Thursday, July 28, 2016

DECLARATION FOR ALL OF US! : Safe/Safer Sex


"I practice Safe/Safer Sex.  If a person refuses to cooperate, then I don't have sex with them."

Since the days when John C. Holmes was diagnosed as HIV positive - and kept it a secret - there's been some advancement in treating HIV  (the virus that causes AIDS) and keeping it in control and from becoming AIDS, full blown and deadly. 

Actor Charlie Sheen has recently come forward as HIV positive, there are plenty of drug cocktail options as well as experimental therapies in many other countries for those who have the wealth to option them as Charlie and many others have. It used to be thought of as a GAY DISEASE but that isn't true.  Since then we know HIV/AIDS can be transmitted through the transfer of blood through needles - especially shared illegal drug use, contamination - blood transfusion and unclean hospital equipment, any form of sexual activity in which there is blood, including menstrual blood, and that the virus has been detected in other bodily fluids such as saliva and tears.  We know that babies can be born sick with it, transferred from their mothers.  We know that people give and get HIV by rape.  We know that people can get it the first time they have unprotected sex or if a rubber breaks.

What all this means is that you have to be careful and especially that you have to TALK ABOUT SAFE/SAFER SEX with a potential sexual partner BEFORE YOU EVER FIND YOURSELF having sex with them so that you're in agreement. 


It doesn't matter what your sexual orientation is.

YOU - YOUR LIFE - and the PEOPLE YOU LOVE are all worth saying NO to SEX otherwise.


There are MANY web sites that deal with SAFE/SAFER SEX, HIV, and AIDS but let's look at the one that's officially the CENTER FOR DISEASE CONTROL for the UNITES STATES

C 2016 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot  All Rights Reserved


Monday, July 25, 2016

E.S.T.E.A.M stands for Empowering Successful Teens through Education, Awareness and Mentoring : DAWN SCHILLER TURNS HER HARSH EXPERIENCE AROUND TO HELP OTHERS


 
update April 2022.  It appears this link is "suspended."
So I'm offering this link to DAWN who holds a Masters Degree and is and expert
in sex trafficking: DAWN SCHILLER COM - BIO
 

DAWN SCHILLER


DAWN SHILLERS WEB SITE
from publicity photos
on her web site.
 

From EMPOWERTEENS: "To think of images of kids beat down, used or thrown away should break our hearts. What a terrible feeling to be unwanted, not important enough to be asked what you might be thinking or feeling. No one to worry if you are scared or lonely… to offer you safety without strings. We recycle our trash, but consider an unwanted teen unsalvageable. Why? They are our poets, artists, musicians, scholars, athletes, chemists, and thespians. They are worth more than the sky. They are all our children. Let’s embrace them."
 
 


Monday, July 18, 2016

JOHN C. HOLMES and DAWN SCHILLER BECOME DRUG ADDICTS and HE TURNS HER INTO A PROSTITUTE

THE ROAD THROUGH WONDERLAND - Surviving John Holmes
By DAWN SCHILLER, C  2010,  is published by Medallion Press

MISTRESS MANIFESTO BOOK REVIEW and EXCERPTS

After we have come to understand the slow seduction that Dawn Schiller began to experience as an underage teen, and the way she, John C. Holmes, and Sharon, his wife, moved into living together, and we wonder how much Sharon did or didn't know, we next wonder how it is that the relationship between John and Dawn, which had it's romantic moments no doubt, turned very ugly.  The answer seems to be easy.  They smoked pot recreationally, but John started using cocaine and he knew that many a person had lost everything they had before he started using.  His drug addiction came rapidly upon him and with it he began to steal from his own household.  He sold the very rings that he had given Dawn as tokens of his love.  He stole from other people too.  He looked for cars that were unlocked and stole out of them. 

In her book Dawn says that Sharon doesn't know about the pot.  The problem I have reading that in the hear and now is that the pot was being smoked in the cottages in the court that the Holmes' managed, including, very much so, in the cottage that John's brother David and wife lived in down the way. Don't know about you, but medical marijuana is legal now where I live, and the smell of neighbors smoking it is very tell tale.

