Life after porn

Matt Sanchez

Matt Sanchez, a marine reservist who has travelled to Afghanistan and Iraq as an embedded journalist, is an unabashed conservative, and made his name as a political activist while at Columbia University. Harangued by on-campus socialists for his support of the US military, he subsequently wrote an op-ed article for the New York Post in December 2006, complaining that the university had ignored his complaints and were prejudiced against the military. For this he was honoured at the Conservative Political Action Conference. It then emerged that Sanchez had appeared in gay porn movies under the stage names Pierre LaBranche and Rod Majors.

Traci Lords

Traci Lords supposedly named herself after Katharine Hepburn's character Tracy Lord from the classic rom-com The Philadelphia Story, but her own film debut was rather less auspicious. She became famous (make that infamous) for appearing in porn films and Penthouse magazine when aged just 16. Her first film, made in 1984, was called What Gets Me Hot! After her arrest for making adult fare while under age, Lords moved into the mainstream, appearing in films such as Blade, and television series such as MacGyver, Will & Grace and Melrose Place. She even sang for the Manic Street Preachers on their 1992 single "Little Baby Nothing".

Sharon Mitchell

Sharon Mitchell, formerly a famed lesbian porn performer, is now the director of the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation, which she established in 1998. She appeared in more than 2,000 movies in the 1970s and 1980s, but her career took a dark turn when she became addicted to heroin, a habit she shook off in the 1990s. In 1996, she was brutally raped by a "fan" and left the porn industry. She founded her health organisation for adult film performers after acquiring a PhD in human sexuality from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in swinging San Francisco.

Linda Lovelace

Linda Lovelace (real name Susan Boreman) ended her life as an anti-porn campaigner. She starred in Deep Throat, the 1972 film which involved her engaging in sexual practices she later claimed were performed under duress. Indeed, she said her husband (and pimp), Chuck Traynor, regularly threatened her with a gun. After publishing her autobiography, Ordeal, in 1980, Boreman joined the feminist anti-pornography movement. She died following a car accident in 2002.