Frottage

I write a lot about myself in this blog--even when I am supposedly addressing the subject of wrestling. Whatever else I seem to be discussing in these pages, I am always talking about me, my tastes, my interests, my obsessions, my kinks. I do this mostly because I find myself fascinating. I make no apologies for my egoism. It is my conviction that any man over 25 who is not fascinated with himself--his mind, his will, his passions, especially--is not a man worthy of my time. Then, too, there's something probably to be said for keeping all that fascination to oneself, but in the 21st century we all live in glass houses, on nearly constant liquid-crystal display. I started the blog to analyze my own erotism, to examine it in public or rather in the public-slash-private realm of the blogosphere. Ringside at Skull Island is a personal journal and a scrapbook, as I have said before. It's devoted to my thoughts on wrestling, its fusion of violence and creation, intimacy and cruelty, imagination and physicality, guilt and thirst for justice, authenticity and camp. It's a plan I've stuck with ... for better or worse. 

When I play at fantasy pro wrestling via instant messaging, it's a different story. Steeped in my self-indulgence on the blog, I use this other outlet to lose myself in other people's fantasies. I almost never have anything to suggest to my partner by way of who our fantasy wrestlers should be or what the rules of engagement should be or what gear or what venue. It's not listlessness on my part. It's escapism from my own imagination, which I explore plenty enough on my own through the blog. On these occasions I prefer to enter into my partner's daydreams--so over the years I have wrestled nude and weightless on an intergalactic spacecraft, played a serial killer playing cat-and-mouse games of domination and control with a cop (a real cop, as it turns out, a motorcycle traffic cop, though, not an FBI profiler), fought to the death in an alternative universe where the gladiators possess sixteen senses instead of the mere human five, and pitted Alex Pettyfer against Zac Efron in a poolside brawl at a Beverly Hills mansion. I just take the other guy's kink and run with it along with him, I infuse his fantasy with my feeling for the sensual--and I'm hardly ever disappointed by where it takes us both.

Of course, when on occasion I write about erotic combat for pay, I write with the collective mindset of the particular company I am working with--or my concept of its mindset, anyway. I speak as and for BG East, for instance, not as or for myself. And unlike the writing I do here, the intent is to sell whatever match I'm describing to whoever I imagine would be its perfect audience--often me, but sometimes somebody else. So, now, although I wrote the catalog description of Fantasymen 34 a month or so ago, its first draft anyway, I'd like to look at those three really remarkable matches partly as a review and partly as a springboard for another long Joe-like digression, meandering through my private world of scintillating pain and pugnacious frottage. You need not follow along--these pictures speak thousands of words on their own and probably make more sense than my banal musings about them. Do as you please. 

It's not that I have a lot to add to the catalog descriptions. I just want to muse over the particular excitement I get from touch. Skin touching skin. Even the word "skin" packs a certain tingle. Lately I have been trying to pay attention to the succession of stances wrestlers take from faceoff to the victory stance over a fallen foe. I am especially fond of the point towards the beginning of a match, as two men stand inches apart, bending their foreheads together as they glare meanly into each other's eyes. Then their bodies draw in--usually in a test of strength. They feel the other guy's breaths against their faces. Then maybe the chests press together, nipple tapping nipple, and then the stomachs--here is why I love a slightly convex but firm belly, guys--nudging against each other. Then, of course, the cocks, which glance off each other, setting a charge off in me as an onlooker, whether or not the wrestlers experience a comparable excitement. From there, the action moves on to other things, eventually (almost inevitably) leading to one wrestler grabbing hold of the other from behind, crotch tucked against the pert round buttocks of the guy in front. If I'm lucky, the wrestlers at some point return to a face-to-face encounter--a bearhug, or a corner ten-count, as the aggressor towers over the victim, pounding away as the crowd counts out each punch and abs bump against nose and lips. When I was a teenager watching Championship Wrestling from Florida on TV, a cross-body roll-up pinning position could make me jizz in my Fruit of the Looms. It still can, forty years later. Such is the power of touch on my imagination. (As a child, I loved to loan things to classmates--paper clips, pencils, erasers--and I thrilled as I could practically feel their grasp on that object, as if it were somehow an extension of my nervous system!)

What I love about gay wrestling sites (there's the obvious, of course, but more particularly) is that they never sacrificed the power of touch that has mesmerized me since childhood.  (My mother had only one mobilized arm, her right had been paralyzed in a car crash before I was born, so she was never able to lift me up from my bed as a baby--Maybe that's where all this is coming from, Professor Freud!) Today's mainstream pro scene has shifted away from the grunt-sweat-and-groan grappling of old-school wrestling. Too homo, way too homo. How seldom do we get to see the old schoolboy pin anymore, wrestler's thighs straddling an opponent's hips, arms pressing the shoulders to the mat! It's all about flying off the top ropes these days, acrobatic leaps that clear the head of the opponent by seven inches, sudden, split-second punches that rock the skeletal system, steel chairs, fluorescent light bulbs, ladders--but very little clenching, pressing, and weighing down, body upon body. It looks too much like hugging, I guess, or fucking. But I am a fan of aggressive, muscular hugging--and fucking. It's kinda hot.

BG East's Fantasymen series is mostly about beautiful bodies. I love beautiful bodies. God, how I love beautiful bodies! But the moments that work best for me are when body bumps against, grinds against, mashes against body. Mainstream wrestling features beautiful bodies too, but these tend to be shy around each other, both men painstakingly careful not to let crotch come into proximity of any part of the opponent's body. (There are straight wrestlers fearless about this, and for that alone I can adore them, even when their bodies are not especially beautiful.) But BG East's Fantasymen gives us both--beauty and the bump--and how fucking great is that?