But Is It Art?

Joey Nux vs Topher DiMaggio (Wrestler4Hire)

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Wrestler4Hire, perhaps only accidentally, created a masterpiece of queer art in the 2019 video of Nux vs DiMaggio. There's the casting, of course - gay XXX icon Topher is the luckless jobber, looking every bit as beautiful as Bobby Kendall in Pink Narcissus, and  Joey is the cheerfully sadistic heel, looking like a cross between a Tom of Finland motorcycle cop and actor-bodybuilder William Smith, object of my masturbatory fantasies circa 1968. Taken all together, every shot in the video seems to echo Physique Pictorial  and Jean Genet. 

The luminous photography and composition of shots are several steps above 90-percent of all the gay wrestling films and videos ever made. The camera angles and Joey Nux's physique are equally architectonic and visually intriguing. Both wrestlers are works of art in and of themselves -  embodiments of S&M daddy dom and sub roles and, in a probably unintended nod to Susan Sontag, the "fascinating fascism" that undergirds the representation of male bodies in propaganda. The poses appear to have a mischievously ironic subtext. There's a whole history of male-male relationships alluded to - from belt-snapping disciplinarian to the creation of subcultural solidarity through hazing. You may think I'm joking, but I can imagine Nux vs DiMaggio, ten or twenty years from now, as part of a video exhibition at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay & Lesbian Art - maybe even MoMA. 

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