Absolute Mayhem (14 page)

I readily give praise to AIM for how they handled
things with the last big HIV scare, back in April 2004.
They put up degrees-of-separation charts, listing the
people who directly came into contact with the HIV
source, then the people who were at one remove from
it, two removes from it, etc., etc. This was the time when
the owner of Cherry Boxxx Pictures had me doing only
girl–girl scenes, of course, so my risks of getting it were
greatly reduced. It was such a scary period, nevertheless.
It was due to a guy named Darren James, then a
performer for seven years, who had gone to Brazil to
shoot and came back infected with the HIV virus. I
remember that when I was married to Craven and he
once told me he was going to Brazil to shoot, I begged
him to use condoms. 'Whatever you do, whoever you
fuck,
please
wear a condom,' I told him, and he just
laughed at me. I'd heard that the porn stars over there
could get a fake clean test for just US$10.

Anyway, as the story goes, Darren James shot a bunch
of scenes down there for two weeks and came back
to LA with his test still current. He then shot a bunch
of scenes without getting re-tested – after shooting in
a foreign country, which is a big no-no. His test was
still only two weeks old, not 28 days yet, and he went
ahead and did a gang-bang and a bunch of anal-creampie
scenes (when the guy ejaculates inside the girl's ass
and the camera captures his sperm oozing out of her) –
not knowing that he had already contracted HIV from
some Brazilian porn chick.

Twelve girls were involved with Darren and his circle,
and that's how the virus began to spread. Jessica Dee and
Lara Roxx were the first to be named among the infected.
Jessica, from the Czech Republic, was then 25 years old
and, luckily for her, Platinum X co-owner Jewel De'Nyle
then hired her as a director so she could work behind the
camera instead. Lara, from Montreal, Canada, was only
21 years old at the time and had been working in porn for
just three months. She moved back to Montreal shortly
after the outbreak and said in an interview on
Entertainment
Tonight
that she had regrets about her short stay
in porn. 'I was just pretending to be happy about it,' she
reflected. 'I thought US$2000 a day sounded attractive.
I expected that I could go sleep with whoever I wanted
and I thought that the actresses ruled.' Now, she was
afraid of 'dying too early, too soon, too young'.

I remember feeling terrified – because a lot of my
friends and some guys that I had always preferred to
work with were on those long HIV-generation lists,
which went on and on and made everyone paranoid. It
felt so surreal, like the end of the world. There were so
many obvious questions being asked, like 'How could
this have happened?' and 'How can we prevent this from
happening in the future?', and I really felt like quitting
the business at that point.

The mainstream press, of course, got great mileage
out of it.
The New York Times
ran a piece on 17 April
2004 with the headline 'HIV Case Shuts Down Pornographic
Film Industry', documenting how an entire
industry that churned out 4000 films a year had to stop
working for 60 days so that performers could be tested.
Sharon Mitchell then wrote an op-ed piece in the same
paper on 2 May 2004, noting that

each month we give about 1200 actors a test that can identify
HIV as early as 14 days after infection. We also test for chlamydia,
gonorrhea and syphilis . . . In 80,000 tests my organization
has conducted since 1998, there have only been 14 diagnoses
of HIV infection. We're doing an excellent job.

Across the pond,
Arena
magazine in the UK did a
piece about the whole fiasco in its August 2004 issue,
quoting Jill Kelly as saying, 'Anyone who continues to
shoot at this point is a complete idiot,' because while the
entire American adult-film industry was shut down for
a whole month, certain idiots were indeed still shooting
porn. The piece, written by Justin Quirk, ended with a
quote from Lara Roxx, sounding very bitter:

We should think about these issues right now, to change stuff
around to make this a safer fuckin' business. It isn't a safe
business and I thought it was. I knew double anal [two penises
together in the one anus] was dangerous, really, but I was
putting it way back in my mind because I was down in California
to make the maximum amount of money, to come back
home wealthy. I had plans for the money.

