Get ready for a week-long Brandon Iron festival. This is one of my favorite interviews, and I intend to present it more or less in its entirety, across the space of several days.

Brandon, a performer and upcoming director in the adult film industry, met me in late September of 2002 to tape this interview. For some reason we ended up staging the shoot oustside of a Ralph’s Supermarket in Sherman Oaks, as the odd peripheral noise will attest. I wanted to meet in a coffee shop, but the Starbucks we tried was even worse in terms of background blabber. We weren’t sure where the hell else to go . . .

Our discussion centers around Brandon’s “Slap Happy” video series, a controversial rough oral-sex series which he produced to great beratement in 2000 and 2001 for Rob Black’s Extreme Associates. At the time of our interview, the four tapes had garnered both high praise within the adult industry and serious damnation from without.

Brandon and I have stayed in touch since our initial meeting, and I’ve continued to find him one of the more fascinating people in my life.  He’s always amongst the smartest guys in the room. Brandon’s quick and funny, as well as remarkably perceptive. But what sets him apart from most (and what makes him an ideal interview subject) is that he’s mindblowingly open. I dealt him a host of difficult questions during our interview, and his responses were just so honest and uncalculated that it took me aback.

I can’t say that I agree with all, or even most, of what Brandon says, though I also admit, with some trepidation, that I’m a fan. I’m posting this interview, in fact, in an effort to generate more discourse around the difficult-to-broach topic of rough sex. But agreeing or disagreeing is not my point, here; instead, I merely want to express my pleasure in meeting a person who has the courage to express his unique point of view despite what it might portend for his image.

Within the confines of the porn industry, of course, claiming some form of showboat-misogyny might actually escalate your popularity, not diminish it, but I didn’t get the sense that Brandon was trying to do that. He was venting to me, and if it just so happened to come out bleakly dark, or sickly comic - just like every moment of his Slap Happy collection - well, then that’s just the way the chips fell. Brandon’s unblinking acceptance of his own fucked behavior, which many would leap to condemn as amoral or at least depraved, materializes as a sick yet weirdly honest beacon in a society beset by bullshit and addicted to guile.