It’s dry reading material, but in light of an LA porn performer’s recent HIV result (and the resulting panic), I want to do some basic rumor control. I’m simply amazed at the amount of misinformation and hysteria that passes for reporting.
For today’s episode of Rumor vs. Fact, I’ve excerpted from this excellent essay by Ernest Greene.
RUMOR: 16 Hidden HIV Infections! AIM a conspiracy!
FACT: False. Despite much misreporting, it’s one contained case.
… none of Fielding’s cynical machinations sinks to the level of his false assertion, trumpeted by The Times, that AIM has “concealed” an additional 16 HIV infections in the industry since 2004. In fact, eleven of those cases involved male performers in gay porn who are not part of AIM’s client base and who do not test with AIM and four were private citizens not affiliated with porn who sought testing at AIM for personal reasons. As required by law, all HIV infections detected by AIM were reported to Fielding’s department, which is how he comes to know about them, but were not disclosed to AIM’s heterosexual porn industry clients because they did not involve het porn in any way. And yet The Times reported this deliberate and heinous distortion of the truth under the blaring headline: “More Porn HIV Cases Disclosed.” In point of fact, there is no way AIM, Fielding or anyone else can know that the cases involving the gay performers were porn-related, as AIM does not monitor that population.
Relatedly:
RUMOR: The names of the actors need to be released publicly! AIM is not cooperating with authorities by withholding them.
FACT: False. People calling for the names of the infected actors are crazy. Why, to shame them? To ruin their names? I don’t need to know who they are, as long as I’m not working with them. And thanks to AIM, I’m not.
RUMOR: Porn performers are a risk to the public!
FACT: Actually, when it comes to HIV, the public is a risk to porn performers. HIV cases come from outside our pool.
It is still much, much safer to have barrier-free sex with a tested porn performer than with a stranger met in a bar, but porn performers themselves have been known to have barrier-free sex with strangers met in bars. Porn performers do not represent a threat to the health of the citizenry of California as Dr. Fielding would have us believe. It’s the other way around. Outsiders with unknown histories pose a threat to our well-observed community.
This risk is impossible to gauge and impossible to eliminate entirely, short of keeping performers locked up between shoots, an idea that would probably get some traction with Fielding, Kerndt, Fryer, Weinstein and the rest of their gang.
This is what they do in Nevada brothels: lock the women up between tests. Have we mentioned that clients, of course, are neither tested nor quarantined? It denies protection to sex workers that clients are guaranteed. I think it’s inhumane. But I digress.
Also — is it just me, or does an isolated HIV case not only suggest but require that the source was not a performer?
RUMOR: We should just make porn without condoms illegal!
FACT: This is the most complicated bit, but in my opinion, the most interesting. If Greene is right, it can’t be done through law without preventing testing and the privilege of refusal to work with HIV+ performers.
Ernest Greene tells us the trainwreck story of regulation:
… Cal-OSHA’s plan for porn would be the means through which it [condom regulation] would have to be put in place. Cal-OSHA has jurisdiction only over employees. Independent contractors, which is how porn performers not under contract to specific companies, are currently classed under state law, would not be subject to Cal-OSHA supervision unless reclassified as employees.
So what, you might ask, is so bad about that? After all, it would make them eligible for workman’s comp and provide them with a mechanism for reporting unsafe working conditions on the set.
There’s just one little hitch in this plan. It is against the law in California for any employer to require an HIV test, or even to ask about a potential employee’s HIV status, as a condition of employment. Doing so is considered employment discrimination and carries significant penalties to the employer.
In fact, if performers were considered employees rather than contractors, it would be illegal for a producer to hire a performer on the grounds that said performer was, in fact, HIV positive. That’s right. Producers would be required to hire HIV+ performers, and if other performers didn’t like working with them, those performers would be fired while the HIV+ performers would be allowed to remain on the set until partners could be found who would work with them.
Well, fuck. We already have a condom-only, no-testing model in gay porn and it has been much less successful than het porn at preventing HIV. Greene, quoting a gay porn producer, writes: “it’s just assumed that all of our talent is or will be infected and that the use of barriers is a secondary precaution.”
Did you know? I had no idea that condom use in het porn was so rare and so discouraged. I feel … sheltered. Clarisse Thorn writes that my generation may not practice perfect safe sex, but we do believe we should, and I agree. Condom use is one “should” I am willing to live with.
I was also unaware that so much hetero porn did not use condoms. Personally, I think condoms plus testing is the way to go. If there really are legal issues with asking performers who are employees about their HIV status, the law should be amended to allow employers to require HIV testing if it’s work related (as it would be for porn).
