Bill Weintraub

Re: frottage and the revelation

07-13-2002

i thank ken for this terrific post

i've been corresponding a lot recently with naked wrestler boy, who has two pages in Warriors Speak:

Cockfuckin Man to Man

and

The Ultimate in Man to Man

and i'm hoping to do a third with his comments about the difference between competitive and erotic wrestling

cause naked wrestler is a real wrestler

he's a guy who wanted to wrestle in high school, but didn't cause of, as he puts it, "the fag sports thing"

but did wrestle in college

then stopped for 15 years, and has only recently re-discovered himself as a wrestler by joining his city's gay wrestling club

and he's been having a great time, both as a competitive wrestler, and erotically as well

so like Warrior Patrick, who trains as a boxer, he has something to tell us about sex and sports and aggression and being a man who likes to have sex with men

now one of the themes of this site and of my own life and of my life as a gay activist has been the value of training in combat sports -- boxing, wrestling, karate -- for gay men

both because it's good for people who are the targets of hate to know how to fight, and because it's a way for them to reclaim their masculinity

of course the idea that gay men should reclaim their masculinity isn't politically correct

instead, the dominant ideology would have us believe that the role of gay men is to teach str8 men how to be less masculine

i don't agree

because i don't think there's anything wrong with being masculine -- to the contrary, i think it's good for men to be masculine

and i think all we need say to str8 men is that if they want to be intimate with another guy, that's not a big deal

and they can do it without giving up their masculinity

that makes a lot more sense to me than telling men to stop being men -- which is neither possible nor, in my view, desirable

now i wrote to ken privately suggesting that if there's a gay wrestling club in his hometown, he train there

i don't know if he will, but in general my experience in working with gay men is that it's very difficult to convince them, whether they have erotic fight fantasies or not, to train in a combat sport

and that's because they believe, on some level, that they can't -- that they can't be aggressive in that way because they're fags

but they can

and the boost to their self-esteem and morale when they do is immeasurable