by Legs McNeil
TIM CONNELLY: You’d drive out to some industrial park in the middle of nowhere, and these high-level guys—Teddy and Bobby—are in a fucking Quonset hut running their little empire, doing blow, and fucking skanky little girls from San Bernardino.
TOM BYRON: Teddy used to have these little coke orgies or whatever—because I think he liked to videotape guys fucking his wife, Sharon.
Sharon had red hair—wasn’t that long. White skin, pretty face. She was skinny because she did a lot of coke. That’s about it. She was pretty friendly, but she didn’t come on that strong to me. Marc Wallice was fucking her. Probably Paul Thomas. I don’t know anyone else.
FRED LINCOLN: When Teddy first met Sharon, she was a member of the “horse set.” She could’ve went to the moon! But she went along with Teddy’s degenerate ways—so she gave up her career, thinking Teddy was going to take care of her.
PHIL VANNATTER (LAPD DETECTIVE): Sharon Snyder was sort of the outcast of her family. They were not happy with her lifestyle.
TOM BYRON: I woulda fucked her. I dunno, Sharon Snyder was a very sexual person. I mean, that might have been because she was full of coke—but she came on to a lot of people.
She probably made a couple of flirtatious passes at me, but I didn’t really pick up on it. I mean, she was the wife of the guy who was paying my bills, so I wasn’t gonna go there.
And Teddy definitely had a violent streak. I knew he was connected, but I wasn’t scared of that; back then everybody was connected. But I’d heard stories about Teddy, you know? Paul Thomas told me that Teddy once fucking put a gun in his mouth and threatened to blow his fucking head off—and I think Marc Wallice said the same thing. You know what I’m saying? I’d heard Ted had done, like, scary things.
Plus, he did a lotta coke. So, you know, guns and coke…I kept a respectful distance.
PHIL VANNATTER: I saw a videotape of Sharon—several months pregnant—having oral sex with another man. This is the kind of people they were. Anybody who would film his pregnant wife having sex with somebody else has got to be a sick puppy.
To Be or Not to Be?
LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY
1984
PAT LIVINGSTON: I just didn’t want to go on. I didn’t want to go on as Pat Salamone, and I didn’t want to go on as Pat Livingston.
I just saw my life totally coming apart and Salamone was part of that, Vick and the family were part of that, the job was part of that. Everything was just…I just wanted to stop. So did I take a .357 Magnum down and look at it that week? You bet I did. I was sitting on the edge of the bed staring at it.
BILL KELLY: At the time MIPORN went into operation, pornography was a four-billion-dollar-a-year business—and by the time the operation was over, porn was about an eight-billion-dollar industry.
So we had absolutely no permanent effect on interstate transportation of obscene matter at all.
PAT LIVINGSTON: I can’t remember whether I spun the cylinder or opened the cylinder. I had such a feeling of hopelessness, and no alternative other than to just end it. I wasn’t able to think rationally.
NANCY LIVINGSTON: Vickie called me on a Friday night, just hysterical. She couldn’t talk to me over the phone, so I went to pick her up. That’s when she told me and my mother that she’d found the gun.
Vickie asked Michael if Daddy had taken his briefcase upstairs with him.
Michael, who was very perceptive, said, “Yeah, Mom, are you thinking what I’m thinking? He has a gun in there.”
Pat was in the bedroom with the gun, and I think they wrestled with it. She took it away from him. It had four bullets in it.
PAT LIVINGSTON: I hadn’t slept in three or four days, and I had worn myself down. That Friday I asked Vick to stay home, then, very shortly after, I wished she had gone. I wanted to be by myself and do what I wanted to do, and she wouldn’t let me out of her sight. But eventually I left because I had an excuse to go see Dr. Riddick.
VICKIE LIVINGSTON: Pat had an appointment at Dr. Riddick’s at five. He was procrastinating about leaving, then he finally left about 4:15. About 5:15 Riddick called me and wanted to know if Pat had left yet. That’s when he told me that Pat had talked to him about suicide.
