on the journey than any particular destination.

One of the first tests of “explore with an open mind” came in the form of invitations to group matches. I don’t know that I’d given a lot of thought to group matches before this past week, but I had a couple of invitations to groups by the time I arrived in Toronto. My initial thinking was that I very well might be too self-conscious for groups. Stripping down and laying bare my insecurities and inexperience to wrestle is a lot, and doing that with others watching on is that much more. But almost right off the plane, I had my first WF match, which was a group of four of us hosted by an incredibly generous, hospitable, and fucking fierce local hottie. This was my first time wrestling more than just one opponent, and it was new, overwhelming, fun, and intense. My three local hosts knew each other well, and the chemistry they shared the instant everyone was in the room together was palpable. Since “Hey, I’m new to this” is still printed on my business cards, we paired off, with two of them demonstrating some holds, and then the third letting me try them out on him. There was a lot of anticipation on the mats for letting loose, and pretty quickly we paired off and started rolling. Having two stories happening side by side on the mats was wild. Long-time voyeur that I am, I kept getting distracted watching the other pair, which frequently contributed to me getting locked down and worked over worse (better?). Just when I was settling in to this parallel play vibe, seamlessly and organically, partners traded around. And then playfully vicious double-teaming broke out. And then, finally catching on, I joined in on some sweet triple teaming (these guys were way, way tough enough to handle it). And by the end, I was the one on the receiving end of a triple team by these three sweaty, sexy, fierce studs. It was all super collaborative and negotiated, and, at the same time, unexpected. Afterward, I told them that I felt like Dorothy in Oz, having learned valuable lessons from each of them. I left it up to them to decide who was the Scarecrow (wrestle smart, Bard!), the Tin Woodsman (wrestle with passion, Bard!), and the Cowardly Lion (wrestle fucking fierce, Bard!). Additional lessons I learned from this awesome threesome included BRING WATER (fuck, I sweat a lot). And bring towels. Lots of towels came in handy by the end of this match. Really, really handy.

Not long after I arrived, I scored an invitation to another group a couple of days later, thanks to connections through my buddy Scooter and the Tin Woodsman from that first group. Whatever self-consciousness I felt from a group of 4, I was now facing 9! The extremely generous local host, MadeinCanada, welcomed us to an incredible set up with tons of mat-covered floor space. MadeinCanada also offered a systematic way for everyone to pair off and take turns rolling with different opponents over the course of a few hours. Well, that plan lasted about 2 minutes. Pretty spontaneously, everyone was on the mats going at it in groups of two, three, or four (or occasionally more). There were wrestlers of different sizes (I wasn’t the smallest!) and levels of experience (I wasn’t the rookiest!), which created a lot of interesting dynamics. One particularly fun moment included me locking a crotch ripper onto my cousin, Scooter, so that my fellow lightweight rookie, David DeLeon, could climb on top and mess with him. Karma came back to bite me in the butt when I was double-teamed not long afterward, but it was all good, ferocious, sweaty, safe fun. As irrepressibly interactive as it was with all of us on the mats, I had a hard time resisting the urge to sit back and watch the wrestlers bigger and more skilled than I am do their thing. I was so turned on watching fiercely skilled Sunny DeLeon (WTF? I was on the mats with Sunny DeLeon!) and a fucking hot hunk who goes by the handle SeattleFight (who has more than 450 confirmed opponents on MF, I later discovered), tear into each other. SeattleFight caught me watching (more than once), and waved me over to take my turn. Somewhere in the middle of it all, I found myself feeling more confident, less inhibited, and just riding the wave of being locked together with another wrestler (or 8).

My third group meet-up experience had been planned ahead of time. This group was referred to by some as the “Veterans.” Being a rookie, I couldn’t bring myself to say that I was part of a group of veterans, so I called it the “Upperclassmen” (though that name didn’t stick with anyone else). In practice, it was a select group of finely aged wrestling hunks (I think I was the youngest allowed in the door). Despite having such amazing group experiences already, I still walked in not sure if I’d actually wrestle, or just get to know guys on the sidelines. One of the awesome 1:1 opponents I’d had earlier in the week (Txwresl, tons of experience and incredibly generous coach) was there, and he talked me into stripping down to my compression shorts (because I DID come prepared), and getting some practice in. This setting probably should have felt more conspicuous, because mat space was limited, and for any one or two pairs wrestling, there were that many or more on the sidelines chatting and watching. But maybe my confidence was growing, or, with experience, my inhibitions were just lowering, because it was the most fun group experience yet. SeattleFight was there again, and, holy hell, all he had to do was lock eyes with me and crook his index finger to call me over, and I was irresistibly drawn back on the mat, getting bearhugged relentlessly, trying to employ just a few tricks I’d been picking up from earlier in the week.

My last group experience (three of us) was the hottest and most spontaneous yet, bringing together at the last minute a sensationally hot hunk I’ve been getting to know online for several months and someone I’d grappled with already. I don’t know if it’s because all of us had some prior personal connection, or if it’s because it happened so spontaneously (from possible idea to reality in about 15 minutes), or if I was just riding this learning curve right up and over the top, but this was the most wildly intense group of all. That element that I mentioned in my last post about WF, of managing to get out of my head and just be present, sort of fell into place in this final three-way match.

I had to unlearn some things in order to really learn some things at Wrestlefest. Like, I needed to unlearn my preconceived anxiousness about the idea of group matches. I needed to unlearn my default of watching, and instead, lean into wrestling. In the spirit of learning more about how to wrestle and exploring what I liked and didn’t like with an open mind, I had an amazing set of experiences with about two dozen awesome wrestlers that I met in super hot batches. Group matches, even more than 1:1 matches, take a lot trust and chemistry, clear expectations and generous, collaborative, creative wrestlers. And it’s worth the extra choreography and planning!

And that doesn’t even begin to really discuss my one-on-one wrestling experiences at Wrestlefest Canada… (to be continued…)

WrestleFest Community

July 31, 2023August 2, 2023 wrestlebard7 Comments

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.

As Seen On TV…. at the Black Eagle last Friday!!!

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.

Stunningly hot and fashionable Ben Monaco at the Black Eagle WF mixer

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.

Sexy, charismatic, and wicked clever Ollie Watts partook of WF Canada, too!

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!

