Fire Fighter

Krushco is still your goto place for big burly lugs savagely grappling for dominance on a mat. It's not about narrative or muscle or yucks or montage or youth or world titles or even winning and losing. It's about sweat, slaps, bite marks, boners, pain, respect, spandex, and fighting and panting to the point of exhaustion, to the point that the two of you are semiconscious heaps gliding across each other's body like ice floe. This is no frills wrestling. It's basic and it's primal. It's not about prettyboys, and it's not "entertainment." This is ritual in the raw. A Krushco match is hypnotizing, ecstatic, and brutal. It's one of those things you get or you don't get. I like to think of its master, Krush, as the Iron John of queer wrestling.

Krush goes up against Johnny O in Underground Wrestling 71, the company's latest release for download. As Krush at one point suggests, Johnny O may not have realized what he was stepping into, but he gets it without anybody having to explain it and throws himself 100% into the fray. This match is a lot like your first brush with wrestling--whatever the exact circumstances of it were, and assuming you've ever wrestled outside of gym class--where you learned that two men's bodies in struggle have their own rhythm--and it's a rhythm that seems to open up some kind of quasi-spiritual space (though still steeped in the world of flesh, sex, and physics) like the dizzying dance of Dervishes--or the pounding beat of house music at three in the morning. Or so I think. Krush eggs the guy on, pushing him to his limits, taunting him, wearing him down to a frazzle, so that Johnny O looks like he can no longer tell up from down. And how else to describe his face at that moment but as "enraptured"?