Remember when I concluded my last post here with the caveat about how long it would be before AHF would manufacture another crisis to sell the condom mandate??
Turned out...it would take less than 24 hours.
Today, AHF finally broke out its propaganda big stick and attempted to regain control of the STI's in porn narrative with an online press conference on the current situation....and, trust me on this, it was much more than the usual clown show.
Oh, Michael Weinstein was there with his usual pontificating BS about how the industry simply chews up and spits out performers, along with the usual lies and talking points. But this time, he brought him some backup.
As in....none other than Cameron Bay and Rod Daily themselves.
The former Cameron Adams shed the usual tears about how life changing her infection has been, and leveled some new charges based on that now infamous Public Disgrace shoot of July 31 for Kink.com, where she and Weinstein effective imply that they were infected with HIV. The newest charge is that the performer who engaged with Bay in that scene had cut the tip of his penis and bled, yet still continued to do the act with her without a condom. Never mind that Kink.com protocols allow a performer in a straight sex scene the option of requiring a condom...and also never mind that all the other performers involved in that scene tested negative for HIV prior to and immediately since that scene took place.
And as for Rod Daily?? He played the "good cop" side of the routine to a perfectly crossed "T", speaking only positive and inspirating things about how condoms protected him from HIV even while he performed on the gay/TS side with openly infected performers. That's nice, but does that cover his off-screen activity? Or, the fact that, after having used the FSCPASS tests for years to document his sterling record of cleanliness, he all of a sudden went rogue in August and abandoned them for a non-PASS test that turned up positive? Or...maybe it was the fact that the FSCPASS tests went full panel, including tests for Hepatitis C, which caused his hesitation?
Now, Daily does have a preplanned excuse: he didn't want his test results "leaked". Which explains why he was so busy practically throwing his prior test unredacted at people prior to last July, right?? Then again, Weinstein (through his usual sockpuppets) was making noises at that time (and repeated the charge today) that Cameron Bay's test results had been breached by FSCPASS doctors...a charge that was publically denied by PASS and Cutting Edge Testing's Dr. Peter Mao.
But, apparently, flipping Cameron Bay and Rod Daily to the Dark Side by paying for their treatment and medication wasn't enough for Darth Weinstein, so he decided to break out two new victims to throw into the propaganda mix.
The first one was the infamous "Performer #4" that Weinstein had been hinting at since last week. ID'd only as "John Doe", P#4, who described himself as a crossover performer, testified that he had gotten infected sometime in the past six months. However, he refused to offer any other information on exactly when he was diagnosed or infected, or what tests flagged his infection. Most certainly, he never used the PASS testing regimen...and he offered no evidence or even charge that he was infected on an adult set.
The second new "victim" was a performer named Patrick Stone, who described himself as a gay porn model whom had shot on/off since 2010, including bareback scenes. His claim to fame here was that he was a part time performer for Kink.com's gay section (which, BTW, requires condoms), and that he was propositioned by Kink to perform a scene in mid-August, in between the two moratoriums imposed. But, like P#4, he clammed up on exactly what nature of a shoot it was (gay, hetero, or BDSM), or whether or not Kink knew of Stone's status when they offered him the shoot a week in advance. Plus, Stone prefaced his remarks with the revelation that his "infection" may in fact be a false positive.
Of course, you can't have any AHF propaganda conference without Derrick Burts and Darren James present to cheerlead...though one would wonder why Weinstein would continue to send these two out, considering their histories.
By now, the point of today's assault should be obvious: Weinstein wants to blow up the FSCPASS testing regimen as bogus and a failure (even inventing the hashtag #PASSFAIL) because it failed to flag the infection status of these five people. Thusly, according to such illogic, testing is a failure and no real protection...but condoms are a fail safe 100% means of protection because...well, it protected Rod Daily and Patrick Stone, well didn't it?
The problem, as always, for Weinstein and his associates is that the scoreboard still hasn't changed, regardless of their attempts to move the goalposts and buy ringers. Six hours after AHF began this latest charade of a press conference, the cold hard fact remains that every active performer who performed with Cameron Bay on set since her last clean test has come up negative for HIV. Every active performer who performed on Kink.com with either Cameron Bay or Rod Daily who was NOT HIV+ before then, is still not HIV+ since then.
