No Holding Back

No Holding Back: The Brad Armstrong Story

My 20 Year Career As Straight Porn's Top Male Performer

Copyright 2004

Not every guy can make a living spraying his semen into the faces of gorgeous young models like I have for the past 20 years.

Whenever I go to conventions or speaking engagements to promote our films it always happens. Some guy will come up and pop "The Question" to me.

"How do I break into the business?"

And I am very honest with them when they ask me that.

"Son, you gotta have a great body, you have to have impressive equipment, and most of all, you have to ALREADY be used to making it with hot chicks."

See, that's what's gonna disqualify over 90% of these guys right there. They are guys who are still living in their parent's house, driving a beat up old car, dressed in torn T-Shirts and baggy shorts with beat up tennis shoes, are lucky if they can snag a ordinary looking girl and here they dreaming about getting it on with models like Nikki Anderson or Julia Taylor.

Those top-flight adult models are very PARTICULAR about who they work with. This ain't the 1970's anymore, when the business was still getting established and the girls didn't have my say. Back then models would show up on the set and be told, "Ok, here's the guy you're going to screw. Tough if you don't like it."

Today's top models hand-pick their co-stars, and no, before you ask, the size of the dick isn't that important to most of these girls. They like big cocks, don't get me wrong, and they love big muscles, but mostly what these girls look for is personality. Same as they would in a real-life relationship.

Think about it, if a girl can't stand a guy, if his breath stinks and his personality turns her off, she is gonna have to be ONE HELL OF AN ACTRESS to not let it show during the shoot. Because this business is about getting VERY up close and personal with each other.

Most of the guys that approach me with this question are about 20 pounds overweight, dressed like rap star wannabes, their personal grooming leaves much to be desired and they do not project that one characteristic that turns women on: confidence.

Remember the hot chicks at your high school and at college, if you went? What kind of guys did they date? Yeah, the guys were good looking but so what, there were dweebs and un-popular guys that were good looking. Did they dress nice? So do lots of nerds. What is it they project that the hot girls go for?

Masculinity. Confidence. They have their shit together. They are well groomed, too. Lots of guys today don't seem to think that matters, but it does.

All right, that was high school. What makes you think it's any different in the adult video business? Some guys seem to think if they land the job they get to sleep with a hot girl no matter what she feels about it.

Maybe at the low levels of the business, when people are breaking in, girls don't have much say and they do have to 'do it' with whoever they get paired with. But by the time you get up to the high quality product, like VCA, or Private, forget it. Those girls only work with who they want to work with.

And the directors and producers are NOT gonna make these top models screw a guy they don't like. The whole point of an adult vid is to turn the audience on. If the girl doesn't like the guy and it shows, how many copies of the video are they gonna sell? Very few.

Volcanic sex scenes are turned in by models who are genuinely turned on by each other. And if you ain't the type of guy that makes a Jenna Jameson or a Nikki Anderson wet just by standing next to them, you're gonna have a hard time getting to the top in this business.

What kind of guy gets paired with the top girls? Well he's gotta be in shape, number one. The fat guys can make a living at the lower level of the business, but they are scraping by. Most of them could make more money with a legitimate job. Directors don't want to pair a curvaceous, tanned babe like Julia Taylor with a guy that's pale, overweight and awkward looking. They want to pair an in-shape guy with their top models because that makes the sex look hotter, which is the whole point, of course.

Secondly, the guy has to have impressive equipment. Some guys get along with the 6 -7" inch cocks but like the fat guys they don't work much and they never reach the top of their trade. The average 'top' stud in the business has a 8-10" penis when erect. That's not just to discriminate against those not blessed; it's so people can see the guy's organ during the sex clearly. If a guy only has a thin 6 incher, people watching a girl slide up and down on that in the Cowgirl position aren't seeing a whole lot. But if you paired that same babe with me or Peter North, guys with big, easily seen 10" inchers, that changes the picture because now the audience can clearly see her impaling herself.

