For a couple days this past May, the American imagination was obsessed with biker gangs. They seemed to have sprung right out of a nostalgic fantasy on AMC and into an actual gunfight outside a titty bar. (Brought to you by CNN.) But as the reality of what happened in Waco, Texas, unfolded over the following weeks, the story lost the aura of a Hollywood-ready blaze of glory, and began to look more like a messy, tragic, and pathetic fuckup. The bikers—many of them veterans, the vast majority of them law-abiding— began to seem less like romanticized road warriors, and more like disgruntled men on the edge of society being thrust into bloodshed in their misguided search for brotherhood. (See more photos here.)

As GQ correspondent Nathaniel Penn began reporting what would become The Untold Story of the Texas Biker Gang Shoot-Out for our October issue, photographer Benjamin Rasmussen set out to Texas to shoot the historically camera-shy members of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club. We asked Rasmussen to talk us through the photographs he took that day, and how the hell he got these guys to pose for the camera.

These photographs were taken in or outside the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Frankston, Texas, on Sunday, June 28th.

Benjamin Rasmussen: "When one biker would greet another they would almost always hug. A lot of the Bandidos are vets and they use a lot of brotherhood terminology. It's very masculine and intimate, but we could almost never photograph them hugging, because for the most part we couldn't photograph somebody until we had spent time with them.

"Everyone was very aware of how they were being portrayed. All of the wire and news photos that had come out were both literally and figuratively shot from behind the police tape in Waco.

"I was trying to get a sense of what that community was like from the inside."

"These are patches being sold to raise money for the families of Bandidos arrested in Waco.

"A lot of the guys, they're big, they're tough, they're intimidating, and that's a pretty big part of their identity. But they don't need to intimidate one another. It didn't feel like there was a lot of fronting going on. People were pretty chill. They were pretty humble. By the end they were incredibly welcoming towards us. By the end we got invited to ride with the Bandidos."