Array Seka - Inside Seka

They debated me. More than anything else, they kept saying, “But this way, no one will know he’s wearing one.”

“Listen, everyone should wear a condom unless they’re in a long-term, committed, monogamous relationship. I want the audience to know he’s wearing one!”

I never would have dreamed it, but I’d just given my first Safe Sex Public Service Announcement. If they’d had the cameras rolling, they could have shown it on TV or in movie previews. And it would have worked a helluva lot better than the kinds of homogenized spokespeople who were already doing them. I had become associated with sex, and if someone like me said it, unscripted, people might have taken it more to heart. I never set out to be the spokesmodel for safer sex, but I believed in it and I would have done PSAs in a heartbeat. But America didn’t want to see someone like me with a message like that, unless I was already riddled with AIDS and speaking from my deathbed. I believed in what I was saying because I didn’t want to end up like that. I liked breathing too much! Life is good! So is sex, so what you do, if you have any sense at all, is try to combine the two — life and sex. Condoms help with that.

Henri and Gloria cheered me on. “Give her what she wants!” It worked. If you watch closely, you can see the condoms in my Garter scenes, and even if you can’t because of some angle, trust me, they’re there.

Garter was not a big hit, unfortunately. If it was, perhaps I would have “un-retired” a few more times. But Garter would be the last — my final XXX feature in which I’d have real sex.

Did I miss it? No. The phone continued to ring, but it wasn’t just that they wouldn’t meet my price. The industry continued to change, and not for the better. Garter was practically a throwback, with people like Randy, Ona Zee, Mike Horner, and I involved. Literally no hardcore was being done on film. There was either soft core — no erections and no penetration seen — or there was hardcore. Most hardcore was becoming almost totally plotless. Many of the old players were disappearing, and not just the ones in front of the camera. I’d get calls from people I’d never heard of. Flyby-nights. It used to be we all knew each other — not just the actors, but the entire industry. Now any punk with a video camera was a filmmaker, especially in porn. With home video and the Internet, the industry had grown too large. And it wasn’t some big corporate thing. That might have actually been better, believe it or not. I’d go to return people’s calls and the number would be disconnected. That sort of thing didn’t happen with Time Warner or Sony.

With more product, there were more actors. I didn’t know these people from a hole in the wall. I wouldn’t know who to ask for or who to avoid. There were always a few bad eggs who would pass through the system — crackheads and crackwhores who did one or two films, got a bad reputation they richly deserved, and then faded away. You knew who they were. We had our own little “minor league” system. Now it was all minor league. With people like Randy West, Annie Sprinkle, Debi Diamond, and Ginger Lynn, you knew you were with people who at least cared about themselves, and by doing that, they cared about you, health-wise. But many of the kids I met who were just entering the business in the nineties and beyond seemed to have a death wish. They didn’t give a shit if they lived or died, just as long as they could say they were a porn star.

The industry didn’t do that to them. They did that to themselves. A small handful like Jenna Jameson and Lexington Steele have lasted, while most haven’t. I got out alive. That’s the most important thing.

I always enjoyed doing radio. But I never imagined I’d become a radio host in a major market.

I had been a guest on several WLUP Chicago radio shows, including Steve Dahl and Gary Myers’ show. Steve was the guy who crushed thousands of disco records at Comiskey Park in support of rock and roll. They’d call me at like six o’clock in the morning and ask me dumb stuff like, “What are you doing?” I’d tell them I was sleeping or cleaning the apartment. I guess they found it interesting that an adult movie star would have a normal life. They were huge shock jocks on “The Loop,” so it was good publicity to be on with them. They liked me so they weren’t slamming me.

I did a New Year’s Eve show with them at a club called Park West, where I was in a hot tub the entire show (talk about getting pruney). Steve, who was totally loaded, would climb in and out. At one point, he was on stage with an electric guitar in his hands when he started drunkenly stumbling backwards towards me. I was in there thinking, “We’re going to fry because he’s going to fall into the hot tub.” I was right. At the last second somebody grabbed it out of his hand right before he fell in. That would have been some way to go.

At one point I was the “den mother” for the Kevin Matthews Show. He’d say, “Let’s call the Den Mother,” and I’d come into the studio. You never knew what he was going to do because he’d fly by the seat of his pants.

He would do fundraisers for a Catholic orphanage he was fond of. Believe it or not, he called his charity barbecue contest Beat Kev’s Meat. There were some pretty good cooks out there and he’d have celebrity judges. One summer, he asked me to come out and help the event draw better, along with celebrity hunter and fisherman Babe Winkelman. He was sort of like the Brawny Paper Towel guy. They’d have an auction with things like a guitar from Mötley Crüe or a painting from a gallery. Dinner was served under a huge tent. Kev would ask me and Dave to take this big fish bowl around asking for donations for the orphanage but we were toasted, having been drinking all afternoon. The priest was pretty drunk, too. It made for an interesting day of fund-raising — the porn star, the priest, and the outdoorsman teaming up.

Kevin kept remarking I had a good voice for radio. I finally said to him, “Make it happen.” And he did.

It was Saturday nights from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. and it was called “Let’s Talk about Sex.” At first I was like, “How do you fill up four hours of time?” I dreaded dead air. The first night I thought, “This is going to be the longest night of my life.” But I was absolutely wrong. The phones just lit up. I also had guests like the gay women who wrote Diamonds Are a Girls’ Best Friend, a book about women’s softball. Johnson and Johnson had actual doctors on who specialized in sexuality. They could ask any of us questions. I remember one question in particular. A caller wanted to know, “Where was the strangest place you ever had sex?” My immediate thought was the famous Newlywed Show segment, so I said, “In the butt.” We all cracked up.

Although it did get wild at times and we had an awful lot of fun, we didn’t think of the show or treat it like a shock jock gig. A lot of the questions were from people with legitimate problems. Women worried about keeping things interesting and fresh, while men were more worried about whether they were cumming too soon. It was very satisfying because we actually helped people with good, solid advice from folks qualified to give it. We covered a lot of ground. We made them feel open and at ease. We didn’t have licenses on the wall. The intimidation factor was taken away. There was no judgment on our end.

We welcomed just about anybody who wanted to come to the studio. We had dominatrixes with their slaves. We’d spank people. Restaurant owners would bring foods that served as aphrodisiacs. Of course, everybody who worked at the station wanted to watch the show because we always had naked people there, sort of like Howard Stern.