PAT LIVINGSTON: I just drove down the road to Shelbyville, toward Dr. Riddick’s place, going very slow. Then I turned back to St. Matthews, past the police department and Bacon’s, just kind of meandering, wandering. I didn’t have any direction. I didn’t know where I was going. I thought about going to Dr. Riddick’s. But I didn’t. I should have.
VICKIE LIVINGSTON: I was real scared. I tried to get into Pat’s briefcase to look for his service revolver, but I didn’t know the combination. I ran upstairs to check and see if the big gun was there—and it was—but Riddick was talking about the car and all this other stuff.
PAT LIVINGSTON: I ended up in Seneca Park, out by Route 64, where the golf course is. Then I got back on Route 64, drove through downtown. Then I went 10 to 15 miles into Indiana. Then I turned around, came back, and crossed the bridge back into Louisville.
I got off at the Grainstead exit, which is kind of near Riddick’s office. I thought I might be going there. But then I got back on 64 again. I drove back over the bridge into Indiana. A couple of times along the way, I stopped the car and just sat there.
BILL KELLY: I was misquoted in one of the Miami Herald articles where I said, “Agents didn’t use to have mental problems. They just went out and shot themselves.”
It sounds cruel, but what I meant was this: Back in the old bureau, you never heard about a guy that had psychological problems. Nobody was getting psychiatric treatment that I ever heard of.
PAT LIVINGSTON: I thought about a lot of ways to kill myself. I thought about doing it the same way my uncle had done it—just going off the bridge. That seemed like a nice, easy way of doing it. I thought about using the gun.
BILL KELLY: Obviously it was happening to some guys, but instead of going to get help they’d take a service revolver and blow their brains out. That’s what I meant—but it was sort of twisted around to make it look like I was suggesting that Pat should have shot himself. I wrote him a letter and said, “Pat, that is not what I meant.”
PAT LIVINGSTON: Then I came back home and saw my brother-in-law Denny’s car here. I just came in the kitchen, and Vick was on the phone to Riddick or somebody, and I heard her say, “He’s here.”
Denny was standing there, and Vickie’s friend was standing there. I sat down in the chair. A dining room chair. People talked, and I just didn’t say anything.
Then they asked if I wanted to go to the hospital, and I went.
BILL KELLY: I would have kicked Pat’s tail from here to Butte, Montana, for the incident in Bacon’s Department Store, but I would not have fired him. We had a tragedy on our hands. I was one of the few people that supported him before the bureau, saying, “I knew this case from the beginning, and I think that the bureau should have accepted some responsibility for his condition.”
It was a shame. His life was destroyed, and so was his family’s.
GRID
NEW YORK CITY/LOS ANGELES
1984–1985
SHARON MITCHELL: Marc Stevens was nine and a half inches—but we used to call him Mr. Ten-and-a-Half. At that length, does it really matter?
Marc was wonderful and flamboyant. We appeared in a couple of the same movies, but we never directly worked together. But I did work with Marc’s dance troupe. We used to paint ourselves all odd colors—mostly silver and gold—and do dance shows. It was very popular, and it was fun.
ANNIE SPRINKLE: I met Marc Stevens at Leonard Curtman’s studio, and I fucked him right away. Marc fucked girls, but he was totally gay—he had relationships with guys.
Marc and I became very good friends. We lived down the hall from each other for a good ten years—at Twenty-seventh and Lexington. I was in apartment 11, he was in 11B.
SHARON MITCHELL: Marc was a rather successful pimp for a while. He worked out of t
he same building where Annie Sprinkle had the Sprinkle Salon—a very nice building right off Gramercy Park. Marc had a stable of girls, but he’d call in for specialty stuff.
I only worked for Marc for about a day—ha, ha, ha—because I was a really bad hooker. I never liked sex that much to begin with, and at least in the porn movies I had my choice of people to be with. I mean, here comes somebody that you wouldn’t have sex with if you weren’t getting paid, and they want to do things to you with no camera around. I was just like, “Whoa. Why?!” So I wasn’t very good at it, ha, ha, ha.