And, if anything, this episode actually proves how valuable the system is, because just imagine what would have happened if Cameron Bay had NOT decided to take that PASS test in August, but had gone over to the same antibody test that Rod Daily and apparently the other "victims" had used. Suppose that test had missed her seroconversion and gone negative, and she and Daily had continued to shoot porn and otherwise engage in extracurricular activity unknowing that she was actually infected. Suppose that there had been no original moratorium to begin with due to the PASS system flagging the positive/reactive result and triggering the testing protocols.
Oh..and one last bit of thought: Cameron Bay had originally said in another interview that got transpired into a Huffington Post column (more on that bit of propaganda anon) that she was motivated to get tested in mid August by the brohaha over Andre Gorz and his Hepatitis C issues. For those of you who missed it, it was megaperformer Lisa Ann who blew the whistle on Gorz when she scheduled (then aborted) a shoot with him in order to force him to reveal his tests. The motivation for LA was that Gorz had all of a sudden disappeared from the approved FSCPASS "whitelist" of cleared performers during July due to his Hep C prognosis, yet he was still able to get shoots in spite of that.
To summarize: five performers who more than likely contracted HIV through either their own private extracurricular activity and/or took advantage of the different system of protection on the gay side of the industry, were sucessfully isolated and prevented from infecting other performers on the straight side unwittingly thanks to the PASS system of screening and testing. It is that system that Michael Weinstein and the AIDS Healthcare Foundation want to destroy in order to impose his condom mandate and make his fortune off strategically placed condom ads and paid endorsers.
Sources for this post:
XBiz report on today's AHF press conference
XBiz report on FSCPASS's response
The Real Porn Wikileaks blog response
Gram Ponante's response
Kink.com CEO Peter Acworth's response (via TRPWL) (via XBiz)
A sanctuary for supporters of sexual free expression and the adult sexual media.
What we have appears to be another isolated situation involving people who were at high-risk from off-camera activities resulting in new infections that were only detected by the unparalleled effectiveness of the industry's existing testing procedures.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet AHF attempts to use the same data to prove the opposite of reality. Those performers who followed the existing procedures were quickly identified and isolated. Those who did not - who either didn't test or went outside the existing system of centralized reporting - were unable and/or unwilling to identify the source of their infections, how they found out about them and who else they may have exposed.
What seems to have happened is that gay performers who relied on condoms with testing a virtual afterthought - an example Mr. Weinstein would have the rest of us emulate - got infected with HIV, either on or off a set. Given the assumptions on which gay producers operate, a calculation that recognizes an existing HIV+population of 30% among the gay porn talent pool - brought the virus with them into the het talent pool with very unhappy results for Cameron Bay. The two nameless, faceless performers, both male also, rolled out at this circus were quite probably gay side players also who found out about their status at some point by way of AHF's own clunky ELISA testing after who knows how many high-risk exposures.
From the het talent pool that tests by the PASS protocols, no transmissions whatsoever have been documented. AHF would have us believe that there is no distinction between het and gay porn performers and indeed Measure B recognizes none, which is where Weinstein dives off the cliff. Gay producers are about as eager for universal testing as het producers are for universal condoms. State and federal laws make mandatory testing likely DOA due to anti-discrimination laws and mandatory condoms will ultimately die in front of some federal judge who has to rule by law, not the propaganda of any given faction.
So what we end up with, if we're lucky, is a return to the status quo, which includes a known risk of STD transmission kept to the lowest possible level among those who use it. A separate population of porn performers who don't will be at higher risk as they have been all along and to the extent that they work with those who do test, will be lucky to enjoy the protections that testing affords as the price of admission.
Here's where I say something nice about AHF. Alert the media. Every doctor I know has nothing but praise for their treatment programs for HIV patients. I have no doubt they were quick to extend a warm welcome to those programs to Cameron and friends and I don't blame them one bit for taking advantage even if the cost was being paraded in a dog-and-pony show by a shameless huckster who profits from their misfortune.
Does our industry have something better to offer them? No, it doesn't. Back when AIM was still operating, we moved people seamlessly from detection to treatment, but PASS assumes no such responsibilities. It offers referrals and counseling, but it's not and never has been and never will be a full-service clinical operation. This business does not offer any kind of assistance to those for whom it has no further use and it's not about to start doing so now.
