CHAPTER TEN -- KRISTEN BJORN ON BOTH SIDES OF THE CAMERA
(Did You Sleep With the Models?)
I met Kristen Bjorn in a world that was soon to vanish, the world of gay San Francisco before the devastation of AIDS. I know from my diary entry dated August 26, 1982, a Thursday, that our meeting took place on Monday night, August 23, at the home of Dennis Forbes. Dennis was, and is still, something of a renaissance man. A regular contributor to our magazines, he used the name Fred Bisonnes for his model photography -- an anagram of his real name. But more about Dennis in a later chapter. For now, a few lines from the diary.
"A six-day trip to L.A. and San Francisco, where so many of our contributors live. During this get-acquainted visit, I explained recent changes in Modernismo policies and practices to a number of them, new and not so new, who are almost uniformly eager to work with us.
"My favorite of them all is Dennis Forbes -- solid, full of slow-moving energy, who works constantly and seamlessly at his photography, illustrations, and writing, while helping to run Falcon Studio. He is an Earth Father type -- patient, steady, sets forth his thoughts in measured speech. The night of my arrival he cooked a vegetarian dinner for me, Robert McQueen, who is editor of the Advocate, and a model we used recently in Mandate. Dennis and his partner, Michael, live on Golden Gate Ave. in an Italianate single-family Victorian built in 1876 which obviously survived the earthquake with no harm done."
Fast forward to the present. Dennis now lives in North Carolina with a different partner, Robert McQueen died in 1989, and the young man just setting out on his career would soon become famous under the name Kristen Bjorn. Before that, however, he appeared in three videos produced by Falcon. Then his interest shifted to making videos rather than appearing in them, and within a few years he was internationally famous. As producer-director of some 200 films, he is known to every gay man who ever watched an erotic movie.
By 1985 he was such a brand name that I ran a lengthy interview with him in the November issue of Mandate that year. The blazing cover blurb proclaimed: "EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: THE KRISTEN BJORN STORY." Since he had moved to Brazil almost three years earlier, I mailed my questions and we completed the interview by phone.
He was not yet Kristen Bjorn at the time of his first appearance in our magazines, which took place in the September 1982 issue of Mandate -- an eleven-page spread, almost one-tenth of the issue, with photography by Fred Bisonnes/Dennis Forbes. Titled "Arm's Length," we might also have called it "En Garde!" since he is posed as a fencer with a few stitches of protective clothing (none below the waist) and he wields either a foil, an épée, or a sabre. Fencing aficionados will know the sport's finer points, although I don't.
A black and white photo opens the layout before we reach the color page shown above. In that first picture his face is covered by a fencing mask with attached protective bib that covers the chest. The rest of him almost outmeasures the foil -- or is it the sabre -- oh hell, call it his sword and make a dreadful pun. One thing is certain: readers — lookers -— didn't give a damn about correct terminology, proof being the feeding frenzy caused by this layout. An avalanche of letters, one of which I ran in the November letters column:
"Dear Mandate:
You have done it again -- you've scooped your competitors by running an imaginative photo essay with an unusual theme. I'm referring to 'Arm's Length' in the September issue. I thought that sword was so sexy, and the man who's ready to use it is quite a dashing musketeer as well.”
As a model, he appeared once more in Mandate, this time a centerfold in April 1983 -- a still from one of his three Falcon videos. I don't recall which one, whether Boots, Beach Rovers, or Malibu. In the June 1985 issue of Playguy we ran a layout from one of his earlier modeling sessions. There he ended his career as model and took up photography fulltime. From then on, we used his work more than that of any other photographer or studio.
I recently asked him about the early career of Kristen Bjorn, and this is what he said. "I was paid $500 for the first two videos. My costars Jon King and Sky Dawson were paid $1,000 each. Chuck Holmes [owner of Falcon Studio] told me he needed to see whether I was a crowd pleaser or not. For my last one, I asked for $1,000 and Chuck agreed to it."
I asked whether he appeared before the cameras again. "I only appeared as a director/producer in a couple of documentaries which I made in the early 2000s called Making It With Kristen Bjorn and The Agony of Ecstasy. Since so many people asked me what it was like to make porn, I wanted to make serious documentaries about the production of two of my films. However, these documentaries upset a lot of people who claimed that I had ruined the experience of porn for them. I realized then that people do not actually want to know how porn is made. What they want is a confirmation of their own fantasies about it." (Both documentaries are available from kristenbjorn.com.)
This assessment is astute not only regarding films, but magazine layouts as well. As noted earlier, no one really cared whether I slept with the models; they wanted, as Kristen says, confirmation of their own fantasies.