The cover models for Wonderfully Made might look suspiciously familiar to some in the wrestling community

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...)

WrestleFest Canada

July 25, 2023July 25, 2023 wrestlebard8 Comments

I’m at the airport as I type this, waiting for my flight to Toronto. I’m a little nervous. Traveling always makes me a little nervous, but this time, I’m also nervous because I’ll be participating in WrestleFest Canada, my first WrestleFest experience. Getting together with dozens of wrestlers (current count at 80 confirmed) is both super intimidating and super exciting at the same time.

I grew up feeling way isolated. First, I was isolated as a gay kid in a small, working class town with absolutely no representation in sight. My only points of reference for far too long were offensive jokes in which “fags” was the punchline. I remember coming across references to same-sex sex in science fiction (big, big, big sci-fi geek here), and combing through books to learn more. All the while, wondering to myself if I was the only person in the world who experienced attraction the way I did. I’d linger at the magazine rack in the grocery store to ogle the muscle hunks on the cover of fitness mags, desperately turned on, but under the (certainly mistaken) impression that the content there wasn’t intended for a male lustful gaze like mine. I carried this inner world around with me, growing to understand myself more and more as someone aroused by men, and under the impression that was extremely rare, perhaps to the point of unheard of. Like, am I the only one?

Once I started owning (internally for the most part, at first) that I’m a guy who gets turned on by guys, I then grappled (pun intended) with what it means to be a gay guy who really gets off on wrestling. I remember my first boyfriend making a snarky comment about weirdos who get off on watching guys wrestle. Like, it was something laughably freakish to him that someone’s primary hot spot is wrestling, significantly more so than just sucking and fucking. I sort of melted inside a little, thinking, fuck, there must be something really off about me… though I was intrigued that my boyfriend had heard of other guys with a wrestling kink. But I figured that maybe I was one in a million, at best. I pictured myself going through life knowing there might be a handful of others out there, but being pretty likely to remain in my own head, watching pro wrestling, providing the erotic subtext with my imagination, trying to figure out how to navigate how “gay” I am as opposed to how much into wrestling. I dated guys and never told them about wrestling, even though it was often imagined scenarios of wrestling that fueled my erections. It felt really isolating to be filtering the outside world and its rules of engagement (in and outside of gay culture) through my experience of myself and my orientation toward wrestling.

Finding gay wrestling companies online was a MAJOR epiphany for me. I mean, fuck, I’d discovered my supplier of masturbation content that didn’t require me to imagine an erotic subtext to hot guys wrestling. But more than that was the realization that there’s a market for homoerotic wrestling. I’m a target demographic, not an unheard of anomaly. This is a going concern, and I’m on a mailing list, meaning, holy shit, there’s A LIST!

I consumed as much BGE, BG, Can-Am, On Top, and other wrestling as my income would permit for many years. I poured over the mailers like a quarterly version of the Sears Christmas catalog, fantasizing about just how hot these matches might be. It was a further epiphany to realize that I DIDN’T get turned on by all of the content, but there was still all that diversity of content, meaning… fuck, there are different tastes represented on that mailing list. We don’t all like precisely the same things, even if we’re all clearly turned on by erotic wrestling in general. I started mentally cataloging what my tastes were, what kind of wrestlers and pairings turned me on, what gear and context and type of matches pushed my buttons. About 15 years ago, I started blogging, not even really sure what I was planning on blogging about, but wanting to put on the outside all of that internal world I’d been so immersed in on the inside for so long (not sure if that makes sense, but hopefully you get what I mean). I blogged about hot guys who turn me on and wrestling, which, let’s be honest, meant hot guys I wished wrestled, and all things wrestling.

I don’t know if you’ve picked this up about me, but I tend to color in the lines. I tried for a while to blog about homoerotic wrestling videos without using any copyrighted images from producers, so as not to piss anyone off and violate anyone’s rights to their creative work. But, FUCK, I wanted to show pictures to illustrate what I was finding so hot about matches, because getting off on wrestling is so fucking visual for me. I was SO nervous when I reached out to info@bgeast.com, hat in hand, asking if I could have permission to occasionally post images of the matches I was blogging about. When Kid Leopard himself wrote back to me, saying that he’d been reading my blog, liked my writing, and gave me permission to use their copyrighted images (with specific parameters explained… this is KL, after all), I would just sit and stare at that email over and over again for days. It was my first direct, 1:1, personal contact with someone who not only did I get off on watching wrestle, but I was 99.9% convinced that he, too, found wrestling a core turn on. I’ve reached out to all of the companies I’ve posted images for over the years for matches I review, and everyone has given a green light (some more generously than others), but it was that email-to-email point of contact with KL that really opened up my world.

And then, holy shit, people started reading the blog. I mean, I checked the stat counter from the start, wondering if I was pissing into the wind, and was truly amazed when this blog would get over 100 views in a given day. But when readers began commenting, it was just fucking wild. It was wild enough to have readers just sharing their opinions, bitching about my taste in men, agreeing with me about a particular hold or wrestler, etc. But when comments started showing up from people saying things like, “I never knew someone else experienced what I experience,” that my blog was that glimpse of person-to-person connection for someone else who’d wondered, once upon a time, if they were the only person in the world who got off so particularly to wrestling… fuck, that was wild. I was nervous about sharing an email address publicly, the first time I offered it, and I instantly started getting email messages from even more guys who wanted to compare notes, reflect on our respective kink(s), etc., even if they didn’t want to air it publicly in the comments section on the blog. I was recently trying to clean out my email archives, and found (and kept) hundreds of those messages that I’ve received over the years. Even the haters, even those guys who’ve been so offensive in insulting particular wrestlers or match styles or my tastes that I’ve not allowed their comments to get posted, even those guys sort of blow my mind, because they’re just as passionate as I am about the erotic power of wrestling (even more so… some of you guys are fucking over the top, even for me).

I’ve written about this relatively recently, so I won’t go into too much detail, but when writers started reaching out to collaborate on homoerotic wrestling fiction, that was yet another level of shared passion for homoerotic wrestling. It’s INTENSE going line by line with someone in describing a wrestling scene that turns me on, turns them on, turns us on, sometimes not even for the same reasons. I’ve watched homoerotic wrestling with a few guys, which is similarly intense, but actually writing it, co-creating and building a shared narrative vision… fuck, there’s sort of no hiding there. We’re naming something that moves us deeply, literally putting into words what our bodies respond to instinctively. My current writing partnership with AR is, by far, the most intense and rewarding experience in that vein, for all those reasons, but especially because we’ve explored our kinky edges that we haven’t really named for anyone else before (even me, 1,675 posts into this blog!). I’m not alone, not even close.