Within a few months, the weekend cocaine high turned into twice and then three times a week. Sharon may not have recognize the smell of pot wafting in the courts, but she did know that John was calling Dawn to meet him over at his brother's cottage a lot at this point.
(Page 239)

Soon John was dealing, mixing powdered baby laxative in with the cocaine powder and Dawn and his brother were helping him.  About the same time Sharon offers Dawn the job of managing the cottages full time so she can quit her nursing assistant job and be free to start taking classes.  (Pages 230 and 233)

The fun outings, camping and day trips end because they need to be home so they can use.  The other tenants notice the unusual behavior and are no longer trusting. They are watching their property and complaining to Sharon.  (Page 235)

John promises that he will quit the drug but can't. 

There's a difficult visit of John's mother at Christmas to deal with in which she senses something amiss and deliberately ignores Dawn and says that she feels she should have no place in the family.  John's mother even calls Dawn a "devil." Sharon tells her, "Dawn is in this family by choice - our decision."  (Page 244)

As John becomes holed up in the bathroom for hours doing the drug, he and Sharon stop communicating.  (Page 248) and then John accuses Dawn, whose been taking a typing class, of seeing a young stud at school. (Page 249)  Soon he is beating her, even cracking her jaw, jealous and threatening to kill her (nonexistent boyfriend.)  (Page 259)

He now takes her to sit in the car while he makes his deals on Wonderland at Eddie Nash's, and lets her know that he is engaging with very dangerous people.  (Page 265)  He becomes an angry man, tearing up a garden, scaring the other tenants, and, one day...

"Sharon sees me crumpled on the porch holding my gut and crying.  She steps back into the shadow of the house, emotionless."  (Page 266)

Sharon uses her nursing skills to patch Dawn up sometimes but when Dawn threatens suicide, Sharon writes her a letter and says that she has to change or will be kicked out.  (Page 277) 

This is when John and Dawn leave to live in seedy motels and in a van, basically homeless.  Before the day that Dawn makes her break from John, he will witness people being murdered at Nash's, be arrested, go on trial, be freed, and the couple will go on the run to Florida, where they feel safer and resume a more stable life - for a while. 



Missy here.  Cliffhanger!  I want to encourage you to get and read this devastating book.  (I hope you'll be inspired to read many of the books that I read first and use as research here at MISTRESS MANIFESTO.)


Thursday, July 14, 2016

DAWN SCHILLER on HER EXPERIENCE OF BEING INVOLVED WITH A MARRIED COUPLE


"It's like living three different lives.  The one with John and me.  The one with Sharon and me.  And the one with John, Sharon, and me.  But I do questions every day whether or not Sharon knows about us.  Some days I have no doubt that she is well aware of our relationship and simply has no desire to discuss it.  But on other days I am completely baffled and afraid to think about it.  Even so, the three of us all seem content with what we have and unwilling to rock the boat."  (Page 215)


THE ROAD THROUGH WONDERLAND - Surviving John Holmes
By DAWN SCHILLER, C  2010,  is published by Medallion Press

Monday, July 11, 2016

COCAINE TOOTHACHE DROPS and LINK TO COCAINE ANNOYNYMOUS

image Google Images - Public Domain - Vintage

YES ONCE UPON A TIME COCAINE WAS CONSIDERED A MILD IF NOT HARMLESS
INGREDIENT for MEDICATIONS and the ORIGINAL RECIPE FOR COKE-A-COLA!

COCAINE ANONYMOUS - WORLD WIDE

Saturday, July 9, 2016

The SLOW SEDUCTION of DAWN SCHILLER from her book THE ROAD THROUGH WONDERLAND - SURVIVING JOHN HOLMES

THE ROAD THROUGH WONDERLAND - Surviving John Holmes
By DAWN SCHILLER, C  2010,  is published by Medallion Press



MISTRESS MANIFESTO BOOK REVIEW and EXCERPTS

Dawn's childhood and early teens were colored by absent parents and living in a violent slum environment in Florida. Her mother was a German immigrant who'd married an American GI, came to America, and found herself working three waitressing jobs to support her three children. She and her children were abandoned as her Viet Nam vet husband, who had handled Agent Orange and got disfiguring cancer, became a hippie and traveled. Dad's return to Florida was only to admit that he had another woman and child in Thailand and to ask for a divorce. Oddly the children were asked which parent they would prefer to live with. Dawn and her younger sister chose their Dad because their stressed out hot tempered mother was sometimes abusive and their pot smoking Dad seemed so mellow. They wanted out and he talked California. 

