"No" is the strongest word in the english language, don't do any sex act on film or video for the first time. "Practice makes perfect!"

Risky Business
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1273562,00.html

When HIV broke out among America's key porn stars earlier this year, the industry was brought to a standstill. Andrew Anthony meets Dr Sharon Mitchell, an ex-junkie and hardcore performer turned health crusader, who is single-handedly forcing LA's adult film trade to clean up its act

Sunday August 1, 2004
The Observer

Somewhere in the endless suburbs of the San Fernando Valley, Sunset Thomas and Randy Spears, the stars of many hundreds of porn films, are engaged in romantic conversation. A pencil-thin woman with heavily enlarged breasts, Thomas is wearing a chain-link silver top that is more flesh than chain, a micro-miniskirt and a pair of 6in stiletto boots.
'You want something to talk about?' she asks Spears, who is sitting across from her at a mocked- up candle-lit restaurant table.'I'll give you a fuck you'll never stop bragging about.'

'Cut!' shouts the director, Bruce Whitney. 'Beautiful.'

The wooden animation of this scene from Virtual Pleasure Ranch may make daytime soap opera seem like the work of Ingmar Bergman, but in comparison to the recent trend in the adult film industry it aspires to the condition of art. As a feature film, with dialogue, however rudimentary, and characters, however ill-drawn, it is positioned at the shrinking, quality end of a business that is now dominated by 'gonzo' porn - low production-value, storyless sex.

Gonzo has transformed American pornography, a business estimated to be worth between $5bn and $10bn a year. Almost anyone with a video camera and a couple of willing performers can make gonzo, which means that almost anyone does make gonzo. It also means that the nature of what is depicted has become more raw and more disturbing. As one industry veteran told me: 'In the US on primetime TV, they're hanging secretaries off buildings to get that fear factor. What do you think the porn business is going to do to shock you?'

The answer, needless to say, is more than it did before. Porn has always leant towards the extreme - the desire to see more is what forms its very rationale - but now there is almost nothing but extremity. An examination of what's available on pay-TV in my LA hotel confirms that the era of punning parodies - with names like Backside to the Future - is past. Now the videos carry remorselessly literal titles, such as Extreme Sex and Cream Covered DD Cones, to go with the 'no-holes-barred' action. Here is a world stripped of everything - language, motivation, body hair - except the grunting couplings, or triplings, or even quadruplings of dead-eyed performers.

Virtual Pleasure Ranch is made by VCA, a company that was bought last year by Larry Flynt's Hustler operation. According to Veronica Hart, a long-time VCA director whose contract recently came to an end, as a result of the take-over the company is less interested in producing the kind of feature films that have been her hallmark. 'I make sex for mature adults,' she told me. 'I start with a script, and that's the big difference between features and gonzo.'

Whitney disagreed. A wry, mild-mannered character in his thirties, with a nerdish enthusiasm for technology, he was attracted to pornography by the possibilities presented by DVD. The story line of Virtual Pleasure Ranch, such as it exists, is based on its interactive feature. Set in a brothel, it allows the DVD viewer to select various options. But if it notionally retains the concept of narrative, it only serves to show how far gonzo has encouraged the adult film industry to lose the plot.

With the restaurant scene complete, Thomas was anxious about her next scene. Her tiny facial features that seem hardened by cosmetic surgery, or experience, were tightened into a nervous scowl. Most often to be seen strutting and pouting, she looked momentarily worried, vulnerable. Whitney sought to reassure her, and when that failed he came over to where I was sitting a few yards away and politely asked that I leave the set. It seemed Sunset was not happy about my presence; it made her feel self-conscious.

The problem was she had to read an autocue and she is not confident about reading lines, especially in front of strangers. So I took an early break for lunch and a short while later, having completed her lines, Thomas entered the studio canteen and sat down next to me. She had dispensed with the chain-link top and ate her food bare-breasted, while I tried not to look and also tried not to look like I was trying not to look. After lunch, I was invited back on set to watch a gymnastically splayed Thomas masturbate, perform fellatio on Spears, and then have anal sex. Throughout these lengthy and sometimes painful exertions, she exhibited not the slightest concern about my being there.