If you’ve followed this blog, you know that it was just a few months ago that I took this to another level and tried meet-up wrestling myself. Credit where due, Drake Marcos was the first hottie to drag my ass into a wrestling match and let me start exploring who I am not just as a a voyeur or writer, but as a wrestler. There was about 8 years between my super hot match with Drake and my venturing into meet-up wrestling again just this year. My last couple of posts document how that journey is going (short story: it’s going FUCKING UNBELIEVABLE!!!). Scott texted me a few days ago, letting me know that he was getting together with a whole cadre of wrestlers I’ve lusted over on the pages of this blog, namely Brad Rochelle, Jonny Firestorm, Shane McCall, and him. I think that Scott may even be angling for a second run at taking me on, after he got a bit more than he may have bargained for when he faced his #1 fan the first time (anytime, tough guy!).

Brad Rochelle and Jonny Firestorm enjoy a reunion with Scott Williams

And now, I’m going to my first WrestleFest. Getting ready for it has opened me up to just how NOT alone I am still more. The organizers use both MeetFighters and a devoted Discord server to help participants connect with one another and set up matches. Through my friend Scooter, who I technically met online only 6 months ago, but somehow feel like I’ve known for years (true story, we’re pretty sure we were probably on the same dance floor at a gay club 28 years ago or so), I was invited onto another Discord server of several dozens of great guys all exploring their wrestling fetishes and comparing notes with one another. I’m on those servers all the time, because it’s not just a bunch of isolated guys not wanting to be isolated any longer… it’s a community. Scooter is fond of calling us all brothers, because there’s a camaraderie and mutual support about all sorts of things that feel real… like health and fitness, negotiating wrestling meet-ups safely and sanely, lusting after random guys we encounter online and in the course of our lives. And all things wrestling. We don’t all have the same politics or preferences. We’re spread across geography, and diverse in age, race, and even sexual orientation (I’m fascinated by connecting with bisexual guys around all this!). But it’s community, in the exciting, reassuring, difficult way that it is to be part of community.

But holy hell, WrestleFest is next level for me, my friends. At this moment, I have a total of 3 matches under my belt in my lifetime (starting with Drake), and I am scheduled to more than double that in the coming few days. I’m especially excited for opportunities to meet and talk with guys off the mats, like at the bar social on Friday, and a couple of lunches I have scheduled just to talk with really interesting, cool guys who, like me, get off on wrestling.

I won’t post about every detail of this week, because I don’t want everyone I meet and/or wrestle to be worried what I’ll have to say about it on the pages of this blog. Though… I may ask if guys are okay with me sharing some details that I expect to be hard for me NOT to share. I’ll only share details with permission of all parties involved… yeah, let’s put it that way. I honestly don’t necessarily know what to expect, or how I’ll feel, or what I’ll enjoy or not enjoy. But I’m deeply excited to be part of a community, a brotherhood of sorts, of guys from around the world who probably think differently than I do about all sorts of things, but, in their midst, I won’t be alone in enjoying my passion for homoerotic wrestling.

Wish me luck!

Patriotism

July 6, 2023July 7, 2023 wrestlebard3 Comments

I’m not the most patriotic person. It’s not that I’m anti-patriotic, exactly. I appreciate my American citizenship, and I’m happy enough to have been born here. I just don’t really muster a “love it or leave it” kind of passion for the U.S. Like, for some really cool contributions the country has made to the world, it also has at least it’s share of bad shit that’s made a whole lot of people (including a lot its own citizens) really suffer unnecessarily. A wise friend told me recently that’s probably the case for every country, which sort of rings true.

My relationship to the Fourth of July holiday is similar. I like a day off and potato salad, but I really resent my neighbors insisting on setting off illegal fireworks that put my dog on edge for days. When I see a home flying an American flag, I don’t assume that the people who live there are the worst stereotype of insular, egotistical, homophobic, racist, hyper-nationalists… but I wonder. So, me finally getting around to post my Fourth of July post on Juy 6 somehow seems apt.

I do get a kick out of the occasionally clever twist on American patriotism that sometimes shows up when it comes to homoerotic wrestling. Hunks who don stars and stripes gear (which is actually frowned upon by serious patriots, right?) typically show up as the handsome, earnest babyface heroes who get their asses handed to them by nefarious heels. For some reason, that trope tickles me. It’s definitely not because I’m unpatriotic. But I just recognize how annoying over the top American patriotism can be, and there’s something satisfying about seeing cocky boys in red, white, and blue get the manifest destiny beat right out of them.

So, sure, go USA (!).

Dream Come True – Part 2

July 1, 2023July 5, 2023 wrestlebard5 Comments

As I was saying, a whole lot of threads somehow came together just a few days ago, leaving me standing in front of the man of my dreams, BG East hunk Scott Williams. Every morning since, I wake up and immediately ask myself, “Did that really happen?!” Then I pull up my texts with Scott and the pics and videos from our meet up, and breathe a sigh of relief. Fuck, yes, that really happened.

Scott is just 100% Scott. By that, I mean he’s as scorching hot as always, and he’s all snarl and smirk and trash talk, just like he is in his BG East videos. Like, literally, he is precisely as devastatingly hot as he was when he was wrestling Brad Rochelle in Ultra Fight Two, which was the first thing I ever saw him in. Someone has since asked me if I found his portrait in the attic that keeps him from aging. It’s not quite like that, but close. He’s distractingly handsome. He’s also in incredible shape. I was staring, a little slack jawed, at his sculpted pecs, when I asked him if he has to work at staying in such incredible shape. For just a moment, he dropped his snarky swagger and answered, “Oh, yeah.” And my respect for his mouthwatering fitness somehow grew even bigger, knowing that his physique is a labor of love.