Lara had to borrow the money to return to Montreal.
'After I paid them back for my plane ticket,' she said,
'I spent all my remaining money from that scene. On
doctors.'

The poor girl. None of my actual friends ended up
infected, though I did know Jessica Dee, but only briefly
because we did one movie together – back in 2001, when
Stoney Curtis directed both of us in
Fast Times at Deep
Crack High, Volume 3
, in which we did a three-way with
Mr Marcus, one of my very few interracial sex scenes.
Jessica and I appeared together on the box-cover and we
shared top billing in the credits. She was so sweet, and
was terribly unfortunate to have been one of the girls
who did anal cream-pie with Darren James.

Things eventually went back to normal, and the quarantine
on performers and the moratorium on production
both ended in early May 2004 – a month earlier than
expected – after all the suspended talent was repeatedly
tested and then cleared to return to work. I broke
up with my boyfriend and started shooting scenes with
guys again. Still, it was a serious wake-up call.

I have been afraid since then, so I like to see official
test results before a scene. If I don't know the guy, I like
to see his test and ID, so that I'm sure it's really him. If
the test is not from AIM or I can't call for a result, then
I won't work with the guy.

Saying that, having a 'current test' sometimes doesn't
mean shit, as I've caught things from people whose clean
results were 'current' (as, indeed, Darren James's were).
You could have fucked someone two days ago and caught
something without knowing it. So, I've had sexually
transmitted diseases and not recognised the symptoms,
or not had any symptoms at all. We should get re-tested if
we think anything is wrong at all (such as different smells,
different-coloured discharges or abdominal pains).

Every month now, I get stressed out when I go for a
test. Although I am now aware of pretty much all the
symptoms, having caught chlamydia and gonorrhoea in
the past, you never know if you've been infected again
or not. If you have shoots booked, then you're screwed,
because it takes a week for the medication to work,
which also fucks up your insides. I know that I may
never be able to have children because of my past STDs
(not that I've ever considered becoming a mother – and
I've never had a pregnancy scare, thank God – but it's
not nice to think you don't have the option), and I get
panic attacks all the time, possibly due to some of the
medications I've taken.

What pisses me off the most is when I'll only have
one or two shoots in a given month and I'll catch something
from that one shoot. Off -camera, I use condoms,
so I know it's from the shoot. It really sucks big-time
when you're only working one or two days and you lose
a week of work because of that. This has happened to
me more than once, and the reality of what we girls
do is that you never know when the next time will be.
I mean, why do we do such crazy things, some people
outside the industry must ask, to make a living?

These days, most people tend to skip the opening
disclaimer that runs just before an adult movie, which
reads:

The sexual situations in the following adult feature are shown
for entertainment and informational purposes. We highly
recommend that individuals follow the surgeon general's
accepted guidelines for safe sex, which are monogamy and/or
abstinence, or at a minimum the use of a condom combined
with a selective choice of sexual partners. We hope that you
find the following feature an enjoyable stimulation to your
adult practice of safe sex. Thank you.

I like the 'selective choice of sexual partners' bit –
highly ironic, given that we performers seldom get to
choose our on-screen partners. We usually work with
whoever happens to be cast for that particular movie.
There have been times where I deliberately haven't asked
who I'm working with because I want to be surprised
when I get there and also trust my agent's judgement.

Now, when I do find out ahead of time and then
decide not to have sex with that person, that's a different
matter. All of us have a 'wish list' of preferred performers,
and sometimes the director will indulge us, but it
doesn't always happen. I used to always choose whom
I worked with but, somewhere along the line, things
changed. It became the directors who would exercise
their choices in terms of guys they liked to use, and
that was that. And as far as 'safe sex' goes, most people
outside the business have no clue what we have to deal
with. At present, every company refuses to shoot with
condoms except for Wicked Pictures, and the general
reasoning behind this is somewhat lame – they claim
that it decreases sales.

