by Lynsey G
In 2012, the Free Speech Coalition galvanized in an attempt to stand against Measure B, and numerous other trade associations, publications, and porn industry icons spoke against it. The “No to Government Waste” campaign produced ads explaining that enforcing condom regulations in porn would be a waste of taxpayer money, not to mention potentially fatal to the porn industry, which brings in significant tax revenue to the city of Los Angeles, its county, and the state of California. AHF promptly launched its own “Yes on B” campaign, trotting out HIV-positive retired performers as paid spokespeople and unveiling billboards around Los Angeles.
The battle raged for months, but in the end, most voters in Los Angeles County just didn’t know much about the testing protocols that the porn industry used. They didn’t understand that condoms are all well and good, but that many models choose not to use them for solid reasons. They only knew that they’d seen commercials and billboards exhorting them to “protect” adult film actors. And so almost fifty-seven percent of voters, when presented with Measure B on Election Day, took it at face value. And it passed. And AHF patted itself on the back and looked forward to Cal-OSHA levying fines against the industry.
Pornographers began to decamp to Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tampa, and Miami to get away from the draconian law. Applications for adult film permits in LA county dropped by ninety-five percent. Vivid Entertainment filed a lawsuit against the county health department, claiming that Measure B was a violation of performers’ free speech. A district judge only sort of agreed—condoms, he decided, were not a violation of free speech, but, “Given that adult filming could occur almost anywhere, Measure B would seem to authorize a health officer to enter and search any part of a private home in the middle of the night, because he suspects violations are occurring. This is unconstitutional.” Vivid considered the ruling a victory, but nevertheless filed an appeal to attempt to solidify their First Amendment claim. The federal Ninth District Court agreed with the lower court about the unenforceability of Measure B, reaching a settlement in March 2016 that made Measure B pretty much moot.
But, in 2013, HIV showed its unwelcome face yet again. Over the summer, four performers tested positive. Production was halted industry-wide for a total of almost twenty days as several generations of scene partners were tested—none of the transmissions were found to have occurred on an adult film set. But then, in December, another male actor tested positive for the virus, leading to another weeklong industry moratorium. After all these tears in the fabric of the rigorous testing system, many in the industry began to rethink their stances on condoms and testing. Industry-wide, testing protocols were ratcheted up to a fourteen-day maximum between testing and shooting, which is still in place. Currently, many actors who work without condoms require their partners’ test results to be no more than a few days old. Industry-approved tests now use the Aptima HIV-1 RNA Qualitative Assay test for HIV, which can detect HIV RNA in human plasma as early as ten days after exposure to the virus. Most industry testing panels now also include screenings for Hepatitis B and C, trichomoniasis, and syphilis on top of HIV, chlamydia, and gonorrhea. And, though no testing protocol will ever be one hundred percent safe, neither will sex with condoms. It’s not a safe world we live, or screw, in. But the porn industry is doing as much as it can to protect its own.
THE AIDS HEALTHCARE FOUNDATION, however, was not satisfied with Measure B’s unenforceable status or with the porn industry’s travails. In early 2013, AHF sponsored AB 1576, a bill that would have mandated condom use in adult films across the state of California. In late 2015, the Cal-OSHA Standards Board decided to take a look at a complaint that AHF had lodged back in 2009, objecting to the lack of state-level regulations specifying how blood-borne pathogen laws should affect the porn industry. These regulations, collectively called §5193.1, would have required a laundry list of impractical concessions pushed onto the industry in order to avoid worker exposure to potentially infectious bodily fluids. The regulations would have required barrier protection for all genital-to-genital contact, as well as skin, mouths, eyes, and all mucous membranes that might come in contact with infectious fluids—fancy talk for gloves, dental dams, plastic outfits, and eye protection. In effect, it would have turned every sex scene in California into a medical fetishist’s dream, and everyone else’s nightmare.
On the day of a public hearing on the matter in February 2016, most of the adult industry shut down, and well over a hundred workers—actors, producers, and others—took an unpaid day off. They flew, bussed, or drove to Oakland to speak on behalf of their industry. After a long day of impassioned anti-legislation pleas, mixed with weepy tales of woe from several former performers who contracted HIV while working in the industry (all of whom had been paid by AHF to attend the hearing—and none of whom actually contracted HIV on an adult film set), the board voted to table the guidelines and work with the adult industry to find regulations that would be more feasible and appropriate. The industry celebrated a major battle won, but steeled itself for the war to continue.
AHF, undaunted, was already preparing for the next clash: yet another ballot initiative, slated for the November 2016 election, which would not only require condom use at all porn shoots in the state (again), but also allow private citizens in the state of California to file suit against pornographers for reported violations of existing condom laws. These private individuals would thereby be able to obtain, via the public record, the private information of all the porn folks sued, thus reducing the safety of the industry further.
The Free Speech Coalition led the charge against Proposition 60, funded almost entirely by dues charged to its industry members. It spearheaded an ad campaign that denounced Prop 60 for encouraging harassment, and porn stars and advocates took to the streets in rallies that called out AHF for its meddling.