TIM CONNELLY: The first time I heard about anything AIDS-related was when Marc Stevens brought it up. He said, “There’s something going down in the Village that seems to be, like, much bigger than what’s normally going down in the Village—people are getting really sick and dying.”
ANNIE SPRINKLE: Marc Stevens said, “Have you heard about this gay cancer thing?”
I laughed and said, “Gay cancer?!” I just thought that was hysterically funny.
Marc said, “No, really. Gay cancer.”
I was like, “Yeah, right.” But then I started hearing bits on the news about GRID: Gay Related Immunodeficiency Disease.
SHARON MITCHELL: I was up at Fred Lincoln’s apartment kicking coke when I had a fucking kidney shutdown or something. Fred took me to the hospital, and they gave me whatever it is they give you.
So I’m in this complete stupor, and when I open my eyes the first people I see are Larry Levine, Al Goldstein, Fred Lincoln, and Ron Jeremy. They’re all standing around the bed wearing fucking masks—because they thought I had GRID.
I went, “Oh my God! Fuck!” I thought I was dead, and I was having some sort of flashback thing—you know, “I’ve seen the light…. and it’s Ron Jeremy!”
It turned out it was just fucking too much coke, you know? Which could have been gay-related, I’m sure.
HENRI PACHARD: I was in New York when I first heard about AIDS. What I started to hear was the question “Am I spreading something?”
I thought, “Am I a death merchant?”
That was a serious moral question for me for a while. Then it became “If they want to protect themselves they should, and if they don’t wanna protect themselves, I’m not gonna.”
My biggest fear was not so much about the ability to shoot these movies, but that they were going to be regulated by the Health Department, like when they shut down the bathhouses in all the major cities. Yet, why don’t they shut down pornographers? Violating their First Amendment rights?
Bullshit.
ANNIE SPRINKLE: Did AIDS alter my life? Oh, totally, radically, drastically. It was like we’d had this big, fabulous orgy party, and then suddenly it ended. People were in the hospital; people were dying. There were funerals. It felt like we had gone to war.
TIM CONNELLY: Everybody thought it was the amyl nitrate. You’d be out at a club, having a drink—and it’s really loud and crowded—and somebody would hand you a bottle of amyl nitrate. It was just a cheap high, a lot of people did it. So when the Village Voice did an article about the connection between amyl nitrate and Kaposi’s sarcoma, I had to read it. But by the time I was done I wasn’t buying their theory.
ANNIE SPRINKLE: Of course we fucked in the hospitals. I’d wear my nurse’s outfit, and we’d play with dildos. I had sex with one guy the week before he went in for his spinal tap and then again when he came out. Because I figured, whatever “IT” was—if all these guys had it, I must have it.
HENRI PACHARD: This was 1984. We didn’t have enough information. We discovered that AIDS was beginning to spread among drug users and homosexuals. So if you were a Haitian homosexual needle-using drug addict, then there was a good chance you would contract this failure in your immune system.
So we all thought, “It can’t be me. I’m straight. I only do coke; I don’t do needles, and she doesn’t, either. So we’re both cool.”
TIM CONNELLY: The first person I knew who had it was a porn director named Robert. I worked in a bunch of his movies—he directed both gay and straight films. Robert was really sick when we did Brooke Does College. He just looked terrible. I tried to rub his shoulders because he said he ached all over—but he said he didn’t want to be touched. Even being touched hurt him.
GLORIA LEONARD: God, there was a time—around 1985, 1986—I went to six funerals in four weeks. Among the first was Chuck Vincent and a guy I worked with, Wade Nichols; he also worked under the name Dennis Parker. I could go on and on.
ANNIE SPRINKLE: How could I not have AIDS, when all the people I was having sex with were getting really sick and losing their eyesight and becoming demented?
When you visited them in the hospital, you’d have to wear a mask and gown. But I’d just take all of that off. And you didn’t know if you could touch them, but I did anyway. I just thought, “I’m not going to stop touching my friends and lovers, you know?”
