We almost made it through lunch without mentioning the turkey basters full of cum, which would have been a shame. But just as attorney Karen Tynan takes a bite of coleslaw, I ask about The 1,000 Load Fuck, the gay gangbang opus she defended against charges of workplace safety violations, and which featured a man getting a gallon of semen pumped up his ass—hence, the turkey basters.

"That was the first time I'd ever watched a whole gay porn movie," Tynan says in her soft Southern drawl. "I start out strong, don't I?"

Orgy chitchat is rare in Healdsburg, a drowsy hamlet in California's wine country, about 70 miles north of San Francisco. But for Tynan it's an occupational hazard. Since 2009, she has been porn's go-to labor lawyer, defending studios against regulatory complaints and investigations from Cal/OSHA, the state's workplace safety watchdog. Now, she's leading the industry's fight against Prop. 60, the hotly debated ballot measure known for requiring performers to wear condoms during filming.

"She's like the Erin Brockovich of porn," says Matt Mason, general manager of Treasure Island Media, a San Francisco studio that specializes in hardcore bareback films, including The 1,000 Load Fuck, which was cited for allegedly putting condomless performers at risk (the company was only issued a $685 fine). "Karen is a legal dom," adds Mike Stabile, a porn industry spokesman. Indeed, Tynan's profile picture on Twitter portrays her as a dominatrix brandishing a riding crop in what appears to be a sex dungeon.

"Karen is a legal dom."

Tynan, who is 51, has the folksy cheer of a Walmart greeter, cut with a barmaid's raunchy wit. A friend describes her as a "party girl" who's also "got a bit of a mouth, because she's a shark." She's a genteel shark, though. "Isn't there some rule that you don't eat barbecue in front of a reporter?" she asks during lunch, studying the splatter of meat on her plate. "Or order one of these?" She gestures to her 24-ounce Corona.

This particular party girl never expected to hobnob with porn stars or attend company Christmas parties at Kink.com. Tynan began her career representing "vanilla" clients such as wineries and construction companies. But circa 2009, an L.A.-based nonprofit called the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), which provides HIV prevention and healthcare services, began targeting the adult film industry in California, and Tynan became porn's unlikely legal champion.

First came AHF's complaints against studios that produce condomless scenes, one of which landed The 1,000 Load Fuck on state bureaucrats' watchlist. Then came Measure B, an AHF-backed initiative approved by voters in 2012 that mandated condoms in all porn shot in L.A. County. Now, AHF is pushing—to the tune of $5.2 million—Proposition 60, a statewide ballot measure that would expand the condom law statewide.

Digital Playground / Falcon Studios / Naughty America / Raging Stallion

The state already requires adult film performers to wear condoms, and has since 1992, but enforcement is scattershot. Cal/OSHA investigates only when a complaint is filed. Prop. 60 introduces a new punishment for non-compliance: any citizen in California can sue the producer of an adult film if condoms aren't used, provided Cal/OSHA doesn't act first.

This is the gravest threat to porn "since the Nixon administration," says Jeffrey Douglas of the Free Speech Coalition, the porn industry's trade association. Several performers and studios have threatened to move out of state if the bill passes, potentially taking with them an estimated 10,000 jobs. Some studios, including Kink, have considered blocking California IP addresses to prevent a cottage industry of civil suits against producers. The state's Republican, Democratic, and Libertarian parties have all denounced Prop. 60, along with California's seven largest newspapers, various civil rights and AIDS advocacy groups, and assorted political bigwigs. Dan Savage doesn't like it either.

Any citizen in California can sue the producer of an adult film if condoms aren't used, provided Cal/OSHA doesn't act first.

But AHF—which administers nearly 3 million HIV tests and distributes more than 42 million free condoms per year through its network of pharmacies, wellness centers, and clinics—maintains the law is necessary to cut down on performers' rates of HIV and STIs. Rick Taylor, the spokesman for AHF's Yes on 60 campaign, is fond of quoting a UCLA study that found 1 in 4 porn performers has contracted gonorrhea or chlamydia. The study couldn't determine whether performers contracted STIs on set or in their private lives, but the image of the porn industry as a cesspool of disease took hold. (The last confirmed HIV transmission on a California porn set occurred in 2004.)

