I guess my answer would be the women whom he loved and loved him, the foster kids he had, the many local bodybuilders in his home state that looked up to him. Doesn’t this add up to a lot of stress over the long haul, squaring all that up in your own brain let alone with others? This was not a man who ran off to Hollywood (for example) and gave up traditional attachments. This was a man who stayed and was a fixture in his local community with more traditional type attachments.
You are exactly right to point this out. His turn on the meat market was wholly inconsistent with the domestic life he cultivated. Obviously, he is not the first bodybuilder to peddle himself to men, but most of the guys who do so try to be very discreet about it or they run off to Hollywood and let go of traditional attachments. This requires some mental gymnastics. Either you talk yourself into believing that your local world will never find out about your meat market/porn life—and there are many examples of this, such as porn actor Ty Fox (who was married to a woman, raising a young daughter, and worked as a middle school teacher in VA, but spent his summers making gay porn in West Hollywood), or you do not care if they find out. It seems Brad went down the latter path. By the time you have a public website promoting your availability for escort work you cannot cling to the fantasy that your domestic world will never learn of it. Even so, there is some kind of emotional stress to living this kind of double life. I think that is one reason why so many of the guys who go down the meat market path end up on drugs.