TIM CONNELLY: Robert lived in this beautiful high-rise apartment on Fifty-seventh Street. He was always funny and happy—just the coolest guy in the world. He would have pajama parties. We’d all go over to his place on Saturday night in our pajamas and drink and eat and do whatever—stay up all night. It was just great fun.
When he got sick he moved out to California to be with his mom. So when Kelly and I came out, we went to visit him in this hospital down in Venice. He had lost all this weight, and he had these giant black sores all over him. We had to wear masks and suits because his lesions were festering. That was my first real awareness of the mortality of the disease.
He was saying it was Kaposi’s sarcoma; I guessed it was AIDS.
ANNIE SPRINKLE: My hemorrhoids saved my life—because I’m sure I would have gotten AIDS if I had had more anal sex. I mean, my pussy was made of iron at that time. You could do anything to it. My pussy was invincible.
I was also into macrobiotics, doing a lot of seaweed. Maybe it was that; maybe it was just pure luck. I mean, God knows, I had a lot of sex with a lot of people with AIDS. Drank their piss. Had their Crisco-covered hand go from their butt to my pussy—all that.
You know, it made me think—maybe it was a miracle. An absolute miracle.
BUD LEE: I don’t think anybody in our business has been infected with HIV from another human being. You know why? I think it’s what they do when they’re not working. It’s their lifestyle.
ANNIE SPRINKLE: During this big AIDS crisis, I became really involved with the healing circle. Probably half the people there had AIDS; the other half were people really affected by AIDS or who didn’t know if they had it. Most of us hadn’t been tested.
GLORIA LEONARD: Did people really try to alter their behavior? No, they stuck their heads in the sand, essentially.
TIM CONNELLY: The only people I knew who had it were gay, and the only people who seemed to talk about having it were gay. So at that point—as crazy as it sounded—I thought maybe it was created by somebody who hated gay people. Because it just didn’t make sense any other way. I mean, if it was just because they have anal sex, why weren’t straight people getting it?
And somehow maybe they gave it to a gay guy, and gay guys only have sex with gay guys. We weren’t hearing about gay women getting it.
ANNIE SPRINKLE: I had never cried before—you know, until AIDS hit. Then suddenly it was like a lifetime of tears and sadness. I suddenly felt the human condition for the first time.
JOHN WATERS: It’s truly a taboo to fuck without rubbers in a gay movie, and even if you did, they wouldn’t distribute it. But in straight movies they don’t—and that shocks me because that’s how you get AIDS, plain and simple.
BUD LEE: Every one of our movies should have condoms in them. What educational-minded person in their right mind is going to advocate unsafe sex between consenting adults? Not one. So for us to look legitimate—to hide behind that banner—we have to allow condoms. But we also have to temper it with freedom of choice among the talent.
TIM CONNELLY: When I heard that T
ony Taylor had AIDS, that’s when I realized it was bigger than the gay community.
Tony was a guy I met at Show World; he lived with Kelly and me for a while. He was a big, strapping, black guy from the Upper West Side, whose mother raised him alone. Tony was extremely articulate; he looked like Sidney Poitier. But then Tony got into drugs real bad, and he got AIDS.
Even though Tony was a sex worker, there was no question in my mind—there’s no way he ever had gay sex. It was obvious he’d gotten it from a needle.
ANNIE SPRINKLE: At a certain point, Marc Stevens started doing so many drugs that I stopped hanging out with him. Then he started selling crack out of his apartment, and he had all these guys from Honduras with guns hanging around.
He had a gorgeous penthouse apartment—with views and decks—and they made it like this cave. All the windows were covered with black paper and the washer and dryer were being broken into all of the time.
SHARON MITCHELL: Marc was bisexual. You know how some people are gay for pay? I think Marc was straight for pay.
ANNIE SPRINKLE: Marc was really into coke for a long time. And then crack, and then he went through an angel dust phase.
One night one of Marc’s crack guys crawled along the ledge of our apartment building and came in through my window. I woke up, and this guy was feeling my legs. I thought, Holy Jesus. That was pretty scary. But I killed him with kindness and got him to leave.