Pain Is the Game

 Adrian Street vs Jim Breaks, October 14, 1966 (Joint Promotions)

Jim Breaks is compact, muscular, and inventive as a ring performer. Adrian Street is big, colorful, and opposite to Breaks except that, like Breaks, Adrian is a stunning ring performer. In Victor Rook's 2006 doc Changing Perspectives: Profile of an Openly Gay Wrestler (2006) - a must-see for Skull Islanders - Street talks about his use of the gay gimmick, saying it happened as a response to audience members taunting him for being gay. (Note: Street is not the openly gay wrestler of the film's title.) Back then, the gay gimmick was always the heel, usually predestined to be destroyed by his presumably straight opponent. Out gay pro-wrestling heroes like Effy had not yet been born.

Jim Breaks, small but hunky, plays off Adrian beautifully. Both men have distinctively S&M styles, relishing slow punishments. I have had an off-and-on crush on Breaks for decades, beginning in the 1990s, a decade after his retirement from the ring. He and Adrian wrestle in tight, sweaty clenches, micro-wrestling in camera close-ups, for instance, bending an opponent's fingers back, threatening to break them. If you haven't already guessed, I'm a sucker for wrestlers strenuously engaged, often crotch to crotch and belly to belly. Although I'm not an out-and-out sadomasochist, I am sympathetic to the erotic rituals and turned on by small disciplinary assaults, for instance, these opponents tightly bound in each other's arms and legs.