They do things differently in the Valley, the parallel universe to Hollywood's celebrity cosmos. It's the shadowland of sex and fame, the alternative world for those who can't act or can't wait. The trip from the major studios to the warehouses where they shoot porn is a brief one along the 405 freeway, but it's a one-way journey. Plenty of wannabe actors, drawn to LA by the dream of stardom, slip from mainstream movies into porn; it is all but impossible to return the other way.

There are similarities, of course, between these neighbouring entertainment industries. They are both huge commercial enterprises. They are both concerned with creating generic fantasies out of youth and beauty. And they even share some of the same maxims: never work with children or animals is an old Hollywood saying that in the Valley is the bottom line of a morally elastic business.

Nevertheless, the adult film industry is a culture that has created its own rules. For an outsider, what is most striking about Los Angeles's pornographic hinterland is how normalised its abnormalities have become. Here, the ordinary (an actress reading her lines) is troubling, and the bizarre (people engaging in graphic acts of sex in front of others) simply mundane.

Against this warped backdrop, it's easy to lose sight of social and personal priorities. And to an extent, it's on precisely that moral dislocation that the industry trades. New people, or 'talent' as they are referred to in porn, usually enter the business with certain goals in mind and firm ideas about what they're not prepared to do. After a while, those aims and limits tend to change - typically the aims grow smaller and the limits expand. Finally, after prolonged exposure, many performers will do almost anything for money. And by and large, the more they are prepared to do, the less they are ultimately worth.

As a business model for maximising the exploitation of labour it's almost perfect, except for one problem: the risk of HIV infection. The more extreme the sex, and the fewer precautions that the business takes, the more chance of an outbreak. And in lowering the cost of production and extending the limits of the acceptable, gonzo has upped the risk of contracting Aids.

The adult film industry has long boasted a lower rate of HIV than the rest of America. But earlier this year, business was brought to a standstill when a number of actors were found to be carrying the Aids virus. In mid-March, a performer named Darren James went to Brazil for a porn shoot. Cheap production costs and a ready pool of local talent make Brazil an attractive location for American adult filmmakers. While condoms are only used by a handful of US production companies - the prevailing wisdom is that they are nnot a crowd-pleaser - they are standard in the porn industry in Brazil, where HIV is far more widespread. It doesn't take much investment, however, to persuade Brazilian performers to dispense with protection.

A former marine from Detroit, James had wanted to be a policeman, but instead drifted into adult films in the mid-Nineties. As a slim, small-framed African-American, he was not in great demand in the industry, which prefers its black males to be well built, and so he found himself with the roles, or tasks, that other actors rejected.

James was conscientious about his health status. He did not drink or smoke, and he tested for HIV every three weeks. Nevertheless he came back from Brazil with the virus, although it did not show in the first test he took immediately on his return. In Los Angeles he went on to have sex, over the following couple of weeks, with 12 female performers who in turn went on to have sex with an even greater number of male performers.

One of the women James had sex with was a 19-year-old French-Canadian who went by the name of Lara Roxx. An occasional stripper with a history of depression, she had arrived in LA from Montreal just a few days before. According to an interview she gave to the American porn industry's online magazine, Adult Video News, she was informed by Mark Anthony, the director of her first and only shoot in LA, that she would be required to perform a 'double anal' with James and Anthony himself. Though it seems an anatomical impossibility, a double anal requires a woman to simultaneously accommodate two penises in her rectum.

Apparently Roxx informed the director that she'd never before attempted that particular feat. 'Well,' she reported Anthony as saying, 'that's what we need. It's that or nothing.' She chose 'that'. Her interview with AVN details a disturbing series of symptoms she suffered before she was diagnosed with genital warts, viral pharyngitis and HIV.

By mid-April, James had also become ill. He had been bitten by a spider in Brazil, which probably lowered his immunity, and further tests showed that he was HIV positive. One of the women he slept with in Brazil, who was rumoured to be an intravenous-drug user, was found to be positive. Three more performers were also diagnosed with the virus, making a total of five. James went into hiding and a moratorium on production was agreed by most of the adult film companies. For 30 days no porn was shot in the Valley.

