In the March of 1998, I returned to Ohio for more wrestling. (I blogged my original trip on 4/6/2007.) I wrestled K again, but an added attraction was available this time. The fellow I'd chatted with on the computer during my first trip, the fellow who told me about K and helped me get in touch with him, was also in the area. He and K lived together. As things worked out, I would get a chance to wrestle both of them on the same visit, although we wouldn't be in the room at the same time, which was something I'd always thought would be interesting—to watch two other me wrestle right in front of me.

K is a big fellow like I am—weighing in somewhere in the upper ranges of the 200s. We wrestled again during this trip and had a fine time doing so. Like before, I was unable to get a single submission from him. Nothing stops him, it seems. Nothing I can do, at least. We wrestled, we talked, we wrestled some more. It was on this trip that he told me one of the most interesting things that I've heard from another wrestler, something that has haunted me in the years since. He was talking about when he learned that he was gay. It's a simple story with complicated consequences (at least in my view). He was dating this girl, and he was spending time at her house, like daters do. Maybe they were getting along all right—going out to dinner on the weekends, going to movies, maybe over to Cincinnati to the amusement park, sprawling and cuddling on the couch to watch TV. The things that dating people do, you know. My guess is that at some level he felt comfortable with this "normal" experience.

But she had brothers. Maybe he knew them from high school or work or the local bar. Maybe he just met them when he first came to pick her up. I picture it like this: as he grew more comfortable being in their home, he began to horse around with these guys, these brothers of his girlfriend, and this horsing around included some wrestling in the back yard. But what K discovered was that he had a strong physical reaction to this wrestling, different from and stronger than the reaction he had cuddling on the couch with their sister. As might be expected from a smart man like K, this situation—reactions, feelings—wasn't swept to some dark corner of his mind, nor did he try to ignore it altogether. Eventually, as he analyzed it, he came to the understanding that he was gay. How his life progressed from his time in that house to our wrestling on the motel floor, I don't know. But I enjoyed the time we spent together, and I learned a lot about wrestling life from him.

Something different happened with J. He and I had been online friends for some time. We shared a lot of interests and similar professional situations. We had chatted online for a few years and done some fun cyber-wrestling. But when we met in person I couldn't enjoy wrestling him. I had tried to convince myself that I was a wrestle-anytime-anywhere-with-anybody kind of guy. Such a guy, I believed, without a physical agenda or preferences for certain looks and such, couldn't be in it for anything but the wrestling. To that point, however, I hadn't wrestled anybody under 200 lbs. J weighed in in the 170s. He was all sharp points, all bones and muscles without any of the big belly and big thighs I associated with wrestlers from my days of watching it on American Saturday mornings. J was a good wrestler, but try as I might, I couldn't enjoy wrestling him. It wasn't being stabbed by his points—knees, elbows, etc. I recognized that I had a wrestling fantasy and along with this recognition came the realization that I had a body type I liked to wrestle, which in turn suggested that I had a body type that I was attracted to.

This hasn't led me to conclusions and understandings K came to partly through wrestling his girlfriend's brothers. Maybe I'm not gay. Or maybe I'm not brave enough or honest enough to follow through with considering the full implications of this. Maybe it's just as simple as having a wrestling fantasy and that big men fulfill that fantasy, which is all in fun (with a little homoeroticism thrown in). Maybe not. Maybe it's far more complicated than I'll ever understand.

An Email

Here's an email that I wrote this morning to a friend of mine. Like many friends I have these days, I've never met this man. We communicate solely via email and blog. These are means of communication for which I'm grateful, but at the same time it's a shame that we might never meet in person.

Great to hear from you, Xxxxxxx. I hope life is going well for you in every way, and I'm glad that you're still checking out the blog and keeping in touch from time to time.

The play has bogged down for the moment but only because I've been getting back into a mystery novel I've had under construction for some time. Although I don't always write about wrestling, the novel features a good bit of it as well. I'm currently at around 207 pages.

I agree about the intimacy issue. Wrestling is an intimate activity, no question about that. The assumption often is, then, that to enjoy that intimacy outside sanctioned events--organized wrestling bouts, amateur or pro--suggests homosexual activity or, at least, homosexual desire. But to me this isn't the case. To enjoy wrestling, to enjoy the intimacy of physical contact with another man, isn't, for me, homosexual in nature. I recognize the obvious homoerotic in wrestling, but I understand that as being different from the homosexual. In fact, much pro wrestling foregrounds the homoerotic, and fans are, oddly, either oblivious to it or, what's even more intriguing, comfortable with it.

Interesting stuff to think about!

All best--Xxxxxxx

For Bill

Check out the body scissors beginning at around 4:00. You get a lot of the variations in a single sequence.

My readers know how much I love a good head scissors hold. So you can imagine how thrilled I was to run across this match on YouTube!

Watch for another match story coming soon.