Proponents of the measure say that the existing testing regime using screening of performers and once-monthly (now twice-monthly) testing has been proven to be a failure due to back-to-back-to-back "outbreaks" of performers getting HIV, as well as an alleged "epidemic" of other STI's such as chlamydia, gonnorrhea, syphillis, Hepatitis B, Hepatatis C, and HPV, which they say are affecting the industry; and that only mandating condom usage will redress the problem and protect "worker safety". Proponents also cite the supposed benefits of mandating condom usage for porn performers in the general context of promoting "safer sex" amongst the general population; intimating that since porn has a disproportional influence on the developing sexual habits of impressionable youth, it should be coerced by government fiat to promote such "safer sex" practices as a means of "mentoring" young people into more "responsible" practices.
While all those intentions may be based on well-meaning goals and incentives (and some may be based solely on simply taking out competition and privileging those more economically more able to profit from a condomized regime), opponents of the condom mandate like me have stated that the measure simply attacks a straw problem that does not exist, uses a nuclear bomb when a precise scapel would be more appropriate, denies the choices of the very performers they claim to want to protect, undercuts the very cause of promoting "safer sex", and ultimately, decimates and violates the rights of innocent people who's only crime was to engage in sex in ways not approved by certain elitists.
There are other objections that have been raised to the LA County ordinance (and a similar law that was passed covering the City of Los Angeles), such as the fact that it would essentially intervene in even private, monogamous coupled affairs where filming their sex scenes for mere personal pleasure rather than profit could still require both the expensive purchase of a permit to even tape their lovemaking, and even require the use of "bloodborne pathogen protection" as well as condoms, even if the couple was certified to be STI-free and never engaged in risky behavior. Others will cover those objections in other venues.
What I intend to do here is to reset an earlier HIV-in-porn "panic" to reveal exactly how much this latest condom mandate campaign has become nothing much than the latest in a series of "sex moral panics" designed to exploit popular prejudices and assumptions about porn performers and sex workers and sexually active/assertive people in general to fuel sexually regressive and highly reactionary legislation.
The template I will use is an article that was posted here on this blog on June 14, 2009 by BPPA contributor/co-founder emeritus Ernest Greene (aka Ira Levine), recounting an earlier "panic" that took place at that time in which a performer was found to have tested positive for the HIV virus. The subsequent brohaha set the foundation for the ultimately successful campaign against the Adult Indistury Medical (AIM) Foundation, which until 2011 had been the principal agency for testing porn performers, as well as the ongoing campaign for the condom mandate. I will add relevant annotations to Ernest's commentary, as well as some context to the present day, as I go along.
It should be noted that at the time of the original article, Ernest served (as did his wife/partner, Nina Hartley) on the executive board of AIM, and was instrumental in the formation of the testing regime they used up to their untimely demise due to mainly the efforts of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the California state branch of the Occupatonal Safety and Health Administration (Cal-OSHA), and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health Services (LACDPHS). These three organizations also happen to be the main proponents of and boosters for the condom mandate.
Latest HIV-in-Porn-Panic: Rumor Control Central Re-Opens for Business
As readers of this blog already know, a female porn performer tested positive for HIV earlier this month at the Los Angeles clinic of the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation (AIM), of which I am chairman of the board emeritus after six terms as a board member, starting with the organization’s formation in 1997. Though I’ve given up blogging as a hobby, the sensationalistic press coverage by local media and irresponsible fear mongering by public officials and anti-porn partisans in the wake of this development cannot go unaddressed.
The current situation has long-term implications for public health and public policy reaching beyond the parochial concerns of the porn industry, those who support it and those who oppose it. The ghoulish glee, complete dishonesty and utter disregard for the potential consequences to actual sex-workers in the attempt to politicize a single, isolated episode with which rad-fems and self-styled porn experts have seized upon this thing is disgraceful and says much more about them than it does about us.
For those implications to be considered rationally, there must first be some clear-sighted recognition of the known facts of this particular case. I’ll try to provide them, and then I’ll offer my perspective on the spin they’ve been given and my own best assessment of the correct course of action for the industry itself and for the greater community of which it is a part. I do not pretend to objectivity in this matter. I don’t have that luxury. I make my living as a pornographer and I am married to an active performer exposed to the same risks as everyone else in the long-term talent pool here, where the majority of porn in sold in America is made.
