[tag]Erich Blancaflor[/tag], photographed in [tag]Las Vegas[/tag] the day after he competed in the [tag]2008 NPC USA Bodybuilding Championships[/tag], has been added to the Membership Section with 15 all-[tag]new video[/tag] clips! Catch Erich’s [tag]Gold’s Gym[/tag] workout, [tag]outdoor[/tag] [tag]posing[/tag] sessions, poolside scenes, and [tag]private posing[/tag] now!

by Steve Weinstein

EDGE Editor-In-Chief
Thursday Sep 11, 2008

On a Saturday night in May, in an old New York City office loft on a side street, an unusual mix of Chelsea boys and straight bodybuilders, along with a smattering of businessmen, drag queens and female muscle groupies, are enjoying a cocktail party.

Most of the huge men, who are in town for a major competition, move freely among the gay boys. It is the rare occasion when the men, many of them “models” for muscle-worship websites, actually get a chance to press the flesh of any of their adoring consumers.

The impresario who has brought together this motley group owns the most popular and successful company devoted to muscle worship. Ulrich (he goes by his last name, although professionally he is known as “Rich O.”) is a German-American who has managed to parlay his own private obsession into a franchise of DVDs and websites where gay men ogle and–for a hefty per-minute fee– chat with the possessors of some of the world’s most super-sized physiques.

Although gay porn companies, notably Falcon and Colt, offer man-on-man action, and other sites like BlueBlake and ManifestMen show similar fare, they can’t provide the range and poundage of manflesh. At any given time, on Ulrich’s sites, you can see film clips and still photos of dozens of bodybuilders stripping, posing, getting hard and getting off.

Watching Hummer-built men performing in front of a camera solo may not be to everyone’s taste. But tens of thousands of customers like it well enough to pay $24 and up per month to visit the Web sites, as well as many more who pay $50 or more for DVDs, and some who are willing to “tip” up to $100 for a private chat with their favorites.

A Eureka Moment: People Care More About the Body Than the Workout
Ulrich stumbled into the shadow world of muscle worship several years ago during the heyday of the workout video (remember Jane Fonda in her leg warmers?). Instead of a merely fit personal trainer, he filmed a hunky Chippendale’s dancer and had an epiphany—-at least a business-styled one.

“I realized a lot of people were asking more questions about the model than the instructions,” he recalled in a recent interview in his Chelsea office between jaunts to scout and photograph models. “People kept making comments about the model–how sexy, what a nice butt–everything except the instructional workout itself.”

He moved to Miami, where he started shooting “lifestyle videos” of hot locals. In one, a well-known wrestler did a spontaneous striptease on the beach for some admiring female spectators, and sales skyrocketed. “I tried to get the guys to do strips, no frontal, only rear nudity,” he said. “But it wasn’t as explicit as guys wanted them to be.”

So he created Dynamite Studios and then, 10 years ago, his first Web site, MuscleHunks.com. Today, his Internet stable includes MuscleGallery (not explicit); MuscleHunks (explicit); PowerMen (very explicit); and LiveMuscleShow.com (paid live interfacing via webcam). His DVD catalog, which now numbers dozens of titles, varies from “lifestyle” (not hard) to explicit (orgasm) and compilations under themes like “Pretty Boys Gone Wild” and “Latin Paradise.”

The business is run as lean as the men are huge. At any given time, two or three video editors hunch over monitors while an office manager labels DVDs for shipment.

The only other employee, works out of Florence, Italy. A veteran of the straight porn industry, Shaun officially runs the company’s marketing. But she mostly works, she said, as the models’ “nanny. I help them set up their technology, help improve their performances, manage their lives.”

When they come to work for Ulrich, she added, “They don’t know what to say or how to talk to gay guys.” Their previous posing skills were limited to bodybuilding stages. They’ve spent much of their time working out in macho gyms in Northern Africa, South America and, increasingly, Eastern Europe; 30 countries in all.

Ulrich spends much of his time canvassing the international bodybuilding circuit to scout new talent. He looks for a handsome face as well as hot body, but also innate sex appeal.

When he started, he was shy about approaching them–and they were hesitant to work for him.

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