I've often been asked how erotic models are named. While a few insist on keeping their real names, most choose a pseudonym that sounds masculine, contemporary, everyday -- Jack, John, Chad -- or memorable for being uncommon. For instance, Kristen Bjorn. I have two versions of his naming. Dennis Forbes, in a recent conversation, said that he invented the name, perhaps because of the new model's blond hair and Nordic features. Kristen himself said that the name was created by Falcon Studio "which, at the time, preferred model names that sounded similar to the names of famous people. I was told that my name was inspired by Bjorn Borg, the Swedish tennis player. They thought I looked something like him."
These two versions do not contradict each other. Dennis Forbes was involved in many aspects of Falcon, so it's likely that he did indeed invent the name, based on that of the celebrity sportsman. Bjorn Borg, incidentally, was born in 1956, a year before Kristen Bjorn. His career lasted through the 1970s and until his retirement in 1982.
My next question was, "Why did you cut short your performing career? When I was editing the magazines, I was frequently asked, ‘Do you know Kristen Bjorn?’ and ‘When is Kristen Bjorn going to make another film?’ You had a huge fan base from the start."
"After visiting Brazil for a couple of months in 1982," he said, "I moved there six months later. Since there was no gay porn industry in the country at that time, I didn't have opportunities to perform, and that was the end of my modeling career. I probably would not have pursued it in any case. I was more interested in working behind the camera. I had studied photography for several years, and since the age of fifteen my dream was to work as a photographer for National Geographic. I loved traveling, and I loved photographing people. I was not particularly interested in porn per se, but I saw it as an opportunity to make my dream come true."
His travel articles in Mandate, accompanied by evocative photographs, show his versatility and his taste in selecting farflung locations. Among the places he wrote about were Peru, Buenos Aires, and South Africa. The latter country, where apartheid stood as official policy until the early 1990s, proved controversial as a destination piece. I heard protests from one colleague and from several readers. I felt, however, that it was important to spotlight repressive states, especially vis-à-vis gays and lesbians affected by unjust laws. Kristen's South Africa travel article ran in September 1985.
In it, he views the country panoramically. His month-long travels took him from Johannesburg, where he was commissioned to do a fashion shoot for a clothing company, to Cape Town, Durban, on to the so-called "black homeland" of Bophuthatswana, and finally to Landolozi, a private game reserve in the northern Transvaal. Viewed from the twenty-first century, this article is like a historical snapshot taken when AIDS was "a new phenomenon in South Africa -- fourteen cases had been reported" at the time of Kristen's visit in early 1985. "There are many gay clubs in Jo-burg," he wrote, "and they are usually racially mixed. It is not uncommon to see gay men of different races groping one another. Homosexuality, according to the South African government, is illegal but usually not prosecuted. There are many attractive men in the country, although the gays don't look as pumped up as in the United States." Proving his point is the blond youth he photographed on the beach at Cape Town and whose pictures we ran following the travel article. The model is tan all over with a natural build that seems unmodified by free weights or Nautilus. He was also our cover man for that September issue.
Kristen's youthful dream of a career in photography leads to a flashback. I asked him to put the record straight about his early years; like all famous people, he is the subject of differing narratives. Born in London on October 12, 1957, he was three years old when the family moved to Washington, D.C., where his father was posted as a diplomat. "My mother was the daughter of Russian emigrants," he said. "Although she spoke Russian, she unfortunately never taught me more than a few words." In later years, he learned Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, and a working knowledge of other languages.
Here I quote from my 1985 Mandate interview with Kristen. "I'm the youngest of a litter of four. I have two sisters and one brother. Because of the age difference between us, they had already left home by the time I was twelve and we rarely saw each other after that. My parents divorced when I was fifteen; both have since remarried. We write to each other on occasion, but we haven't seen each other for many years. Even though the women in my family know that I'm gay, I haven't told them about my film work; I'm sure they would not approve. They know that I work as a fashion photographer, but I haven't told them about the erotic photography."
Growing up in and around the District of Columbia, where politics hold dominion over all, was unexciting for him owing to "the lack of culture and diversity." Following high school graduation, he left the U.S. and traveled widely in Europe and Asia. After settling in Spain for a time, he moved to Mexico. In 1979, he visited San Francisco and decided to stay. For two years he attended San Francisco State University, supporting himself as a waiter and as a salesman in a natural food store. Increasingly drawn to healthy living -- "I learned how good a fit body feels" -- he studied various forms of body work, including Swedish massage, shiatzu, reflexology, and hydrotherapy. "I worked as a masseur in a gym," he recalls, "and later I began a private practice in my own studio with clients sent to me from gyms and dance studios all over the city."
