I was in Los Angeles in the late eighties and video had boomed. Everything had almost completely switched over from film to video. We were still shooting film style with reasonably large budgets, and we were still making money hand over first. Most of the time, we were flying back and forth from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and either working in a studio there or in a house or somewhere on the outskirts. We started getting lazy and instead of taking the whole crew and meeting in a parking lot and having to take a big truck all the way up to the mountains or flying everyone there, we all started to work in the hills of Malibu. There are a lot of mansions there and they were kind of hard to get to so why not? We started doing that, it was very clandestine and believe it or not, they actually had a Task Force. Can you imagine watching porn and pursuing shoots? It was actually quite funny, but [detective Lloyd Martin] was a real character and he was determined to get something on someone. It was very close to the time when [director] Hal Freeman had just been arrested and things were kind of hot, but we were taking a chance.
I was working for the Zane brothers on the east coast. I’m not going to get into their history because I think they’re still alive and working, but they were producing this particular movie. I forget who the director was, but I remember the guy who owned the house was a very wealthy actor or producer, and he was a very good-looking guy. He had a big house, a boat — you name it and of course, he loved all the girls around. I think it was called Backside to the Future (1986) and Erica Boyer and I were in a bathtub. We were taken on that shoot and all of us were held in jail — all of the actors, and there were about eleven of us there. Randy West and I were the only two who didn’t turn state’s evidence. I was sick as a dog because I had a huge fucking habit. They wanted us to testify that the Zane brothers were panderers. I said, “Wait a second, wouldn’t that make this a prostitution situation?” Then there was the obscenity issue to go along with it.
Based upon information notated on lukeisback.com the Zane brothers of Sicilian ancestry were founded by Charles Zicari (Chuck Zane) and his Uncle Dominic Zicari. The Zanes first emerged as porn producers in 1983, and eventually formed Zane Entertainment. Allegedly, Dominic Zicari was responsible for bringing adult bookstores and peep shows to western New York, where he owned and operated more than forty locations. Dominic was charged over one hundred and fifty times for selling obscene material and was convicted. In a few short years, the Zane Brothers whose films were considered by many to be subpar even by industry standards, declared bankruptcy for the first time after the company was taken over by Chuck Zane (at Dominic’s insistence) following the bust of their joint venture Backside to the Future, the first of two installments. In 1998, Zane Entertainment helmed by brothers, Matt and Mark Zane, repackaged themselves as “gonzo” specialists attracting a chic and more contemporary demographic. Zane Entertainment began to sign on new stars under contract such as Sunset Thomas.
This had been the second time I had been arrested for obscenity. I had won the first time I had been arrested in New York. I just was not going to sign it so I kicked dope in jail; it was awful, but what the fuck was I going to do? I just did not agree. I just couldn’t. There was no way I was going to walk around with anything on record saying — first of all, that I was doing something obscene, and second of all, I was doing something that wasn’t of my choice — that I was being pandered out to do. I wasn’t signing it, I said, “Fuck that.” I didn’t give a shit. License or no license, I didn’t care what the end of this all meant. To me, it had a very strong meaning to my being and who I was, and I was just not going to fucking agree to that.
Thank god, we held out because Randy and I were the only two — I think we stayed in jail for about two weeks. Because we held out, we won. The whole situation was overturned and then the motion picture and television business started allowing insurance and life insurance for adult entertainment to be shot in Los Angeles County.
In August 1988, the California Supreme Court overturned pornographer Harold Freeman’s conviction for pandering (hiring actors to work in a pornographic film production) several years after the original adult oriented movie titled Caught From Behind (1983) was busted. The court ultimately interpreted that Freeman’s conviction was an infringement of First Amendment right to freedom of speech. Following the overturned conviction, the state of California unsuccessfully appealed to the United States Supreme Court. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor ruled that the California Supreme Court’s judgment was founded on an independent and adequate basis of state law therefore bringing about the effective legalization of hardcore pornography in the state of California, known today as the “Freeman Decision.”
Following Backside to the Future, in 1983, Sharon won the CAFA (California Adult Film Award) Best Actress Award for Sexcapades. Directed by Henri Pachard, Sexcapades regards a fledging director who accepts an offer to direct a porn film against his wife’s wishes. That same year, Sharon won Best Supporting Actress for Night Hunger (1983), a Damiano directed erotic thriller with Eric Edwards, Sharon Kane, Jerry Butler, Honey Wilder, and Laurien Dominique. In 1984, Mitchell won the AFAA award for Best Actress in Sexcapades.
“You can’t please everyone, so you’ve got to please yourself.”
— RICK NELSON
According to her filmography, Sharon Mitchell’s career as a director began in 1980 and concluded in 1997 including twenty-nine titles. One of her noteworthy directorial efforts is Be Careful What You Wish For (1994) starring Veronica Hart, Kelly Nichols, and Sharon Kane.
I was never a very good director. I never really liked it that much. I directed and produced about forty films and some videos. I just didn’t like it and I wasn’t very good at it. You know you’re never any good at anything you don’t like, but I needed money so I did it. I had a good job and obviously made money, but I just didn’t like it.
