Information travels in ways that sometimes defy our notions of what is possible. It happened to me that the 7 year old child of a friend of a friend overheard a conversation at a party where somebody I didn't know was talking to somebody else I didn't know about something I had been doing in a country far away. What I had been doing there was supposed to be a secret, but the seven year old - who I had never met either - picked up that piece of very important information about me at a party where I was not present and then went to his father to tell him about it who then told my friend and my friend told me. I denied it, but the information was true. With all my imagination, to this day I have not been able to figure out how on earth that information could have traveled across half the world through people I did not know to end up in the hands of a seven year old in LA. I will never know. Eventually that highly embarrassing information even made it further until it reached... well, that's a secret.

I wouldn't have been that surprised if I had been a CIA operative or a celebrity, but I am as irrelevant as they come.

I'm telling this story to explain why I find it highly unlikely that somebody who is doing porn or who has been doing porn in a distant past will ever be able to bury that past. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I find it very unlikely.

Somebody somehow will always find out about it.

A secret is only safe if you're the only person who knows about it. If you did porn there are thousands and more who know your "secret". And it won't just go away the day you decide that you had enough of it.

I think the best way to deal with it is to make sure that your family (including children) and friends know about your past. That way, when the day of the reckoning hits, they are prepared and will stand by you. As far as employment, that's a different story. I guess that's a case by case situation, even though, porn rarely helps your career prospects.