For Tynan, the question is simple: Does bareback sex put performers at risk? She is adamant that it doesn't, and that everything else—turkey basters, gangbangs, buttplugs—is just window dressing.

"We're not there to talk about what the content is or whether or not we find the content obscene," Tynan says. "We're there to talk about particular acts and the risks involved in them." For the past several months she's barnstormed California, telling reporters, politicians, voters, and anyone who will listen that Prop. 60 isn't about protecting workers' health but about advancing a moral crusade.

On Election Day, voters will decide not only the fate of Prop. 60, but perhaps the future of porn in America. If the initiative fails, porn performers will have one hell of a blowout—pardon the pun— and they'll owe a lot to Karen Tynan.

Tynan's career sounds like the stuff of a daytime talk show: Meet the woman who went from wonkish soccer mom to porn industry superhero. She grew up in Jonesboro, Georgia, a bedroom suburb of Atlanta whose big brush with fame was when parts of 1977's Smokey and the Bandit were filmed there in 1977. Her father was a small-town police chief and her mother an insurance broker. Money for college was scarce—"I lived in an apartment with my mom, she drove a crappy Pontiac"—so Tynan enrolled in the Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, New York, where she estimates that 15 members of her class of about 250 were women. It was the first time in her life she felt in the minority.

After she graduated in 1987, Tynan accepted a job with Chevron to be a deck officer on a tanker transporting oil from Valdez, Alaska, to California. In summer, she hauled asphalt up to the Pacific Northwest. She moved to San Francisco in 1994, and Chevron put her up in an apartment in the then-gritty South of Market neighborhood and paid her a per-diem to teach classes on process management. She met a handsome tugboat captain who soon became her husband.

By the time Tynan gave birth to their daughter in 1996, she and the captain had returned to his hometown of Healdsburg, an hour and a half away from the action of San Francisco. She craved an intellectual challenge, so when her daughter was seven months old, Tynan enrolled in law school at Empire College in Santa Rosa, California, attending night classes and Saturday study groups while her husband was home.

Tynan's profile picture on Twitter portrays her as a dominatrix brandishing a riding crop in what appears to be a sex dungeon.

She graduated in 2001 with plans to practice labor law, but the 9/11 terrorist attacks and resulting market tightening nixed any hope she had of joining a good firm—many of her classmates had job offers revoked. Tynan made ends meet by doing contract work for other attorneys and eventually scored full-time gigs with small firms—until the recession of 2008 left her unemployed again. Then 43 years old, Tynan struck out on her own, creating a website and borrowing a conference room in Santa Rosa.

One day in 2009, her phone rang. On the other end was Jeffrey Douglas, an L.A. attorney who often represented the porn industry. Just then, Douglas explained, Cal/OSHA had subpoenaed the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation, which conducted HIV and STI tests for porn performers, demanding that it disclose medical information, including the identity of a female performer who'd recently tested positive for HIV. Douglas Googled "Cal/OSHA defense attorney" and Tynan's name popped up. It was a total fluke, the random chemistry of SEO keywords.

Douglas put Tynan on retainer as the industry's labor law expert, and she eventually helped win a permanent injunction that prevented Cal/OSHA from accessing adult film performers' medical records. In short order, studios including Falcon, Treasure Island, Kink, Raging Stallion, and Evil Angel enlisted Tynan to defend them against regulatory grievances. She also successfully represented a group of talent agents whom AHF accused of encouraging unsafe sex. In just a few years, she'd built a roster of major porn clients.

"I actually expected other adult industry attorneys to kind of brush up in this area of the law and provide this service to their clients," Tynan says. "But they didn't. Whenever people got inspected by Cal/OSHA or had employment-law issues, I seemed to get the calls. I think it wasn't a plan, but once I sensed it start happening, I embraced it."

"She comes across as this sweet, innocent, Southern belle, which actually gives us more credibility."

