I did a little neighborhood wrestling as a boy. I wrestled with my cousins and with other boys living close by. Sometimes I'd have a friend over when wrestling was on the local TV station, and we'd wrestle in the floor of the living room, acting out for ourselves what was happening on the show. Sometimes the wrestling was a pile of boys outside in the grass, tumbling together down the slopes of our hilly yard. Often these matches were one-sided affairs, with two or three of them coming against me at once.

But even then I knew that something I felt as we wrestled and laughed together was different from what they felt.

As I approached puberty, I used to spend the night from time to time with this one boy. We were ten, eleven, twelve years old, and we slept in the same bed at his house. Our bodies were beginning to awaken, and we began to explore our sexuality with mutual masturbation. When it was his turn to stimulate me, I would hold him in a headlock while he worked me with his hand. The suggestion of wrestling did nothing for him, but it did a world of good for me.

This "boy" and I still know each other, and we're both in our late 40s now. We've never talked about those nights long ago in the bed at his house or in a tent pitched in one of our yards. But here I am, wrestling with this psycho-sexual obsession with wrestling, and he--thrice married, thrice divorced--has recently been dealing with something of an addiction to sex (all heterosexual experiences, as far as I know). Those nights of exploration seem now harbingers of the lives we've lived since then.

Beyond these boyhood explorations--not that uncommon from what I understand--wrestling faded from my social life. My neighborhood friends and I stopped wrestling as we became teenagers. We still spent the night together, but the sexual explorations stopped, replaced by talk about sports and girls. I always thought about wrestling them--the boys and the girls--but kept it to myself. When one of my boyhood friends, the one most interested in TV wrestling, became my first college roommate, I imagined us stripped down and wrestling on the floor in our room, but that never happened. He might have wrestled if I'd asked, but I was all too aware of wrestling's effect on me and didn't want to expose myself to the humiliation of having an erection while wrestling with another guy.

And so, nothing more happened with wrestling for more than 20 years. I thought about it. I watched it on TV. I looked for in on magazine racks and library shelves. But I never wrestled woman or man outside my own dreams. . . .