The older I get, the more it occurs to me just how incredibly much I know about a very few things. For example, I was recently binging on old episodes of the BBC comedy “Would I Lie to You,” in which celebrities try to guess if each other is telling some far-fetched truth or just out-and-out lying. It’s fun British comedy of the sort of like. No one has to be bitterly insulted or degraded. They enjoy laughing at themselves as much as each other’s jokes. It’s clever and crass, and they swear and flip each other off (good-naturedly) in a way that would be banned from broadcast TV in the intensely repressed US. In one segment each episode called “This is My…,” they bring out some random person and three celebrities tell the story of who this person is to them. But only one of them is the real story, and the other team of celebrities have to figure out who is telling the truth.
So I was watching WILTY with some friends recently, and they bring out this drop dead gorgeous, super fit lean hunk for the “This is My” segment, and I immediately blurt out, “Holy shit, that’s Brit pro wrestler Terry Frazier!” And, yeah, I ruined it for my friends, because the real story among the lies was the (also hot) comedian Jack Whitehall told the story that this guy was Terry “Mean Machine” Frazier who was teaching him how to wrestle. The other team couldn’t believe it. They guessed one of the other stories was true, and still they were sort of not quite believing it when it was revealed that the guy really was a pro wrestler giving lessons to Jack Whitehall. To prove the point, Terry picks Jack up and bodyslams him to the set floor, and absolutely everyone loses their shit. Though, of course, I’m over here unable to stop myself from saying, “I told you so.”
What this demonstrated to me, other than that I have no problem smugly bragging about what I know to my mostly disinterested non-wrestling obsessed friends, is how remarkably much I know about a particular segment of professional wrestling. I have a somewhat encyclopedic body of knowledge specifically about wrestling for gay eyes, including most gay-oriented wrestling and those mainstream pro wrestlers who, let’s face it, are such gorgeous gay bait. Like Terry Frazier, who I have gotten off on countless times over the years from his Brit pro wrestling matches I treasure on YouTube. I’d pick him out of any crowd, and before watching WILTY, I never expected that the absolute lock I have on that bit of trivia would ever come in handy other than helping me satisfy the occasional itch for an intensely sexy, lean babyface twunk jobber to watch.
I’m sure that’s one of the big reasons I enjoy having gay wrestling friends. Like, if I’m in a mixed group and professional football comes up in conversation, I’ve got nothing to contribute. Hell, if most mainstream pro wrestling were to come up in conversation, which it really doesn’t that often in my non-gay wrestling friend circles, I still have precious little to offer. Unless Finn Balor or L.A. Knight or Josh Woods pop in the conversation, at which point I have to check the crowd I’m in to decide whether or not to reveal that I know the back catalog of gay-oriented wrestling companies so well that I can point out their underground gay wrestling-as names from back in the day.
But I feel like I finally get a little taste of what it might be like to grow up as a boy obsessively immersed in boy-things like sports stats that honestly bored me to death when I was, in fact, a boy. When I’m hanging out with gay wrestling fans, suddenly the embarrassing wealth of knowledge I carry around with me from the thousands of hours I’ve spent watching and writing about wrestling from a gay perspective turns into something useful. More than that, that shared body of gay wrestling knowledge connects some invisible dots between me and my wrestling-obsessed friends. Like, we don’t need to explain how we happen to be able to name every opponent Alexi Adamov wrestled in Who’s Next… we know that we all know because we spent delightfully hot and sweaty moments of profound pleasure watching them.
It brings to mind that powerful moment I wrote about from the Gay Wrestling History Panel I co-moderated at Wrestlefest about a year and a half ago, when I asked the wrestlers on the panel who they wish they’d have had a chance to wrestle from the past. And I swear all 150 of us in the room turned glassy-eyed and introspective as the wrestlers started shouting out names that strummed the nostalgic strings of lust in all of us. And, spontaneously, people in the audience began shouting out the names of their favorites, too. And after ever name, there was these deep, primal, corporate grunt of lustful acknowledgement. We’d all invested ourselves in experiencing and cataloging those private moments of pleasured appreciation, and when given the opportunity to all come together in one place and name them, those gutteral gasps and grunts conveyed something we’d shared all along, even if we’d never met each other before.
I used to spend a lot energy wanting to be the smartest person in the room. But these days, I know enough to know that on most topics, I’m seldom the smartest person the room. And at this point in my life, I’m really (really) okay with that. What I don’t know about auto mechanics or the NBA draft or pharmacology or quantum physics (or any number of things about which there are so many other people with such greater expertise than I have), it’s left me with so much room in my brain to store tens of thousands of pieces of titillating trivia about the subject that I spend so much time exploring and writing about here.
Sidelineland 