Maybe it was fate but as they drove across the country, they chose to pick up a hitchhiker because he looked safe and like he had some pot. They were right and this hitchhiker took them to the place where he had a woman awaiting him, a loving woman named Harriet, who was unaware he had another woman too. Soon the hitchhiker was gone, leaving Dad to carry on an affair with Harriet, leading her on and making promises he never intended to keep because she provided a roof over their heads.  (Harriet would eventually go after Dad legally for Breach of Promise, having had to move back home with her parents.)

But perhaps what is more remarkable is that it was the mid 1970's Glendale, California, Harriet lived as a renter on a property described as a "court" with small cottages, and in one of them lived John C. Holmes, porn star, and his wife Sharon, who was managing the property, and in another, John's brother David and his wife Karen, who were financially dependent on John. Several of the renters at this property quickly understood that the family new from Florida were near homeless, destitute and hungry. They cared enough to allow Harriet her guests long term, other residents sent over food, and Sharon and John both came up with odd jobs around the property so that Dawn could make some money.

So far, so good, you think.
Then you ask, at what point was it that all this caring and sharing covered over the fact that an adult male, married and a star in the world of pornography, was seducing an underage female?  (Many adults suspected or knew something was up, and John's own brother and Sister in Law knew more than Sharon because they were in on the drug use!)

We know that Mom was left in Florida. Dad is gone a lot. It turns out that after he enrolled Dawn and her sister in high school, applied for government benefits, and went to the local VA for further skin cancer treatment, he also got himself a job and an apartment in Riverside, about an hour's commute south, and imported his long waiting Thai lover to be there. He would suddenly yank Dawn out of Harriet's with the lie that they were all going back to Florida. Dawn's sister did go. By this time John C. Holmes was so involved with Dawn Schiller that he conspired to get her back to Glendale, and he and Sharon helped the high school drop out, get full time work as a nurses aid.

HERE THEN is a progression of seduction, from DAWN SCHILLER's own book.

John, while Sharon was working full time, took Dawn and her younger sister to Zuma Beach - Pirates Cove - which was a nude beach and where Dawn and John were body painted.  (Page 115-116)  (They got naked, no touching.)

"John sees my father's lack of concern for my whereabouts and takes the initiative to ask me to join him for errands alone more often."  (Page 122) (This soon includes going to the beach, mountain hikes, and an overnighter camping trip, that included her sister and sister's boyfriend the first time, at Leo Carrillo State Park near Zuma Beach.)

John sets up her sister, who is a young teenager herself, to have a "private" conversation with Dawn about their age difference and what her true feelings are for him.  "Stunned I am frozen to my spot on the water bed.  John's delighted laugher trails behind him across the courtyard all the way to his door."  (Page 130)  (He's listening in and her younger sister seems to be the more mature one, who says she thinks John is acting like a high school kid.)  (Page 131)

John has her wait in the car as he goes into the Pussycat Theatre where his film THE AUTHOBIOGRAPHY OF A FLEA, a Victorian era piece, is playing, to buy tickets.  She is underage but together they see one of his porn films.  (Page 133)

He takes her to Zuma to "Make love" with him in the van.  While his moves are seductive and even gentle to start, and Dawn's not a virgin, "I close my eyes and silently let the terrible searing pain of finality wash over me with the crash of the ocean tide."  (138)  On the silent ride home, "Everything hurts and I can't walk."  (Page 139)  Three days later, Harriet takes her to a clinic for antibiotics.  Harriet seems to guess that Dawn has had sex.

Then, John gifts her a teddy bear and a birthstone ring.  (Page 141)

He takes her for a weekend to PALM SPRINGS where they stay as "Mr. and Mrs. Holmes" at the Biltmore Hotel in a private bungalow.  (Page 146)  (More sex.)

