o/t porn article in today's Guardian

[TopShelfBlue]

An American obsession

A raft of new books and films explore porn's unpleasant past. But its present is pretty nasty too

John Patterson
Friday February 7, 2003
The Guardian

If you thought that you knew everything about the history of the American adult movie business, think again. In the next few months we shall see a veritable avalanche of memoirs, movies and quasi-official histories of "The Industry". Whether you believe this represents another sad stage in the coarsening of America, or a happy milestone in the continuing relaxation of its sexual puritanism, it seems porn is about to take another step towards public prominence and - dare I say it? - respectability.

Well, not respectability, not yet - but public prominence, certainly. Fascination with the industry has escalated in the straight media since the release of The People Vs Larry Flynt and Boogie Nights in 1997. Flynt's profile has risen steadily since, as he's expanded from printed into filmed pornography, making additional millions in the process. John Holmes, the prodigiously endowed porn star whose story was plundered for Boogie Nights, has been "immortalised" with his own documentary, as have Ron Jeremy and the late Savannah. San Francisco porn pioneers Jim and Artie Mitchell had their tawdry, depressing story - they made millions, and Artie later shot Jim dead - rehashed in Rated X, starring the sons of Martin Sheen. Trey Parker put real porn stars like Chasey Lain into his porn spoof Orgazmo, and at the same time the hitherto impermeable membrane separating porn from the mainstream started to dissolve.

...

Jenna Jameson, the brightest star in today's porno firmament, has been on dozens of chat shows, played herself on the NBC political drama Mister Sterling, and will soon publish a sex guide, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star. Jameson's tome is just one of three porn-related books being published this year in the US by HarperCollins (one wonders how much sex the people at HC are currently getting - or how little), and the only one set in the present, of which more, or less, later.

The other two look backwards over porn's not so illustrious past. Legs McNeil, who compiled the oral history of American punk, Please Kill Me, has interviewed the first wave of porno film-makers for The Other Hollywood, which should put everyone's hair up in curlers.

And Traci Lords, the 80s porn star who was a cunning, battle-hardened skin flick veteran before reaching the age of consent, will publish a memoir, Traci Lords Underneath it All, which she calls "an uncensored walk in the stilettos of a 15-year-old porn star." It has porn's typical, irreversible-nosedive trajectory: fake IDs, serious money, major narcotics - the lowest, stickiest rung on stardom's ladder - followed by exposure (of entirely the wrong sort), disgrace, and rehabilitation. "Remember," she says, "then it was all about cocaine and sex. Porn stars didn't have bill boards, they weren't on successful talk shows." Plus ?a change, Traci. Tell it to Jenna.

Porn's most infamous tailspin was Holmes. Many of his old skin flicks are now back in release, including his likeably ridiculous Johnny Wadd thrillers ("Show me some ID!" Zzzzzzzipp... "Omigod - you are Johnny Wadd!"), and his 70s-icon status now almost matches that of Bruce Lee or Farrah Fawcett-Majors. But he spun completely out of control. He contracted HIV, developed an Andean-sized cocaine habit, did jail time, and ended up living in his car and stealing luggage from airport baggage carousels to support himself, his habit and his 15-year-old girlfriend.

Finally Holmes, widely suspected of playing two drug gangs against each other, was dragged by one gang to the other's HQ on Wonderland Avenue in the Hollywood Hills, and forced to watch as four people were beaten to death with a steel pipe. Holmes was tried, but not convicted, for what the LAPD called "the four-on-the-floor murders", and died, penniless and despised, with Aids in 1988. The whole tale will be told in Wonderland, starring an unrecognisable Val Kilmer as the man with, as one commentator said, "a pot of gold at the end of his zipper". Expect it to do very nicely when it's released.

