The Other Hollywood (69 page)

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
Supposedly, Patrick had to bring Marc over to AIM, and Marc was crying.

MARC WALLICE
:
It was said that I had to be dragged into PAW to take my PCR test. That’s bullshit. Fucking lying, asshole punks. I wasn’t crying, and I wasn’t dragged in there.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
I called Marc, and I called him, and I called him, and he actively avoided me. Finally I had to call his boss, Patrick Collins, who was in Budapest, and who has little tolerance for these things. Patrick’s got a very booming voice; I think I must have heard him screaming in both ears that day, even though he was in Hungary.

So Patrick had his wife in L.A.—who was pregnant and had a baby in the backseat—go pick up Marc Wallice and bring him in for testing.

MARC WALLICE
:
I said, “Let’s go in there and get this taken care of.” I would’ve never gone in there if I knew I was positive. If anyone came to my house and dragged me, I’d fucking break their neck. They just kept making suggestions. I said, “Fine, let’s go.”

SHARON MITCHELL
:
We brought Marc to Dr. York’s office in Mission Hills. Marc did not want to do it—he kept trying to get up and get out of it, you know, because it was apparent that he knew.

He had no visible signs of HIV. And, remember, Marc was an old drug user like the rest of us, so him looking a little thin and worn was not a big deal. His appearance wasn’t a big issue, but his behavior was disturbing.

MARC WALLICE
:
If I knew I was positive, why would I ever have gone to PAW to take a test? Why wouldn’t I just say, “Fuck you. I don’t have to go there. And I’ll just quit the business right now and direct.” Wouldn’t that have been much easier than going up there—knowing that I was going to come out positive?

SHARON MITCHELL
:
Everybody was trying to give him a break, but there was no way around it. I mean, there was a night where we had a general meeting at the Sportsman’s Lodge, for industry only. That night, I was absolutely, 100 percent sure because I got Marc’s results back, and he was avoiding me. He kept saying, “Do I have it or what?”

I said, “You have to come in so we can discuss your results.”

And he wouldn’t come in.

MARC WALLICE
:
Patrick Collins found out I was positive when he was in Europe. He kept telling Reuben Swift to call me, but I wouldn’t take his calls. If Patrick wants to talk to me, he’ll call me. Why does he keep sending his flunkies to call me?

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
Was Marc Wallice in denial? I don’t know. I actually do a little better just assuming that he is.

The adult industry came to the conclusion that he was the one who gave it to the four of us, although he denies it. He may have known or may have not. Probably he did.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
At AIM Healthcare, our release says that we have the right to disclose your results with or without your permission because there’s so many partners in jeopardy.

So I had to go in and show his release test to Steven Hirsch, Steven
Orenstein, Jeffrey Douglas, Russ Hampshire, and everybody else. They said, “We’ve got to close the doors to the press and just make the fucking announcement.”

And I did—and everybody went crazy. But once the reality was out—that HIV had hit the adult entertainment industry—it got compliance within that community pretty quick.

MARC WALLICE
:
I would never have gone up there if I had known I was positive. But nobody is listening to those points. They are just listening to the gossip which is saying that I knew I was positive for all these years because I had faked a test years ago.

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
I have HIV no matter what, so I just have to let go. Every once in a while I think I’m gonna go ahead and prosecute Marc Wallice and put him in jail. But then I think, I’ve already put it to rest once. Why dig it back up again?

MARC WALLICE
:
I have no idea where I might have caught HIV. It had to be from the set. It couldn’t have been at the awards show because I wasn’t shooting any drugs or doing any street whores out there in Las Vegas.

I don’t want to sound like an idiot, but maybe I had a nick on my balls from shaving. All the sweat and shit when you’re doing a “cowgirl.” All the sweat is dripping down there, and you got a little nick at the base of your dick.

Who knows? How can you prove that?

SHARON MITCHELL
:
I had the joy of having to tell Marc Wallice that he was HIV-positive. It was awful because I go back years with him—getting high and partying and just being a roommate and a brother, you know?

I discovered some very sad things. From his viral load, he appeared to have had it for quite some time.

MARC WALLICE
:
I suppose this will be the new thing on CNBC. I’ve seen people on TV say that they’ve done it purposefully. I saw it on
Geraldo
once—this black guy who was proud of being positive and infecting four hundred people.

This is nothing that has been proven yet. I don’t know how they are going to prove it. It’s not true.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
A viral load is the amount of a virus that is detected in your system. It’s a measurement per two milliliters of blood of how much of the virus is in your blood. When I test someone and they come back positive on a PCR-DNA, I run a Sero conversion, and another couple different tests, including the viral load test. With that and a Western Blot, I can usually tell how long a person has had HIV.

MARC WALLICE
:
I hate to say it, but I’m going to laugh my ass off when the next person comes up positive that I haven’t been involved with. I won’t laugh for the person, but I will laugh for the idea that Marc Wallice infected the porn girls. Take that and stick it up your asses. And it’s going to happen.
It’s going to happen.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
The PCR-DNA test turned out to be amazing because there has been absolutely zero spread of HIV in the adult industry—since Marc Wallice—because of the HIV monitoring system.

There have been people who have gotten HIV, and who might have brought it into the industry, but they haven’t worked yet—because we’ve written all the policies for the companies that say you have to have a clean bill of health before you work.

I mean, it’s happened where they’re unzipping their flies, getting ready to have sex with a girl or two, and they call up going, “Hey, we’re about ready to start a scene, where’s the fax?”

