by Lynsey G
Now-retired performer Danny Wylde told me in a 2011 interview that, when he started doing porn, “I wasn’t working full-time at all. So I took the jobs that were available to me. Many of them came from the heavy S/M or gay sides of the industry.” So that’s where he worked, until he decided to try to get more mainstream straight work. “It wasn’t until about a year later that I learned of the stigma attached to [gay-to-straight] crossover male talent,” he said. Danny was fortunate in being able to make the leap, but some aren’t.
Lance Hart, founder of PervOut.com, spent two years as a contract model for a high-end gay company. “It was great money, awesome company, all that. When my contract was up, I wanted to do straight stuff … And that’s when I hit the wall of, ‘Oh, you’ve done gay stuff. You can’t play with us. Because gay people have cooties,’” he said in 2016.
“Cooties” is actually a good word for the situation, because the divide between gay and straight industries is in place largely due to the threat of disease, whether real or imaginary. To paint a complicated situation in extremely broad strokes, the gay industry generally relies more on condoms to keep performers safe, while the straight industry relies more heavily on current STI test results. This difference is somewhat in keeping with larger cultural norms. In the most sweepingly general terms, gay male culture, with its roots so firmly based in the AIDS epidemic that swept the eighties and nineties, has embraced, normalized, and even celebrated the use of condoms, and the gay porn world has taken that as its cue when it comes to sex on camera. But the straight porn industry has taken a different approach—testing instead of condoms. There is a host of reasons for this preference, which we’ll discuss, but the upshot is that men who have worked in gay porn are often seen as vectors of sexually transmitted infections because it’s thought that their industry does not apply testing standards as rigorously. Their reputation is not fair or accurate, but it persists nevertheless, in the manner that prejudices often do.
Danny Wylde explained to me, “My issue with the straight porn industry is that crossover male talent have been singled out as the only ‘high risk’ group for disseminating HIV among the talent pool. Those who participate in prostitution, intravenous drug use, and other ‘high risk’ activity do not seem to be taken into consideration (albeit these activities are harder to prove). Crossover talent are held to the same standards as everyone else working in straight porn. And they are just as likely, or unlikely, to participate in ‘high risk’ behavior off set. So when you really look at the issue, it seems that the stigma attached to male homosexuality in general trumps the concern over HIV transmission.” In fact, most instances of HIV infections in the industry have been proven to come from non-industry activity, just like Danny said.
When you really think about it, it’s something of a brainteaser as to how homophobia can even exist in straight porn. As director Ivan revealed to me, “You quickly get over the homophobia working in porn.” He went into some in-depth descriptions of scenarios he’d seen at shoots in which supposedly straight men did things that most would qualify as further down the Kinsey scale than solidly “heterosexual.” I won’t repeat them here, for the sake of my readers’ delicate sensibilities, but he made a good point. (And the interview is on YouTube, should you be curious.)
Furthermore, given that the porn industry as a whole is regularly pilloried by mainstream media, considered the primary vector for immoral sexual behavior in our society, it’s odd to think that anyone in this marginalized industry would be eager to further marginalize others. Wouldn’t it be more effective and friendlier for everyone to get along?
But, alas, pornography is something of a funhouse mirror to mainstream society—many of the issues we see in everyday life are re-created in adult entertainment, distorted and blown out of proportion. And homophobia has long been one of these outsized, wibbly-wobbly reflections. Many men in the straight industry are terrified of being seen as even the tiniest bit gay, and much of that fear comes from the debate over condom use versus STI testing. The official line on testing versus condoms from the straight industry is that consumers don’t want to see condoms in porn, that the sight of latex destroys the fantasy. Recent research has shown that men of all sexual orientations tend to prefer condomless sex scenes over sheathed porn, though around thirty percent don’t really care either way. But few producers are willing to bet on condoms in their content; I have heard and read numerous producers swear that condoms drive down sales. And, in such a difficult economic climate as the current one, they’re not willing to take the risk.