Thirdly, the guy has to be an expert with women. No fumbling, no awkwardness. He has to be a sexual athlete and have a personal touch. He can't be one of those guys in the cheap gonzo flicks that pays some teen amateur girl to blow him while he sits back and does absolutely nothing. The job of the porn stud is to drive the girl wild so her personality comes out during the scene, just as she's trying to drive him wild. You have to be a lovemaker, not a inert cock some girl is blowing or screwing.

Fourthly, the guy has to deliver on the cumshot. Some guys have every quality I've listed so far; they are in shape, they have big dicks, they know what they are doing with the girls......and then when it's time for the money shot nothing happens. Well, they climax, obviously, but it's hard to see. Which is not good. If a guy has spent the last 20 minutes of a video getting sucked and screwed by a gorgeous babe, and then she jacks him off into her waiting mouth, the entire scene has been building to that moment, so the guy has to deliver. When he orgasms, his semen has to be clearly seen and the more of it there is and the more forcefully it leaves him, the more exciting the cumshot is. Which is why guys who only produce a dribble or two don't work much.

Now fair or not, the audience equates a man having a powerful orgasm as the perfect conclusion to a hot sex scene. And what's the most graphic evidence that the man is having a powerful orgasm? Is it how loud he yells? Is it how much is body jerks and shakes? Nope. It's how much semen leaves his penis during the ejaculations and how forcefully that semen leaves it.

So, not surprisingly, the guys who go off like firehoses and who's semen is clearly visible as they ejaculate get more work than the guys who go off like a limp, barely turned on water hose that leaks clear, hard to see fluid.

The sixth and last thing is that you have to have control. And I mean CONTROL. Nothing ruins a scene that the director is trying to create like the male model shooting off early. Do that more than a few times and the phone will stop ringing. Believe me, if the word gets out that you're a trigger-happy fellow, your earnings will nose dive.

And most of the guys who want to work in this business just do not understand that you have to have the WHOLE package to make in this business these days since the competition is so fierce.

Hey, who wouldn't want to make a living making it with hot ladies like Sylzvia Lauren or Sandra Russo? But you have to fit the bill to even have a shot at getting your foot in the door.

Every time there is a casting call for new male talent, how many guys do you think show up? 10? 20? Last time VCA held one of those 200 guys showed up. They get to sit across from a table from the VCA reps and talk for about 5 minutes while they are looked over. Out of that 200, maybe 5 or 6 will get in the door and get to take their clothes for for some pictures. Out of that maybe 2 will get to the next level - a photo shoot with a new girl who is also coming into the business. If he does well with the photo shoots, he will then after a couple of months move on to videos. That doesn't mean he's got it made. He's still trying out. They may start him out with gonzo type flicks with little set up and no acting ability required, or if they think he has promise he may get second billing in a shoot. But most big productions companies like VCA or Private will only add about 4 or 5 male models a year. That's out of about 1,000 guys that show up to try out.

So I admit I get tired of some guy with pimples, who is fat, out of shape, and couldn't get a date in a singles bar full of hot chicks, coming over to me and asking who they need to talk to about 'breaking in' to adult vids.

I try to be polite, but one point I definitely make is that if they aren't screwing hot girls right NOW, forget doing it for the cameras, because if these guys ever got Nikki Anderson's face close to their dicks they would go off in about 3 seconds.

I got into the business by accident. That's the way it's been for most of the top guys. I was going to be a pro football player. Peter North wanted to be a bodybuilder. David Perry was shooting for a career as a male model for the fashion industry.

Peter was asked to do a magazine layout by a guy that saw him at the beach. David had a career going in Europe and then hit a wall and took a magazine shoot to pay the bills. Me? I was UCLA's top linebacker prospect of 1984.........and then I broke my right leg in my first game so badly I still walk with a slight limp today. The doctors took one look and said my playing days were over.

Since I was on a scholarship to UCLA to play football, one of the first things that happened is that I lost the scholarship and was stuck in L.A. after I dropped out of school. I tried to work a few jobs but nothing felt right. The most I could find was a job for $7.00 an hour working as a clerk in a store. I could pack up and go back home to Texas but I knew there was nothing waiting for me there. I was 18 years old, my whole life ahead of me, and already a dream I had been working towards since junior high had just died an ugly death.

