DUBLIN — A number of Brandon Iron’s friends and associates unofficially confirmed over the weekend that the male talent and producer, who had been MIA since March or April, had passed in Ireland, where he had relocated.
There are no verifiable details about the date, manner or circumstances of his sudden disappearance and death.
According to XBIZ sources, some of his friends and associates in the Los Angeles adult industry are currently in the process of preparing a memorial here to commemorate his passing.
The Canadian-born performer would have turned 51 last month.
The Size of the Fight in the Dog
Brandon Iron began performing sporadically in 1991 and joined the industry full-time in 1997.
This is how Iron’s official bio described his career choice: “He completed a degree in English, but quickly learned he preferred adult magazines over literature. After squandering several years in unfulfilling jobs, he pursued his pornographic passion and has no regrets.”
He was immediately recognized for the length and girth of his penis — he often photographed it next to diverse soda and energy-drink cans for comparison. His penchant for rough, gonzo-style scenes and over-the-top cum shots, two signature trends of the early 2000s, made him a popular performer back then.
He gained notoriety in the industry under the umbrella of Extreme Associates, and later on became one of the signature content creators for Red Light District andI Platinum X.
Self-conscious about his height, Iron’s favorite motto was “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”
“I’m a short man, and I just wanted to belong somewhere,” he said in an extremely revealing 2014 interview for Sal Genoa’s “Porn Director Podcast,” which should be essential listening for anyone interested in Iron’s life, career and psychology, and also for anyone looking to understand what happened to the DVD stars of a decade ago after the dawn of the tube sites.
“I just wanted to be part of a team,” Iron told Genoa. “Extreme Associates, Rob Black, they were the bad boys around 2000.”
After several years working under other companies, the performer/director broke free in 2007 with his own Brandon Iron Productions. Unfortunately, his timing could not have been worse, as the business model he had learned from his former bosses (DVDs plus paysites) was being decimated by the tube site revolution and “free” porn.
In the last 10 years, besides losing a considerable amount of projected income to the new realities of the industry and getting involved in endless fights to keep pirated content off the free sites, Iron had a series of personal situations that effectively removed him from the U.S.-based adult industry.
The passing of his mother in Canada, and his Kafkaesque problems with U.S. immigration authorities, were part of the reason for relocating to Europe, where he managed to continue his career into his 40s in Barcelona, Prague and Budapest.
The other crucial element of his move was that he fell in love with Sarah, a fan who had initially contacted him for a tryst (according to a close friend), and who eventually became his partner and the mother of his child. Iron, Sarah and their daughter lived together as a family until the relationship disintegrated sometime in the last few years.
Mr. Rollercoaster
XBIZ spoke exclusively with Steve Holmes, whose career as an in-demand transatlantic male talent coincided with much of Iron’s.
“I was shocked but not surprised when I heard the rumors a few weeks ago,” Holmes told XBIZ.
Holmes explained that he has known Iron “since my very first trip when I first arrived in the U.S. in 2002.”
"He approached me and shot me on this trip and since then we worked together many times and we shared office space for a few years when we were shooting for Platinum X Pictures.”
“I always called him ‘Mr. Rollercoaster,’” said Holmes. “One day he was the happiest man in the world — ‘I have the best life, I have sex with all these beautiful girls,’ and the next day he would say, ‘I can’t do this anymore, I’m selling my camera, I’m going to work at the warehouse.’”
A strange thing Holmes noticed was that even if Iron was not in one of his “low moods,” he would be generous to other people but relentlessly unforgiving to himself.
“He would say, ‘I don’t deserve this’ all the time,” explained Holmes. “He would punish himself — he’d take the train from Budapest to Hamburg, which would take three days, because he said ‘I don’t deserve the luxury of flying’!”
This also translated into his feeling about his status as a male talent A-lister.
“We were all a tight group of performers, back then — Erik Everhard, Manuel Ferrara, Lexington Steele, me,” said Holmes. “We all worked for each other, during the Red Light, Platinum X years.”
And When There's No Pearl Inside
"I first met Brandon in 1998 when I was working at Legend,” wrote Kick Ass Pictures producer and former journalist Mark Kulkis on Iron’s Facebook page after news of his death started spreading. “Brandon was going through one of his funks at time. Throughout his career, he would suffer these bouts of low self esteem where he was convinced he was no good and declare he was going to quit the business.”
By the time he vanished from social media, in late March, he was recycling old content featuring early appearances by superstars like Sasha Grey, Faye Reagan or Riley Reid, creating custom clips (some of them very personal and unusual), appearing on Chaturbate and managing two ManyVids stores: one for his trademark, ridiculously-huge-cumshot POV blowjobs and the other aimed at the gay market featuring himself masturbating alone.
The masturbation solos were branded as “stress relief” videos. “Hi! My name is Brandon and I have a lot of stress in my life,” he blurbed them. “This is how I deal with it.”
“Men of that generation, the DVD years, have a particularly hard time adapting to the new online reality,” a female performer whose career overlapped with Iron told XBIZ. She herself has successfully transitioned to the new business models, but she sees a lot of her former male colleagues struggling.
Part of the problem is a cultural change. Invariably Iron is described as well-read, very well-travelled, mild-mannered, intellectually curious — off-camera, that is.
"Brandon and I came into the industry at the same time," performer and activist Alana Evans told XBIZ. "I've known him for more than 20 years. He was one of the most respectful, kind and sweet men I've ever met."
His last Twitter post (the rest are robotic announcements that one of his ManyVids has sold, a grim occurrence that now follows any adult industry tragedy) is about money, or lack thereof. He had been promised a Lamborghini in the DVD days, he wrote, and now he might consider a job as a parking valet.
“When you come in and your balls are bigger than your brain, if you ooze confidence, the world’s your oyster,” he told Sal Genoa in 2014.
“And then, that oyster gets shucked, and when there’s no pearl inside, you take a good, deep look inside yourself.”
Back in March, he texted a friend, “I miss L.A. so much.” After the long Irish winter, he wrote, California seemed like “paradise.”
He posted pictures where he smiled sadly while holding his latest thrift-store finds. He was reading “The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Loving Kindness" by Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential” and a memoir by David Rieff, Susan Sontag’s adult son, mourning his famous mother. Iron had alluded online to the loss of his own mother, and his anger at her lack of proper end-of-life care in Calgary.
Through all that, he kept posting photos of himself in different European cities, always with the sad smile.
“I’ll go wherever Ryanair takes me,” he wrote.