"Here", of course, refers to California and the Los Angeles region, where indeed most porn videos are produced..although, secondary markets such as Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Miami are emerging as challengers.
For brevity's sake, I will skip over Ernest's recollection of the 2009 case in detail; you are perfectly free to link to the original article if you wish to reset that case. Instead, I will jump forward to the reaction to that episode.
The lies started, as they so often do these days, with unsubstantiated reports from remotely involved parties appearing on porn gossip and chat sites. Perhaps the most harmful of these lies was that the infected performer was given a false negative result from her June 4 test by personnel at AIM prior to working on June 5.
This didn’t happen. It couldn’t have because her results did not come back until June 6, as laboratory reports conclusively establish. While AIM’s testing protocols are not foolproof, as nothing wrought by human hands can be, clinic procedures absolutely forbid clinic staff from discussing pending test results with anyone, including those tested, until the lab reports are in. These rules were observed to the letter in this case.
Another false accusation spread around the ‘net claimed that AIM made no attempt to stop the performer from working while her test was still pending. AIM has no legal authority to forcibly prevent anyone from doing anything. However, the importance of voluntary compliance with AIM’s testing and quarantine procedures is well understood throughout the industry and when the positive results were verified, the infected performer’s contacts have honored AIM’s request to refrain from performing until all re-testing is completed. Again, that is how the system works, and it worked quickly and effectively this time as it has in the past.
If that reminds you of something, Clones, then you remember went down last year with yet another HIV "scare", where a performer in Florida appeared to have tested positive for HIV, only to find out that the source sample used for his original diagnosis was tainted. He was retested under a different regimen and found to be HIV negative. However, the nature of his original tests, as well as the rumor that a major production company had allegedly allowed him to perform scenes during the arbitration of his original tests, potentially "infecting" many others, let to widespread chaos and rumors running amok. It wasn't until the Free Speech Coalition, through their then newly formed Adult Performer Health and Safety Services (APHSS), officially released the itenerary and etology of the tests, and verified the false positive, that passions ultimately cooled..but not before AHF and Cal-OSHA and antiporn activists like fundamentalist Christian ex-porn starlet Shelley Lubben were able to exploit the situation to their own advantage and further boost the condom mandate campaign.
And speaking of AHF and Cal-OSHA and LADPHS...here's where they come into the picture. Onwards, Mr. Levine...ahhh, I mean, Mr. Greene:
But vicious as these distortions of reality were, their sources were already well known for their hostility toward AIM’s voluntary harm-reduction approach and knowledgeable insiders viewed them with the skepticism these sources have richly earned by their past behavior.
It wasn’t until the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles County health officer Dr. Jonathan Fielding, Cal-OSHA spokesman Dean Fryer and Aids Healthcare Foundation President Michael Weinstein got into the act that the bigger and much larger and more ominous falsehoods were put in general circulation.
Fielding is a long-time adversary of AIM’s whose department has a history of harassing and defaming the organization dating to well before the 2004 cases. Fielding’s hirelings have attempted to obtain confidential medical records of AIM’s clients, made threatening calls to AIM clients in efforts to intimidate them into giving information his department has no legal right to collect and publicly accused AIM of “stonewalling” his department’s attempts to investigate STI transmissions in the industry, though he knows as well as we do that California law is extremely specific regarding what we must report to government agencies and what we are forbidden to report to anyone. Members of Fielding’s staff have heckled AIM board members, myself included, from the floor at public forums unrelated to his agency’s mission and Fielding himself has lied to my face in his office in front of two other AIM board members and two members of his own staff regarding his intended recommendations to the state legislature prior to the investigative hearing into the 2004 cases.
And yes, that would be the same Jonathan Fielding that is currently setting the terms of enforcement for the upcoming LA County condom mandate, should the voters of LA County pass this initative. Government bureaucracy is so much fun when you can play both sides of the street and get paid, isn't it??
But 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. But then again, The Times also characterizes mainstream porn as a $12 billion dollar a year industry, an unsourced figure frequently repeated in mainstream media and universally scorned as a ridiculous exaggeration by industry insiders.