Despite her impartiality about directing, Mitchell recalled that she and her female colleagues felt a sense of endowment of power as unified women working in a sexually oriented industry.
You know, we thought we were feminists. When the feminist movement came out, we thought “my god, aren’t we fabulous, we’re ahead of our fucking time.” We were not only taking control of our sexuality, but in the big part of our world, we thought, “Aren’t we special.” And all of a sudden, boom, people like Andrea Dworkin, and all of these cranky people who probably hadn’t had a fucking orgasm in a hundred years, started coming after us. They were leading women in the feminist movement, and within that movement, they actually created a subculture called Women against Porn [WOP]. They’d pick on us and so on, but we thought we were feminists. We thought we were the definition and the height and example of that. We formed something called Feminists for Free Expression (FFE). Gloria [Leonard] and one of us have always kept it going. There was always an invitation to go on TV or radio to debate them. They thought we were fucking stupid, I guess. You get someone like Gloria back then who is just going to run rings around anybody; I don’t care who or what the fuck you are. She’s just so bright, but they targeted her because she was the first female editor of a men’s magazine [High Society].
Three of the original founding members of Feminists for Free Expression are author, professor and ACLU President Nadine Strossen; former performer, director and author Candida Royalle; past President Dr. Marcia Pally, also an author, professor and teacher who works and writes in Berlin for six months out of every year.
They targeted Gloria and we would go — a few of us. Sometimes, it’d be me and Gloria and Candice or it would be Janie [Hamilton] and Kelly [Nichols] and Gloria. We would go and if it was actually a TV show or a radio show, they would never show up, they were such chicken shits. I know that Gloria had a back and forth debate with them, but I believe it was years later. When the movement was that hot bed of controversy, we were so surprised. You couldn’t be any more surprised than we were.
Sharon readily welcomed controversy and contended she felt supercharged and empowered whe
n critics of the adult community were appalled and outraged.
I was in Boston and I did something [I think was] called the Nun’s Bad Habit [title and year of release are unknown]. It was with Herschel Savage and I played the nun. I was standing next to a candle which turned into a penis candle. Then the candle turned into Herschel Savage as this Jewish angel, and it was so controversial. People were throwing stones at me. Of course, coming from the Catholic background I was first in line, “I’ll do that part!” There were people throwing stones at me and calling me names and so on and so forth, and I just thought, “God, there’s something in them that this particular thing just pisses them off”. It always goes back to the porn roots and that I’ve come out of there and made myself something. It’s almost as if they think, “You don’t deserve that,” or that we all deserve AIDS. We represent something that really, really gets under their skin because an individual never gets ticked off about something unless he or she has a part in it.
We know that we are nice people, probably some of the nicest fucking people you’ll ever come across. We’ve raised each other’s kids and we’ve loaned each other money. We’ve been pals all these years. We’ve made our living; we didn’t hurt anybody. We’re not a bunch of fucking gangsters. We’ve evolved through a very tough period to struggle for what normalcy means to us. Whatever that means individually or collectively to us, and those of us who have survived it — you can’t find a better group of people.
AIMing to Please
In March 1996, Sharon Mitchell was viciously attacked by a man just outside of her apartment after completing her stage act in a strip club. Reports stated the unknown assailant pushed Mitchell inside of her residence, broke her nose, crushed her larynx and raped her. Sharon managed to reach for a ten-pound dumb bell and knocked the man out cold. It wasn’t until later when she realized that the man, an avid fan of her work, heckled her earlier at a club where she had been working. Sharon has publically stated that the rape attack was a pivotal point in her life and cited the incident as the reason for her decision to redeem herself and remain drug free. She enrolled in school and received her doctorate in Human Sexuality.
In May 1998, Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation (AIM) was founded in Los Angeles as a non-profit facility. Sharon Mitchell proactively and efficiently took on the role of director in response to the threat of AIDS and HIV in the adult community. Regularly, AIM tested more than one thousand sex performers every thirty days for the detection of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, and built itself a reputation as a reliable and safe health clinic.
In 2004, five sex performers were informed by AIM they had contracted HIV. At least three of the cases (one of which was Canadian newcomer Lara Roxx) were traced to male porn star Darren James who apparently contracted HIV while working in Brazil that same year. James tested positive in April of 2004, and was the first veteran actor to have contracted HIV since Tony Montana’s positive diagnosis in 1999. Mitchell and AIM called for an immediate work stoppage so that all performers could be tested at least three times over the course of a two-month period and cleared prior to returning to work. The quarantine lasted for sixty days.
Five years later, in 2009, the Los Angeles Public Health Department stated there were sixteen unreported cases of HIV within the adult community. AIM responded the cases were individuals not currently working in sex films, but seeking employment as adult performers. In October 2010, AIM reported a current performer had tested positive for HIV and came under scrutiny by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. The individual’s name was not released to the public, but Vivid Entertainment and Wicked Pictures (the latter being the only adult production company known to practice condom use) temporarily halted production. It was later revealed the HIV infected performer’s name was Derrick Burts who had worked in straight and gay pornography.
