Cruising

PAC vs Adam Maxted, OTT Live in Belfast: So It Is! (Over The Top Wrestling, 28 July 2019)

Maybe you remember an early shot in the controversial 1980 thriller Cruising. A guy picks up a guy at a leather bar and brings him home. In the bedroom the camera focuses on their feet, in heavy work boots and thick socks. On the floor next to the bed we clearly see jerk-off magazines in closeup, with three or four wrestling magazines on top. That's more than a throwaway shot. It was an epiphany for me, solo at a poorly attended matinee in Miami. In it I recognized myself and at once realized the gay life had a culture for me, who was not particularly big on Judy or Barbra or drag or even gay porn. (All of it is fine and amusing, just nothing I am passionate about.) Wrestling was all the porn and show business I craved. Two or three years later I bought the 1977 book The Joy of Gay Sex  because thumbing through a copy at Walden Bookstore I saw that there was a section on wrestling. I started bringing up the subject with the guys I met at gay bars, and a whole new world opened up.

This 2019 match brought all this back to me. PAC and Adam Maxted emerge out of the dark and into the light, their bodies already glistening with sweat or baby oil. The darkness is the same deep pits-of-hell darkness you find in leather bars. Maxted and PAC are built like Zeus and Hades. In the ring they size each other up, literally. Maxted towers over PAC.  PAC's facial expressions make clear that he's not used to being the little guy in the ring. The body contact is brutal and becomes increasingly so as the match progresses in and out of the squared circle, so brutal that the referee has to make a judgment call because the loser would rather die than tap out. It's all make-believe, yet under these circumstances I am a believer. Vicariously I feel the pain and feel the thrill of bringing pain. Although I am not a violent person, man-on-man aggression, with no weapons but one's own body, turns me on in ways that romantic music or a ten-inch dick does not. As a bookworm and professor for the past four decades, I'm about as unphysical as they come - but wrestling gives me a contact high.

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