That a swift diagnosis was made, the sick quarantined, the virus isolated and production ceased can be traced to the efforts of a woman named Sharon Mitchell. Mitchell is the founder of the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation (Aim), the organisation that tests LA's adult film performers for sexually transmitted diseases. Earlier this year she gained her doctorate in human behaviour. Though not a medical doctor, she possesses a qualification that gives her unique insight into the problems and practices of the adult industry. For two decades she was herself a porn star, and also a junkie. First she cleaned up her own act, then she turned her formidable attention and willpower to her former trade.

The Aim office is situated in a low-profile building on Ventura Boulevard, the other side of the San Fernando ridge from Beverly Hills. It stands opposite a pet hospital advertising 'rattlesnake vaccine'. As I waited for Mitchell in the lobby, a succession of young women arrived, accompanied by men whose expressions seemed to call for the antidote on sale across the street. One of the men, all pimp swagger and gold jewellery, complained about the $110 cost of the various STD tests.

After a while, an elegant, youthful-looking middle-aged woman in white coat, miniskirt and flip-flops came out and asked me if my meeting with her was for counselling or testing. I replied that I was there to interview her and, allowing a swift smile, she invited me into her cramped office. On the door was a sign that read: 'Well-behaved women rarely make history.'

Slim and dark-haired, with a strong, angular face, Mitchell had only just returned to work from a stint in hospital, suffering from exhaustion. The HIV outbreak and attendant media coverage had taken its toll. Everyone wanted to speak to her and hear her story, which was no surprise, because as tales of redemption go, this one demands retelling.

Brought up in a 'typical middle-class Catholic family' in New Jersey, Mitchell left home as a 17-year-old to become an actress in New York. She found work in soaps, worked on stage off-Broadway and did a little modelling, before her agent, who was moonlighting in pornography, suggested she give it a try herself.

'I thought, "What a great way to say 'Fuck you' to the Catholic church and my parents at the same time." It was, like, the Seventies - rebellious ...'

Many in the porn industry, especially the old-timers, lament the passing of what is now seen as the 'golden age' of porn in the Seventies. Back then, when sexual liberation still had the edge on gender politics among social revolutionaries, pornography was seen in fashionable circles as a radical movement. The films were real films shot on 35mm and screened in cinemas. They had costumes and rehearsals and took two or three weeks to shoot. Nowadays a video shoot is completed in two or three days.

'You probably had sex with your friends twice in three weeks,' Mitchell recalls, 'and it was a very straight sex scene. We were basically performance artists. I had to wait a year-and-a-half for my first movie to come out, and the first time I walked into the movie theatre and saw my vagina, it was 16ft high on the silver screen and I thought: "That's me!"'

She talks with the no-nonsense speed of a native East Coaster and the unsentimental clarity of a clinician. Essentially she had a good time in porn, she emphasises. She went on to make more than 1,000 films and thrived on the acclamation and the money. She was, she says, good at what she did. But things started to deteriorate with the arrival of videotape. Budgets were cut right back and all pretension to filmmaking disappeared.

'Guys were coming in and they were starting to do this thing called the $200 sex scene. I had been in the business and seen some really sleazy stuff. I'd seen people who couldn't make it at all in the real world become feared and revered in this industry. The scum of the earth can make a career in the porn business and become really successful. So I knew that it was starting to change for the worse.'

It was at this point that, on reflection, she now thinks she should have quit. But she was a heroin addict, and when it came to a choice between going with her ambition or sticking with her habit, the habit won. Then, in March 1996, after a performance at a strip club, she was followed home by a 'fan'. As she turned the lock, anxious to get a fix, he leapt on her and forced her inside. He then raped her and beat her savagely, breaking her nose and crushing her larynx. Mitchell saved herself from death by hitting her assailant with a 10lb dumbbell. But she saved herself from her life by making a decision. With understatement born of repetition, she says: 'It was just a really clear sign to get moving and get out.'

Towards her latter years in the industry she had been haunted by questions she tried to ignore. 'Could I ever have been a mother? Could I ever really have a relationship? Could I have gone back to school and done something? Could I ever have been a real actress?'

Renouncing porn, she went to university, where she studied public health. Many of her fellow students rejected her when they discovered her background, but she was filled with a righteous determination to complete her studies. 'I began really to resent the porn business. It was almost as if I wanted to blame my addiction on the porn business. I wanted to blame anything that ever happened to me physically or emotionally on the porn business. Now that, by the way, was not true. But that's how bitter I got. I got that reformed whore syndrome: "Don't talk to me about it, I don't want to remember that I did it."'

