BLUE CONFESSIONS

My Undoing: Love in the Thick of Sex, Drugs, Pornography and Prostitution by Aiden Shaw
(Carroll & Graf, $15.95)

Aiden Shaw has a ridiculous amount of experience under his belt.
The prodigiously endowed, HIV-positive British porn star has appeared in over fifty films with randy titles like Forced Entry, Grease Guns and Hand Jobs.
When he’s not hard at work at the Falcon or Catalina studios, he’s a Renaissance man of sorts. He composes music and performs in a band called Whatever, and he has published novels and poetry collections.
Heck, the writers of Sex and the City liked him so much that they named John Corbett’s character after him.
Shaw, 40, just published the memoir My Undoing. Given the fact that he’s naked on the front cover, he might as well have called it My Undressing. But don’t get too excited, boys and girls. In the photo Shaw’s treasure trail ends right above his package o’ plenty.
This revealing picture would probably ensure good sales even if the book sucked. Fortunately Shaw is a reasonably compelling writer who balances juicy tidbits about prostitution gigs and recreational drug use with weighty accounts of his psychotherapy sessions and his bout with paralysis after a car accident. Most of all he chronicles his ongoing struggle to find true romance in an industry that values cum shots over heartfelt relationships.
It must be said, however, that My Undoing is a real limp dick when Shaw spends long and tedious stretches cataloguing the mundane details of his daily life, such as doing laundry.
The most troubling aspect of the memoir is that Shaw does not seem particularly concerned about practicing safe sex despite his HIV-positive status. In one scene, he complies when an HIV-negative man at a party asks him to ejaculate in him without wearing a condom. Shaw lets himself off the hook by implying that such indiscretions are inevitable when booze, drugs and horny men join forces.
Shaw is candid and engaging throughout most of his memoir, but it’s hard to warm up to him when he dodges responsibility for such dangerous behavior.