In the latter part of summer 1996, I began to make plans for my second, third and fourth wrestling experiences. Seven months had passed since my first experience with D. I'd continued an online friendship with Luke--a lot of chat along with a good bit of cyberwrestling with him. Through various online experiences, I was beginning to define what I was into and not into and learning to spot the real folks and the fakes on AOL.

About this time I met B, my first "local" contact, who lived in a town just a short drive from me. We arranged to meet at Applebee's one afternoon when my family was out of town for a few days. As we ate lunch together, he unfolded the kind of story that I'd suspected was out there.

B was in his 50s at the time, but he looked younger. He stood around 5'11" and weighed maybe in the 220s or 230s. Just right! He'd been working out with weights for some time and had a powerful body. He was into wrestling, but his interests tended to be toward finishing holds such as the figure-4 leglock. He was also training in one of the martial arts to get more knowledge of working over pressure points and such. If I'm remembering rightly, he won some kind of tournament in Atlanta within a year or two after we met.

B had been married to a woman not too long before this, and he and she had a couple of children together. And during that life he'd been a preacher. His pulpit had been in a Baptist church or in some other Southern evangelical denomination. And from that pulpit, he said, he had preached many a sermon against homosexuality. But as it often seems to happen in relation to such homophobic behavior, he discovered or accepted--through wrestling or some other means--that he was, in fact, a homosexual.

When I knew B during that brief period in 1996, he'd left his family (or they'd left him), but I'm not sure how much time had passed since this event. He did, I think, have some kind of relationship with his children--or was trying to reestablish one. And he was experiencing a relationship with another man, although I don't remember if it was his first or how committed it was at that time.

After he told me the story over lunch, we went back to my house to wrestle a bit. I'd fixed up a place near the downstairs hearth, but it wasn't much good. The space wasn't big, and the stones of the hearth were dangerous. I went upstairs to change into the colored no-fly briefs I used for wrestling, and B stayed downstairs to change. I remember coming down the stairs and seeing him waiting there in his trunks. He looked great. Only, he had on his tennis shoes, which I didn't understand but didn't question. We got a feel for each other, traded some holds, tried out some holds we'd always imagined trying (head scissors for me, of course) and generally rolled around a bit. Not a terribly satisfying wrestling experience, but the story beforehand had made the time worthwhile.

For a while I saw a lot of B in the online wrestling news. I think he participated in a couple of the big gay wrestling events that take place in Florida and Oklahoma and Pennsylvania. I downloaded a couple of pictures of him and still have them on a disk somewhere. But I haven't seen anything of him in a long time now. As far as I can tell, he's not on either of the wrestling directories I'm most familiar with. None of my friends mention him when they talk about those with whom they've been chatting or wrestling. Ten years is a long time, and much can happen to a person.

Most of the time, I'm certain that I'm not a homosexual. Most of the time, I'm also certain that I'm not overwhelmingly heterosexual either. I'm something other than either, and my otherness seems in a constant state of fluidity . . . and a constant state of secrecy as far as my family is concerned. Whenever I'm trying to work out the logistics for a match or I nearly get caught with some compromising materials on my computer screen, I think of B. I wonder where he is, of course, but I also wonder at the courage it must have taken the homophobic family man and preacher either to reveal to all that he was homosexual or to live through whatever catastrophic event outed him.