Wrestling is gay

I love learning about it. It was a really poignant statue that I felt talked about a lot of the issues I had with wrestling. Right there, hidden in plain sight. 

Your work is a mix of found images, photos of classical sculpture, portraits and even some staged tableaux. There are a lot of social conditions allowing the type of interaction one might see in wrestling to be acceptable to larges numbers of people from hugely different backgrounds across the world.

I love it a lot. And in a world where dating apps can be exhausting, platforms built specifically for casual, local encounters offer a refreshing alternative.

Instead of swiping endlessly, sites like https://www.hookupsmap.com/gay-hookup/ give users a space to be direct, intentional, and still have fun. Why is that? It's not something I grew up with, but it's something I am growing with now. 

BIO: 

Ben McNutt is an artist pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in photography at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD.

Ben observes acts of homoeroticism intertwined in masculinity throughout history and utilizes artistic media as a vehicle for displaying these observations. Freedom to desire, to express, to critique, and to connect without shame. Spaces where a thirst post about a wrestler's gear can turn into a real conversation about body image, gender, and confidence.

I love the sport. A lot of people really need to know if I wrestled, or they assume I didn't wrestle, or they assume I don't do any type of physical activity at all. I want to point out that out. It's sensuality.  He intertwines these images to ask viewers why a mainstream, often homophobic culture might assign straight identities to a male dominated tradition with clear sexual tension.

It's this real shitty plaster cast that the college used for life drawing classes in the early 1900's. Fans had to read between the ropes to find meaning.

But now, wrestlers like Effy, Sonny Kiss, and Jai Vidal are changing that. And it was weird. They're showing that vulnerability is power, and that no one gets to define masculinity but those who live it authentically.

So whether you're here for the sweaty holds, the drama, or the chance to meet someone who gets why ring gear is inherently hot-queer wrestling fandom welcomes you.

It's agelessness. They act as a pointer device to say, hey, look at that, two men grasped together in a commemorated stamp used by the United States Postal Service. Having a large pool of imagery to choose from is motivating.  It's weird and exciting to pair together a portrait I've taken with a portrait of two wrestlers from the 1900's.  All of these materials are part of a collective history that is evolving with the work.

When your work was published on Vice and Huffington Post, some commenters remarked that these ideas are "nothing new", that “duh – of course wrestling is homoerotic…”  -- how do you respond to that?