Crossposted from Calico’s blog
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.
Tags: AIM, HIV, OSHA, porn industry, pornography, testing