After Dad announces they are leaving the day before they are to go, he gives John a "murderous stare" and John calls Dad "a son of a bitch"  Then Dawn's sister, who is going back to Florida with her boyfriend, says, "John knows, the whole courtyard knows - what Dad is doing to Harriet... and everybody knows about you and John too."  (page 155)

Back alone to Glendale and the cottages, leaving Dad and his Thai lover in Riverside, John's brother and sister in law, in whose cottage she is staying temporarily, start providing food, and Sharon shows up with a casserole.  John, soon back from France, gives dawn "a thick platinum band lined with three large diamonds." as well as poetry he wrote for her that she thinks is beautiful.  (pages 178-179)

Sharon helps her get work at a local nursing home by providing Dawn some of her own old uniforms, sometimes drives her to work, and they rent her a room somewhere on the property that needs a lot of fixing up.  John brings furniture - antiques that he strips and refinishes.  Sharon brings in towels, sheets, comforters, silverware, dishware.  (Pages 179-180.)

AT THIS POINT THE SHARON, JOHN, and DAWN LOVE TRIANGLE BEGINS.

John takes Dawn to Barstow in a van to pick out a Boston Bull puppy to give Sharon as a gift.  (Page 182)

Sharon starts inviting her over to their place for dinner and treats her like family.  Sharon and John surprise her with a brand new 10 speed bike to get to work.  (Page 185)

John takes Dawn to Vegas on a Harley.  Sharon knows and advises them to take some water with them.  Brother David and sister in law Karen will be there too to gamble and drive them and the Harley back to LA.  (Page 187)

Sharon and John lower her rent because she is now collecting rent, sharing in the apartment management job.  (Page 193)

Has Dawn now become legally an emancipated minor?  (It doesn't say but if so, maybe that throws a different understanding into this situation.)  Dawn says in her book that her Mom now knows that John is her boyfriend and that John and Sharon just live together.  Turns out that Mom, her sister and younger brother are moving from Florida to Oregon.  Mom sends her bath mats and towels for her new place.

CHAPTER NINE is called IT TAKES THREE TO TANGO  (It's 1978 and Dawn is now about 18.)


The three of them spend most of their evenings at home, playing scrabble and rummy and listening to classical music.  Dawn is invited to move into their spare bedroom and give up the room she's been renting, and is being mentored by Sharon to pass her certification as a nurses aid. Sharon knows that John and Dawn are still going on weekend trips - the beach - the mountains - Palm Springs - Vegas - and usually declines to go.   When Sharon does go to Vegas with them, she's the one covering for her need for an ID because she's underage and the three of them share one king sized bed, with John in the middle.(Page 214)

 



Saturday, July 2, 2016

PORN ACTOR JOHN C. HOLMES and WIFE SHARON GEBENINI and MISTRESS DAWN SCHILLER LOVE TRIANGLE - PLAYED OUT THROUGH THE WONDERLAND MURDERS

UPDATE APRIL 2022 : Still a very popular post!  HERE IS A CURRENT LINK TO DAWN's WEBSITE:  She is highly involved in ending sex trafficking in Los Angeles County:

UPDATE JULY 2018 :  This post has gotten a huge amount of hits lately and maybe that's just because the title has the word "porn" in it. I hope you'll be interested in linking to DAWN SCHILLER's non profit after you've read it and will donate.  And while you're here, I invite you to go through my Archives to learn about a great number of other Mistresses, for there are very many reasons why, including real love!  Also the GUIDE to ALL TOPICS by MONTH is in PAGES. Missy




Porn star John C. Holmes, his first, long term wife, Sharon Ann Gebenini, and his underage Mistress Dawn Schiller, make for a truly bizarre "Love Triangle."  No matter how philosophical you might try to be, their relationships were rife with abuse, especially because the violent drug addict this actor became got tied up in a murder of four people so brutal it was compared to the Manson Murders. Unlike the Manson Murders, also in a canyon in the Santa Monica mountains of Los Angeles, this case goes unresolved. But, before it was all over years ago, Holmes was one of the suspects tried and acquitted. Many people, especially those involved with drugs and dealing in the Los Angeles/Sunset Strip/Laurel Canyon area, were afraid for their lives.