But there are several “condom-mandatory” companies that require condoms on every set—one of these companies happens to be Wicked Pictures, one of the biggest, oldest, most respected names in the straight porn industry. Condoms are required for anal and vaginal penetration on all Wicked sets, with oral sex and the all-important “pop shot” being exempt. Wicked is one of few companies that still operates on a contract model—paying salaries to its contracted performers and promoting them, thus turning them into true porn stars. This is a business model that requires a huge investment on the part of the company, and Wicked’s continued success is evident in its production of big-budget feature films, massive presence at industry conventions, and steady stream of awards. Clearly, condoms have not hurt Wicked too badly.
Although most straight companies claim to be “condom optional,” meaning that actors can use condoms if they want to, the truth in practice is less benign. It’s not uncommon for performers to ask for a condom on set and be provided with one, only to later find themselves blacklisted from that director or company’s roster. Especially in recent years, with turnover rates for talent higher than ever and profits bottoming out, many companies would prefer to hire someone else next time rather than deal with someone who wants to use condoms. Some actors have reported getting into fights with directors on set that ended in tears, walk-offs, and cancellations, resulting in a bad reputation for being difficult to work with, all over wanting to use condoms. As with many issues in porn, the issue of blacklisting over barrier protection is always in flux, and I have been told more recently that this stigma is beginning to decline. But still, in such a small, sequestered industry, reputations make and break careers, so it’s not uncommon for newbies to agree to work without condoms against their deeper wishes in order to safeguard future work.
Established performers who have proven themselves profitable are often able to dictate their safer sex terms more effectively, and a significant number shoot only with condoms, but for most active talent, being picky isn’t as viable an option.
BUT, INDUSTRY POLITICS ASIDE, it’s important to note that condoms in porn aren’t necessarily the failsafe one might think. There’s a reason that the term for sex with barrier protection has been modified from “safe sex” to “safer sex,” after all. While condoms are “highly effective in preventing the transmission of HIV,” according to the CDC, they’re not foolproof by any means. They aren’t equally effective for every STI, especially those that can be transmitted by skin-to-skin contact, like HPV and herpes. They can break, slip off, and—especially in sustained, over-the-top porn sex—cause friction burns inside the penetrated partners’ body. Latex burn means microtears on the interior of a sexually penetrated cavity, which leave a person far more vulnerable to STI transmission. If the condom breaks, and the penetrating partner has an STI—surprise! That latex burn becomes a big problem.
Due to the vigorous and prolonged nature of the sex that porn stars have on camera, furthermore, it could be argued that using condoms at all on a porn set is tantamount to using them improperly. Your average condom is not built to withstand hours of use, frequent stops and starts, or the athletic rigor of what Seymore Butts once called “circus-act sex.” Particularly if there are numerous participants using condoms in the same scene, the possibility of a malfunction ratchets up exponentially—and each malfunction calls for a stop to the action, a re-sheathing of the penis in question, a wat
er break, a bathroom break … By the time filming starts again, precious minutes have passed. By the end of a shoot, the use of condoms can equate to hours of extra time on set, and many more microfissures inside the body of the penetrated actors. As legendary performer (and registered nurse) Nina Hartley told The Huffington Post, “Shooting scenes with condoms are noticeably more uncomfortable … They aren’t built to withstand our shoots.”
Adult entertainers often have a list of reasons for preferring or not preferring to use condoms on camera. Whichever direction they go with, that choice should, I believe, be left up to them—not to directors, and certainly not to anyone outside the industry who lacks an understanding of the many variables. So, in order to keep performers as safe as possible with or without the use of condoms, the straight industry has put in place an ever-evolving testing protocol that strives to prevent STIs from entering the talent pool in the first place.
