Photo by Daniel Caso
“People can call me a degenerate all they want, but everyone’s got skeletons in their closet — I just leave my closet door open,” Dominic Piccirillo, a former employee of California’s prodigious pornography industry said. “People are always lying in bed at night thinking about their sins. We all do it. I’m just not embarrassed by mine.” He paused. “I want people to know what I’ve done; maybe it’ll help them in some weird way.”
In 2011, Piccirillo began traveling from Chicago, Illinois to Orange County, California to act in a number of pornographic films. Pornography production is illegal in Illinois, as it is in 48 of the 50 United States.
The pornography industry “by and large lives here in Southern California,” said Ged Kenslea, the senior director of communication for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. This is for a number of reasons, but legality and location are important factors.
“There are only two states in the union where adult film production is legal,” Kenslea said. “Everywhere else it would be considered participating in an illegal act of prostitution. California and the state of New Hampshire both have state supreme court rulings that codify adult film production as a legitimate business.”
Many looking to begin a career in the traditional film industry get their start in pornography, Mark Burch (name changed) said. Burch was one of those people.
“A lot of people in the film business end up doing one or two [adult films] at the beginning of their career; it’s not a big surprise,” he said.
Today, Burch works in audio/visual production for the traditional motion picture industry and recently worked on the filming of the TV series “Modern Family” and the blockbuster film “Inception.” However, from 1999 to around 2001 he worked for Vivid Entertainment, a major producer of pornographic films.
Founded by Steven Hirsch and based in Los Angeles, Vivid Entertainment was and still is one of the largest pornography production companies in the U.S., grossing nearly $100 million a year in revenue during the time Burch was working there, according to a 2005 article about Hirsch on Forbes’ website.
All six of the films Burch worked on with Vivid were shot in the San Fernando Valley, save one small series of films he helped produce in Hawaii. He laughed a little when he spoke about the overall process.
“They’d usually rent a big fancy house up in Chatsworth, rent some furniture and put it in there and come up with some dumb story and shoot away,” he said.
Burch said his motivation to work in the industry was strictly financial. Even as a younger man with no family, he said he didn’t necessarily enjoy the work, but it was exciting at times, and no one around him raised any concerns.
“I had qualified for the union, but hadn’t done any union shows yet,” he said.
Burch said the actors did it “because they enjoy doing it and because they can get paid for it. I never met anyone who didn’t enjoy doing it and was doing it just for the money. They were into it.”
Burch added, laughing, “After like two [films] you’re like whatever, now you’ve met them all, and they’re a bunch of crazy exhibitionsists that love each other.”
Since Burch’s short stint in the industry, revenue from pornography production has steadily declined, due mostly to the rise of the Internet, according to a study published by CovenantEyes, an Internet accountability and filtering company. In fact, global revenue (including online revenue) from pornography has declined 50 percent since 2007. However, revenue from online content alone is still upwards of $3 billion per year.
“There are millions and millions and millions of free pornographic websites out there,” Chris McKenna, educational resource manager for CovenantEyes, said. “So there’s no need to pay for porn; you can feed a decades-long addiction with all the free content you want.”
Regardless, the pornography industry in California still employs 2,000 to 3,000 people, Kenslea said, and that’s just the actors.
“Two sets of workers are here: both the performers, as well as the below-the-line staff, the cameramen and women, the grips and all the production people who may also be working in mainstream film or TV production,” Kenslea said.
What the camera is pointing at, but doesn’t see.
Piccirillo, who is now 28 years old and working as a welder in Chicago, said he started his brief career in the pornography industry shortly after leaving the military. He was contacted by a producer, who saw a non-pornographic but revealing video of him on Youtube, and Piccirillo said he acted in seven pornographic films over the course of the following two years.
He started flying from Chicago to Orange County every few months to shoot. All of the films he took part in paid around $1,000 each. He said these films were then posted to a variety of pornographic websites, usually appealing to a largely homosexual demographic. For his seventh and final film he said he was paired with a transsexual actor and paid nearly $6,500 for the one-day shoot.
“The money was great,” he said. “If things were different, I don’t know, I might go back and do it again. Sometimes I want to … If you’re asking me if I regret it, I don’t.”
Piccirillo’s explanation for getting into the business was simple: money and a sex addiction. Piccirillo said that, for his entire adult life, he struggled with this addiction. He said it has caused problems in most of his relationships, including the one with his family, especially in his first marriage.
