It's impossible to believe, but Michael Brandon swears it's true: It wasn't until after he came out of the closet, got divorced, and started a porn career in 1989 that he realized how un-average his dick was.
"Seriously. Because my sexual experience had been very limited up until then, and when I was sixteen and seventeen I was with my girlfriend and I didn't do a lot of sleeping around," he says. "I didn't take gym so I didn't have the whole locker room shower scene experiences that a lot of people grew up with. I didn't know that I was blessed in the way that I was blessed."
But the whispers on his first shoot — by his recollection a traumatic experience — clued him in. Soon enough, he had appeared in nine films before getting sidetracked. "I was just doing the movies kind of as a hobby," Brandon recalls. "But what I was doing as a regular job at the time was managing one of the gay bars in Orange County, Calif. And because I was fresh meat, because I was all twinkly-eyed, I very quickly got caught up in the drug scene. And that took me out of the loop for close to ten years."
His return came in 1999 (aided, like his initial work, by agent Johnny Johnston), accompanied by escorting work that helped supplement his income. Brandon quickly built a reputation as a hard worker, top-notch performer and — most impressively — a nice guy. It was that combination that made his induction into the Hall of Fame a no-brainer.
"I was honored, humbled. For somebody who's won as many awards as I have, some people would probably think, Oh, it's just another award. But it's the industry taking notice in an industry where there's hundreds and hundreds of people. To be picked out of that crowd, it was an honor. I'm very appreciative."
To date, Brandon estimates he's done somewhere between 150 and 200 scenes ("It's all been kind of a blur..."). His career hit high gear when he met Chris Ward at Raging Stallion Studios in 2001. After his first feature for the studio (Sexpack 6: Heavy Equipment), Ward helped finance Brandon's first star vehicle, Terms of Endowment, and helped launch his own line, Monster Bang, that was quickly merged with the Raging Stallion line as Brandon became a partner with the company.
"Raging Stallion really turned it into a career for me. I fell in love with Chris Ward's philosophy, the way that Raging Stallion treated models. On the flip side, they appreciated my, um, fuck power," Brandon says with a laugh. "With Terms of Endowment, what I wanted to do was invest in my own self and my performances. It was just a door that opened."
It led to back-to-back GAYVN Performer of the Year Awards, just two in a long line of industry citations he has piled up. (The most recent being the Free Speech Coalition's Lifetime Achievement Award, which he received on July 15.) He credits his recovery process from his years off as helping him gain a new respect and appreciation for his own path in life.
"All of the things that I've gone through are just character-building experiences that have brought me to today," he says. "One of the things I learned about myself in my recovery and through reading the escorting reviews on the Net was that I wasn't just a cock. And being a skinny, big-dicked, blue-eyed white boy, a lot of my identity was attached to my cock."
Along the way he learned more about himself. In particular, an on-set experience between scenes with Chi Chi LaRue stuck with him. "I was being arrogant, bouncing my hard-on around, and Chi Chi sat there behind the monitor and he just looked at me and he shook his head. He said, 'Michael Brandon, you just think it's all about your cock, don't you?' And that has stuck in my head. It was a moment of realization: Maybe there is something more there. And having Chi Chi LaRue, of all people, take notice of that, it really made an impact on me."
Brandon now spends a lot of his time behind the camera, producing every movie along with Ward and handling all pre-production duties with Raging Stallion partner Kent Taylor. He's also, for two years now, had a new non-porn passion: his boyfriend Marcos. "He has been amazing," Brandon says. "The boundaries that I've had to set within myself, kind of reeling in Michael Brandon a bit... I can still be the wild man, but I'm the wild man with him."
And how does he feel knowing that his career had been set in stone — that his name will forever remain at the top of the list as one of the classiest men and performers to work in the industry? "Just asking that question... it's bringing tears to my eyes," says a choked up Brandon.
"To the outside world, our industry is just sex. And a lot of people think that the job is easy, and it's not. It's a business. It's a very influential, thriving business that's going to be around even after the Bush era. But leaving my mark on this industry in what I feel is a positive way — and in what obviously the industry feels is a positive way — it's a very good feeling."