LEGENDARY PERFORMER JOHN HOLMES succumbed to AIDS in 1988 after having worked on gay sets where, rumor has it, he initially contracted HIV. Back then, the young and spread-out industry had no system to test its talent, but most producers did their best to ascertain the sexual health of their performers before filming. It wasn’t until 1998 that the Adult Industry Medical (AIM) clinic was founded by retired performer Sharon Mitchell, who had quit doing porn to become a sexologist and health counselor. AIM became the main testing center for adult talent, using performers’ test results to construct a database that could be referenced easily by anyone in the industry before a shoot. Producers collectively self-imposed a testing regimen in which all models needed to have test results no more than thirty days old in order to shoot. All sexual activity was to be logged into the system, thereby creating a network through which disease transmission could be tracked and any infected performers’ sexual partners, and their partners, could be alerted and tested.
This system, called SxCheck, was still in its infancy when Marc Wallice, an award-winning performer who was rumored to be an intravenous drug user, tested positive for HIV in 1998. Rumors spread that he had been hiding his positive status for some time, and AIM set to work tracing his work history and testing his scene partners. Things were quiet until 2004, when Darren James tested positive for HIV. It was later determined that he had contracted the virus on a set in Brazil, where there is a less-rigorous testing system in place. He kept working upon his return to the US, and had infected three female partners before he tested positive. In order to contain the outbreak, the American porn industry effectively shut itself down for thirty days to reduce the risk of the infections spreading further. (If you hear about any other industry that self-imposes a moratorium on business when somebody gets sick, please do let me know about it, by the way.)
In the years that followed, similar outbreaks cropped up from time to time: Performers would test positive for HIV, the industry would shut down until all affected partners could be notified and tested, and then things would get going again. After the 2004 outbreak, however, there were no confirmed cases of transmission between partners on a porn set until 2014, when a gay male actor transferred the virus to a scene partner on camera. The actor in question had been recently tested, but using a testing method that was slower than the industry-standard RNA test. The industry duly shut down production and tracked down the actor’s other scene partners to stop the spread of the virus. In this and several other cases, actors who tested positive were either gay-to-straight crossover male performers, or male performers who worked with transsexual female performers. As a result, the stigma that still haunts these actors was perpetuated.
Some studies have shown that porn actors are not at a statistically significant increased risk of STI infection than the general population, and at least one has found that the adult film talent pool is less affected by STIs than the rest of Los Angeles County. Other studies have shown different results, but the reality seems to fall somewhere in the middle; porn stars don’t seem to be at a particularly elevated risk for STIs, though many would have us believe otherwise. I may be a bit of an optimist, but knowing what I know about the testing system in porn, I’d rather take my chances with going home with a porn star than a “civilian” from a bar any day of the week (and maybe, just maybe, I have). Not only are they likely to know what they’re doing once we get there, they’re probably going to know their STI status and be a lot less afraid to tell me about it than most of the population.
Over the years, furthermore, the testing system in the industry underwent constant improvement—testing methods and schedules were updated regularly. And in 2011, the system was working insofar as it could at keeping those inside the industry protected. But even as industry self-regulation was evolving, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the largest AIDS service nonprofit organization in the United States, was unrolling a massive campaign to dismantle the porn industry’s testing system and impose legislation requiring condoms on all porn shoots. After the Darren James incident in 2004, AHF began to lobby the state of California to require condom use by male performers, and to register mountains of complaints against those who did not. Federal blood-borne pathogens law already mandated that barrier protection should be used between mucous membranes in places of work, but those rules were written for medical settings, not adult film sets, so they had been largely ignored by the adult film industry until AHF began raising a ruckus over the issue. After initial attempts to force the state government’s hand proved unsuccessful, AHF’s president, Michael Weinstein, eventually pushed an ordinance through the Los Angeles city legislature that required condoms in permit-bearing porn films. The ordinance, which became law in 2012, was easy for filmmakers to get around; production companies with studios on premises fell outside its parameters, and other porn producers just didn’t bother to get licenses before filming.