Scott’s first words to me were, “I’m impressed, Bard. You actually showed up.” I get where that comes from, of course, but I also was thinking, fuck if I’d be anywhere else in the world, right now! I’ve got precious little direct experience wrestling, mind you. Of course, I’ve been obsessed with homoerotic wrestling my entire adult life (and more than a bit of my pre-adult life, honestly). But I was seriously in suspense about how this would go, facing down a fierce hunk with such an extensive, well-documented wrestling resume. So, just to break the ice and keep it real, I called attention to that fact. As we were both stripping down to briefs, I just breathed in deeply and named it, honestly admitting that this was a dream come true, and I was already a winner for getting to experience it. “You’re bigger than I am, and you have a boatload more wrestling experience than I do, obviously,” I said. He shrugged, like the it was no big deal. “Which makes me think,” I went on, “that the pressure’s really entirely on you. Like, how fucking humiliating would it be for Scott Williams to submit to a faceless blogger with almost no experience?”

Apparently, my effort to break the ice and express empathy for Scott didn’t land well. “Fuck you, Bard,” he snarled back with just a little heat. “You’re going to see a lot of this,” he flipped me a middle finger salute. “And this, too,” he emphasized, flashing both middle fingers at me, as I belatedly remembered to hit record on my phone. Still, trying to express my empathy for the pressure that must be weighing on him, I asked him again, “When they’re, like, suddenly collapsing, and you’re tapping out, how embarrassing would that be? Damn!”

“You know, Bard,” Scott snarled and snapped, taking a step back and trying to give me a little more perspective. “You made a big mistake, okay? Going right to the top, instead of working your way up. You’re a nice enough guy, but it’s my job to beat you boys down and keep you in your place.” He suggested I should have aimed lower, maybe call out a less threatening BG East wrestler to tackle first. He suggested maybe Jonny Firestorm might have been an easier opponent to start with, for example, which I thought was pretty ballsy of Scott, really. I can’t remember for sure, but I think he told me that he’d prefer I not repeat that directly to Jonny. So, let’s all just keep that between us, okay? No one tell Jonny that Scott thinks of him as less of a challenge, right?

Scott seeing what all those taunts about my legs get him.

I was honestly having a bit of an out of body experience when he suddenly grabbed hold of me and threw me down. It’s hard to focus on defense, offense, or much of anything else, when all I can think is fuck, Scott Williams just climbed on top of me!!! Somewhere, though, instincts that I wasn’t sure that I had kicked in. There I was, flat on my back, with Scott crawling on top of me about to dazzle me with some devastating submission hold. But sort of like time slowing down, I noticed his right leg was in reach of my left arm, and his neck was hovering just over my right arm. And suddenly, I had Scott locked up in a cradle, with his left arm neutralized between my legs. I asked him, “Holy fuck, what just happened there, Scott?” Like, sincerely, it took me by surprise, as the man of my dreams grunted and pried at my arms, futilely attempting to break out of the cradle. He jerked on his left arm, trying to free it from the steel trap of my legs locked around it, and got absolutely no love at all for his efforts. I asked him, “Holy fuck, Scott, did you just get buttoned up already by a lowly blogger?!” He rumbled out a few seconds of profanity and threats, but the direct answer to my question came when he tapped out. Holy. Fuck!

The infamous Scott Williams headscissors

If you’ve ever watched him wrestle, or if you’ve read anything I’ve ever written about him (including part 1), it will come as no surprise when I say that our wrestling match centered extensively on scissor holds. Scott has super long, strong (distractingly sexy) legs, and despite my by best efforts to avoid them, my head and neck kept getting trapped between them from multiple different angles. I remember one point at which he was asking me a question while crushing my skull in face-to-crotch scissors, and I could literally not hear a thing over the roaring buzz of pain in my ears. His crotch shoved in my face was also a huge (HUGE) distraction.

Scott’s native tongue is flipping the bird.

This newbie is a pretty quick study, if I do say so myself, though. Knowing that Scott really only respects blindingly hard headscissors, I made sure to spring that trap repeatedly. I’d prepped by studying hours (and hours and weeks and months) of homoerotic wrestling matches, and I particularly took to a figure-4 choke, reaching back and grabbing my ankle to lock it on like a vise. Scott flew his middle finger salutes a lot, staring up at me while his head turned purple.

Scott warned me ahead of time that I did not want find myself in his camel clutch. I’ve seen that camel clutch in his BG East matches, and, yeah, I get it. And yet, somehow, just when I was recovering from one of his headscissors variations, I lost track of where he was, and damn it all if I didn’t end up flat on my stomach with Scott on my back. I could see what was heading my way, and even still, I admit to strong ambivalence about the situation, because… fuck, Scott Williams was on my back. But he was absolutely merciless, as he yanked my arms up over his knees and wrapped his fingers around my chin, prying my neck way back. He helpfully narrated the entire thing for me, explaining to me why it hurt, and then transitioning from a chin lock to a choke, then to grabbing me by my overbite, to point out how each variation hurt a little different. Fuck it was devastating, and I couldn’t exactly argue with him when he explained that once locked in, there was no escape.

I learned a lot about myself when I wrestled Scott. For example, I learned that, while watching countless hours of homoerotic wrestling does not a wrestler make (no surprise), there were some transferable bits of knowledge and insight. Like, having watched Scott crank up the pressure on his scissors by leaning back on his hands and thrusting his hips, it turns out I could put that observation to good use. I also learned that I’m too stubborn for my own good. I should have given up sooner than I did on a couple of occasions, where the only purpose served in refusing was to sap my strength that much more. Definitely, stubbornness is the main component there, and something I want to reflect on further (live to fight another day, and all); however, I also credit my desire to savor every fucking moment of this dream match with everything I’ve got. I also learned about myself that, while there’s not a direct equivalence, there’s a clear through-line to being turned on by watching a wrestling hunk getting dominated on video to being turned on by watching a wrestling hunk getting dominated by my own enthusiastic efforts.