And we’re like, “Hold on, it’s positive.”

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
Marc Wallice was basically blackballed from the whole industry except for a couple of companies. VCA believed his story—that he didn’t know and that he was devastated. He didn’t know what to do, so they took him in as an editor for a while. But eventually even VCA ended up firing him; now he’s editing with a different company.

MARC WALLICE
:
I’ve got to start like a regular fucking piece of shit again. A six-dollar-an-hour job. I’m thinking of going to school to learn computers. I need something to do.

My mother can’t keep giving me money anymore. I have one brother who’s three years older. He’s a fan. He doesn’t know yet. Let him find out from the magazines.

I’m a big star to them. Little do they know.

BUD LEE
:
Marc Wallice is a little boy. Got bigger pants on him, like most of the people in our business. I like him a lot. He’s a good kid.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
I also realized that the last movie I did was with Marc Wallice—without a condom. So telling him brought up a lot of things for me, too, which I had to set aside in order to do my job as a counselor.

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
I talked to Simon Wolf, who was either owner or coowner of the company that hired Marc Wallice. I’m like, “Why is he editing for you? You know, he basically caused an HIV epidemic in the adult business.”

Simon goes, “Well, that hasn’t been proven, and he says differently, and I believe him.”

MARC WALLICE
:
Now I walk around with my head down, trying to hide, thinking that everybody knows that I infected people with HIV because that’s all they’re going to read. What does my life hold now? A job at McDonald’s in Utah?

BUD LEE
:
I got Marc Wallice a job after he was HIV-positive. Why? Well, a lot of us used to depend on the fact that Marc was a home-run king. He’d come on the set, get an erection, fuck as many women as you wanted him to, and he’d come when you asked him to do it. And he did that for us for fifteen years. Saved our asses again and again. We owe him. To make sure that he’s gainfully employed in some way or fashion or another for the rest of his life.

As an industry, we owe him that.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
There’s the question of where those other tests came from. Were they valid? Were they forged?

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
I still laugh at how ironic it is that I wasn’t doing anything outside of the business to get HIV. One of the reasons I came into the business was to explore my sexuality in this safe little community. And because one person betrayed that community, I got HIV.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
Was Marc bisexual? Probably, yeah. He had done some bisexual movies, so, you know, it happens that way. AIDS is in epidemic proportions in Los Angeles and in the United States. Why wouldn’t it come into the porn business? Who knows what people do? The guys could be with other guys—and the girls could be shooting dope.

MARC WALLICE
:
I used to inject cocaine. About eight years ago, I used to shoot up with Sharon Mitchell and Barbara Holder, aka Aja. If I had it then, they have it, too. But I haven’t done needles in seven years.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
I would do a shot five minutes before my scene. But I was a fanatic about using clean needles. I didn’t fuck a lot of people. And I didn’t fuck in the ass and all that.

MARC WALLICE
:
I don’t fuck nobody outside the business. I’ve been doing that for seventeen years. Just because I worked with every person who’s become positive, does that mean I’m the reason?

SHARON MITCHELL
:
It’s easy for a woman to get it, and if a guy’s exposed to it over and over again, it’s easy for him to get it. You know there’s high-risk categories. People who do pornography aren’t uptight, you know? They’re not executives. They have a lot of kink and a lot of shit going on.

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
I haven’t seen Marc Wallice since I found out he’s the one. He didn’t try to contact me. He tried to contact Brooke Ashley, and she basically told him to go die.

MARC WALLICE
:
I hear that Brooke Ashley is also pressing charges. I don’t know how she can prove anything.

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
Marc Wallice contacted John Stagliano after Brooke; I don’t think he knew that John and I had been talking. Marc said, “What should I do?”

John’s like, “Dude! You gave these girls HIV! I’m more worried about what’s going to happen to them than I am about what’s going to happen to you!”

Marc denied it. “No—I didn’t know.”

John was like, “I don’t want to know you.”

And that’s basically how that ended up.

MARC WALLICE
:
When we’re out together, even my mother says, “Marc, those people over there know you. You’re a star.”

I used to be a big, famous star. Now I’m a nobody.

JOHN STAGLIANO
:
Marc Wallice and I knew each other. We never went out socially or anything, but we both entered the performing end of the business in the very early eighties.

Before the controversy came about, he asked me to sell his movies and stuff. But we were never really friends, other than the fact that we would talk on sets. I shot him a lot of times in the 1980s, when I started the Buttman stuff.

But I haven’t talked to Marc since 1996 or 1997.

DAVID AARON CLARK (PORN WRITER)
:
People say John Stagliano changed everything when he did Buttman—when he took the camera off the tripod and squatted down and followed girls’ butts around. But I think the real thing he did—that really grabbed people—was to use his work to feed his own lust.

JOHN STAGLIANO
:
People give me credit for inventing “gonzo porn” because a lot of people have imitated me. But Buttman was just an idea I had in 1989, after I had already started Evil Angel. I was thinking about two things: I wanted to shoot a buns fetish movie, and I wanted to do a movie where the camera was like part of the set, and I was in the movie as the cameraman, and girls could look right into the camera. I wanted to arrange it so the girls could be sexy right to the camera, which turned out to be very effective.

TIM CONNELLY
:
John Stagliano ended up living out the Book of Job—porn style. He lost his number-one actress and beloved but troubled girlfriend Krysti Lynn, whom he had been trying to help out of addiction and into a singing career.