Which brings us full circle to that dinner table on Golden Gate Avenue in August 1982 and my first meeting with the future Cecil B. DeMille of gay erotica. Had I met him in a context less animated by dinner-table conversation, I might have shared Dennis Forbes's recollection that Kristen Bjorn had "a slight accent which I couldn't place, plus a speaking manner that didn't use verb contractions." It isn't that he never uses contractions; rather, he speaks carefully, deliberately, in a soft voice that is nevertheless authoritative. Whatever accent one might hear is probably childhood residue from his father's British speech and his mother's Russo-British inflections. It's a non-accent that almost becomes an accent. Like the British, and unlike Americans, he understates; listen carefully or you'll miss his droll remarks and sly observations. Recalling our correspondence and conversations, I think of his wide-awake intelligence. In other words, he himself is like a camcorder that sees and hears all.
In Brazil, where he lived from 1982 to 1990, he worked as a fashion photographer, and much of his erotic photography has the ambience of a fashion shoot -- minus the fashion. When he took up gay filmmaking he blended fashion-industry sensibility with the eroticism of nude males. He took his models to the rain forests of South America, to famous beaches from Miami to Sydney, to the high Andes, and posed them there like fashion models. If you switched the gender from male to female, and added designer dresses, daring two-piece swimsuits, jewelry and shoes, you'd find yourself almost in the pages of Vogue or Glamour.
By contrast, others in the industry remained safely predictable. Colt, for instance, typically used a single color background for its muscular models, or posed them over motorcycles or in high-tech industrial settings. Other studios went for boyish models in backyard swimming pools, reclining on beds, or twirling a lasso like a naked Roy Rogers. Many of these could be said to create static objects of sexual fantasy with their models. Kristen Bjorn, on the other hand, packaged and sold his own fantasy just as Givenchy and Dior and Chanel sold theirs. And the Bjorn look became wildly popular.
This would not have happened, of course, if he didn't have an exceptionally good eye. I've heard his work -- still photography and later videos and DVDs -- described as coolly stylized; as both beautiful and hot; as metrosexual; as international vs. the look of L.A., San Francisco, or New York. Given that roughly half of his models, South American and European, describe themselves as straight or bisexual, they often bring a different sexual flavor to a Bjorn project, especially his films. His models never seem bored, hesitant, jaded, or used up, as they often do in the work of lesser craftsmen. The Bjorn product -- vibrant sensuality conveyed by technical brilliance -- results from directorial expertise and perfectionism.
Watching him behind the camera as both director and videographer, you know, as he himself surely knew early on, that he was born to make erotic pictures. Had this genre not been available, he would have found another. Or, given his serious mind and intellectual interests, he might have become a professor of philosophy...or an archeologist, a physician, an environmentalist.
I doubt that any other maker of erotic films could match his work ethic. "When filming," he says, "each production day lasts up to twelve hours. That means that during the shoot, the models and crew do practically everything together." That's to avoid cluttering the set with additional crew who might inhibit some of the models. Therefore, Kristen Bjorn and his production assistant -- who also does lighting and still photography -- handle all technical aspects. Models are expected to pitch in. They help move equipment and props, pack and remove the same after the shoot. Everyone eats together and on remote location shoots all bunk together. The models nap between takes, and often play like young boys to ward off boredom during the long work day. Kristen usually spends four days per scene, and since many productions have eight scenes -- often shot on different locations -- cast and crew spend about two weeks together, sometimes longer.
"Attraction between the models usually evaporates after the first day of production," says Bjorn. From then on, according to the models, sexual fun for the camera is hard work.
After his years in Brazil, Kristen Bjorn lived for a time in Miami and then in Montreal before choosing Barcelona. There, he lives in the Barrio Gótico, which he describes as "the oldest part of what was the walled Roman city of Barcino, founded in 2 A.D. There are some Roman ruins left, but most of the buildings date from the eleventh century up to the nineteenth. My apartment is on the top floor of a nineteenth-century building on the edge of the Mediterranean."
I wish I had heard the following anecdote from his lips rather than via email, for without his FM radio voice -- cultivated, controlled, relaxed -- I suspect a loss of nuance, especially overtones of dry, ironic comedy. The story begins in 1986, when he returned from Brazil to San Francisco on a visit. He was the house guest of Dennis Forbes and it was then that Dennis encouraged him to expand his career by adding video to his still photography. "To get started," Kristen said, "I recorded a mockup interview with Dennis in his study. I asked him questions, and recorded his cat, his parrot, then I panned the magazine tear sheets attached to the walls: naked men with erections, men on their knees with butts stretched open. His published magazine work.
