When my byline first began appearing in Adult Video News in 1995 or ’96, David Forest was one of the first agent-publicist-manager types to track me down and pitch stories about his roster of male porn performers.

One of my early profiles centered on Chad Conners, then at the height of his bubble-butt, virile-jock-next-door fame. I drove out to Forest’s apartment at the foot of the Hollywood Hills for an interview, then accompanied Mr. Conners and his manager to a nightclub appearance in West Hollywood. The story appeared in print a few months later.

We repeated this formula many times over the years. There was a memorable, erotically charged interview for the now-defunct HX Magazine (out of New York) with Jeff Palmer in the late ’90s at Forest’s condo in North Hollywood, for example. And contentious negotiations for a Ken Ryker cover and profile for Unzipped Monthly (also defunct) in the early double-aughts.

All this by way of saying: We have a history together. So when he offered to talk up his stint as a male madam between 1981 and 1996, I went for it. Stay tuned for Part Two of our talk shortly.

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JCA: I have to ask why you’re wanting to tell this story now.
Forest: Why? I want to do a book and I need to let some of this get out there. Everything we talk about is fact. I have no intention of making up anything.

JCA: How did clients find you, back in the day?
Forest: I advertised, and I still do. I have to be very specific about how I word everything. Back in the day, they would see [my advert] in The Advocate, their “Pink Pages,” years and years ago. Then it became Advocate Classified. This was the ’80s and early ’90s. So these celebrity types would call me right out of the Advocate or they had a “friend” or a current client of mine that gave them my number. Divine called me from the Advocate ads. They had a section for every corner of the country.

JCA: What did you call your service?
Forest: Back then it was called “Brad’s Buddies and Superstars.” This was when I was done with the music business, the summer of ’81. It was just the Advocate. Back then it cost $10 for the little Southern California “Pink Section” ad—with no photos—advertising “the hottest guys in L.A.” for 24 hours. They forbade me from saying hottest “boys.” So word travels and with celebrities, one will tell the other.

JCA: From what I remember from our past talks, things moved pretty quickly for you in this new business.
Forest: By the summer of ’82, I changed to “Brad’s Buddies” when the Advocate moved their offices to Los Angeles. There were no mass emails, nothing like that. There was also Databoy, I did that, too. The owners ran the “Superman” contest.

JCA: You were pretty open about running an escort business.
Forest: That probably got me in trouble. Keeping it real confidential is not how you sell Levi’s and McDonald’s. To do it the way I wanted to do it, I had to advertise.

JCA: And word-of-mouth helped out.
Forest: Word-of-mouth was major. (Clients) liked to think other people were doing it, too. They would call and talk about how a “friend of a friend” tried it first.

JCA: As I recall, these were your “celebrity buyers.”
Forest: The celebrity buyers were obviously very nervous about this. They would maybe have a friend call me first. They’d make up names and, of course, I’d find out who it was. I’d find out because a boy would tell me about it later. That’s how it happened with the “second boy” that would go to a certain client’s home. Usually, the second boy would end up getting me the second client as a new customer. The second boy sent to that same certain client’s home came back to tell me his man was famous.

JCA: So you always knew what was really going on.
Forest: It was always kind of neat when a hot non-escort, non-client friend of mine would call me to have a boy sent to a friend of his. One in particular has a movie coming out soon. He wouldn’t even pay for the boy, he was just the casting gal. Well, his friend is now dreaming about my guys in his prison cell.

JCA: So you’re still in touch with some of these guys.
Forest: I personally met one of my hottest celeb clients before he became so hot. And now that he is so hot, he rarely calls me. Of course, that’s primarily because he’s still seeing the same boy I sent him years ago. That boy, by far, was the hottest, biggest-earning call boy I ever worked with.

JCA: Did you have much competition?
Forest: I did not. There was Bi-Coastal Studs. They were cheap and their list of boys was a mile long. They were Target and I was Gucci.

JCA: It’s interesting that you really had to sell your clients on your boys, with your voice and your powers of persuasion. They had no pictures to look at. It’s an intimate relationship.
Forest: Back in the day, the clients had to trust me. I described the boy and what he would do and they took my word for it. Now, everyone wants to see pictures. They want the boy in the pictures they want me to look at (first), even if the boy they really wanted really didn’t perform. Back in the day, I knew what every boy would do or not do.

In this era of computers and Rentboy, I still get guys who just don’t want to hunt down boys. Celebrities or businessmen who don’t have the time, they don’t want to go poking around online. And I have some guys, celebrities and others, that I’ve been dealing with for 25 years and this is just how they do it, through me.

Stay tuned for more from Mr. Forest about running an introduction service and dealing with celebrity clients…