To hear the industry tell it, stories like these are all now safely in the past. They belong to porn's renegade days, before the advent of the VCR, before Aids, before the 1988 legal decision that made it OK to film porn in California without fear of prosecution. Things are different today, they say, and it's plausible, considering the multi-billion dollar profits porn now generates, taking into account the distribution warehouses, tape and DVD-duplication shops, the freedom of speech organisations, the legal spokespersons, the political lobbyists, the jam-packed auditions, and the prominence of one-time pariah figures like Flynt and Jameson. An infrastructure is in place, taxes are paid, profits are reinvested, and respectability sought. "We're a mainstream business now, pure and simple," says Steven Hirsch, the head of Vivid Video, "we're nothing more than widget-makers."

But down in the engine room of porn, things seem to have changed very little. Diseases like chlamydia and hepatitis C - but not HIV or Aids - run at about 50 times what medical experts consider epidemic proportions among us civilians, and there is no government-backed regulation of health issues whatsoever. There is an informal system among porn stars of exchanging recent HIV tests, and high-end companies like Vivid demand condom use, but that's about it.

The LA Times recently reported on a single three-day sex shoot at which no less than three actresses claimed to have contracted HIV from a single male performer bearing fake test results. One of them, Anna Marie Bellowe, interviewed at a Honolulu clinic for homeless Aids patients, remarked: "If I was a prostitute in Nevada, I'd still be alive. If I was a migrant farmworker, I'd still be alive. As it is, I'll be buried before I get wrinkles." And her $10,000 cheque for three days' work, during which she had unsafe sex with 25 men? It bounced.

You can bet that the rats in the upcoming remake of Willard were treated more tenderly than many adult- industry performers are. Don't expect any political reform in this area too soon. No one in California state politics is prepared to touch an issue like this - or people like these. If porn is technically legal, fine, but to do anything about potentially fatal work conditions would be tantamount to wishing that California more closely resembled disreputable but none the less heavily regulated Nevada, which has had no cases of HIV in its bordellos since legalisation 20 years ago.

George Flint, of the Nevada Brothel Owners' Group, says: "If we had the disease rate you see in the porn world, we'd be out of business tomorrow. One customer saying he picked up an STD in one of our houses, and our industry would be gone overnight." But according to California attorney and porn-law expert Frederick Lane: "It would be political suicide for anyone in government to start regulating the porn industry. That's why nothing's been done."

Which begs the unsettling question, who are the bigger hypocrites - Nevada pimps or California politicians?

[jj]

Intemperate at the beginning- the snotty tone about degradation could be equally applied to Tin Pan Alley, for example, with similarly horrendous consequenes for its victims: but nice to see them berating the politicians for their moral cowardice and hypocrisy in the cocnluding part.

[Darren]

That is some pretty shocking stuff, Ian but I don't think that hypocrisy is exclusive to just CALIFORNIAN politicians, almost ALL politicians are hypocrites. Hypocrisy is their policy. Unfortunately the only politician who lived up to his promises is absolutely the worst and most evil of all time - Adolf Hitler.

[Lizard]

And he never made a porno!, or was one flew over the eagles nest, ever released.

[jj]

.....never quite managed the 1000-year Reich, either.

[Crimpo]

Hitler - f**K him and the panzer he rode in on.

Interesting to see the Guardian hack picked up on the LA TImes but not the Belladonna furore - but is recycled moral outrage really as satisfying as the hardcore original...

[jj]

...sorry, what was the B Donna hoo-ha?

[magoo]

Cue Officer Dibble to rant about Guardian reading, handwringing, public sector twats with simpathies for the Palistinians...etc

[marcusallen]

The whole thing,(re "POLITICIANS") whatever side of the Pond or indeed, the world
is simply indicative of ASSOLES, LIARS, THIEVES,HYPOCRITES, ETC on a GRAND SCALE.
We, wherever, who voted for them(I didnt) are utter, total mugs, but of course we have little choice

Magoo; you know as well as I do that OD's rants on this subject are arrowed at the heart of the very same ESTABLISHMENT that I fucking hate (see above) .

[steve56]

politicians make promises they dont keep just to get in,but who ever you vote for the goverment still gets in