Whatever you do, DON’T pat him on the head

I learned a lot about Scott, too. For example, I learned that Scott hates it (fucking HATES it), when he’s trying to remember to flip the bird, trapped hopelessly in headscissors, and his opponent rubs his head condescendingly. “You really hate that, when I’m rubbing your head like that,” I asked him, when he kept swatting my hand away furiously. The middle fingers were his only reply. I also learned it absolutely infuriates him when an opponent, having acknowledged how much he hates getting his head rubbed when he’s helplessly trapped, keeps rubbing his head anyway. Oh, fuck, he hates that! I learned that it pisses him off when he’s getting owned, and his opponent sits back with a smirk and watches his face suffering. I mean, fuck he’s gorgeous and it’s not like I’m not going to soak in the sight of his sweet, sweet struggles, but, yeah, it irritates him. And, happily, I learned that Scott is genuinely a fierce, devoted, supremely accomplished fan and aficionado of homoerotic wrestling. He’s a master of his craft, even if a long-time fan is able to channel all of his enthusiasm into wringing out a little more than a handful of frustrated, whimpering submissions out of him. In a couple of breaks we took, I learned that Scott genuinely loves the homoerotic wrestling world, keeps up with new releases and hot new rookies, checks in with former opponents, and has a passion for the exact same things about wrestling that I have a passion for. At one point as we were chatting about current wrestlers floating both of our boats, it was just so familiar. I thought, fuck, it’s like we chat about this stuff all the time. And then it occurred to me that in our replies back and forth in the comments of this blog, we have been! Those glimpses of Scott in text and his insights and perspectives genuinely belong to a fan of homoerotic wrestling, not just a star.

Scott rethinking his decision to agree to wrestle his #1 fan

I honestly lost count of submissions, so I can’t tell you who had more. I think it was pretty damn close to even, though, and I’m not just saying that because Scott isn’t here to fact check me as I write this post. I do know who earned the final submission of the match, with a smirking, head rubbing, figure-4 choke, but I’ll just leave it at that. Honestly, I’ve got so many fucking words to say about meeting and wrestling Scott, that I’ve been tying myself up in knots trying to figure out how to pare it all down from the multi-volume tome in my head to a couple of modest blog posts. But another thing I learned about myself, is that even if I forget to pause and take pictures, if I forget to keep track of submissions, if I’m clearly a novice squaring off against a hardbodied hunk bigger and stronger than I am, with oceans more experience than I’ll ever be able to catch up with, this really fucking happened, and those memories are mine to treasure.

Scott knows how to hit reply and comment on this blog, so I’ll leave it up to him to fact check anything that I may have misremembered or misrepresented. This whole thing keeps percolating in my mind, as I relive and savor meeting and wrestling the man of my dreams, so it’s possible there might be a part 3 someday down the road when I find I have more I need to say about. In the mean time, that really fucking happened. I met and wrestled Scott fucking Williams, the man of my dreams. Now, I’m hitting gym, because it’s leg day, and if there’s ever a chance this might happen again, I’m going be fucking ready for it.

Dream Come True – Part 1

June 30, 2023 wrestlebard4 Comments

You know how they say that you should never meet your heroes? Well, whoever it is who says that, fuck them. Because I met mine, and it was spectacular. Meeting Scott Williams has been on my bucket list just about as long as I’ve been watching homoerotic wrestling videos. In order not to bury the lead, I’ll just say here that I can now check that off my list. I’ve been processing this for days now, thinking about what to say about it. I’ve got just SO fucking much running through my head, so this will NOT fit into one blog post. You’ll have to cope with the suspense, or check back in tomorrow to read this and part 2 back-to-back.

Scott Williams – Promotional Image for BG East’s Ultra Fight 2

I can’t be sure, but I believe that the first time I referred to Scott Williams (in print, anyway) as “the man of my dreams” was when I interviewed Shane McCall about 9 years ago. I’d been thinking it, though, from the moment I first caught sight of him in promotional material for Ultra Fight Two, probably at least 10 years prior to that, and then I studiously collected everything I could get my hands on with Scott in it. His body, his face, his attitude, everything about him just rubs me the right way. It’s borderline criminal that his entire BG East catalog contains only 4 matches (not counting that Spartans wrestling club release with Scott and Shane as babies, that I wish I could put my hands on again). I regularly run into wrestling fans similarly fixated on Scott’s hotness from just those 4 matches. When that happens, I promptly remind them that Scott deserves all the accolades, but I’m the undisputed president of his fan club. Don’t even try to test me on that, boys. I will beat you down mercilessly. Just sayin’.

Shane McCall (left) and Scott Williams backstage at BG East’s Wrestling with Pride 1

I’m not certain of when Scott first started commenting here on the blog, but I do know that I named it as my favorite blogging moment of 2015 when Scott sent me well-wishes in a comment to a post that year. In response to my lustful musings about whether he still wrestles, Scott assured me that he’s “still keeping in shape and wrestling privately here in Boston and when I travel…always will love it and will always make you proud on the mats or in the ring!” I melted when I read it. And then did again and again, when Scott continued to chime in over the last several years with his perspective on my reviews, sharing his opinions about new wrestlers, and reflecting on the homoerotic wrestling industry in general.

Scott with Shane McCall (center) and Brad Rochelle (right) at Wrestling with Pride 1

My longstanding simmering crush on Scott took an unexpectedly hot turn in 2017. There’s a slightly complex drama that I’ve documented elsewhere that led up to me receiving what might be the hottest surprise gift I never expected, namely a video of Ty Alexander working over Scott in private in a brutally merciless camel clutch, using the man of my dreams to challenge me to face Ty in a wrestling match. In the video, Ty just calmly trash talks me, as Scott whimpers and wails, submitting over and over as the Trophy Boy ignores him. The idea of Scott suffering because Ty knows how infatuated I am with him… fuck, that was fucking hot (sorry Scott/not sorry)!

A still from Ty’s torture of Scott, using the man-of-my-dreams to send me a message

I shamelessly appealed directly to Scott in May of 2020, penning a blog post addressed specifically to him, in which I asked him to weigh in on the hottest headscissors in the business, other than his. Honestly, we all had a lot going on around May of 2020, right? Well, Scott didn’t just reply, he broke down some of the science and aesthetics of punishing headscissors in just such a way that I immediately made a public commitment to never skip leg day again (which, no joke, I’ve pretty much kept!). In a follow up post, I concluded, “…if there’s ever a chance that someday I can slide Scott’s head between my quads, I’m determined to be ready to pack on enough pounds per square inch to make the man of my dreams gasp out at least 10 h’s.” In literature, we refer to that as foreshadowing.

Scott demonstrating his punishing headscissors in BG East’s Matmen 15.