She's also embraced her role as an attack dog sicced against AHF and its firebrand president, Michael Weinstein. Until recently, the porn industry viewed AHF as a nuisance with deep coffers—the organization's annual budget tops $1 billion. That view hardened over the past year as AHF funneled millions into Prop. 60, sending a chill through the multibillion-dollar porn industry and unleashing performers' fiercest outcry in a generation. "Our lives are on the line," tweeted producer Jiz Lee on October 31. Several have threatened self-exile to Las Vegas, Florida, or Phoenix if Prop. 60 passes. Others have already moved.

The No on 60 campaign has marshaled less than a half-million dollars, depending instead on grassroots activism and the megaphone of social media. Mr. Pam, a female director of gay porn, considers Tynan one of the industry's stealth weapons. "She comes across as this sweet, innocent, Southern belle, which actually gives us more credibility," Mr. Pam says, noting that many outsiders expect porn's off-camera personnel to be "old, sweaty, gross men"—not a woman who could easily blend in at a church bake sale. Seasoned in the macho netherworld of an oil tanker, Tynan says she's "pretty comfortable" being one of the few women on the business side of porn.

Mike Stabile recalls that when female performers make their case to politicians and newspaper editorial boards, a lot of "mansplaining" and "virtual head patting" drown out their voices. Tynan can subtly dominate a room, though, and her very normalcy reassures you that even cum-filled turkey basters have a place in the circle of life.

Alyce and Justin's home porn set. Courtesy of A and J Studio

Unlike porn's previous foes, AHF's concerns aren't about obscenity but about labor protocol. A major selling point of the Yes on 60 campaign is that producers will finally be required to pay for performers' STI tests, which run about $200 a month. But this relies on an outdated idea of performers and producers as separate entities, as segregated as whoever is in front of the camera and whoever's behind it.

"I don't think other people, even the state attorneys that deal with it and legislators that look at it, really understand the commerce of it, the production of it, the distribution of it, or anything like that," Tynan says of today's porn industry, where Snapchat, Twitter, and Instagram are as essential as bronzer and Nair once were. As an example of the legal system's cluelessness, Tynan tells me that some of her clients have been subpoenaed to hand over videotape. The reality that porn is shot on digital cameras, uploaded to the cloud, and edited by remote freelancers doesn't jibe with the fantasy of the industry as a mini-Hollywood with its own sound stages and kinky backlots.

The couple behind A and J Studio. Courtesy of Alyce and Justin

Arabelle Raphael is a prime example of the new porn economy. Most of her income is from clips or custom videos shot in her own home with her husband. "We're a dying industry," she says. "This is how performers make money these days. We sell underwear, we make our own stuff, it's multiple hustles." She points to cam shows and sites like Chaturbate as another way performers work outside of the traditional studio circuit. Anybody with a webcam and a modem can monetize his or her body, which means that under Prop. 60, anybody who does so without a condom can be sued.

This alarms Alyce and Justin, a 25-year-old married couple from Sacramento who make homemade porn under the moniker A and J Studio. Just over a year ago they began posting x-rated pictures and videos of themselves to Tumblr. It was fun and carefree, a way to inspire other couples to get freaky. When those videos surfaced on tube sites, they decided to take control by selling clips through third-party sites such as ManyVids.com.

The couple is monogamous and doesn't use condoms, though they both get tested regularly and Alyce is on birth control. Under Prop. 60, they'd be classified as producers, since they have a financial stake in their videos. That means they're vulnerable to lawsuits if they sell clips of themselves fucking without a condom. In addition, Prop. 60 requires adult film producers to obtain a permit within 10 days of a shoot. Each permit costs $100.

"It would be pointless for us to even continue," Justin says. "The average price of our videos on a clip site—we like to keep them on the low end—is like $8 to $10 per video."

A major selling point of the Yes on 60 campaign is that producers will finally be required to pay for performers' STI tests.

