The unique flavor of Brian Brennan’s Latino Fan Club videos springs from the fact that he is making movies he likes. A virgin until he was 20, he had a three-year affair with his first lover which began in college in Buffalo, New York. In 1975 that lover left him for a woman, and the “Lutheran from a very repressive white-bread New England farm town environment” found himself single and on his own in post-sexual-revolution New York. “I had been living through him, I think, and I had to learn to take care of myself.”
Abandoning his job of teaching art history in a “pretty rough school,” he spent the next ten years as a muralist and as a graphics designer in advertising. “I alternated spells of two or three years of promiscuity with relationships which lasted a couple of years. My first lover was Jewish, my second Brazilian, and my third Puerto Rican, so I guess you might say I kind of evolved in that direction.”
Looking for porn videos to rent, he discovered that “all the gay companies were then in L.A. and there was only the very occasional Mexican in them, but very hard to find.”
An ardent movie fan since childhood, and possessor of a home video camera, he decided, “Maybe I could make my own. The porn companies were using three-quarter inch tape equipment, which I couldn’t afford to rent, but I took a chance and just taped using VHS. The quality wasn’t as good, but the advantage I had was that I would be tapping a market that was just waiting to see butch, macho, Latin men.”
He found his models at “a wonderful hustler bar in New York City called The Phoenix. The management made it a kind of clubhouse for straight young Latino men by letting them bring their girlfriends to hang out with them. It was very loose, a very friendly place. You were allowed to photograph or videotape their go-go competitions, and whoever bid the most could oil the guys up for once-a-week wrestling exhibitions.”
In 1985, Brennan shot his first video of solos, San Juan Six-Pack, and “taught myself editing.” To market it he did a photo shoot for Blueboy magazine and, instead of pay, accepted an ad in their pages for his video. “It didn’t sell very well, but I did another and it sold very well indeed. By doing business by mail-order through ads, I created a very specialized mailing list, customers who were looking not just for gay porno, but for Latin gay porno. By 1991, when a fan who was dating my roommate said he would be interested in the business, I was able to show him the ropes and market his work through my membership base. That fan was Ron Rico, who called himself Francisco Franco then. He did about a dozen movies for me before he went his own way and founded Big City Video.”
Asked what his best sellers are, Brennan muses, “It’s hard to say. Essentially, I have a list of men who are just waiting for anything I make." He’s done about 140 movies, but has “retired” his earlier, technically inferior titles, and currently keeps about 90 digitally-shot ones advertised for sale in his monthly newsletter and on his website.
Although he carefully reads any response from customers, his movies continue to reflect his own ambitions and his own tastes. “I’m going for a super-documentary feel, to get real, to try to capture the flavor of New York,” as in the three racially-mixed Parole Officer Perez features, about NYC social workers who let young perps on parole slide in exchange for dick.
There’s a minimum of fucking in his movies because, Brennan laughingly says, “When I started out I paid a lot of attention to what was going on in gay porn. At first you imitate, and then you slowly find your own style. I was attracted to trying to really bring out the personalities of these boys, and to leave all that rough charm the way it was. And I was thinking, ‘Just show what interests you the most,’ and I guess I’m just cock-centered, not that interested in anal. I put some fucking in, but every scene is not exactly the same as every other — you know: some kissing, some jacking, some sucking, and finally fucking — like you find in most porn. There’s always some role-playing going on, which I find humorous as well.”
Brennan’s depiction of that role-playing, his realism of setting and racial mix, and his capture of a true 21st-century erotic atmosphere made him an inevitable inductee into the GAYVN Hall of Fame — although he says, “Twenty years seems like a long time, but I’ve really been invigorated this year. I’m just getting started. If I make it another ten years, then I’ll be thrilled.”