Fast forward to my New Year’s Eve post just 6 months ago, when suddenly things heated up super fast. Having long teased me in his comments about the possibility of the two of us squaring off, suddenly Scott declared that 2023 was the year it would happen. Light trash talk ensued, in which I walked the fine line of reiterating how fucking hot I think Scott is, while at the same time speculating about the possibility of adding some of his tears to my treasured homoerotic wrestling souvenirs when he’s tapping out in my headscissors. Yeah, yeah, I know. Big talk from a very inexperienced wrestling fan. But, fuck it all, I love it when a plan comes together, because… holy shit, I’m writing this because it actually happened… I got to wrestle Scott the-man-of-my-dreams Williams!

And it was perfection. Not to totally blow his cover, because fans know how much Scott likes to posture and growl and taunt like a tough guy, but he was incredibly considerate as we figured out schedules. Sure, sure, he repeatedly dropped in taunts implying that any scheduling conflicts on my part were just fear-based excuses. And, yeah, he relentlessly predicted that he’d handle me and my quads without breaking a sweat. But seriously, Scott fans back me up here: that’s just par for the course, right? In the meantime, I’ve been working out like a man possessed for the past 6 months in the hopes that this whole thing would actually go down. And, holy shit, just a few days ago… it did.

Not my face, but 100% my expression standing next to Scott.

In case you’re new to the blog or you don’t read the comments, you’re now pretty well caught up with how I found myself standing face-to-face with Scott Williams. Well, face-to-gorgeously-hairy-pecs, considering Scott is significantly taller than I am. Honestly, I’d have donated a kidney just for an autograph, but no, all of that trash talk back and forth sent this careening in the only direction that it possibly could go. I was standing in nothing but briefs and a shit-eating grin in front of the wrestler who makes my heart skip a beat unlike any other.

So that’s part 1 of my story of meeting the man of my dreams. I’ll persist in combing through the jumble of excitement and reflections on the experience of meeting and wrestling him, and continue the narrative tomorrow. Suffice it to say, for now, I keep pausing in the middle of doing other stuff and ask myself, “Holy shit, did that really happen!?” Happily for me, I have photographic evidence that it did, and happily for you, Scott has given me unrestricted permission to share the pics and talk about the whole thing here. Unhappily for me, it just occurred to me that I forgot to actually get an autograph (fuckfuckfuck). But what I got is a thousand times better…

Je Ne Sais Quoi

June 29, 2023 wrestlebard3 Comments

BG East just dropped Catalog 169, and it’s full of exciting new matches and several new faces joining long-time favorites of mine. I immediately took a shine to the newbie babyface, so proudly from Canada, Mickey Knoxx, debuting in Jobberpaloozer 22.

This will sound like bullshit, but I’m going say it, and I absolutely mean it. The first thing about Mickey that entrances me are his eyes. They’re dazzlingly pretty, like impossibly so. Some joker who wrote the match description for the website calls them “piercingly ice blue,” but I’m not even sure if that’s right. They’re fluorescent gray somehow, but I don’t think that’s a physical possibility. Does he have white irises!? Is that anatomically possible? Fuck. I can’t stop staring at his eyes. And, fuck, yes, I’m the joker that wrote that match description, so I’ve been mulling this question over for a while now.

Okay, to say that I can’t stop staring at his eyes is, actually, bullshit. I definitely start with being riveted by his eyes, but, yeah, pretty quickly I’m staring at his ass. It’s a really, really beautiful ass. I’m not the only one who thinks so. In stars and stripes trunks, representing the classic American lack of even the barest wisp of cultural humility, even uber-patriotic Chase Addams confesses “You’ve got an ass that wants to make me sing ‘O Ca-na-da!” He drives home the point by spanking Mickey’s cheeks with each syllable, while our neighbor from the north is strung up helplessly in the ropes. Fuck, I get that, Chase. That is a spankable ass!

To start this match, Mickey is just exploring the place he’s long longed to be, BG East. Chase is already in the ring, nursing a little bitterness from being stood up for an earlier scheduled match. It all starts out remarkably cordial; so much so, that I start to wonder if these two are going to wrestle or just walk off arm in arm to grab a beer together. The first spark of heat is struck when Mickey, unsolicited, offers his opinion that he brings a certain “je ne sais quoi” factor to contribute to the BG East bench. “Someone’s got beginner’s ego,” Chase chides him, seemingly bristling at the French language. “Calm down there, Mr. Canada.”

The spark erupts into a full-blown wildfire (BTW, sending my best to all of you Canadian firefighters), around the time that Chase declares that the only worthwhile Canadian contribution to the arts is Celine Dion. Mickey asks, incredulously, “Celine Dion?! I hate her.” Somewhat hilariously, Chase is visibly offended, in defense of Celine. “She’s a national treasure,” he insists. Mickey snorts derisively and snarks back, “More like national trash.”

A legitimately hot shoving match sets off Chase, who unleashes 25 minutes of what Chase does best. Always innovating new ways to crush, cripple, and humiliate an opponent, woe betide the unlucky international visitor who finds his hot ass in Chase’s sights. Mickey munches on a lush, long dragon sleeper, with his face buried in Chase’s armpit, that shows off the newbie to perfection while demonstrating the veteran’s total command of his opponent’s body. Chase is fucking cruel when he gets on a roll, and he steamrolls right over hot bodied Mickey. Knees to the gut (and lower) repeatedly drop Mickey to all fours, only to be dragged back up by his ears a second later, to do it all over again. Mickey spends a boatload of time on his knees, staring at Chase’s crotch, struggling to catch his breath, teetering, dizzy on the brink of collapsing to the mat in a heap, and reconsidering a whole lot of life choices that led up to this relentless, soul crushing rookie wrecking.

Everything is classic Chase, from the expansive use of every corner of the ring, every rope, every turnbuckle to heap on piles of crushing punishment, to the speed-up/slow-down whiplash pacing of his blinding speed interspersed with long, lingering, luxuriously held holds. And Mickey sells like he’s been doing this for years. He rides that edge of helpless whimpers and blinding panic in a way that grabs me hard. There’s this almost betrayed tinge to his grunts and groans, as if he’s bitterly thinking “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” as his dreams of taking BG East by storm come crashing spectacularly down around him. Like every babyface hero, his demolition is a brutal object lesson, disabusing him of the notion of justice. Ignore the brochures, Mickey. The U.S. is not the meritocracy we like to pretend it is. You didn’t deserve any of the insane punishment Chase doled out to you, and yet, that’s exactly what you got. Fuck clean breaks and fair play and Canadian nice.

