Array Seka - Inside Seka

I can’t say I was happy Fred was dead. I knew and liked all his friends and family, and they suffered. Nobody should have to suffer that way. But I wouldn’t say it bothered me either. The visual I had in my head was of the house falling on the Wicked Witch of the West, with Dorothy — Dottie — Seka — me — watching all the Munchkins dancing around. “Ding, dong, the wicked witch is dead….”

AIDS. Fred and Gary drove it home for me, but while they were some of the earliest cases I knew, talk of the disease was spreading like wildfire throughout the adult industry.

For those not old enough to be sexually active in the 1980s, let me take you back. Take what we know about AIDS today and imagine a time when we knew nothing! Absolutely nothing. In some cases less than nothing. Every day we were being pelted with new information, much of it untrue: It only happens to gay guys. You get it from toilet seats. You could get it from oral sex. You couldn’t get it from oral sex. Condoms protect against it. Condoms provide no protection at all. There were those saying the whole thing was a crock and it didn’t exist at all! Or that it was a massive conspiracy to kill gay people. You name it, we heard it, and by “we” I mean the adult industry. We probably heard most of it before anyone else because we had sex for a living. You’re damn right we were listening. Again though, the problem was, what do you listen to?

We had always been into getting tested on a regular basis, but that was for the clap and herpes and things like that. We girls also kept up on pregnancy testing as well. But picture a time when there was no test for HIV or AIDS. That’s what I lived through.

Initially, it was called “the gay disease.” Did that give us all a sense of relief? No. The girls all did girl/girl scenes. Did “the gay disease” cover that, too? We didn’t know. We doubted it did, but nobody knew anything for sure.

Some of the guys were gay, believe it or not. A greater number were bi or else occasionally did “gay for pay” — straight guys who did gay porn when they needed the extra dough.

Gay guys in straight porn? Sure. Premature ejaculation is always a concern. If a gay guy can manage to get it up and keep it up, he is often a good bet to perform well. He’ll be on top of a girl, reading Blueboy magazine, bored out of his skull and lasting for hours. It works.

But once “the gay disease” came around, it was a witch hunt. Certain guys were shooed off sets and blacklisted. Some were gay or actively bi, while others were merely “suspected,” and that was enough to kill their careers.

Then we had our first fatalities. Some guys we swore were straight as an arrow passed away. Then some girls. Things were getting freaky. Along with these events were the ever-changing theories from the news and medical community. Everyone could get it. Or maybe we all already had it and the entire world was coming to an end. It was madness.

Some folks slept right through the whole thing. Mr. and Mrs. America, married and monogamous for decades, tended not to worry as much. But us? We were on the front lines, baby. An enraged God was gonna smite us all for our perversions. We was all gonna die.

John Holmes’ death hit me particularly hard. John and I did so many scenes together. We were paired together as often as Tracy and Hepburn. But John’s death left as many questions as answers. We all knew he did drugs, but which ones? When? How much? Did he use needles? Most of us didn’t think he did. I never partied with any of the other actors in the industry, so as well as I knew John, a lot of those tales were just secondhand stories to me. I didn’t know what to believe. And he went so fast. That was the part that freaked me out the most. It made me wonder — and to a degree it still makes me wonder — if it was even AIDS at all. I’m not saying AIDS doesn’t exist, but for most people the incubation period is fairly long and the painful slide to nothingness horrifically drawn out. John seemed to go in a matter of weeks. How was that so?

But worst for me was realizing how often I’d been with John. And some of the others who died — the girls, too. Now if someone screened a movie I was in and I saw John or one of the others, it was like watching a horror film, like I was watching the prediction of my own death.

I started turning away jobs. A lot of us did. Others, on the other hand, were in denial. There was so much misinformation that if you were the eternal optimist, you could con yourself into blocking out the bad news and clinging somehow to the reports that the whole thing wasn’t as bad as it seemed and it only happened to “other kinds of people.” Some thought since we all knew each other so well, we were in a protective little bubble. But most of us had been with at least one person from the business who had it, so how was that theory supposed to make any sense? There were also the “death wish” people who claimed they simply didn’t give a shit; life was a crapshoot anyway and any of us could walk outside and get hit by a drunk driver on the way to the corner store.

Me? I wanted to live. The idea of condoms protecting you from infection started to gain more and more traction. But the powers that be who ran the industry tried a few films with guys wearing condoms and the feedback wasn’t positive. By and large, guys didn’t like to wear those — guys in the audience, I mean. After the Pill came out, every girl was on it and condoms gathered dust on pharmacy shelves. Most guys in mainstream America got used to going bareback and they liked it. Watching pornos with woodsmen in rubbers was a buzzkill for them. Most non-industry folks were less paranoid and scared than we were, so they really didn’t want to start using them.

Another strange thing was that as more people became aware of AIDS, the more XXX product they wanted. Masturbation went up! No one ever got AIDS from jerking off, so bring on the porno and have yourself a safe sex party! The disease was cutting into the amount of new product being produced since it was cutting into the acting pool, but all our old stuff was being converted to Beta and VHS and people were watching it at home. In the eighties, everyone went out and bought a home video system. Gone were the red carpet premieres. Adult movie theaters began closing. Who wanted to be harassed by local cops for jerking it in a public theater when you could watch our stuff in the privacy of your own home? Of course, we actors saw none of the new profits. We got paid to work on that film one, two, three, four years ago, and the fact that now it was playing in half the bedrooms in America didn’t make us one thin dime. Even when we tried negotiating for a piece of “the back end” — a percentage of the video sales — we never saw a penny. Creative accounting. None of us had the cash to take those guys to court to prove we were owed more money, so our only option was to keep working or get a job waxing cars.

With the advent of home video, the industry expanded. More new girls and guys came in. When people like me and others started turning down jobs, even more came in. Those of us who took a tiny bit of false comfort in the fact we were a little community of actors who all knew each other and who we’d all been with, had that thrown out the window. We’d show up on set and we knew no one — it was all newbies. Fresh meat. People who could have been carrying any damn disease.

But I was still Seka. I was still a star. It wasn’t an ego thing; it was a business thing, period. Like any other company in America, I knew how my stock was doing on the market.