Because Calvin O’Shay wears a haz-mat suit in public I elected for a less obvious meeting place north of Ventura Blvd., in an undisclosed location in Reseda. I offered O’Shay one of the Grand Vizier’s Auchencloss cigarettes and you would have thought I had stuck my finger in my ass and offered him a whiff. He refused, obviously.

I asked O’Shay what gives with the suit and he muttered something about having grown up in a hermetically sealed environment.

I asked if that meant he had been a Bubble Boy to which O’Shay commented something about one of his relatives having written scripts for the TV show Branded. He didn’t think I’d catch The Big Lebowsky reference, but I did. O’Shay is all about the adult industry’s fight against the AIDS Healthcare Foundation which is trying to stir up trouble with Cal-OSHA.

O’Shay informs me that The AIDS Healthcare Foundation has posted a “call to action” bulletin on their web site, exhorting people to call LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky and complain about the brutal and inhumane conditions on porn sets.

They not only list Yaroslavsky’s phone number, according to O’Shay, they also provide a pre-written letter of complaint that you can email:

www.aidshealth.org/news/press-releases/tell-supervisor-zev.html

“Where oh where is the Free Speech Coalition?” asks Calvin. “Why aren’t they posting similar calls to action? They sent out special ‘alert’ emails for the porn tax and .xxx domain issues. They must think those problems are much bigger than Cal-OSHA .

“That’s sort of like a New Orleans prostitute fretting over her next trick while Katrina is blowing into town.”

“If everyone in the porn biz called and wrote Yaroslavsky, he’d have to think twice before pursuing this,” Calvin says. “As it stands now, we’re a silent majority. And as AIDS activists have been saying for years, Silence = Death.”