Leaping off the top turnbuckle with Mickey in a headlock, Chase plants that handsome face into the mat in a decisive bull dog that finally puts the rookie out of his misery… at least until he wakes up and realizes he’s still stuck on the wrong side of the Peach Arch. And I totally agree with Chase’s (albeit sarcastic) assessment of the newbie, as he’s covering the sleeping canuck with an American-themed pride flag. “I think you’re going to do great at BG, kid!”

“You look great”

June 12, 2023 wrestlebardLeave a comment

I often wonder how much organization is churning away behind the scenes at BG East. I enjoyed getting to be on site during one of the weekend shoots several years ago, as a dozen or so hot wrestlers all descended on the BG East headquarters to squeeze in as much sizzlingly sexy wrestling as possible over a few days. Hot guys were everywhere I turned. There was wrestling happening somewhere all the time, often more than one match being recorded at the same time in different venues. And when they didn’t have the cameras pointed at them, there were idle wrestlers everywhere, in the kitchen, down on the dock, watching television, napping in the sunroom. It was so fucking busy, with so much eye candy everywhere, I quickly suffered from whiplash and a raging sugar high.

So it wouldn’t exactly surprise me if the oft-used premise for a match, that two wrestlers showed up to warm up and practice in a temporarily unclaimed spot in the compound, actually happens. A lot. That’s the premise for Ring Rookies 6, when Forrest Taylor walked into the ring room, expecting to find it empty, but instead found Jack Norwood already warming up in the ring. It was Forrest’s second release from BG East, and his first time stepping foot into the ring. It was Jack’s debut, and as of this posting, his only released match. So this was, indeed, a classic ring rookies set-up.

“Excuse me! Who are you? I reserved the ring for this time,” Forrest bitches immediately. “I got here first,” Jack snaps coldly with a sneer. I like the look of Jack. He has that combination of a pristine, pretty face and a hot, meaty body that works wonders for me. He also possesses chill confidence, to the point of being downright cold. He suggests that they can settle who gets to stay in the ring room by wrestling for it. With a whopping one match already under his belt, Forrest is way cocky and quick to accept the challenge. And in the opening flurry of action, fuck, Forrest looks like he was born in a wrestling ring! He breaks a collar and elbow lockup with a sharp knee to Jack’s gut, before scooping the newbie up in a full nelson. The red-headed lumberjack swings him around in the full nelson, letting centrifugal force add brutal pressure to his hands cranking on the back of Jack’s neck. He flings the newbie into a corner and punches the living fuck out of Jack’s tightly muscle, flat abdomen. “I told you to leave when you had the chance,” Forrest snarls with an evil grin.

Regular readers know I always enjoy a hotly contested, competitive match, and that’s what Jack and Forrest deliver. They both possess a curious quality of cocky confidence bordering on ring savvy, considering they’ve reportedly not battled it out in the ring before. But they both obviously have wrestling experience behind them. Jack delivers a snap mare that absolutely no rookie has a right to. Just when Forrest is crawling up to his hands and knees, shaken hard, Jack snaps his thick thighs around the red-head’s lean waist and squeezes. Forrest refuses to submit, even while he’s struggling for air. As the “rookie” Jack starts to roll them around the ring by the body scissors, Forrest wails and writhes like a fish on a hook. He desperately tries to pry apart Jack’s crushing legs, but the rookie’s smooth, rock hard quads are like a steel padlock, going absolutely nowhere.

Both ring rookies score submissions, and they both gloat big time. Forrest lays into Jack’s meaty pecs like a terrier with a bone, ripping, stretching, punching and prying them all over the ring. “Go ahead and quit,” Forrest demands with a smirk, working to rip Jack’s head off his neck with a chinlock while punching the muscle kid’s pecs a deep cherry red, until he finally submits,”Okay, okay!!!”

“You like that,” Forrest asks, catching Jack eye fucking him as he’s flexing his sweet, petite round guns in gloating victory. “You look great,” Jack admits on his hands and knees, staring unblinkingly at Forrest’s big tartan bulge swinging in front of his face. Then he’s laughing like a supervillain after he’s delivered an uppercut to Forrest’s balls, dropping the red-headed hunk to his knees hard. Once Jack notices how fucking pissed it makes Forrest to drag him around by his hair, he does it pretty much non-stop. The red-head gives away a submission to an abdominal stretch, a century into getting his alabaster abs pummeled hot, hot red.

I like the attitudes. I like the bodies. A lot. I like the suspense of two snarling, evenly matched, fresh and ferocious fighters wringing each other out, demonstrating both their potential to dish it out and take it. We’ve seen a lot (literally) of smoking hot Forrest since then, and I, for one, am down for seeing a lot more of him (in all senses of the phrase). I think it’s surely time to see Jack’s hot, muscled bod and cocky, calculated chill back in action, too.

The winner trusses his beaten rival up in the ropes, cooing in the loser’s ear as he bears down on a lovely sleeper. “I guess we both got to use the ring,” the preening, flexing victor monologues, his eyes admiring his own hot body on display with his vanquished rival slack and helpless behind him. “But we know who the winner is.”

You’re gonna catch a beatin’, brothah!

June 8, 2023 wrestlebard1 Comment

Back in the good old days, before streaming, before DVDs, there were things called “VHS tapes.” I know for a fact some of you young’uns are a little blurry on this point in homoerotic wrestling history. One of the things we’ve given up with the awesome leaps in technology and convenience that have transformed gay wrestling over the past 30 years or so is the extra tape at the end of a standard VHS tape. BG East used to record trailers for other products, that you’d find when you reached the end of the matches that you purchased. You can find these (and more recent ones) in the Arena now, but there was something sort of magical about not knowing what you were going to find at the end of those tapes. However much tape was left, you’d get these tantalizing little clips of products you didn’t buy, but maybe now you will buy. It’s just capitalism, but I swear, sometimes I keyed off at least as much on those trailers as the matches I just bought.

That’s how Zack Coleman and Brian Barnes first came across my radar. They caught my eye in a trailer for the inaugural Tag Team Torture. And honestly, it takes a lot to grab my attention in that collection, because fuck, the other two matches on that tape are deliriously hot. But even more “fuck,” tag team partners Zack and Brian are off the charts hot! So yeah, of course I bought that. I don’t think I’ve ever reviewed that match, though, but I thought, before I do, I’d review the only other match these two stunning hotties appeared in, namely Fantasymen 17, where they wrestled against one another before teaming up.