Then, in 1998, there was a major outbreak of HIV in the porn industry. Testing for HIV at the time was a lax procedure. There had been very few cases in the heterosexual porn community, and though 'Long' John Holmes, a porn legend, had died of Aids, it was attributed to his drug use or bisexuality. Complacency and corruption were rife and therefore it was not difficult to forge an HIV test result. Mitchell, who was still engaged in her studies, was asked by the Free Speech Coalition to investigate the outbreak. She found that an actor called Mark Wallice had falsified his HIV certificate and infected five actresses through anal sex. In the process, she set up Aim, a non-profit organisation, and instituted a strict regime of testing.
Aim uses the PCR-DNA HIV test, which measures the actual genetic material of HIV in the blood rather than the antibodies. That removes the lagtime for antibodies to build up, but there is still a delay between infection and detection. Typically it takes around two weeks after contraction of HIV for sufficient viral load to amass to register in the test. Since 1998, Aim has conducted more than 80,000 tests on the 1,200 performers who make up the industry. Up until April this year, there were no transmissions. The only positive results detected came from newcomers attempting, unsuccessfully, to get into the industry.

With that record, it might be thought that the industry would be satisfied. But in fact, Mitchell has many critics in the Valley. Some suspect her of making a personal fortune, even though Aim is non-profit. Some resent what they see as the 'monopoly' she holds on testing. To which she responds:'The fire department is also a monopoly. But is that an issue if your house is on fire?'

Others, including the main talent agent in the business, Jim South, complain that Aim extends its remit beyond testing and therefore represents a conflict of interests. When an actor or actress arrives at Aim for the first time, they are told about the pros and cons of the industry and given a videotape, called Porn 101, which warns them in straightforward terms of the situations they should expect to encounter. South has protested that a number of young girls he has sent along to Aim quit the business after the induction meeting.

'Never, ever do I tell people, "Don't do this,"' Mitchell responds.'And there are days when I wish I could, because I see myself walking in here at 17, 18 and I think to myself, "Boy, she could probably be a doctor in about four years, instead of 24."'

Mitchell is now 46 and has a boyfriend from outside the industry. She decided not to have children because she thought she'd be a poor mother, and her maternal instincts went into Aim. But now she is so fed up with the business that she plans to set up her own practice. 'As someone who sits here and sees day-in day-out the deception, the disease, the denial, it looks like a very sordid place. I feel like I'm sweeping back the fucking ocean some days.'

There are, she says, three principal reasons why people become porn performers: money, fame and sex. Those who come from dysfunctional backgrounds and are looking for fame tend to be the most vulnerable to exploitation. The most common career-span is between six months and three years, and it is the people who are focused on earning enough money to set up their own business who leave the industry in the best shape.

I asked, with a certain disbelief, if there were really any people who got into the business for the sex. Mitchell returned my look of incredulity with one of her own. 'Yes,' she said firmly, 'a lot of the men do. They want to have as much sex as possible, with as many people as possible, with as little attachment as possible, and that's why there are a lot of men who are very suited to this industry. That's why those specific males last very long. They often don't have a love interest in their private lives. Performing acts of intimacy over and over again without the actual intimacy really takes a damage on your private life.'

Randy Spears, like Mitchell, used to be a real actor in Hollywood. A rugged-looking character in the Jean-Claude Van Damme mould, he harboured dreams of becoming an action hero. In 1988 there was a writer's strike, film production stopped and he needed money. He'd been a Chippendale dancer and a model, so the step into adult films did not seem so large. 'But as soon as the camera started rolling,' he says of his first porn shoot, 'I knew I was never going to be Bruce Willis. The door was shut.' He speaks of the numbness that takes hold of him after long periods of work. Sometimes he'll work 80 out of 90 days, at the end of which he feels hollowed out. He tried to leave the business in the early Nineties, when he married a porn actress and started a family. They moved to Pennsylvania, where he ran a gym for a while. But the money brought him back and the marriage, like so many in the industry, did not last.