So I'm asking around the small group of friends I had made on the UCLA campus before I dropped out about any good work, and one of them, a really cute co-ed I had had my eye on before the untimely demise of my football career told me about a modeling agency looking for new talent. She mentioned a little shyly that she had done some nude modeling for them, and she had gotten some good money for it. She told me with my good looks and physique from years of bodybuilding and football, I would be a natural.

So, out of prospects and stuck in a dead end job, I show up at the South Talent Agency in Central LA. It's a little storefront place, and what they do there is they don't really produce any photo shoots; it's an introductory level agency that farms aspiring models out to photography studios and production companies.

I go in, meet the nice lady behind the counter, and fill out a questionnaire. She takes some Polaroids of me, all the basic front and side shots, then asks if I'm interested in the nude/adult modeling work. And for a moment, I almost said no, then thought what the hell and said yes. So five minutes later I'm standing stark naked in front of this wall while this lady, who looks alot like my high school librarian, with short gray hair and horn-rimmed glasses, takes pictures of me from different angles.

Then she asked me a question that completely caught me off-guard.

"Can you get an erection for me?" she said, matter of factly while standing behind the camera.

"Uh, sure no problem."

Now I wasn't a novice, OK, I'd had my share of girls in high school and college, but this was the first time I ever had to get it up under these circumstances, with no hot lady nearby.

I used my hand and I think she was impressed by how fast Mr. Happy got to full mast. My dick is just over 9 1/2 inches long, and she took some shots so the length of it was clearly evident.

She took a few pictures and then said "Ok, we're done."

I put my clothes back on, and that was it. She told me I was 'on file' now and they would begin sending my pics out to the productions companies to see if any of them would bite. I left and 3 weeks went by and I forgot all about it.

Then I got a call from South about a photo shoot that required a male model and the photographer had liked my pics, so he was interested in meeting me.

On my lunch break from my clerk job I drove out and met him at the South agency. He was a fat guy with a handlebar moustache, his name was Arnie Fegley and he was one of the top adult photographers in the world.

He was freelancing stuff these days to the top Europe hardcore magazines and making a ton of money and it just so happens he was looking for a muscular male model with a big cock. Most of the guys he was having to use, he didn't really like. He was one of the first guys to get the REALLY attractive models to do hardcore. It was 1984, you know, and not to insult the ladies that worked the industry on the East Coast, but it wasn't until porn bloomed in California you started to see gals like Ginger and Amber Lynn and Christy Canyon doing it.

A new generation of really attractive, tanned and talented models was taking the adult world by storm in the early 1980's and Arnie was one of the first guys to realize that the thin, pale, pimply guys with small dicks would no longer fit the bill. For gorgeous tanned women you needed handsome tanned men. And he found what he was looking for when he contacted the South agency and asked them if they had any body-builder types with good equipment.

They told him they did, but this new client was so new to the business a personal meeting would be best beforehand instead of just sending me out to the studio.

Arnie and I hit it off from the first time I walked into the room. Turned out he was a rabid football fan and went to alot of UCLA games, so he was somewhat familiar with the program. He remembered the stories in the sports sections of the local paper how disappointing it was that the Bruin's top linebacking prospect, Brad Armstrong, was knocked out of football without ever playing a full game.

He told me loved the pics, and asked a bit about my sexual history, the blood tests and all that stuff. I indicated I would be willing to take all the tests, and that satisfied him. He gave me the address of his studio and asked me to be there the following Monday. He told me if he liked my work, he would use me regularly, since he had a whole new bevy of hot models coming in and he needed male models to use with them.

I took the tests at a nearby clinic, turned in the results to the agency, and then waited for Monday to arrive.

I parked my beat up old Chevy Prizm out front next to some gleaming sports cars and had a self conscious moment before steeling myself and going through the doors.

