Brian-Mark likes octopus, baked chicken, and macaroni and cheese. Given the choice of going to a gay bar or attending the opera, he’ll take Aida over Abba. His favorite color is purple, and he’s crazy about ornithology. His taste in reading runs toward novelists from the 20s and 30s–Fitzgerald, Somerset Maugham, Edna Ferber. More than anything, though, he loves fucking on film, barebacking on film, jacking off on film, sucking cock on film. “What won’t I do? In front of the camera, probably nothing. I feel safest there.”
Brian-Mark quickly shucks his clothes, leaving on a black leather cap and his trademark black leather boots. “I always have on boots when I’m having sex,” he says. “I think it’s hot.” He jumps down from the box where he has been sitting and dabs at his left nipple with a Kleenex. “I wish it would stop bleeding,” he says, irritably. “It’s oozing a lot.” A doctor in Joliet who “specializes in a lot of things like this” has injected KY Jelly into his chest to puff it up for the photo shoot. The effect “probably only lasts a day,” Brian-Mark explains. “It gets absorbed into your body pretty quickly, or you sweat it out. All the boys in LA are doing this.”
“Put both your hands on your ass,” he directs. “But my dick’s not hard,” Brian-Mark protests. Ron instructs him to correct the situation, and Brian-Mark obliges. “I can get hard like that,” he says, snapping his fingers. “I’m known for that in the business. It’s a joke, ‘Oh, the wind changed direction–Brian-Mark’s dick’s hard.’”
Brian-Mark is the fifth of six boys; his parents met while his father was stationed in South Carolina during World War II. They met at a dance; Chester, who hailed from Iowa, was 31, and Lou Ellen was 17 and flirtatious. At one point he said to her, “If you marry me, we’re going back to Iowa,” and that’s what they did, settling on a 160-acre farm outside of Holstein, population 1,000, which Brian-Mark describes as “north of nowhere.”
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Life on the farm followed the typical routine of chores at sunup and sundown, says Brian-Mark. “My friends who know me well cannot imagine that I used to clean shit out of hog houses and hunt for eggs in the henhouse.” He was dramatic and emotional, which, “in Iowa, didn’t fit in very well.” He remembers crying hysterically when his 4-H hogs were sold. When he was around seven or eight, a neighbor took Brian and his brothers to the town swimming pool. In the locker room, he saw “the Croxel brothers–and they were big, beefy football boys–in the shower, and I thought they were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. I just thought they were pretty, like looking at a lovely piece of artwork. I didn’t know what that meant.”
He graduated from Midland in 1978 with a double degree in theater and secondary education and taught high school for a year and a half in Buffalo Center, Iowa. But he found the atmosphere stifling and moved to Omaha “to be a big ol’ homosexual in the big city. I thought Omaha was big stuff then.” Almost immediately he met his first real boyfriend, Gordon. By this time he’d come out to his mother, who recalls that visit with her son. “We were driving and he said, ‘Mom, I’m different,’ and I said, ‘Of course you are, you’re not like everybody else,’ and he said, ‘I’m gay,’ and I said, ‘I understand.’ We came back to where we were staying and he slept on the couch, and the next morning I got up and looked at him. He looked the same, he was breathing the same, he didn’t look any different. That was my acceptance at that moment.”
Sometime around 1987, Ron, who had been working as a product photographer, started doing pornographic photo shoots, concentrating on the leather scene. He’d done figure work in college and received compliments for it, so “I tried it like I did any professional work,” he says. In 1991 he got his first magazine cover, for Drummer. In 1993 a friend of Ron’s from Male Hide mentioned that Brian-Mark would be a good subject and agreed to set up a session between the two. “I thought he was going to be really difficult,” Ron recalls. “He had all these restrictions and would only agree to a half-hour session. I thought, ‘This is going to be a nightmare.’”
