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585 Outbreak

JOHN STAGLIANO: Krysti was supposedly going to meet Marky Mark, alias
Mark Wahlberg, at some restaurant. She was at my house because we
were supposed to look at a location the next morning for her music video.
Krysti had recorded a song, which had been written by Prince and was
produced by Ed Strickland, who had been working for Madonna’s company.
So we were producing a music video to go along with the song.



586 The Other Hollywood

Krysti was all dressed up, and she was playing hard to get, and then
Marky Mark’s people didn’t call back, so it was a memorable afternoon.
Krysti left, and she was going a hundred miles an hour on Los Virgines
Road and lost control of the car and went off into a gully.
She died.
I never had anybody I was close to die before, so it was a little bit difficult.

BROCKTON O’TOOLE: John and I were out there when they found the vehicle.
I went out there, and the highway patrol had already removed Krysti from
the wreck and taken her away.
Krysti was found under the steering wheel. It was very sad. John was
pretty torn up about it. So I have a feeling that the business down in Brazil
would not have happened, if it hadn’t been for this. I think he was punishing
himself.

TRICIA DEVERAUX: Krysti had a friend in the car with her when they were
both killed, and I think John felt responsible somehow.

BROCKTON O’TOOLE: John was torn up pretty badly. It was tough, but Krysti was
driving, and she was at fault, no question about it. And there was this young
girl, a secretary, who was also killed. Krysti was driving John’s second car, so
her family said to John, “What are you going to do about this?”
John had a meeting with the other girl’s family, and he says “Let me
talk to your lawyer.”
The family went into another room. John said to the lawyer, “Well,
what do you think?” The lawyer says, “Well, I think if you want to settle
it right now, I think the family would agree to $250,000.”
John said, “I’ll write you a check. But I have to give it to the family
myself. I want to tell them I’m sorry.”
And he did—and told them not to worry about the funeral.

JOHN STAGLIANO: On the first anniversary of Krysti’s death, I was feeling
kind of bad about myself. The girlfriend I was with, I felt, didn’t really
love me; she didn’t show affection, and I was not feeling good, a little bit
bitter.
So I go down to Brazil.

TIM CONNELLY: John ended up on a suicide mission in South America, seeking
out a Brazilian transvestite street hooker to violently fuck him up the
ass without a condom, hoping to drown all his sorrows and guilt.

JOHN STAGLIANO: I’d been drinking a little bit, kind of enjoying being
unhappy. Next thing I know I’m picking up this street “girl” and demand



587 Outbreak

ing to be fucked up the ass, so lost in my self-pity I don’t care what happens.
I gamble, and I lose.

TRICIA DEVERAUX: John went down to Brazil, and he got HIV.
He knew right away that he’d done something he shouldn’t have—the
non-condom part for sure. So he started getting HIV tests.

JOHN STAGLIANO: I was real careful the next couple of months, getting
tested all the time. I didn’t think I’d gotten it because I really didn’t think
he’d taken the rubber off before he fucked me. But for six months I was
worried, thinking I had to change my life.
And then I started thinking, “Man, I wish I could do it again. I’m not
going to do it again. But I want to.”

TIM CONNELLY: John, after being diagnosed HIV-positive, confessed his disease
to a more-than-not ragingly homophobic industry, knowing full well
the details of his infection would give his jealous detractors and business
enemies poisoned fodder for the gossip market.
And with his courage he proved himself yet again to be of the rarest
quality in the smut biz: an honest man.

JOHN STAGLIANO: You know, I am a little bisexual. I had sucked some guys’
dicks in quarter peep shows and stuff like that, as a variety thing. But primarily,
I guess, I’m heterosexual. I just personally don’t worry so much
what people think about me.
But, you know, admitting that I really wanted to get fucked in the ass,
and might really like it, is not necessarily a socially acceptable thing for a
straight man.

TRICIA DEVERAUX: I met John Stagliano because he called me—he had gotten
HIV a year before I did. He said, “Well, you need to have someone to
talk to who kind of understands a little bit about what it’s like to have
HIV. I could talk to you a little bit.”
I said, “You know, that would be really nice.” So we went out for a
drink at a Mexican restaurant near my apartment. We hit it off immediately,
as friends.

JOHN STAGLIANO: I really enjoyed shooting Tricia when she was working.
The people in the business today are so much more sophisticated than they
were, I think, ten years ago. So I just starting talking to Tricia after she got
infected, and several months later we wound up getting together.