“I couldn’t have a real relationship,” he said. “It just didn’t happen. It’s a literal addiction — paying for it, getting it. It really doesn’t matter where you’re getting it. I’m a full-blown nymphomaniac.”
Instead of mansions in the San Fernando Valley, Piccirillo said he mostly filmed in small, rented office spaces in Orange County. He added that condom use during filming and proof of STD testing were optional.
Moving beyond a moral concern.
As the industry stands now, there is a statewide concern regarding safe-sex practices, Kenslea said. Even with federal OSHA requirements mandating condom use during all filming in California since 1993, the only time Cal/OSHA will get involved is when a violation is reported, Kenslea said, but by this point the dangerous behavior has already occurred.
“Lawmakers [in California] have purposely ignored this with no repercussions,” Kenslea said.
Testing for HIV and STDs has become a standard preventative measure with the pornography industry. This practice is both ineffective and irresponsible, Kenslea said.
“The equivalent would be like using a pregnancy test as a form of birth control,” he said. “It diagnoses a condition; it’s not a form of prevention.”
The underreporting of HIV cases in the industry compounds the issue, Kenslea said. The most recent case was in December 2014, when an LA-based porn actor traveled to Nevada and infected several other performers and another person not in the industry. In 2004, adult actor Darren James returned from filming in Brazil and infected four of his female co-workers, Kenslea said.
A number of other cases where individuals became infected while actively working in the industry have gone unreported. Including one in 2010 and three in 2013, according to Kenslea.
“They [the pornography industry] try to blame the person saying, ‘Oh no, it’s an infection they got in their personal lives,’” Kenslea said.
Another initiative, the California Safer Sex in the Adult Film Industry Act, will be voted on this coming November. If passed, it will affect pornography production safety standards statewide.
Measure B and the California Safer Sex in the Adult Film Industry Act have prompted threats by the pornography industry to leave California, Kenslea said. But these threats “ring hollow for business reasons, for legal reasons and for personal reasons.”
In regard to taking actors out of Los Angeles to film, Kenslea said, producers need to be aware of what laws they might actually be breaking, including those involving prostitution and human trafficking.
“If you’re flying an adult film performer from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to perform in a film, technically, legally you would be involved in human trafficking, because you are taking a person across a state line for them to participate in what is legally considered an act of prostitution,” Kenslea said.
The AHF will continue its commitment to workplace safety standards and will also continue to push for the implementation of Measure B and passage of the California Safer Sex in the Adult Film Industry Act, Kenslea said.
“We believe that the lives and the physical safety of these young men and women who chose to work in adult industry are of no less value than somebody who is working at a 7-Eleven or somebody who’s working in a tomato canning factory or as a highway construction person,” he said. “They are entitled to the same worker safety as any other employee in the state of California. And the state, we believe, is obligated to provide that workplace safety.”
A matter of the mind, not just the body.
Physical health isn’t the only concerning trend in the pornography industry. Many individuals entering the business do so with a number of serious personal issues, Kenslea said.
“These are young men and young women, many of whom may have complicated lives,” he said. “I don’t know if a lot of people grow up saying, ‘I want to be an adult film performer’ … The performers may have multiple issues that they are bringing with them to the industry.”
A survey of 177 pornography actresses included in CovenantEyes’ report found that of the 177 surveyed, 79 percent had used marijuana, 50 percent had used ecstasy, 44 percent had used cocaine, 39 percent had used hallucinogens, 27 percent had used methamphetamine, 26 percent had used tranquilizers, and 10 percent had used heroin.
“Once pornography actresses are in the industry they have high rates of substance abuse, typically alcohol and cocaine — depression [and] borderline personality disorder [also],” McKenna said, quoting a study done by psychologist Mary Anne Layden. “The experience I find most common among the performers is that they have to be drunk, high or disassociated in order to go to work. The work environment is particularly toxic. The terrible work life of the pornography performer is often followed by an equally terrible home life.”
Piccirillo said he was either drunk or high on ecstasy every time he got in front of the camera.
“Everyone was doing drugs,” he said. “Lots of the girls would be snorting coke and taking Vicodin.”
He went on to say that the men were injecting Viagra or Cialis.
But Burch told a different story. Recreational drug and alcohol use were not a common occurrence, or at least not during production of the films he worked on, he said. For the actors, it wasn’t all about money, and acting definitely wasn’t all motivated by drugs or alcohol. Burch described most of the actors he worked with as simply “sexaholics.”