Comment by Mark — June 15, 2009 @ 7:01 pm
Great article, MC… I think it is sad how many mainstream folks don’t realize the precautions that are in place for the porn industry. It is a good thing!
Thanks for the read!
Comment by DominantBlogger — June 15, 2009 @ 7:12 pm
Actually, the source of the infection may still be a performer, because a fair few performers are not “full time”; in fact, poor old “patient zero” probably is one who doesn’t work consistently (for whatever reason), hence the length of time between tests. So it is possible that source of her infection was a performer who has not worked for a while, hence hasn’t been tested, etc.
Whether that’s a likely scenario is a whole other question. I suspect that, given the known presence of non-porn sex partners in the mix, the most probable vector was via them. But you can’t eliminate the “performer who is ‘resting’ (and so hasn’t bothered to get tested)” scenario.
Malc.
Comment by Malcolm — June 15, 2009 @ 7:26 pm
Technically, they CAN mandate condoms in porn by law, just not under the laws as they /currently/ stand.
The existing regulatory structure (California’s OSHA) has some bugs that would make it problematic, but the legislature could just come out with a new law that mandated condom use for commercial porn production. The problem is that legislatures are subject to lobbying, and the subset-performers-who-dislike-the-anti-condom-pressure-enough-to-actually-do-anything-about-it are just not the lobbying powerhouse that the producers-who-want-to-avoid-regulation can be.
And as much as the public loves to watch porn, they really don’t care enough about how it’s made to mandate protective work equipment, especially if that means they have to go without their ideal fantasy sex and cream pies.
Comment by SW — June 15, 2009 @ 7:33 pm
Malcolm – I’m not sure what are you talking about. AIM testing is an every-28-days thing. Did you read the Ernest Greene article, where he talks about the exact circumstances of “patient zero”?
The scenario of lapsed testing doesn’t exist. If a performer hadn’t been tested in a while and was infected, he/she would have been having sex with Patient Zero in a civilian capacity, because you sure can’t do it on the clock with a lapsed test.
Comment by Calico — June 15, 2009 @ 9:07 pm
[...] Miss Calico, a BDSM porn performer and sex worker advocate, points to a adult film director Ernest Greene’s reponse to the coverage of a reported HIV case among US porn performers. When it comes to porn, notions of privacy, confidentiality, and rights get secondary play over outdated and just flat wrong figures on how hugely profitable porn is (isn’t), and fearmongering over porn actors “infecting” the “general public.” [...]
Pingback by Sexerati | Porn, condoms, trouble — June 16, 2009 @ 10:36 am
I’m sure the law could be rearranged to make condoms a requirement for porn, I just think it’s a poor idea. Most straight porn I’ve seen involving condoms has *only* used them for PIV / PIA, while continuing to show no barrier use for oral sex. While some condom use is safer than no condom use, there’s really not a hard line between safe and unsafe, just a fuzzy continuum. Does the current standard for condom use in straight porn get the Cal-OSHA seal of approval? If not the current standard, what does the state of California what to tell everyone who watches porn is “safe enough”?
Comment by Architect — June 17, 2009 @ 7:25 am
Unfortunately, lapsed testing DOES exist — it’s what’s at the heart of this issue. “Patient Zero” was tested on 4/29, then worked at least on 6/4 and was tested on 6/4. That’s 36 days (the 37th is 6/4). What’s NOT clear (for obvious reasons) is whether she worked prior to 6/4, but after 5/27 (the 28 day point), where she’d still be out-of-test, or indeed whether she worked following the 4/29 test.
So it’s possible for a performer to test clean on day 1, retest clean on day 28, become infected by civilian sex on day 47, retest clean on day 56 (because PCR typically won’t detect within 10 days), and then work on days 57 through 84 while actually infected but technically “in test”. If the performer then retires on day 85, no-one will notice the infection until one of their work partners from the days 57 to 84 period tests positive… Of course, Public Health should then backtrack to find the source, but there’s no requirement for performers to remain in touch with anyone once they cease to work, so its possible that they’d not be able to verify that performer as the source.
Another (theoretical) complication is that HIV transmission rates are high, but not 100% — it is possible that someone has civilian sex with an infected person, does NOT get infected, but then gets infected on set by the sort of mechanism outlined above. The source of the infection is pinned on the civilian, the industry breathes a sigh of relief, and everyone marches on.
The reality is that the industry’s system is pretty good, but it’s not perfect. Of course, air travel is pretty good, but not perfect, too… Risk is everywhere, and the trick is to quantify and minimize the risk while limiting the impact of the risk mitigation efforts. While remembering, of course, that the airline and the porn industry have slightly different priorities than the passengers and the performers…
Malc.
Comment by Malcolm — June 18, 2009 @ 4:33 pm