And so I grew up obsessed with wrestling.

I watched it on television every time I could. Many of these years were before the advent of cable, so the wrestling I saw mostly came to me on Saturdays. When I had my driver's license, I traveled sometimes to high school gyms around where I grew up to watch matches I'd seen advertised on the Saturday shows.

I had an old set of Encyclopaedia Britannica that featured a nice photo page of wrestling. The page held eight photos from a match between "black" and "white" (known by the color of their trunks. My favorite was a picture of black holding white in head scissors and arm hold, a variation of the picture posted above. I don't know how many times I masturbated to this hold. The wrestlers themselves were thin and without what I considered the real "look" of wrestlers, but the hold was great.

Somewhere along the line, I'd discovered a couple of photo/video sources for images of women's wrestling--films of classic matches from the 1930s through the 1960s, private matches between California or New York women, apartment wrestling and catfighting. I knew some men must be out there who liked to watch women wrestle, but I considered it to be more a case of some men preferring this to the poses of the girlie magazines.

I was over 30 years old before I made the discovery that the world held other people who were interested in wrestling in exactly the same way that I was. I remember being in a library that was new to me and going--as I often did--to the section where the wrestling books were shelved. I picked up one book and turned to the index, looking for the page numbers where I would find pictures of my beloved head scissors. With the numbers in my head, I began thumbing through the pages, and lo and behold, every head scissors picture in the book had been razored out! What a wonderful and creepy feeling came over me! Somebody else loves the head scissors, I thought. That was exciting! At the same time, however, I felt a twinge of fear--Somebody knows my secret. The paranoid notion that somebody had cut out those pictures knowing that I'd come looking for them didn't survive long. Somebody else loves the is turned on by the head scissors. But this was 1993 or 1994, and at that time I had no way of learning any more about the person who had removed the pictures. That would have to wait for my first encounters with the Internet, a few months, maybe a year, beyond that library discovery.

But something important had happened. In that library moment I realized I wasn't alone in the world.