Three hours later I was completely naked, covered in sweat, sitting in a chair, my hands spastically gripping the armrests as my twitching cock sprayed out a huge load of semen all over the face of a sexy brunette model named Lana Clarkson while Arnie's camera flashed away. She stroked my cock insistently with both her hands, determined to get every last spurt she possibly could out of me, and by the 6th spurt she was also giggling in glee.

You see, Lana was the first girl among the thousands I've worked with to discover just what a powerful prostate gland I've been blessed with. By the time my orgasm was over five distinct streaks of white syrup ran over her pretty face from chin to forehead.

I heard Arnie gasp in amazement, and Lana herself was gazing up at me in awe as the surges continued. My dick spouted 9 times, then settled down to oozing out some dribbles of syrup. Lana took my cock-tip back in her mouth and sucked sweetly away as I writhed in the chair and the flash and pop of the cameras going off filled the air.

Her face was an incredible sight, with my hot milky semen glistening and dripping from it, and Arnie made sure he got some good closeups as she playfully posed with my dick, licking it, sucking it and nuzzling it.

Finally Arnie called the action to a halt and handed Lana a towel. She grinned up at me and said, "I guess this is one time I really DO need a big towel for this!" and proceeded to wipe my discharge off of her face.

Meanwhile Arnie was grinning from ear to ear. He knew a gold mine when he saw it, and as soon as Lana and I had our clothes back on he sat us down for a talk.

I was still pretty light-headed from the intense orgasm. It had been a thrill, my first adult shoot, meeting this sexy lady in the office with a handshake and a peck on the cheek, and then moving to the studio before the cameras and spending over a hour and a half sucking and screwing the daylights out of each other. On that final suckoff I was so excited one of my spurts of semen had arched up completely over Lana's face, to land on the carpet behind her.

"Ok kids, here the deal." Arnie began. "Thanks to the influence of the Europeans, mostly Swedish Erotica, the facial cumshot is going to be a big thing. Guys want to see gorgeous girls finishing their men off right into their face, and that means the guys are going to have to deliver when they cum. And from what I saw here a minute ago, Brad, you have exactly what Vivid is looking for."

"Glad to hear that." I responded.

Lana was nodding at me too. "I've been with some of the top talent in this business, and boy, you more than blow those guys away."

She gave my shoulder a good squeeze. I was looking at her, still remembering the intense pleasure of my recent orgasm and how erotic her face had looked covered in my semen, and my cock gave a big, pleasurable twitch in my jeans.

"So you guys think I can make a living at this?" I asked tentively.

Arnie rolled his eyes. "Brad, you will make thousands of dollars. You just made $200 today, and I'm going to get on the phone with Marc Richards at Vivid and have him send a new girl over her on Wednesday morning. We'll shoot again then. And I'll pay you the going rate of $200 for each day's work. In the meantime, here's your checks."

He handed me a check, and sure enough it was for two hundred bucks. I had an ephiphany at that moment. I made about $200 a week working at my present job, and here I'd equaled that in less than 3 hours 'work' with this pretty girl.

If I got another $200 on Wednesday doing all this again with a different girl, that would make $400 in one week.

Lana took her check and grinned at me. "You're gonna be real popular with the other Vivid girls Brad, once I tell them what a swell time we had here today!"

After she left, I hung around the studio because it was my day off and I had nothing better to do. Besides, I wanted to ask Arnie some questions. He had another photo shoot getting ready to go, and he told me I could watch and learn. This one was between another new guy, named Jon Dough and a girl who went by Dana Lynn.

Jon was a big strapping guy with black hair and a huge cock, just a shade larger than mine. Dana was a nubile blonde with a cute face and, as it turned out once Arnie turned her loose on Jon, the nature of a minx in heat.

Their scene was shot with different scenery than the one Lana and I had for ours. Dana dressed like a cheerleader and Jon was the football guy in the letter jacket.

"How many girls does Vivid have in their modeling stable?" I asked Arnie as he snapped pictures of Dana blowing Jon's big member.

"Right now about 30." Arnie said, moving around to find good angles as the couple on the bed obligingly keep going at each other.

As Jon was pounding the moaning Dana's shapely ass I whispered another question, as Arnie adjusted one of the lighting bulbs suspended over the bed.