I promised my readers long ago that this blog would be "no porn," and so I'll keep to the relationship of these three people who took, in my opinion, their mutual relationship into a truly mentally, psychologically, and physically punishing zone. 

I had no pre-knowledge of any of the players in this romance and tragedy. I've seen about one minute of film porn in my lifetime and didn't like it.  But one night I brought home a few films on DVD to watch, one called WONDERLAND, because Val Kilmer, an actor I like, stars as John C. Holmes


JOHN C. HOLMES  "WADD" DVD cover
Google Images


When the film proved too violent for me, I decided not to watch any more of it and I tried the companion disk called "WADD, The Life and Times of John C. Holmes", a documentary. There were Sharon and Dawn, testifying to their experiences, sitting in the dark, hiding their faces, while many other people associated with John C. Holmes; producers, directors, fellow actors in that business, as well as his second wife Laurie Holmes, spoke openly in the light. Dawn said she had been moved into their spare bedroom to be "the Mistress," her term, while John and Sharon continued to share a bed in their room.

John Holmes was known for his unusually large manhood, about twice the size of an average man, which was all it took to get his start in this industry when he was in his early twenties, back when vice squads chased people involved in "smut" around town to arrest them.  (The San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles is said to be a porn capital of the United States today.)  Holmes wasn't one to do the strutting stud routine.  He was a tall, lanky, every-man, a man other men could relate to as they watched the films and fantasized that they too could get the girl.  He was thought of as a gentle giant for a long time.

Holmes had left a crazy-filled childhood home, escaped into the military underage but with the signed permission of his mother, and got out an uneducated and average young man with no clear idea about what it was he could do for a living or with his life. He was clean living, willing to work, willing to try whatever employment he could get.  When he was driving an ambulance he met an educated pediatric nurse, Sharon Gebenini, whom he married in the summer of 1965. Sharon suffered three miscarriages.  What is unstated is that maybe her acceptance of Dawn into her marital home with John was satisfying her nurturing self. 

When John decided to get into pornography as an actor, he did so proudly, not even working under a fake name to start. (He did make some films under theatrical names, including Johnny Wadd, during his career. As a result no one is sure exactly how many he did make and estimates go into the thousands.)

Sharon didn't put up any strong objections to her husbands new found career. She would stick with him as his wife for years, their divorce not final until 1983, even as his sex career killed their relationship and they shared that marital bed as - you guess - friends?

In those days most women expected the man to be the breadwinner, especially if they wanted to have a family and stay at home and raise their children. Sharon was reportedly a devoted and excellent nurse then and for many years on, yet it's clear to me that she failed to protect herself from torment. 

Maybe she just didn't believe in divorce. She would never remarry or have children.

Sharon testifies in the film that she has never in her life seen a porn film, but it's difficult for me to imagine that she was so compartmentalized that she could shield herself from the realities of her husband's fame. John Holmes did so very many films, most one day shoots that were out for sale within a week or two, his picture on the packaging.  He earned top pay, starting at $75 a day, and eventually possibly earning up to $3000 for a film before his druggie lifestyle started to effect his employment, not only because he wasn't always showing up but because he couldn't reliably perform. He did interviews and said that he believed that watching porn helped couples sexually. (Ironic!)  As time went by he also had affairs and relationships, started drinking, smoking grass, and then using cocaine, and was missing from home a whole lot.

Holmes took up with Dawn Shiller, then fifteen years old in 1976, about ten years after marrying Sharon. Dawn testifies that he began a slow seduction after they met that lead to sex in a van parked at the beach, romantic and loving, but still she was a teenager to his thirty-something years. (Her testimony in her own book is at odds with what is said in the documentary.  In her book the sex caused her pain and a bladder infection and she was barely able to walk.) As their use of cocaine broke him financially, Holmes and Dawn went homeless, living in a car and motel rooms, and when John's thieving didn't provide enough, he expected her to prostitute. In 1981 after the murders, they fled together to Florida to escape the law. Before she made her escape from him she would be beaten repeatedly and pimped out by him.

Clearly both women were accommodating this man and unwilling or unable to leave their relationship with him, at least not for some time. 

Where were Dawn's parents or family? 

Why was Sharon complicit in allowing her husband to have sex with an underage woman and in their own home?  Did she not know better?