While the LA Times was ultimately forced to retract that stat back then, it remains a central, core foundation of the condom mandate's proponents' ideological offensive...though the exact number sems to expand depending on who's blasting the mic at the moment. "18?? Wait, Weinstein/AHF/Cal-OSHA says 24!! No, he's wrong..it's actuall 36, Shelley sezs!!" And, of course, I won't even get you started on the outrageous claims of how much porn actually sells...since any number from $800 million to $88 BILLION can be thrown around.
Also, the exclusion of gay performers having contracted HIV, and the radically different system that is being employed by the gay side of the porn industry does have some major bearing on why some folks are so hot on the idea of imposing condoms and wrecking the existing system of testing and screening. But, I'm getting a bit ahead of myself; you'll see that anon.
Meanwhile, Cal-OSHA’s Fryer alleges in the same story that “AIM Healthcare has never been cooperative with us and our investigations,” because AIM has obeyed the law and refused to give out client information to agencies not entitled to said information.
And then there’s AHF’s Weinstein, who has characterized the porn industry overall as “a poster-child for heterosexual HIV transmission” and proclaimed that: “This industry screams for regulation. Cal-OSHA needs to require condoms be used in any film. Yesterday.” Weinstein has organized picketing in front of Larry Flynt’s offices to demand that the straight porn industry adopt mandatory condom use and has refused to meet with industry representatives to discuss the reasoning behind the current standards. He is what is colloquially known as a hothead.
A "hothead" who also happens to be very successful at shaking down major companies and government for lots and lots ANNNNNNNND LOTZ of cash, as well as incentizing his formula of condoms and treatment in lieu of other means of protection, even if that stand in the way of actual solutions. Not to mention, a nice killing for Lifestyles and Trojan and Durex.
And as for the "mentoring" aspects of the condom mandate??
And here is where the game is given away. (Bolded emphasis added by me.)All these individuals, and a few converts they’ve made at the margins of the industry, support a truly mad plan by Fielding’s deputy Dr. Peter Kerndt to implement state-legislated regulations requiring condom use throughout the industry that would make it illegal to distribute sexually explicit materials created without the use of condoms, even though Kerndt himself admits that digital post production effects could theoretically render it impossible to determine after the fact whether condoms were used or not.
If these individuals were mainly concerned with the health and safety of performers, their views might at least be worth a second hearing, and their methods, while still questionable, would at least be well meant if misguided.
Riiiiiiiight. Because "unsafe sex use" was absolutely no problem before porn came along, and because only porn performers and people taping their sex habits for personal pleasure are/were the ones spreading all kinds of nasty STI's and HIV into the civilian world. As if the HIV rate of transmission didn't really explode until the VCR, the Internet, the camcorder, and the 3G/4G digital phone allowed people to sext and flash their naughty bits and pass bareback porn betwen each other in an instant. And, of course, people who actually HAVE "unsafe sex" in actuality have been doing so without the aid of porn for centuries, and yet it seems that they have far less of a risk than the gay male porn population, which has had the unmitigated hammer drop on them due to the nature of the HIV virus..and whom also happens to enforce mandatory condom usage in spite of that.But their real objective has nothing to do with performer safety and everything to do with porn content, which they regard as setting a bad example to viewers following safer sex precautions in the viewers’ private lives. Kerndt makes his priorities crystal clear in his 2007 jeremiad published by the Public Library of Science: “The portrayal of unsafe sex in adult films may also influence viewer behavior. In the same way that images of smoking in films romanticize tobacco use, viewers of these adult films may idealize unprotected sex. The increasingly high-risk sexual behavior viewed by large audiences on television and the Internet could decrease condom use. Requiring condoms may influence viewers to see them as normative or even sexually appealing, and devalue unsafe sex. With the growing accessibility of adult film to mainstream America, portrayals of condom use onscreen could increase condom use among viewers, thereby promoting public health.”
But, if it makes "safer sex" hotter and more sellable to the public, nothing much else matters, I guess. All personal freedoms and choices pale before "protecting the public".
This is basically Weinstein’s line as well. They want to empower the state to punish porn producers for not requiring condom use because they regard the depiction of sex without barrier protections as unhealthy viewing for the audience.
Unfortunately, in the service of that goal, they’re quite prepared to put at risk the performers they claim to be protecting.
The actual method to that madness, I will get to in Part 2 of this essay.