“They don’t need anything to stimulate them,” he said. “That’s their dopamine: having sex.”
Burch said he was once invited to a private party thrown by a few of the actors. At these parties, all the attendees would come knowing that no one was getting paid and everyone was there to ultimately just have sex, he said.
“I went to one, and it was surreal. It’s something out of like a Stanley Kubrick movie — but porn,” Burch said.
Individuals without firsthand experience or who are not legitimate sex addicts have a hard time understanding what it’s really like, Piccirillo said.
“People think going out to a bar and trying to hook up is an addiction; it’s not. Thinking about sex all day, every day, going out and sleeping with hookers, and as soon as it’s over you still feel the same, when it doesn’t matter who or where or when: That’s an addiction,” he said.
Sex Addicts Anonymous (SAA), a mostly volunteer organization that helps to facilitate and organize support groups for sex addiction across the globe, defines sex addiction as “a disease affecting the mind, body and spirit. It is progressive, with the behavior and its consequences usually becoming more severe over time. We experience it as compulsion, which is an urge that is stronger than our will to resist, and as obsession, which is a mental preoccupation with sexual behavior and fantasies.”
Michael Shaeffer (name changed), who works full-time at SAA’s main office in Houston, estimated that during any given week, there are around 1,700 meetings taking place worldwide. He said there are a number of different reasons why potential members are drawn to the program.
“I think they get to a point where their sexual behavior, whatever it is, it becomes unmanageable, and there starts to be consequences,” Shaeffer said. “Often it’s the stress or the breakup of a relationship, being fired from your job, being arrested or coming down with a serious sexually transmitted disease. Sometimes it’s also just that people realize that something has to change. That they are spending too much time on their addiction, too much money, that it’s sapping their emotional, psychological, physical strength.”
Shaefer’s statements about sex addiction echo those found in literature from Narcotics Anonymous, which states: “Addiction is a disease which, without recovery, ends in jails, institutions and death. Many of us came to Narcotics Anonymous because drugs had stopped doing what we needed them to do. Addiction takes our pride, self-esteem, family, loved ones and even our desire to live.”
Ongoing treatment and follow-up with members is generally the only way to successfully break the addiction, Shaeffer said.
“There is never a cure for sex addiction, it can [only] be managed on a daily basis,” he said. “I’ve been in the program for over 27 years; it stops being about sex, and it starts being about unlimited spiritual development and growth.”
Leaving porn in the past
Burch said he ultimately left the industry because he found more reputable work and has had a successful career in the traditional film industry. He never told his family about his time working in pornography.
“Back then I wasn’t married, I didn’t have children, and now I do,” he said. “I was a single man, having a good time, just trying to find work.” He laughed, then added, “Having worked in the business, I’d never buy rented furniture again. I don’t think I need to say anything more than that.”
Piccirillo said he also had his reasons for leaving the industry.
“My wife and I were on again, off again, and I thought quitting would fix the problems,” he said. “I loved her. I still do. She didn’t know that any of that stuff was going on at the time though.”
The pressure for young actors to participate in gay porn was another reason Piccirillo said he left the business.
“None of us [the other male actors] were gay,” he said. “But that’s where you have to start out, and honestly, that’s where the money is. It was a little strange, but I could probably do it again … and I know that’s a little messed up.”
At the time of his interview, Piccirillo was living with his girlfriend of three years and said, in terms of his past, she already knew everything there was to know about him. This included his history with infidelity, prostitutes and time spent working as a male escort in Chicago, which occurred shortly after his stint in pornography.
Piccirillo and his girlfriend have since broken up, and he has moved out of the house they own together. He said he is still struggling with sex addiction and recreational drug use but has been seeing a psychologist regarding his addictive and risky sexual behavior.
Acknowledging his need for outside support, he said, “It was a melting pot of things that I just couldn’t separate from. The drugs and hookers and porn and escorting — you try and get away from one but the other things are still there.”
Kenslea said he and the AHF try and look at pornography objectively as a health concern affecting the state of California, not a moral one, and they recognize that the employees in the industry are people first, all with their own motivations.
“Many work in the industry because of financial hardship and many work in it because they really love the industry, and again, we have no problem with that,” Kenslea said. “This is a legal business in California. We are not anti-porn, we are not moralists, so we recognize it’s a legal business. We just would like these workers to be afforded the same workplace safety that any California employee does.”
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Follow Alec McPike on Twitter: @alecmcpike
