(no subject)
I saw a movie tonight. It was quite well done. Two guys at my school made it about a queer wrestling group they started. Except it wasn’t just about queer wrestling, it was about violence and self-identity and gender and community and sex and empowerment. This was the group that I went to a meeting of on Tuesday when I came back mildly angsting over my bearness because I couldn’t wrestle with them. In fact, though, it wasn’t just a size issue or an age issue or a gender issue. Even if I was magically transformed into a cute little queer I couldn’t experience that community in the same way they do because my relationship with wrestling is fundamentally different than theirs.
I don’t think I’ve posted about wrestling in a really long time. Maybe ever in this journal, now that I think about it. It doesn’t weigh that heavily into my everyday life anymore. But at one point it was all I thought about. And it formed how I thought (and in many ways still think) about myself and my goals. I got my first serious job because the professor I was working for was an ex-wrestler. Not because I was qualified, but because we bonded over experiences on the mat. But that’s getting way ahead of myself.
When I was in sixth grade my family moved to Salt Lake City, Utah for a year. It was a horrible mistake, socially and professionally, for my father and I didn’t enjoy it either. When we came back to Hamilton I had missed a year of hockey and truth be told, even though I went back to travel team hockey I was never destined for greatness in that sport. My father saw an ad for a kids wrestling club at the university and convinced me to sign up. It was a pretty good fit. I won some tournaments and enjoyed it. Pretty soon I was doing as much as I could at the club but my high school didn’t have a wrestling team so I was limited in how far I could go. I really wanted to travel all the way across town to the Catholic school that was dominant in wrestling in Ontario, but that was just a bad idea and my parents wouldn’t let me. The club practices were held in the university wrestling gym and the university coach would run some of them. He saw that I was interested and talented, but didn’t have a place to train more than the couple nights a week the club met. So he did the (in retrospect amazing) thing of inviting me to train with the university team. So here I was training with people at least 4 years older than me. And getting to train every day, including weekends, for 2-3 hours a day. I became something of a team mascot, in a sense. The coach nicknamed me “grasshopper” from the kung fu movies. And of course I got beat up horribly in practice. But it set me up for success in my age group. I won my first Canadian championship in the under 16 division in Greco Roman style. I got to travel to Austria to compete in the world cup. The next two years in a row I won the under 18 championship in freestyle and got to compete in half a dozen major international tournaments in Europe and Asia. My coach wanted me to stay in Canada and set on a path to train for the Olympics. We had targeted the 2000 Olympics. But wrestlers don’t peak until well after other sports and I think even then I was seeing the folks who wrestled at that level and maybe made it, maybe didn’t. But in either case didn’t get left with much except for wrestling. In the end I went to the US on a wrestling scholarship, but the school was a bad fit for me in other ways and I left after the first year (I think I’ve written about that on here before.) I tried to come back to McMaster, but I had lost that spark and wrestling just wasn’t the path I was going to follow anymore.
The movie tonight spent some time talking about homoeroticism in sports. Mostly using UFC fighting as the example, but by extension wrestling as well. There is certainly that aspect, and now having left competitive wrestling, I can see it somewhat in that way. I have lots of homoerotic stories surrounding wrestling and my interpretation of events on trips and with people from the team. Up until my last year I wasn’t out as a queer wrestler, but I was aware that I liked guys and enjoyed the hell out of the opportunities I had. But it was never that way on the mat. Wrestling at a competitive level is all about focus and discipline and training. I’m still not sure I’ve ever been happier than when I was on the mat in a match. It’s a peak experience in a way that I’m not sure I’ve experienced since. It’s hard to talk about without falling back to cliché but the usual split of attention that fills the rest of my life just wasn’t there. Usually I sit and talk to someone and in another part of my head I make grocery lists. But on the mat there wasn’t room for any of that. There’s a picture of me in the school newspaper, I wish I still had a copy. I had trouble making weight that morning and had stripped down to my underwear to weigh in. Somehow I had forgotten to put back on my singlet. I got called for my match and whipped off my track pants and jacket and ran to the middle of the mat, dressed only in my bright blue underwear. I didn’t even notice. I was standing there waiting for the match to start totally oblivious. Focus. For 5 minutes on the mat nothing else in the world registers or matters. And there’s not room in that for sex. An observer can map that onto it from outside, but on the mat that’s not what’s happening. At least not consciously.
The movie caught some of the elements of this peak experience, though. And obviously a bunch of queers wrestling in the mud IS about sex in a much more direct way than high level competitive wrestling. My relationship with wrestling doesn’t take away any of the validity of their experience. But it does mean that I’ll probably never get the same thing out of it that they do. That makes me a little bit sad because competitive wrestling is a path that is long since closed to me as well. I want a way of getting a clear and sharply focused peak experience. Occasionally really great sex comes close, but not very often. I got a taste of it at times on my motorcycle, but the risk/reward ratio of that was obviously not in my favour. Drugs have quit working for me and it’s been 3 months since I even smoked pot. All my games these days seem to be long, quiet peaks rather than stark contrast, and something is missing in that.
