Adult Entertainment

Ever the proper businesswoman, Yuka Sakamoto is poised for that moment late in the night when the bankers and international trade executives who are her regular customers fish into their pockets for business cards. Dutifully, Sakamoto produces her own: "Yuka Sakamoto--Mama." It is the appropriate job description for her line of work.

Two weeks ago today, inside the million-dollar-plus houses on a quiet cul-de-sac in Encino, the neighborhood kids delighted in what the Easter Bunny had brought. Then, about 10 a.m., the porn stars started showing up. Helaine Gesas, who has lived on Hayvenhurst Avenue for 38 years, was in her kitchen cooking Passover supper when she noticed men hauling cameras and lights into the two-story house across the street.

FBI agents burst into Jaguars -- an upscale "gentleman's club" a couple of blocks off the Strip -- just as the shift was changing in the early afternoon and the strippers were in their dressing room getting ready for the next performance. Hearing the commotion outside his office and fearing a fight had broken out in the lounge, the club manager jumped to his feet, threw open the door -- and found two agents pointing guns at him.

Los Angeles has been a fighting a tide of runaway production of big-budget movies and television dramas. Now it may face an emigration of another homegrown industry - adult entertainment. That's the specter raised by some of the hundreds of porn producers in L.A. after voters approved Measure B, which requires performers to wear condoms and establishes a new permitting system for adult entertainment shoots. PHOTOS: Hollywood backlot moments The law was advocated by AIDS activists who argued it would protect performers from disease outbreaks.

Basic Plumbing has been told to close. King of Hearts is history. The Prowl has been cited. Neighbors want the Barracks to go away. The Vortex is shuttered. The past year has been tough for gay sex clubs in Los Angeles. They are under fire, as they have been in other cities in recent years. But for far different reasons. Whereas elsewhere these indoor trysting grounds for gay men have come under attack for allowing unsafe sex, that most Southern Californian of concerns is at work here: land use.

WHEN PEOPLE IN THE PORNOGRAPHY industry talk about why it's so much tougher to make a buck these days, Mark Curtis' name inevitably comes up. Curtis is not an FBI agent or a Moral Majority lobbyist. Curtis, 35, is a video porn prince who has flooded the market in recent years with inexpensive X-rated videocassettes. He's a renegade among renegades, out to become a billion-dollar pornographer, and he doesn't care who knows it. He's proud of the fact that he has made cheap sex even cheaper.

Responding to complaints of undue censorship from movie makers and film critics, the Motion Picture Assn. of America abolished its X movie rating on Wednesday and replaced it with a new adults-only classification. The MPAA, in a joint announcement with the powerful National Assn. of Theater Owners, said the X rating would be replaced immediately with a designation of NC-17, which indicates that no children under 17 can be admitted.

She was a popular stripper who had saved enough money in tips to open her own nude club. He was a high-rolling entrepreneur who didn't think twice about riding in his town's Fourth of July parade surrounded by dancers from his topless club. Together, they transformed a quiet Christian dance club in Lake Forest into one of Southern California's most popular strip clubs. They planned a chain of elite clubs that they hoped would bring exotic dancing into the mainstream.

Like the swimsuits for which they are named, the Bikini Barbershop is back. Closed since Nov. 7, the attention-grabbing salon reopened Tuesday at a new location, 1673 Irvine Ave., where it will continue its gimmick: women in bathing suits cut hair. "It's a novelty," said customer Ralph Starkweather of Irvine, who got a $13 haircut on opening day.