In contrast to Hollywood, the big stars in pornography are nearly all women. Men, with a very few exceptions, are viewed as little more than lumps of muscle attached to a penis. As if to emphasise this point, in Virtual Pleasure Ranch Spears was filmed, for interactive purposes, in such a way that the viewer shared his point of view. He had to arch away from the frame as an overhead camera captured only his genitals. 'Keep your head out of the way!' the director kept shouting, and, 'Chin! Randy, chin!' He was reduced, in other words, to nothing but a penis.

Spears wanted a stable relationship, but most people found it difficult to understand the separation of sex and love. 'I'm a very giving man with a romantic side. I believe in love. But it's difficult when you come home and you don't want to make love. "Sorry honey, I've got two scenes tomorrow."'

He was troubled by the spectre of Aids, and thought about the risks before every scene. It was the 'scary edges of our business' that most bothered him. In the old days he knew everyone he worked with, but now people that he'd never seen before would come and go and he'd never see them again. It was for this reason that he tried to work with actresses he knew. But later on he told me that one of the attractions of the job was that he got to have sex with new young girls. 'I'm still a red-blooded American,' he said. He estimated that there was a 'connection' with a female performer in about three out of 10 scenes. Given the conditions in which the scenes take place - with 15 men looking on, cameras and booms poking from every angle, and the stop-start rhythm of filmmaking - this seemed to be an astonishing rate of success. In the other seven scenes, said Spears, 'You're just being a professional.'

Self-effacing, with a generous sense of humour, Spears continues to think of himself primarily as an actor. He won AVN's best actor award in 1990 for his role in The Masseuse, but it must be a difficult self-image to maintain when, as is the case this afternoon, his dramatic skills are restricted to placing his member repeatedly in Thomas's rear passage. 'First speed!' shouts Whitney, by way of stage direction. Followed by 'Second speed!' and finally, as the scene nears its climax and Thomas complains about how much it hurts, 'Third speed!'

'Cut!' shouts Whitney.'That was great. OK, let's load some tape and do that for real now.' By the half-hearted laughter, you gather that this is an old joke. As Spears pumped away in Thomas's behind, a bald man in a Hawaiian shirt, who looked around 60, stood close by with an expression of avid concentration on his face, as if he were watching the endgame of a chess match. This, it turned out, was Thomas's boyfriend.

She told me that she couldn't talk to me that day because she was tired and still had three more 'pop shots' to do. Also known as the 'money shot', the pop shot is the all-important evidence of male orgasm without which no hard-core porn scene is complete. Randy was to supply another pop, having already donated one, and two male performers were due to arrive to contribute the rest.

According to Randy, this was a friendly set. And it certainly appeared that way, with no shortage of banter and camaraderie. He didn't like the new breed of young directors who abused female performers and showed him scant respect. Sixteen years on, he continued to nurture the regret that he did not remain in Hollywood. He told me that his two children, who lived out of town with their mother, were unaware of what he did for a living. 'I worry about what they'll think,' he said.

Though lively and entertaining on set, Spears seemed to convey an air of quiet melancholy off-camera. When I returned to my hotel, I checked his biography on the internet. That day, I learnt, was his birthday. He was 43.

The following day, out in North Ridge, another part of the Valley, I caught up with Thomas. Whitney had told me that she was the 'most famous prostitute in the world'. It turned out that of late she has been working in a legalised brothel in Nevada as the star attraction.

A former Penthouse Pet of the Month, she is known as the Princess of Porn and the Texas Twister, though she was born in Mississippi and grew up in Florida. She came to LA with her ex-husband, a fellow performer who joined the army after they split up and is now serving in Iraq. The titles of some of her films - Double Penetration Virgins, Gang Bang Fury, Anal Avenue - give a forceful impression of the kind of hard-wearing career she's had.

In past interviews, she's made sure to present herself as 'sex-crazed', telling stories of how she once slept with her ex-husband and his brothers and a nephew. She is a trailer-park fantasy, but one with a 223-acre ranch in Texas where she keeps thoroughbred horses.

Thomas left her husband a couple of years back for a man called Dennis Hof, who owns the Bunnyranch brothel in Carson City, where she was formerly employed. They in turn split up last year and now she is with the bald man, a rival brothel-owner. I asked her how much it cost to hire her in a brothel.'I prefer not to say the amount in interviews,' she explained, 'because it will discourage the men from coming. When they're out there and they see me, it's different.'