Zack and Brian’s faces appear in the dictionary under the definition of babyfaces. They look so fresh and pretty, in different ways from one another, but each perfectly babyfaced. Brian is adorable, somehow even more adorable with a few edgy tats and his nipple rings. He’s ripped, too. His washboard abs would steal the show if it weren’t for two things. The first thing that competes with his abs is his huge, pendulous package. At least 5 pounds of his 155 lbs have got to accounted for by the heft in his pouch. There are moments when he’s wriggling and writhing and bridging high off that mat, and it’s just breathtaking!

The other thing that draws the eye away from Brian’s phenomenally ripped abs is Zack Coleman. Holy. Fuck. This boy is dazzling! If I’m introducing you to Zack in this post, first of all, you’re welcome, and second, I’m sorry to report that this superhuman specimen appeared in only these two matches (Fantasyman 17 and Tag Team Torture 1). He’s reportedly 6′ and 195 lbs, and he’s ripped… to… shreds. He’s fucking gorgeous in a way that I’m struggling to find the words to convey. More than gorgeous, he’s so sizzlingly sexy. He just watches as Brian warms up by doing amateur wrestling drills, sliding and hopping and twisting and bouncing around. And then Zack pushes himself away from the wall, fills the mat room with his gargantuan shoulders, and does a front bend in which he folds himself in half, stretching the backs of his legs like a fucking yoga master. “That’s a nice stretch,” Brian snarls, “but it doesn’t mean nothing but that you can look pretty on the mat. Anybody can be flexible.” But, fuck, no Brian. Not anyone can be that flexible, and no one with as much thickly draped muscle mass as Zack can just be that flexible!

The size difference is striking. And hot. Zack towers almost a half a foot over Brian, and I believe the 40 pounds of weight advantage that the BG East website reports. “Someday, you can grow up and be big like me,” Zack taunts, flexing his huge, peaked biceps. “My calves are bigger than your whole legs,” he brags, but it’s not really bragging when it’s objectively, verifiably, obviously fact, right? Fuck. “Weight don’t mattah,” Brian snarls at one point. Zack’s Boston accent, swallowing his ending “r’s” even thicker, makes him that much sexier when he smirks back, “You’ll grow up someday, brothah.”

The wrestling is hot and surprisingly hotly contested. Both of these hunks clearly have extensive amateur wrestling experience. They’re fast and they’re decisive, sweeping legs, locking each other down, and exposing each other’s backs to the mat. About 10 minutes into the 30 minute match, it’s astonishingly competitive, and not in a roll my eyes and suspend disbelief kind of way. Brian is aggressive as fuck, and he takes it to the big man full throttle. He gets huge Zack down on the mat several times, and it’s damn impressive. Keeping him down on the mat, though? That’s another story. Zack is just too fucking big and too fucking strong. He repeatedly uses raw muscle and brute strength to escape and reverse, repeatedly climbing into the saddle on top of little Brian. And right there, that’s the entire story of this match, because Brian is having none of it, and he fights his way free with every ounce of strength and balance and flexibility. In short, he wears himself out.

As Brian is starting to huff and puff and suck down air, Zack gets cockier. The muscle man was tested in those first 10 minutes, but he can see exactly what we’re seeing: Brian burned through his reserves and he’s cooking on fumes. It organically turns into a sensationally sexy bully session, with big, gorgeous Zack absolutely manhandling his fiesty, full throttle little challenger. Several times, he swoops in from neutral, scoops Brian up in his huge arms, and flings him wall to wall across the mat. Sometimes he bothers to follow up and pin him, sometimes not. It’s not like it matters, because he is large and in charge and laughing and sneering at the fierce fucker who refuses to say die, even when he’s just getting crushed by 195 pounds pinning him effortlessly on the mat.

There are only a couple of editing breaks in the filming, so you can feel the heat rising in the room steadily. Zack is so contemptuous of Brian’s fading strength, that he voluntarily drops to the mat in the referee’s position, unsolicited. “Because, you ain’t got no chance, othawise,” he smirks, not looking back, with his top shelf ass waiting for Brian to do something. “Come on, bitch, mount that!,” he barks in irritation when Brian doesn’t immediately respond. Fuck, the pillow talk! Brian gives it everything he’s got left, which is enough to hold Zack in place about 1.3 seconds, before the muscle man escapes, taunting and sneering and flexing his perfect physique.

Zack revels in crushing Brian’s core in scissors. “Tell me when you give, you little bitch. Look at these quads!” Zack is milking the fight right out of Brian, knowing full well how stunning his outrageously hot physique is on display at every moment. He gets the little guy to submit a couple of times trapped between his sweaty thighs, and I could watch that happen again another dozen times and still be enthralled.

Brian’s got attitude, though. After giving away one whimpering submission trapped between Zack’s tree trunks, he audaciously challenges the muscle man to arm wrestle. It would be a transparent play for a low blow, if both of these bro-y guys weren’t so fucking earnest and ego-driven. But, yeah, Brian knew he was going to get crushed in that arm wrestling match, which is why he was poised to pounce on top of Zack and take advantage of the big man’s overconfidence. He pulls on his hair. He threatens to bite him. Fuck, when he rolls the coiled mountain of muscle up in a cradle pin, yanking the fuck out of Zack’s neck, it’s a super sweet submission the small guy earns sensationally.

So, yeah, there’s a lot of big on little bullying, but the intensity doesn’t let up for a second of the 30 minutes of this match. Brian is crushed and forced to grudgingly acknowledge he does NOT have what it takes to conquer the babyfaced beefcake flexing and flicking sweat down on him by the end. “You need an ambulance,” Zack asks, laughing heartily. Flat on his back, wasted and humiliated, Brian snarls petulantly, “You’re, like, twice the size of me!” So much for “Weight doesn’t mattah.”

I assume these two showed up on BG East’s doorstep together, because they’ve got buckets of chemistry in this sweat fest mat match, and the very next catalog they showed up in matching gear as a truly stunning babyface tag team. If this is all new to you, and I’m just now introducing you to these 2-hit wonder twins, don’t thank me. Thank VHS tapes!