gwinea2000:
Originally posted by DoubleMeatWhopper@Nov 30 2004, 04:55 AM
Okay, let's be honest: two men is tight, revealing outfits rolling around on the floor while grappling each other, each struggling to dominate the other ... sounds pretty homo-erotic, doesn't it? And so it can be. There's a fair number of gay wrestlers, so why should we be surprised that some of them do some 'private wrestling' (or 'not so private' on occasion? The intimate contact even manages to arouse many of the straight wrestlers sometimes. Do we ever get hard? I'd be lying if I said, 'no'. I'll admit that I haven't gotten wood more than once while wrestling a particularly tasty adversary, but it wasn't a routine occurence in my case. And I never 'consummated' our mutual lust in the lockerroom. My apartment, however, was only five minutes way!
[post=265312]Quoted post[/post]
That's interesting. I am/was an amateur wrestler myself. I've never encountered anything other than competition at meets -- never seen it, never heard of it. No hard-ons, no washroom scenes, none of it. We'd all take the usual ribbing from non-wrestling friends -- "Dude, you roll around in tights, with your chunk hanging out, molesting the shit out of each other. That's so gay!" My typical homophobic highschool response was always "Well, if you view it in that light, I don't want you wrestling with me."
It comes as no shock to me that there are plenty of gay men who wrestle, and that perhaps some do it for sexual reasons (though I'd guess that the extreme majority of gay grapplers wrestle for the pure sport of it.) As you're aware, it's a pretty taxing and intense sport. I've always likened wrestling to a 6-minute sprint. The LAST thing on my mind when on the mat is the sexual orientation of my opponent. It's competition, pure and simple. I can certainly see from a spectator's perspective how homo-erotic undertones could be drawn. However, on the mat, I don't think sex is AT ALL a common thought, especially at the higher levels.
Of course, the stigma surrounding the homo-erotic undertones is glued to the sport and, IMO, won't be going anywhere any time soon.