I do not blame any infected performers for grabbing the life-preserver that AHF offers them until this business can offer them something comparable. And as those of us who worked on creating the existing safeguards have always known and admitted, there will be isolated cases like these in the future.
It's reprehensible of AHF to parade these frightened young people in front of the media as victims of the status quo. It's reprehensible on the part of the industry that we can't extend them anything better.
Still, bad as things are, they'd be a lot worse if we relied on AHF and its supporters to keep us safe by their preferred means and abandoned our own in the process.
Ernest:
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's not nearly as complex as that....could it be that Cameron Bay and/or Rod Daily (and possibly even Unnamed Performer #3) may have gotten infected through private extracurricular sex unrelated to their professional porn activities? In short, simply a horrible break with the wrong people at the wrong time?
The other two "cases" seem to be imported in by Weinstein for blatant propaganda purposes, I feel.
Still, I understand your point about the industry not having an effective means of financial support for those who do get STI's and are therefore denied their livelihood. That's one reason why I still support the formation of an Adult Performers' Guild to offer some kind of pooled insurance that would cover most of the costs of treatment. Either that, or pass it off to some form of universal health care coverage like single payer.
Either way, it's one total hot flowing mess that isn't going to be resolved easily or quickly. I'm sure Weinstein has more than enough stooges to invent more crises down the road.
That's what I said:
ReplyDelete"What we have appears to be another isolated situation involving people who were at high-risk from off-camera activities resulting in new infections that were only detected by the unparalleled effectiveness of the industry's existing testing procedures." Like a number of other situations over the years in which we excluded aspiring performers because they were positive on their initial tests, the source of infection, by definition, couldn't have been porn, as they hadn't made any yet. They were infected in their personal lives, which appears to be the situation with Ms. Bay, Mr. Daily and their unnamed friend. Such things are far from unknown in the world outside porn. In fact, as those pesky statistics keep remind us, a shocking number of people in now way associated with porn have contracted HIV in Los Angeles County over the past ten years. They all caught a horrible break in the same manner in which Bay and Daily appear to have done so: by engaging in unsafe behavior in their private lives unaffiliated with work.
But I'm glad you agree that simply kicking sick performers to the curb is unacceptable. Even if the new infections turn out to be totally unrelated to porn, these are still performers we're talking about and they deserve our support.
At AIM, they got it. Sharon Mitchell was an ace at steering people through the maze of assistance programs for new HIV cases and kept up with them. AIM offered direct employment working in the clinic to at least two individuals who tested positive, and AIM had not one extra dime to spare.
I find that in the long run the right thing to do and the smart thing to do usually turn out to be the same. It would be right for this industry to offer a group insurance plan under the new exchange laws that go into effect next week. It would be voluntary and for otherwise-healthy young participants, available at a very modest cost. FSC has promised to look into creating such program, but so far I see no evidence of that. It would be righteous to help sick performers, however they got sick, and would help us spike AHF's oft-repeated lie that we "chew people up and spit them out."
You can bet Weinstein will keep cooking up new publicity stunts like yesterday's. That's his specialty.
A little humanitarianism toward performers on the part of those who have most of the money in this game would be both admirable and wise. But how often can we really apply those words to the decision-making class in this or any other industry?
When we fail to step up in a situation such as the current one, we create new recruits for Mr. Weinstein, who has much more largesse to distribute. There's at least one of his false charges we can discredit easily, once we make it false by showing a little compassion at the executive level for those whose labor built the nice, big houses in Encino and paid for the fancy cars producers park in the driveways.
There won't ever be a union in this business because the young and transient nature of the working population makes that impractical to organize. But there can be an institution created by the industry itself to offer more service and support to performers. At the very least, when we go to twice monthly testing pooled funding from the producers should pick up the tab for at least one of those panels. Expecting performers to bear the entire cost of keeping themselves save and then to do so little for them after they've ceased to work on camera paints an unlovely picture of those who run this shop, and rightly so.
Anyone else want to come forward and accuse Nina and me of shilling for the industry and being on its payroll? What's one more lie to people who lie as if talking about the weather.