When I try to clarify the performer-producer designation with Rick Taylor, he becomes increasingly exasperated and threatens to end our interview. (He doesn't.) After I explain Alyce and Justin's situation, Taylor confirms that married couples aren't exempt from Prop. 60. "Sorry," he says, in the same tone people say "fuck off." They're producers, and producers, he says, are "greedy and they want to put people at risk in California, and they want to break the law that's already on the books."

Derrick Burts, an ex-performer who contracted HIV in 2010 and is now a star campaigner for AHF, estimates that only 30 percent of performers are also producers. To him, blurring the distinction is just more misinformation from an industry that's made an art of prevarication. "Every case of HIV from 2004 until today they have denied, denied, denied," Burts says of the adult film industry. "They've taken no responsibility."

Porn actor Derrick Burts, who tested positive for HIV in 2010. GABRIEL BOUYS/AFP/Getty Images

Burts, who is paid a stipend by AHF to cover travel, contracted herpes, chlamydia, and gonorrhea in his first four months in porn. After he started doing gay videos in September 2010, he tested positive for HIV. "I wouldn't be HIV-positive today if I didn't get in the industry," he says, "and it's time for the industry to start being held accountable." (The Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation, which no longer exists, investigated Burts's case and found no evidence that he'd contracted HIV on a porn set.)

Producers say that requirements for regular testing and disclosure of STIs sufficiently protect performers, and today's consumers prefer watching bareback sex. Even Burts admits he likes his porn sans condoms. And porn sex isn't your run-of-the-mill hump-and-go. It can last hours and include more gymnastics than a Super Bowl halftime show. "The friction of a condom on your vagina or your asshole for that long is actually really irritating and doesn't feel good," Raphael says. Asked what would make the industry safer or more equitable, Raphael replies, "choice." And while it's misleading to call Prop. 60 a referendum on female sexuality, many of the conversations about it do segue into talk of stigma and slut-shaming, along with anxiety about gay male appetites.

Back in Healdsburg, the brisket and hush puppies now crumbs, talk turns to what will happen if Prop. 60 passes. Will California's fabled porn industry really pull up stakes? "They're going," Tynan says. "Absolutely. For companies to stay in California and be subject to lawsuits from Michael Weinstein on a weekly or monthly basis, they just can't do it."

Adult performer Mia Li works a No on 60 booth. Courtesy of Karen Tynan / @KarenAttorney

After voters in L.A. County approved Measure B in 2012, adult film production permits in the county plummeted 95 percent in a single year, totaling $450,000 in lost revenue. Meanwhile, production in neighboring Ventura County exploded. The Ventura County supervisor told the Los Angeles Times that residents began complaining about "moans and groans" from suburban porn sets. If Measure B is an accurate test case, people in Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Portland better stock up on earplugs because the industry is coming to them.

"Let them go," Rick Taylor says. "They're lawbreakers. Let that person leave and go destroy another community. I don't want them in my state."

Those performers who don't self-exile could be jumping on a treadmill of lawsuits. Tynan says there's also a more insidious threat of harassment: Under Prop. 60, porn performers' legal names, home addresses, and other personal information could become public information. Tynan says she's already helped several performers file restraining orders against stalkers or overzealous fans.

"I'm not nervous about the vote," Tynan says as we finish lunch. The morning's rain squall has cleared, filling the quaint downtown square with shattered sunlight. A man dressed like Davy Crockett in buckskins and a coonskin hat comes out of nowhere and strikes a heroic pose. Nobody pays attention.

Tynan will be in Florida on Election Day, monitoring the results from a golf course somewhere. "I don't really know what's going to happen," she says finally. (A recent Capitol Weekly poll shows voters basically split on Prop. 60, with 20 percent still undecided.) If the measure passes, she expects to help clients move production out of state, perhaps ending California's four-decades-long reign as the smut capital of the world. If it fails, she plans to look at opportunities beyond porn—legal cannabis and the coming green economy is one option. Even then, porn isn't out of the picture. Tynan has already worked with adult film studios to create branded marijuana strains.

Ever the sweet Southern charmer, Tynan knows one thing for sure: "If [Prop. 60] fails, I'll send Michael Weinstein some flowers."