Her argument, and it's one that unconsciously echoes that of feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon, is that there is no real difference between pornography and prostitution. Except that in a brothel, she says, men wear condoms.

'If all of us got together in this business and said from now on it was condoms, there's nothing they could do,' she says, sounding for a moment like a shop steward. Nowadays, such is her fear of HIV, she will not work with any men she does not know and trust. This was her last film of her contract with VCA. She has enough money to quit porn, but she continues to make films, she says, 'because I like to get new products out for my fans'.

Her brash veneer made it hard to tell whether she was a cynical businesswoman or a long-term victim. In her own mind, she was in control, but all her relationships were with men who have effectively been pimps, even if she had managed to retain some of the financial spoils.

If Thomas has become something of an industry in her own right, at the other end of the scale are young women like Lina Juliette, a 19-year-old Valley girl of Colombian descent who's been in the business for a year, and Shy Love, a 25-year-old former accountant from Connecticut. Juliette had been approached by a talent scout on the street when she was 17. At the time, she was thinking of joining the Marine Corps or studying interior decoration. Instead of exploring these career options, she waited a year and called the agent.

At first she would only work with other women, then only with men with condoms, but now a veteran of nearly 50 gonzo videos, about the only thing she won't do is double anal. The HIV outbreak had made her more health-conscious, she said, and as a consequence she would no longer do 'interracial' (ie perform with black men), but she insisted that she was not racist. It was just 'a health precaution'. Today she would be performing, or rather receiving, double penetration, taking one man in her vagina and one in her rear, neither of whom would be wearing condoms. Yet she did not seem unduly bothered by the risks.

A slight, pretty girl, her face sparkles but not her eyes, giving the impression that what she shows is detached from what she sees.'I used to think the sex was nasty, but now I understand it more,' she says. 'There are certain dicks I'll work with and certain dicks I won't.' Her ambition is to be like Mercedes, a well-known Latino porn star. She is not in touch with her father, whom she has never known, but the rest of her family are aware of what she does, and they don't mind. Her oldest sister found out when her boyfriend saw Juliette in a porn video he was watching.

Shy Love, who is anything but shy, also claimed her family was happy with her career. Vaguely reminiscent of a young Ali McGraw (everyone in porn seems vaguely reminiscent of someone in Hollywood), she speaks in rapid streams of immodesty. She boasts about getting fired from her accountancy firm for getting a boob job, and says that with a face like hers she never has to look for men. As I speak to her in the changing room, I notice that protruding from between her legs is a dildo. She is using it, she says proudly, to stretch her vagina in preparation for her double penetration scene.

On the set, two furtive young men ready themselves for their parts by masturbating as the crew goes noisily about its work. The scene unfolds with the same mechanical movements of all porn, the blunt choreography of market requirements. The two couples go about their separate business, then swap and do the same thing over again. But there is a problem. The man grappling with Shy Love, a scrawny and timid-looking fellow, is having difficulty gaining and maintaining an erection.

The advent of Viagra was supposed to put an end to the male angst that the writer Susan Faludi memorably called 'waiting for wood'. Yet according to old hands it's a growing problem, because many of the young men attracted to the business simply cannot perform under pressure. The porn star Nina Hartley told Faludi that 'the exploitation of the male [in porn] is very distinct, in that he must cut off his dick from his heart.'

In this case, it's obvious that neither organ is engaged in the job. Love, who appears to take her partner's limp condition as a personal insult, works doggedly to redress the problem. But the more she does, the less he is able to respond. A despairing Whitney calls a halt to proceedings.

When set, for example, against the Sub-Saharan Aids pandemic, the threat of HIV in the US porn industry is of infinitesimal significance. The crisis that confronts the business is not to do with the body but the soul. It's an existential malaise that in truth extends beyond the San Fernando Valley into all corners of the consumer-driven world. In many respects, the plotless cul-de-sac that has been reached in the Valley is a fable of our times. What happens when you finally come up against the limit? What happens when there is no more more?

Before they restart, Juliette has a question. 'About the DP. Both guys are going to be with one girl. What's the other girl doing?'

Whitney thinks about this puzzle and decides that the spare girl should grab the other girl's breasts. 'Remember,' he adds, with ironic reassurance, 'it's all about telling a story.'

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