TRICIA DEVERAUX: John and I became really good friends, and then he had



588 The Other Hollywood

to go back down to Brazil to shoot a video. And he called me a couple
times from Brazil, even though he barely knew me. I said, “This is costing
you a fortune.” He said, “Ah, don’t worry about it.”
Another time, he called me after he’d been drinking a little bit. I told
him, “You know what? I think I just have to leave L.A. because everybody
just thinks I’m this horrible drug user who was trying to infect them.”
And John said, “Well, I know things are hard for you. But if you stay,
maybe you could, you know—maybe it would be nice to have you
around.”
I just chalked it up to him being kind of drunk; I didn’t think twice
about it, and about a month later I went back to the Midwest, for a year
and a half.

JOHN STAGLIANO: I grew up in Chicago; I have reason to go back to
Chicago. So off and on for the next year I went back three or four times
and saw Tricia there. Then she came back.
Yeah, we fell in love.

TRICIA DEVERAUX: We realized we liked a lot of the same things. We’re both
from the Chicago area—and our personalities are very similar, which was
what really drew me to him right away because I’d bombed out on two
relationships by going for two different extremes.

JOHN STAGLIANO: Tricia and I have a lot in common. We’re both pretty
much type-A personalities; we like the same music, rock and roll; and sexually
we’re very compatible.

TRICIA DEVERAUX: What do we tell critics who say we’re only together because
we both have HIV? I think that’s why we started to get interested in each
other. But if that was all there was, I think we would have broken up. We’re
both too strong-minded to stay with someone for that reason alone.
We’ve had a couple of hard times in our relationship because now that
I’m out of porn as a performer I’ve always wanted my relationships offcamera
to be monogamous.
John loves going to strip clubs; he loves hiring strippers to do private
strip shows and things like that. And I was like, “Why do you need that?”
John was always a very sexual person, so having HIV probably hit him a
lot harder than it hit me. Because John was having casual sex, and he had
to stop doing that.

JOHN STAGLIANO: I have girls dance for me sometimes—strippers—and
when I’ve got their butts in my face I just play with them forever. I really
get into focus, and I think, “Oh my God, what I had!”



589 Outbreak

In the last couple of months I’ve thought about how fucking incredible
Krysti Lynn’s butt was. I mean, I loved fucking Krysti from behind—it was
the most incredible experience I ever had. I really enjoyed it, but I never
appreciated it—not in the same way I appreciate the little things now.

TRICIA DEVERAUX: The decision to try to have a baby was difficult for
John and me because of HIV. We didn’t even know if it was even possible.
Then we read a couple of articles about HIV-positive moms giving birth
and the babies not having HIV. So we started talking to our doctors
about it.
I asked the doctor, “Is all this just really good luck?” She said it was a
protocol of several different things. The mom has to take HIV medication
during pregnancy; I wasn’t taking medicine yet, but I started when I was
two months pregnant and took it all the way through the labor.
The doctor also said the baby would have to take HIV medicine for the
first month after she was born. And I’d have to have a C-section because
that would allow the doctors to control what would happen with the
blood. She said, “If we do all those things, we’ll have less than a 1 percent
chance that your baby will have HIV.”
Even then, we were worried: What happens if she does? But now it’s
clear that she still could have lived a normal life—and even if she didn’t,
there are worse things in life.
So we decided to try it.
The baby, Isabelle, is negative. And she’s a really good thing for both
of us.

JOHN STAGLIANO: I was getting fucked-up the other night watching porno
movies. And I thought, this is how you write a movie: You set up this
whole scenario where some guy’s doing drugs, he’s about to go too far and
OD, and just before he does, he looks at the camera and says, “Fuck you,
people! You live by a whole different standard than I do! I have this life in
front of me that inspires me. Every one of you has done something at some
point to fuck up your life—get a little too drunk, do too much cocaine.
That’s life, right? And you’re judging me?”
I used to judge these people, and I never knew what was going on
inside them.
You know, they’re experiencing life in a certain way that I don’t know
about, but I need to know about. We want to push ourselves to experience
life and to enjoy it: to be a race car driver, or do drugs, or get fucked in the
ass and risk getting HIV—it’s all the same fucking thing. Pushing yourself
to experience life to its fullest necessarily involves risk. And if you sit in
your room and never do anything—like my mother wanted me to do



590 The Other Hollywood

because she was worried that if I left the house I’d get hit by a car—you’ll
never know what life is like.
Maybe it’s genetically programmed, like women holding back sex.
We’re genetically programmed to say, “Wait a second—oh, it feels good to
go around that curve really fast, but I’m gonna crash.”
You know, like Krysti Lynn did.
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