So, later in 2012, Weinstein became the outspoken leader of AHF’s new campaign to fund and pass Measure B, a ballot initiative that required condoms in all licensed porn movies filmed in Los Angeles County. It also required that production companies obtain and display health permits, which would require them to incur significant costs. Given the shoestring budgets of many small studios in the age of online piracy, this did not go over well. Nor did the fact that AHF spent over two million dollars on backing the initiative and countless man-hours on the collection of more than three hundred thousand signatures to get it on the ballot. Two million dollars, critics said, could have been used to fight AIDS—the supposed mission of AHF in the first place.
But Weinstein’s, and by default AHF’s, fixation on condoms has famously been aimed at adult entertainment, and in the past decade that laser focus has been applied via ballot initiatives, lawsuits, lobbying, and rumored underhanded tactics in order to force barrier protection onto porn actors. The fight has been continuous, unrelenting, and frankly peculiar in its ferocity. At AVN in 2016, Wicked contract star jessica drake summed it up nicely: “One man, Michael Weinstein, seems to have a very personal agenda against the industry. And so instead of running the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, and … helping people with HIV, or helping prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, he seems to be focusing all of his efforts on taking us down.”
Porn industry bloggers have speculated that Weinstein may have financial ties to condom companies. Others think that he may be seeking to take over the industry’s testing apparatus or to name himself the czar of set inspections—either of which would mean AHF could land hefty government contracts and fatten up Weinstein’s paycheck. Whatever the case may be, I think Nina Hartley summed it up most succinctly an interview when she ranted, “The push for condom use is strictly driven by PC bullshit, tainted by old-fashioned Puritanism, by people with a political agenda who are skeeved out by porn.”
This fixation on putting condoms on performers came amidst AHF’s relentless hassling of the industry’s primary testing clinic, AIM. Weinstein and company produced public spectacles outside the clinic in Sherman Oaks, and called out the clinic’s refusal to
share patient STI status with county health officials and violation of federal HIPAA laws by sharing STI status within the porn industry. In February 2011, AIM’s private database of performer STI status, birth dates, stage names, real names, home addresses, and more, was breached. A website (which I will not name here because I don’t want to drive any traffic its way) appeared, exposing the private information of over twelve thousand industry workers, both past and present, along with derogatory language, photos, and more. Although some of the information, it was argued, had to come from elsewhere, it was widely agreed that the majority must have come from AIM’s patient database. After the ensuing flurry of lawsuits and hysteria, AIM closed permanently in May 2011, leaving the industry bereft. The Free Speech Coalition—the industry’s premier trade organization—stepped in, creating the FSCPass system, which now takes responsibility for the collation, dispensation, and security of performer test records that are routed to it from several FSC-approved testing facilities. Many attributed AIM’s slip-ups to its near monopoly on industry testing, so it is hoped that more testing clinics on the scene will lead to a more democratized testing landscape.
I followed all these developments with horrified fascination. From my perch in New York, it boggled my mind that anybody would be so cruel as to target an industry that already bears the brunt of our nation’s neuroses about sex, disease, and privacy. Model April Flores recalled of her experience being outed, “We’re already out there so much. Can’t our [stage] name just be our name and have some level of safety?” Porn actors were fearing for their lives as their fans and potentially stalkers learned their home addresses and phone numbers. Retired performers’ new careers were threatened when bosses discovered their former jobs. The health of thousands of people was put in jeopardy by the shutdown of the clinic. A multi-billion-dollar industry was sent into a tailspin, and my moonlighting as a porn journalist was in jeopardy, to boot. I wrote frantically about the goings-on in LA but found little in the way of interest or readership; the industry-insider politics weren’t as fascinating to the layperson, I discovered, as they were to me. And though no concrete link was ever established between the AHF and the disgruntled former porn worker who seems to have published the leaked information, rumors flew that the timing of the leak coincided a little too neatly with AHF’s attempts to discredit the clinic. The leak was all that AHF needed to renew its efforts to force the porn industry to do something it didn’t want to do: force all its performers to use condoms.