(there’s lots more the movie got me thinking about… threats of violence in society and how the only times I’ve been seriously attacked are when I’ve been in drag. The development of a complex gender identity. The creation of subculture communities. But since the movie isn’t available online and I can’t tell you all to go see it, to rattle on more about these topics would only be teasing…)
I don’t think I’ve posted about wrestling in a really long time. Maybe ever in this journal, now that I think about it. It doesn’t weigh that heavily into my everyday life anymore. But at one point it was all I thought about. And it formed how I thought (and in many ways still think) about myself and my goals. I got my first serious job because the professor I was working for was an ex-wrestler. Not because I was qualified, but because we bonded over experiences on the mat. But that’s getting way ahead of myself.
When I was in sixth grade my family moved to Salt Lake City, Utah for a year. It was a horrible mistake, socially and professionally, for my father and I didn’t enjoy it either. When we came back to Hamilton I had missed a year of hockey and truth be told, even though I went back to travel team hockey I was never destined for greatness in that sport. My father saw an ad for a kids wrestling club at the university and convinced me to sign up. It was a pretty good fit. I won some tournaments and enjoyed it. Pretty soon I was doing as much as I could at the club but my high school didn’t have a wrestling team so I was limited in how far I could go. I really wanted to travel all the way across town to the Catholic school that was dominant in wrestling in Ontario, but that was just a bad idea and my parents wouldn’t let me. The club practices were held in the university wrestling gym and the university coach would run some of them. He saw that I was interested and talented, but didn’t have a place to train more than the couple nights a week the club met. So he did the (in retrospect amazing) thing of inviting me to train with the university team. So here I was training with people at least 4 years older than me. And getting to train every day, including weekends, for 2-3 hours a day. I became something of a team mascot, in a sense. The coach nicknamed me “grasshopper” from the kung fu movies. And of course I got beat up horribly in practice. But it set me up for success in my age group. I won my first Canadian championship in the under 16 division in Greco Roman style. I got to travel to Austria to compete in the world cup. The next two years in a row I won the under 18 championship in freestyle and got to compete in half a dozen major international tournaments in Europe and Asia. My coach wanted me to stay in Canada and set on a path to train for the Olympics. We had targeted the 2000 Olympics. But wrestlers don’t peak until well after other sports and I think even then I was seeing the folks who wrestled at that level and maybe made it, maybe didn’t. But in either case didn’t get left with much except for wrestling. In the end I went to the US on a wrestling scholarship, but the school was a bad fit for me in other ways and I left after the first year (I think I’ve written about that on here before.) I tried to come back to McMaster, but I had lost that spark and wrestling just wasn’t the path I was going to follow anymore.
The movie tonight spent some time talking about homoeroticism in sports. Mostly using UFC fighting as the example, but by extension wrestling as well. There is certainly that aspect, and now having left competitive wrestling, I can see it somewhat in that way. I have lots of homoerotic stories surrounding wrestling and my interpretation of events on trips and with people from the team. Up until my last year I wasn’t out as a queer wrestler, but I was aware that I liked guys and enjoyed the hell out of the opportunities I had. But it was never that way on the mat. Wrestling at a competitive level is all about focus and discipline and training. I’m still not sure I’ve ever been happier than when I was on the mat in a match. It’s a peak experience in a way that I’m not sure I’ve experienced since. It’s hard to talk about without falling back to cliché but the usual split of attention that fills the rest of my life just wasn’t there. Usually I sit and talk to someone and in another part of my head I make grocery lists. But on the mat there wasn’t room for any of that. There’s a picture of me in the school newspaper, I wish I still had a copy. I had trouble making weight that morning and had stripped down to my underwear to weigh in. Somehow I had forgotten to put back on my singlet. I got called for my match and whipped off my track pants and jacket and ran to the middle of the mat, dressed only in my bright blue underwear. I didn’t even notice. I was standing there waiting for the match to start totally oblivious. Focus. For 5 minutes on the mat nothing else in the world registers or matters. And there’s not room in that for sex. An observer can map that onto it from outside, but on the mat that’s not what’s happening. At least not consciously.
The movie caught some of the elements of this peak experience, though. And obviously a bunch of queers wrestling in the mud IS about sex in a much more direct way than high level competitive wrestling. My relationship with wrestling doesn’t take away any of the validity of their experience. But it does mean that I’ll probably never get the same thing out of it that they do. That makes me a little bit sad because competitive wrestling is a path that is long since closed to me as well. I want a way of getting a clear and sharply focused peak experience. Occasionally really great sex comes close, but not very often. I got a taste of it at times on my motorcycle, but the risk/reward ratio of that was obviously not in my favour. Drugs have quit working for me and it’s been 3 months since I even smoked pot. All my games these days seem to be long, quiet peaks rather than stark contrast, and something is missing in that.
(there’s lots more the movie got me thinking about… threats of violence in society and how the only times I’ve been seriously attacked are when I’ve been in drag. The development of a complex gender identity. The creation of subculture communities. But since the movie isn’t available online and I can’t tell you all to go see it, to rattle on more about these topics would only be teasing…)