"Before returning to Brazil, I flew to New York to meet up with Sergio, my Brazilian boyfriend at the time. While there I called my mother, who lived in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. She asked me please to come and visit. Sergio said, 'Let's go! I want to meet your family.'
"So I asked, ' Can I bring a friend? ' Although I came out to my family when I was twenty-two, seven years later my mother, and particularly my stepfather, were not comfortable with my sexuality. By the time we reached Washington, my family had concluded that Sergio was actually a boyfriend. Upon arrival, my mother told me that my stepfather was so upset he planned not to speak to me. But the next morning he apologized. Worried that Sergio and I would somehow embarrass him, he decided his fears were unfounded.
"To celebrate our visit, he made a barbecue in the back yard. I took out my new camcorder, rewound the tape, and started to record my parents at the grill. Soon neighbors were peeking over the fence, since video cameras were so uncommon then. About ten neighbors came to the cookout and I recorded them eating hamburgers. Then I invited them inside to watch themselves on the TV screen. Everyone laughed and shouted at the novelty of seeing themselves on television. My mother was eating a hamburger onscreen when suddenly: a pan from Dennis's cat and parrot to those magazine tear sheets in his study -- naked men with hard-ons, ass shots, butt cheeks. Sergio said in Portuguese: ' Turn it off! '
"Everything moved in slow motion before I could do so. One woman screamed, 'Where was that? ' My mother replied in the sternest tone, 'It wasn't in this house! ' My stepfather was so mortified that he really did stop speaking to me.
"Sergio and I took the next train to New York and from there back to Brazil."
To this point I've written about "classic" Kristen Bjorn -- that is, his work from the early eighties through the first years of the new century. Around 2010, however, everything changed for him and for the industry in general. I asked him for a rundown, and this is his report.
"I've directed and/or produced about 200 DVDs to date. The whole concept of porn films has changed a lot in the last twelve years. It used to be that VHS and DVD sales made up almost one hundred percent of my income, and the website was mostly there to sell VHS tapes or DVDs via mail order. DVD sales are now a small fraction of what they once were, and the website memberships generate most of my income. However, my income is about eighty percent less than it was in 2010, and my budgets for filming have reduced even more. Up until ten years ago, I shot three films per year, and each film required six to eight weeks. Each scene was shot over four days, plus an additional day for still photography. It was important to produce photo sets for the magazines, because that was my source of advertising for the films. The magazines actually stopped paying for photo sets years earlier, because they could get them for free from the studios in exchange for ads.
"The way people consume porn via internet changed everything. They don't want to watch two-hour films on their computers or smart phones. So, we began shooting individual scenes, which are later compiled onto DVDs. The way we shoot now has also changed. Instead of five days to shoot a scene and do still photography, it is now all done in about six hours. I used to rent big houses in remote locations to shoot in and to accommodate cast and crew. That also meant renting vans and hiring a chef. Now we shoot in apartments in city centers, most often in Madrid and Barcelona, which is much cheaper.
"The cost of making films has also decreased. Up until ten years ago, I was shooting with analog cameras. The cost of the professional camera equipment was so expensive that it was more practical to rent it than to buy. Renting two Betacam cameras and equipment for a six-week shoot was about $10,000. Models were flown in from other continents and they were paid up to ten times more than they are now. Even editing was much more expensive back then. To have the Betacam tapes digitized for editing cost thousands of dollars. The editing studios with Betacam equipment charged at least $100 per hour, and were hired for several days to edit a film. Cost did have an advantage: not everyone could afford such filmmaking, nor did they know how to use the equipment.
"These days, professional digital cameras are much cheaper and footage can be edited on any laptop. We now work with about ten percent of the budget we formerly had. It's not as financially rewarding anymore."
I could fill many more Kristen Bjorn pages were it not for space limitations. (I will do so in future Substack postings.) For now, I recommend to fans The Films of Kristen Bjorn, a 145-page interview with KB by the erotic film performer Jamoo (not a Bjorn player, however) that was published in 1997 by Companion Press in California. The book is generously illustrated with stills from his films up to the date of publication. Although now out of print, copies turn up online. Even better: to view and purchase Kristen Bjorn products, visit kristenbjorn.com, a spectacular website that's surely tops in its genre. Among the unusual features: click "Support and More" to learn how you too can "Become a Porn Star."
Thanks for this, Sam. It became obvious early on that KB had a killer combination of a keen eye and masterful technique in the films he created (which set his work on a much higher professional level than most gay photographers of the era). While much of the gay art focused on leather/macho imagery was a fairly new and radical phenomenon, the most wildly creative visions came from James Bidgood, whose work was remarkable considering his barebones budget.