I think that's totally absurd. If these guys are right, it
means that the fans are bitching about seeing condoms
in our scenes, which would say to me that they don't
give a fuck about our health – all they care about is
their fantasy, which supposedly gets ruined when we're
shown using condoms! Now, I know this can't be true
of all porn fans, so I think the companies are using it
as an excuse. I even know of one director who actually
said, 'If you don't want to have sex without condoms,
then you shouldn't be a porn star!' – the ultimate in selfishness,
in my opinion. It's not even written in the law
that we have to get tested every 28 days – that's just a
porn insiders' rule. Things would be a whole lot more
dangerous for us if not for Sharon Mitchell.

If you ask me, the good folks in the United States
government don't care either – they just want to make
sure they earn their share in taxes and that we're not
underage or illegal immigrants, hence the 18 USC 2257
Act, which requires the companies to declare on the
DVD box-covers that 'all performers depicted in this
work were 18 years or older at the time of production'.
The whole Traci Lords incident got everyone running
scared about using underaged performers, for sure, but
there's a whole lot more than meets the eye here. (In case
you don't know, back in 1986 porn star Traci Lords was
busted for performing as an underaged teenager who'd
lied about her age and used fake IDs.) The government
basically lets the adult-entertainment industry regulate
itself to a degree that isn't always healthy for the people
employed, most of whom can barely regulate their own
lives. So, it's a case of the blind leading the blind (or
rather the blonde leading the blonde, so to speak, not
that all of us blondes are stupid).

There are also occupational hazards specifically for
the guys in the industry. It can be frustrating for both
of us when they have problems keeping it hard, but
I understand and will do all I can to help. But some guys
just get so intimidated that they can't do it at all! I've had
that problem a few times in the past, usually with new
guys who think they can make it in the business but get
on set and totally lose it.

On one shoot, I arrived to discover it was a boy–girl
scene, with a guy I already knew – he was a director
himself and used to book me for his own shoots. I knew
he was a big fan of mine and was intimidated by me –
so he was
very
nervous about having sex with me! It
was hilarious. He had to keep leaving the room to get
hard, because he said looking at me was already too
much for him to handle! He smoked some weed, did a
few shots of bourbon and tried to calm himself down,
but nothing would work. Eventually, I gave him some
Xanax and that kind of calmed his nerves. I also had to
keep reassuring him he was okay – I kept telling him
how big his cock was, how good it felt – which helped
a little, except he kept wanting to cum after, like, every
three strokes!

So we had to cut every ten minutes, for him to pull
himself together in the next room for another five
minutes. Then he'd come back hard and we'd start
fucking again. And then he would get the shakes and
he had to go and calm himself down again! We got it
done, eventually, though that went on and on for a few
hours, and all for a 35-minute scene. Poor guy, he may
be permanently traumatised now, with performanceanxiety
issues, all because of me!

It's a huge mind-fuck for a guy, when everyone is
counting on you, waiting for you to perform. Time is
money! And here's where we come to the occupational
hazard. The latest trend for those who prefer not to pop
Viagra pills is caver-jacking (also called CAVR), which
enables a guy to stay erect for long periods by injecting a
liquid into the shaft of his penis. It's definitely not for the
timid, jamming a hypodermic needle into your cock.
Most of the guys don't like to admit to it, but everybody
knows it goes on. A lot of guys won't admit to taking
any sort of drug to help them get hard, but it's pretty
obvious when they are rock-hard long before the scene.
The guy will then usually stay hard for hours, even after
cumming, which must get painful.

Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of male performers
who have no trouble getting it hard on their own;
it's just that some guys need a little help. The thing that
scares me, though, is that by inserting a needle into your
cock you leave an open wound – which can be an easy
way to contract HIV.

My mantra for all the tricky dilemmas of acting in
porn is therefore this: health before wealth.