Fetish Wrestling Is Hot. Meet the Jacked Men Who’ve Made It Their Life.
Muscle Master Kevin built a fetish wrestling empire. In doing so, he saved the life of Damien Rush.
There’s a fine line between professional wrestling and fetish wrestling. Already, wrestling is homoerotic. It’s two half-naked men wearing tight spandex with clear dick prints, touching each other in contorted poses. Sure, there’s a roughness to it, a performative masculinity, but that’s something gay and bisexual men love—just think of Tom of Finland.
So it makes sense that fetish wrestling is a popular genre of—it’s not necessarily pornography—but erotic content for many queer men. While there’s sometimes nudity and sex in fetish wrestling, often, it’s just like pro wrestling—using the same moves—just more sexually explicit. It’s that extra wedgie, the hairy ass exposed, or an armpit licked that makes it slightly, well, gayer.
Kevin fell into the world of fetish wrestling by accident. In his late teenage years, he began documenting his gains in a series of comical YouTube videos that went viral. He went from twink to hunk, and men started reaching out to him, surreptitiously, as he was 16 at the time, asking for flexing videos. Even though he was (and still is) straight, he knew what they were after. Still, he never did anything illegal. He’d send over some videos of him flexing or charge 50 to 100 bucks for a quick 3-5 minutes Skype session where he’d show off his guns.
By the time he was 18, he was making roughly $85,000 selling flexing clips and doing Skype sessions. It took interacting with men for a couple of years, but he eventually found his persona—a man built like Adonis who you will pay to worship. His voice became low and deep. Every single one of his words was purposeful. That’s when he became Muscle Master Kevin, the shredded financial domme who never loses a match, and always gets paid.
(Muscle Master Kevin)
MMK does “cash drain” scenes. “So it may just be me, getting dressed in a suit. I humiliate this wrestler and have him throw 15k at me, and then I beat the shit out of him,” he says. “But the beating up is more of an afterthought. It’s me, the man that I am, and my position in life that’s the theme.”
MMK doesn’t meet up with any men. Everything he does is virtual, yet these men crave paying him. They need to be dominated by him. There is one man MMK has power of attorney over. “To be clear, this is not something I was pushing for, but I’m not saying no,” he says. “Obviously, I'm very careful. I'm not blackmailing anyone. I’m just doing what they want.”
As MMK became taking shape both literally and figuratively, many men began specifically requested wrestling videos, offering him a good chunk of cash, so he went out recruiting. MMK wanted to turn his lifestyle into a career, and his career into an empire.
(Wishing Muscle Master Kevin was choking me out and not that twink.)
That’s when he met Damien Rush. Damien, a bodybuilder, had just dropped out of college for the second time, and his girlfriend had just broken up with him. “I was very depressed, lost, and not sure how to make money, but then a friend told me how he made some good money wrestling and doing skype sessions.” His buddy introduced him to BG East, one of the most popular fetish wrestling sites there is. He did a few videos for them, starting at $250.
In the beginning, Rush was “weirded out” by the whole thing. “I grew up very religious and was even homophobic,” he says. But he needed the money. “I kept doing it because I didn't have any other option.”
Over time, his homophobia faded as he realized that his viewers were “normal,” kind men who are just looking to get their rocks off. But that’s when his body dysmorphia kicked in. He began to wonder if he was big and strong enough and would go through waves of hating his (incredibly cut and muscular) physique. “I think this was also connected to some shame I had doing this and my worry that I’d never be able to get a ‘professional’ job.”
But Rush has pushed through, and a decade later, he’s still wrestling, even though his family pretends that’s not how he makes his living.
Right as he was starting his career, Rush and his parents were arguing about how he was going to make a living. He ended up telling them, “I’m going to do gay porn, and you can go fuck yourselves.”
His mother cried while his dad replied, “I failed you as a parent.” Since that conversation, there’s been no talk of what Rush does or how he supports himself. It’s a classic don’t ask, don’t tell.
(Damien Rush in all his glory.)
Rush is known in the wrestling world as a jobber. He “does the job,” which in this case, means losing. BG East developed his persona. With the tagline “If I can’t beat ‘em, I’ll buy ‘em,” Rush is daddy’s little rich boy. “The ultimate spoiled brat,” he says. Rush is a self-identified pretty boy, too.
