Reported yesterday on ABC Nightline:
A porn actor’s positive HIV test, which prompted a temporary shutdown of Los Angeles’ billion-dollar adult film industry Monday night, has reignited the debate over mandatory condom use in X-rated productions…
“Testing is not a substitute for condom use, and it never will be,” said Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation in Los Angeles. “No test can detect HIV from the moment of infection. There will always be a window period,” which might not reflect recent infection…
“You can’t dangle from a 30-story building from a rope; you have to wear a harness,” he said. “The idea that hurting these performers is a matter of freedom of expression is simply wrong.”
Click for the full article
See also:
Hampden Superior Court Lets Capital Video Reopen Viewing Booths in Springfield; A Proposed Solution (9/30/08)
A search of the term barebacking on its Amazing.net/Goflix.com website today brings up the following and more:
Bisexual Barebacking #6
Barebacking Tag Team
Unsafe Sex with Transsexuals Barebacking #2
Raw Bois #3 – A Twink Barebacking Adventure
Adventures in Barebacking
The title below was prominently on display at an Amazing.net store in Massachusetts on September 28. The character at the bottom of the box cover says, “Go Forth And Be Unsafe My Son!”
AIDS Healthcare Foundation: “Tell Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky that LA County Must Enforce Condom Use in Adult Films!” (8/31/09)
Los Angeles Times: “Groups to file complaints against 16 porn companies” (8/20/09)
Advocate.com: “Business Before Pleasure?” (8/12/09)
Though there are no scientific statistics, there is a quiet acknowledgment among adult industry professionals that a significant number of gay male porn performers are HIV-positive. A survey conducted by TheSword.com of nearly 100 gay male performers says 30% of them responded as being either HIV-positive or status unknown.
Mandatory testing of gay porn stars would all but bar HIV-positive performers from appearing in films…
Stephan Sirard of NextDoorMale.com is one of the very few studio heads who requires condoms and monthly testing for all: straight or gay, male or female, for partnered or solo scenes.
“Condoms break. Condoms come off. And with testing there are window periods. Combine both for best practices. Studios that don’t use condoms and don’t test should be in court for murder,” Sirard says.
Porn Worker Conditions: “Who failed Lara Roxx?” (explicit language)
[To film a special effects scene where someone gets shot,] I had to hire a pyrotechnician licensed by the state. I also had to hire a county fire marshal, who monitored the pyrotechnician and had the authority to stop any behavior deemed unsafe. If you add in the city cops I was legally required to retain for crowd control, the actors and crew on my set had three levels of protection provided by government agencies.
Lara Roxx had zero protection by government agencies. There was no cop on that set. No fire marshal. No doctor. Nobody had a license. And nobody broke the law by paying a teenager to accept the uncovered penises of two men into her anus.
Condom Use Below 20% in American Porn Movies
“In any sexual interaction where condoms are used, consumers tend to drift from that,” said Graham Travis, head of production at Elegant Angel Video, a production company that turns out as many as eight new releases a month. “What the consumers want to see is performers without condoms, something that’s as real and intimate as possible…”
Sharon Mitchell, a former adult-film actress who earned a Ph.D. in human sexuality before co-founding the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation, said on Monday that condom use in the industry had gone up after the H.I.V. outbreak to 23 percent from 17 percent and that it was now back to about 17.5 percent.
Los Angeles Times: “In California’s Unregulated Porn Film Industry, an Alarming Number of Performers Are Infected With HIV and Other Sexually Transmitted Diseases. And Nobody Seems to Care.”
Sexual Ecology: Porn, Promiscuity, and AIDS (explicit language)