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.