>At Starburst, a club in Santa Fe, Brody was hard to miss: standing 6'8, he towered over virtually every other patron. "He definitely turned heads," recalls Tom C., a longtime house manager; "when he walked in, you just had to look: the muscles, the thick beard, that mane of hair, it was like a genuine wildman had just come through the door." He was such a spectacle, in fact, that he was much less concerned than most other club-goers about trying to be discrete. "Of course, you couldn't actually be 'Out' in those days," Tom continues, "but Brody spent less time worrying about it than the rest of us average Joes. If some passerby saw him going into the club, he didn't really care, because, it's like, I don't care how drunk you are, are you really going to walk up to that guy and call him a fag?" Brody's massive size, in fact, actually lead to some practical complications at Starburst, according to club regular Chris N. "It's funny, because Bruiser was actually too big to play in the private tubs; his legs wouldn't even fit all the way in, and there definitely wasn't any room for a partner. So he'd get all his action in the general recreation pool, where most of us would usually just talk and break the ice." But according to Chris, other patrons forgave this breach of bathhouse etiquette: "it's not like we minded it. When Brody got on top of a guy, the whole club would stop and stare: it was like watching a fucking mauling."- from Mark Smith's new book Wet Nights: The Untold Story of America's Gay Bathhouses (2025), p. 96
