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She began as a stripper in San Francisco in the '70s, eventually doing porn for Alex deRenzy. Since then she's quit and returned half-a-dozen times. Sharon turned in some of the alltime best lesbian scenes - with Nina Hartley in Sorority Pink 2 and with Jeanna Fine in Finely Back, Girls' Best Friend and The Finer Things in Life. A leading character in the book Coming Attractions about the making of her movie Stairway to Paradise, Kane lived for years with co-author Ira Levine. "We are both known for odd preferences," says Levine, "hers for young guys and mine for S-M, and neither for liking the other's thing: I'm exclusively heterosexual S-M and Sharon's vanilla. [Vanilla is a term used by S-M people to describe conventional non- S-M sex.] Sharon's a hippie: crystals, natural diet... And she sees me as a meat-eating, beer-drinking spiritual primitive." Growing up in Ohio, practicing classical violin for 15 years, Sharon posed nude at age 17 for her orchestra teacher. "One day he said, "I see you on stage doing this erotic stuff"." After graduation, Sharon moved to San Francisco and married a black to prove to herself that she wasn't racist. "He ended up paranoid schizophrenic...bonkers...in a mental institution." Sharon worked as a stripper at "The Screening Room" before moving to porn. Jim Holliday produced Stairway to Paradise. "Jim reminded me of my stepfather, with the same need to manipulate everything. He got me the money but I had to take a stand for what I believed in. It came down to saying, "I will not direct this movie unless it's done my way." "There was a scene that bothered me. A girl-girl scene. Jim: "Stick your middle finger in and push it in and out and let's do cozy-yummy." "Ira and I cut out about twelve pages [of Jim's script]. Jim had written monologues for actors. We had two days to shoot it. It was hard because he had written the script and was attached... "The crew's going, "Jim, this is not going to work, it's long." He wasn't hearing it... I redid the script and presented it to him...with the feeling that if it's not like this, I won't do the movie. What was he going to do? Go back to VCA and say, "Sharon doesn't want to do the movie the way that I wrote it"? Because Russ Hampshire [VCA owner] was hyped about me directing the film. That got Jim to shift." Jim Holliday asked Sharon to return to Dr. Robert Stoller, the co-author of Coming Attractions, to reduce her criticisms of him. Sharon: "I talked to different people about directing for them, then Jim Holliday came and said, 'I'll get you some money for a movie.' He got it. He takes about two hours to tell you he's got the money. 'Sharon, I want to call you up and tell you, I went out to VCA and used the billy hammer, and, Russ [Hampshire] is in agreement with me...' It's a speech that he's planned for the last three hours." Sharon enjoyed a fling with Stairway's cameraman Jane Waters - the psuedonym for a male cameraman who makes numerous sex flicks with directors such as Harold Lime. In Letters From the Heart, Sharon plays the hostess of a TV show of the same name. She shares true-life love stories written in by viewers which are re-enacted in a series of hot scenes. Gay actor Ryan Idol performs in his first hetero role. (AVN 97) Kane has spent years in the world of homosexual porn, palling around with Chi Chi LaRue and performer Joey Stefano [Nick Iacona]. She met LaRue at the CES convention in Las Vegas in 1987 after returning to porn following some grim years in New York. "You know you've hit your peak because nobody hires you anymore," says Sharon. But as her straight roles dried up, Chi Chi hired her for his polysexual videos. Journalist Charles Isherwood, author of Wonder Bread and Ecstasy: The Life and Death of Joey Stefano, says that the winter's day in January 1987 that Kane, LaRue and homosexual performers Nick Iacona and Karen Dior [a male crossdresser] met, was a turning point in their lives. Kane and Dior performed in Sharon and Karen for Director LaRue. "Sharon and I had a date after we made the movie," says Dior. "I had dated a woman, then dated men, then met another woman; when I met Sharon I had been attracted only to men for a while, but I was really attracted to her, so I decided I was bisexual." Says Kane: "There was something between us; I was terrified. I could feel that he loved me, and I was afraid he would want something from me that I couldn't give him…" Wonder Bread details the relationship between Stefano, LaRue, Dior and Kane, including their drug use. "LaRue and Kane both felt enormous affection for Iacona [Joey Stefano], but there was no jealousy between them; they remained great friends. Perhaps because they had sex - or orchestrated it - for a living, they didn't overvalue its importance as a validation of an emotional or spiritual bond." In a series of visits to Kane in late 1994, Joey Stefano showed her the needle marks on his arm indicating his heroin use. "I know what kind of a life that is - having sex with people who want you to be that image, that porno thing," Kane told journalist Charles Isherwood. A few days later, Sharon watched Joey wheeled into am ambulance after his fatal overdose on cocaine, heroin, morphine and Special K (ketamine). Many people consider Kane an honorary gay man. She loves to seduce homosexual men. Chi Chi remembers how she tried to seduce him at the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas. "Unfortunately, I didn't want to f--- her - I wanted to be her… She's someone who I know I'll love for the rest of my life. Like a fine wine, she's only gotten better with age. Her body is still fabulous, and she has inner beauty as well. She's a loving spiritual person who always has time to help others. And I've never seen a woman who could seduce more gay men. Sometimes I tell her she's a gay man who somehow got stuck in a woman's body (she hates that)." Sharon Kane wrote the scores for the videos The Hills Have Bi's and Idol in the Sky. Kane told photographer Vivienne Maricevic: "You go through life, you have sex and you find out what you like. Then, when you really know what you want, you can attract that to you more. If I see someone that I find attractive, I'm not shy, I go for it. I just go ahead and act aggressive and I don't beat around the bush as to what it is that I want. Probably, if I wasn't in the business, I would have been a lot more reserved and had a lot more hang-ups. But I've gotten over my sexual hang-ups, I have none, I feel really free. It's allowed me a lot of time and space to look at the world and life. "A lot of people in relationships stop themselves from loving people. They think that you can only love one person, and that's your mate. If they start having loving feelings for someone else, they think it's unnatural. Actually, I think it's just the opposite. I think the more people you can love the better-off you are and in a healthier state of mind. It makes the world better, too."
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