Here at MISTRESS MANIFESTO we're most familiar with the wife who allows her husband a Mistress so long as she is kept separate from their home, family life, and friends, so that she is never embarrassed.  Or, we are familiar with everyone participating in a triad or love triangle of adult age and maturity and mutually in the know. 

Sharon says she didn't know the entirety of the relationship between her husband and Dawn and is credited with treating her as a daughter and taking her "under wing." 

Why didn't she get a divorce and try having the family she wanted with another man?

Thinking this through, I realize that forever marriage has meant that many a wife gets used to having a criminal husband, and that being with a criminal may mean also being afraid: Mafia wives, for instance. 

Still, it's a mind-bender for me, how Sharon, a smart woman, with possibly an IQ of 160, could be in such denial and not know that her 30 something husband was actually a criminal, especially with Dawn.  I think mainly she did not want to know.  When he ran to their home to tell her he had just witnessed four people being murdered in July of 1981, she gave him money to run without wanting to know any details she'd have to reveal to the police. When he ran he took Dawn with him. To me Sharon was an enabler.

Holmes became the worst of addicts, without Sharon's participation.  On drugs and desperate for them, he was out of control and angry, and he got closer to the big dealers, and a criminal named Eddie Nash, a man who may have owned more nightclubs than anyone else in town and clearly was a source of supply. Nash was also known to the police as a person behind arsons.  Nash had a house on Wonderland in the Hollywood Hills where the murders took place.

Holmes was beaten by Nash's thugs, a beating Scott Thorson**, witnessed, and was there again when the bloodbath took place.  Eventually, Holmes was tried for murder and acquitted. Then he tried to get back into the porn acting business and there was (still) interest!  He told Sharon he wanted to make their marriage work and would find some other work, which she says she refused.

John is credited in the porn industry with promoting HIV testing all those years ago.  First he tested negative but then, six months later, he tested positive.  Even so, he went to Italy and made the last of his porn films without informing anyone of his illness, instead wasting away while he claimed to have colon cancer. Instead of cleaning up his life so that he could live for years, he increased all his health defying activities and ended up dead.  By then he had a second wife, Laurie Holmes, who he'd married in 1987, to leave as a widow, one who refused Sharon and Dawn to come to his death bed.

In a few days, I'll be excerpting from the book Dawn Shiller wrote called THE ROAD THROUGH WONDERLAND that came out in 2010 to detail the slow seduction and the fact that MANY adults suspected or knew that an disadvantaged and underage young woman was sexually involved with a porn star in his 30's. In media interviews separate of this documentary Dawn says that she did not get into how it was that she and Sharon made their peace and became life long friends in the book as the manuscript was already so long.


THE ROAD THROUGH WONDERLAND - Surviving John Holmes

by DAWN SHILLER

But maybe what's most important in the end is what these two women made of their own relationship, and it may stun you.

Sharon Ann Gebinini, born in June 1943, died in Oregon in October 2012, where she'd retired after years of remaining working as a nurse in Glendale, Southern California, past the Wonderland Murders, the trial of John C. Holmes, and his death.  Her obituary uses her maiden name and there is no mention whatsoever that she had ever been married to John C. Holmes.  However, what is mentioned is that she had two life long friends, and one of them was Dawn Schiller!

Out of this sordid story, Dawn Schiller is the survivor.  She used alcoholism to deal with the emotional pain of the life she lead with John Holmes but she got sober and achieved clarity. Then she got busy advocating for women who have been abused. She serves on the board of a woman's shelter and she started her own non-profit called E.S.T.E.A.M.  Sharon's obituary mentions that in her honor donations could be made to it.

A BEAUTIFUL INTELLIGENT SURVIVOR,  DAWN SCHILLER
from publicity photos found on Google Images.  Later we'll link to her nonprofit.

We know she had it tough but we want to yell Hurray Dawn!

C 2016  MistressManifesto.BlogSpot.Com  / MIssy Rapport  All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights

** Scott Thorson, Mantress of the Month in October 2012 due to his relationship with Liberace was a witness to the beating of John Holmes at Eddie Nash's. Thorson went into a Witness Protection program for a time and this is why he changed his name.