In May 2011, AIM closed its offices declaring bankruptcy following a private lawsuit that resulted after AIM’s database was believed to have been stolen and used to compile actual names and personal information of over 15,000 performers (including HIV status) on a site called Porn Wikileaks (started by an embittered former performer). Porn Wikileaks has since been removed from the web.
The following portion of Sharon Mitchell’s interview was conducted in the summer of 2007, in person, on the premises of AIM’s principle office in Sherman Oaks, California. Sharon stated she was generally in the office three days a week. In light of the recent ruling in Cal-OSHA’s (California Occupational Safety & Health Administration) favor for mandatory provision of condoms for sex performers by adult production companies, Sharon’s 2007 commentary on HIV and testing methods exercised by AIM prior to its closure is relevant.
When I first started AIM in 1998, the average length of a career of a young lady entering at that time if she was pretty and/or motivated was between three and five years. Now it’s approximately three to six months with eighteen months being the longest. There’s no money in it anymore. There is nothing to discuss. Their clothes are already off. It is like “yesterday I had three dicks in my ass.” I don’t think I had anal sex the whole time I was in movies.
John Holmes [1988 death from AIDS] made me aware that there was HIV in the industry, and that’s clearly something that everybody didn’t want to look at. I didn’t even want to look at it even being an addict. I thought this is a reality now and I’m just going to have to suck it up.
I was getting tested every three months and I remember because I was a heroin addict, I was going to a methadone clinic of course, and getting my HIV test. I was asking people at the methadone clinic “Would you test my friends from the porn business for free on the county being that they’ll be my partner?”
They said “sure,” so I would send people to the methadone clinic to get tested.
If John hadn’t been positive, I don’t think I would have gotten that awareness or the wherewithal to really look at AIDS because that’s something that’s just been, even to this day, it’s indestructible — the amount of denial that’s in the adult entertainment industry when it comes to HIV and STDs. People just don’t think that they’re going to get it because they see so little of it, and they don’t realize just how much of it we do see.
Usually, when people contract HIV, they contract it outside of the industry. That’s been my experience running this place, but I’ve only been doing testimony on the industry for the last ten years. It seems like a lifetime, but before that, very few people were getting tested. I mean, even when John came out and said “I’m positive,” and so on and so forth, I started to get tested on a regular basis and I started to ask people for tests, but not everybody did. At that time, these tests were not detecting [HIV] at six weeks, and seven weeks, and twelve weeks. The strains back then were so much stronger and just the sheer fact that the few people who had it had such a strong strain of AIDS. I remember junkies dropping like flies, down on the lower East Side.
They were dealing with the ELISA methodology [then], which is the antibody. The antibody can take any healthy, young person probably beyond six weeks now. [Back then] people could have been infected for maybe twelve weeks before they found out because the ELISA antibodies weren’t as accurate as they are now. Sometimes people could go up to six months and it would go undetected so someone could have had it and it not even come up on a test. They could have had it a week after the first six-month period when it was negative. You never know. So that’s why when we use window periods — that’s why we use a totally different method of testing. We use PCR-DNA, an early detection method here that can tell just ten days after exposure. If someone is positive, we’re able to get them and their partners and put them aside. We’re able to make sure that not many people get it. We can’t guarantee that no one’s going to get it, but we can guarantee that we’re going to catch it very quickly.
While developing John Holmes: A Life Measured in Inches (2008) my writing partner Jennifer Sugar conducted extensive research involving tracking sym
ptoms after initial exposure to HIV, early HIV detection, and the differences between the ELISA and PCR-DNA testing methods. The following information is excerpted from our book.
“In as little as four weeks after HIV infection occurs, some people may have symptoms, although many people are asymptomatic for as many as eight to ten years, or even more. Symptoms are flu-like: fever, swollen lymph nodes, as well as joint, muscle pain, and a red splotchy rash can spread over the body in two to three days after the fever develops. These symptoms of acute HIV infection tend to last about two weeks and then the feeling subsides. Early ELISA tests likely required close to six months in order to show antibodies, so a negative test did not necessarily equate to negative HIV status, but today, negative results from an ELISA are very reliable. Tests that rely on HIV antibodies such as ELISA, have shown to be the most reliable testing methods.”
We can’t keep HIV out of the industry. It’s impossible. We try you know, but we see between ten and twenty people that want to come in the industry every month and have HIV and if no one tested them or looked at their tests, and we weren’t here…
It’s a totally different industry now than it was back then. You’ve got where you’re testing two-thousand people a month, five hundred of them are new, you know, five hundred come and go — about one-thousand stay around for anywhere from six months to three years. It’s a high transient industry. Back then, it was like three hundred of us on both coasts. Certain people have dropped out like Darren James. There have just been people who have dropped out and you knew that they had HIV. Some people said, “I’ve got HIV, and I’ve got to go,” and some didn’t, they just dropped out. It’s very easy to fall of the face of the earth in this business and we’ll never find you again, you know. God knows if they did, or who they were, or what happened.
GOLDEN GODDESSES: 25 LEGENDARY WOMEN OF CLASSIC EROTIC CINEMA, 1968-1985 Page 45
