Sharon Mitchell has been asked some pretty perverse questions in her life, but there is one in particular that stands out. 'This girl called me up and asked me how many plastic chopsticks she could safely get up her rectum,' recalls Mitchell. 'I wanted to ask her why she even thought I would know that.'
As a onetime porn star who has now transformed herself into a humanitarian with two university degrees, Mitchell has become the go-to girl for sex industry workers in Los Angeles - the porn capital
of the world. She is the person they turn to with questions and concerns they couldn't possibly raise with anybody else.
In a clinic on the busy Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, away from the glamour of Beverly Hills, Mitchell is tending to her eccentric crop of clients. Dressed in a smart but casual skirt and tank top, her hair cropped away from a youthful face, Mitchell exudes an easy personableness. She founded the Adult Industry Medical (AIM) Health Care Foundation in 1998 as a place where actors in adult films and prostitutes could be tested for sexually transmitted diseases and undergo counselling if necessary. Shuttling between the foundation's two clinics (the other is in Woodland Hills), Mitchell, who has a PhD in human behaviour, simultaneously plays the role of mother, best friend and mentor to people who might otherwise be ostracised from society.
'We don't have any judgments here,' she says.
'All these people need when they go to see a regular doctor is that one sigh, that one roll of the eyes, and they'll feel alienated and never go back. Here, there is none of that.'