“That’s why guys love to watch me take a beating,” he says. “It’s like that scene in Fight Club, where Edward Norton says, ‘I felt like destroying something beautiful.’”
Unlike Kevin, Rush will meet with clients charging anywhere between $350-$500 for a meeting, which lasts no longer than an hour. “We just wrestle,” he says. “Nothing overtly sexual.” And whether or not he wins or loses all depends on the client’s preferences. “Some guys like a back and forth experience, whereas some guys just want to lose the entire time where some guys just want to win.”
“Honestly, I love it. It’s a ton of fun to wrestle and to create new and exciting content,” he says.
After a few matches with BG East, Rush met Muscle Master Kevin. MMK had just gotten a bankroller who was requesting 30 videos a month and paying handsomely for it. So he rented a house outside Boston and put a pro ring in it. “I was starting to make some real money and told my friends they could too.” Along with a few other bodybuilders, Rush saw the opportunity and moved into the house to begin shooting content. MMK then started recruiting more wrestlers from the gym, Craigslist, and friends of friends. That was the birth of his site, Muscle Domination Wrestling. As MDW became more successful, MMK was able to get indie wrestlers and other fetish wrestlers who’d been working at other sites.
“But even if the guy has no experience wrestling, it’s hardly ever a problem,” MMK explains. “We just lean into their strengths,” he says. That’s because MDW doesn’t just have traditional wrestling matches. They play into the various kinks of their viewers. “So if one guy has abs, we could do what’s called an ‘ab bash’ scene,” MMK says. “If someone is naturally verbal and dominant, we could have him do more a humiliation scene. If it’s two muscular bodybuilders with no wrestling experience, we could have them flex and do strength contests and finish it up by oiling each other up to emphasize their physique.”
(List of wrestling categories on MDW.)
If a guy is jacked but downright awful at learning moves, MMK does “Zzzs,” which is a sleeper match. “Basically, the bodybuilder takes a nap after I choke them, so all they need to do is pretend to be asleep.”
And all of this sells because every man watches fetish wrestling for their specific kink.
“There's no one archetypal fan,” MMK says, “So much so that someone who's buying from one category could not want anything to do with the other category.” One guy may buy clips because he likes the singlets, body odor, feet, seeing a hot man get pummeled, or any number of reasons.
“There’s a huge range of fantasies that clients approach me with, from the mundane, like ASMR, all the way to recreating a scene from an animated movie they grew up with,” MMK says.
David, 51, has been watching fetish wrestling for 20 years, and about three years ago, he discovered MMK and requested specific muscle worship content from him.
“I love to see a big bodybuilder against another big bodybuilder, and then the winner humiliates the loser. That really appeals to me,” he says.
(Screengrab from MDW).
Whereas it’s more about the physical form and the humiliation for David, it’s about frottage and touching for Ben Monaco.
Monaco always loved watching fetish wrestling, so he jumped at the opportunity during a Grindr hookup to wrestle another man. It turned out he was a natural, so his hookup set him up at BG East to start wrestling. Monaco never did it for the money. He simply loved wresting. But unlike David, whose desire to watch wrestling was more of a precursor to sexual arousal—more like sexual foreplay—for Monaco, wrestling is central to the desire.
“The way I’ve always seen it, there are two camps of wrestling,” he says. “There are the ones where it’s foreplay for sex, so you wrestle to then suck, fuck, and that stuff. Then there’s the other side where wrestling is the turn-on.”
Monaco identifies as a “side,” which exists outside the typical gay top, bottom, vers continuum. Whereas top and bottom focus on the roles you play during penetrative anal sex, a side doesn’t typically anal. “It’s all about the other stuff you can do sexually,” Monaco says. “Sides are bizarrely more common within the wrestling fetish community than you would think.”
That’s the beauty of fetish wrestling for viewers. “Everyone gets out of it what they want,” Monaco says.
As for the performers? Yes, they get the cash, but for men like Rush, it goes well beyond the paycheck. “Fetish wrestling saved me,” he says. “It gave me purpose, a sense of direction, and a reason to get out of bed in the morning.”