The industry was so on edge after years of relentless hounding from AHF that, at an XBIZ panel led by the FSC to discuss the legal issues on the slate in early 2016, I was called out by the panelists as an outsider. My credentials were questioned, and I was asked, point-blank, if I was there to spy on the meeting for AHF. When I answered that I was an independent journalist, just there to do research for a book, I was permitted to stay on the condition that I turn off my recording equipment. Later, when the Cal-OSHA hearing in Oakland over §5193.1 was going on and I was looking for live tweets, I discovered that I had been personally blocked from the FSC’s Twitter feed, having apparently been labeled a meddler and possible mole.
Prop 60 was defeated by fifty-four percent of California voters who had no patience for the idea of their taxes being used to force condoms onto porn stars’ bodies. But things are still tense when it comes to condoms in porn. The truth of the matter is that most mainstream producers of straight porn just don’t want to film with barrier protection. Whether that’s due to concerns for performer safety or fears of losing money hardly matters. What is at issue is the fact that, if condom-mandatory legislation were to be enforced in Los Angeles, many producers would move their businesses elsewhere, thus further decentralizing the industry. Or they’d go “underground,” shooting off the books in hidden locations to evade regulations. Both of these options would dilute the standardized testing protocol, making it more difficult for performers to get tested easily and effectively, and much harder for the test results to be consolidated and made easily accessible to directors, producers, and actors. With a less-centralized land base, peopled by producers fearful of making their whereabouts known, the porn industry could easily fall into practices that put performers’ health and safety in much greater jeopardy. The industry is notoriously difficult to corral as it is, with no union and several trade organizations that often butt heads. If the testing system were to fall by the wayside due to regulations that imposed condoms and took control of STI testing, it’s not a huge leap to imagine a reversion to the outlaw days of the early eighties, before porn became legal in California.
The advent of PrEP—a drug that prevents the tr
ansmission of HIV in users—has helped to allay some of the fears and dangers that hover around this controversial topic, but of course the decision to use it must be made on an individual basis, so it can’t be assumed that it will make the porn talent pool impervious to infection. And PrEP doesn’t prevent the transmission of other STIs, so testing for active porn performers remains important for the safety of the performers.
All logistical talk aside, it’s important to point out that pornography is a for-profit entertainment industry—not the documentation of private sex lives, nor a vast library of sex ed videos. While it’s all well and good to want performers to be protected from on-set STI transmissions, the adult videos we all watch are peopled with rational, thinking, consenting adults, most of whom take their health and safety so seriously that they routinely pay out of their own pockets to submit to twice-monthly blood tests. Those tests cost around $200 a pop, and the grown-up individuals who pay for them have the capacity to make their own decisions about what they put on, and in, their bodies. I’ll refer back to Nina Hartley’s excellent words: “The risk of any one activity can never be reduced to zero and after a certain point it becomes cost-ineffective to attempt it. Living includes taking risks. People in adult entertainment have assessed those risks and do what they can to mitigate them.”
Producers, whether they’re right about it or not, are largely convinced that putting condoms in their scenes will eviscerate their sales. Christian Mann of Evil Angel told the NY Daily News back in 2012 that condom legislation for the industry was basically an attempt to “compel an industry to create a product that the market doesn’t want.” It was, he and others thought, a veiled attempt to drive pornography out of business. Pornographers were having a difficult enough time making profits without another drain on their cash flow being forced on them by legal bodies that didn’t understand their unique business needs. Their goal was to entertain their customers with fantasies that they manufactured, not to be the pinnacle of sexual responsibility for the world to follow.
The push to force condoms into sex scenes reeks—if you ask me—of a sex-negative culture that doesn’t know how to educate its children about safer sex practices, looking to an entertainment industry for sex education. It’s an oft-cited fact that children are being exposed to pornography via the Internet at earlier ages all the time. The last statistic I heard ominously whispered that the average American now sees porn for the first time at the tender age of eight. In a country where parents who grew up ashamed of sex have no inclination to bring it up to their kids, porn can seem like an easy out. There’s plenty of it out there, and the kids are going to see it anyway. Wouldn’t it be handy if porn were required to show them how to have safer sex, so that parents could avoid the conversation altogether?
But the porn industry does not exist to educate children who are neither legally nor financially able to support it. Porn is made for paying adults. Not only is the viewing of pornography by children illegal, it is counter to everything that the porn industry stands for. Pornographers don’t want kids to view their products any more than they want those products to be pirated and streamed on the Internet for anyone to watch. Nina Hartley said it bluntly way back in 2010, and it continues to be true: “Porn is not designed to be sex education … It’s entertainment, and it’s not our job to teach safer sex techniques. It’s people’s personal responsibility to educate themselves, assess the risks at hand, and act accordingly. People’s safety is their job, not ours.”
I spoke to rock star and friend of the porn industry Dave Navarro just after Measure B passed in 2012, and he summed up the porn-as-education idea perfectly. “If I’m watching a scene and it’s a boy/girl/girl scene, and [at] the end of the scene, they all turn to the camera and go, ‘And remember! Only you can prevent forest fires!’ I’d want my money back! You know what I mean? Like, what is this, like ‘The more you know’ in porn?”
It may be unsurprising that most pornographers are not interested in making their films into PSAs for sexual health and wellness, but there are some for whom education is part of the mission of porn-making in the first place. For years, indie pornographers—particularly the queer and feminist among them—have been offering quiet but disruptive alternatives to the gay/straight divide in everything from aesthetic preference to diversity to—you guessed it—safer sex practices in order to better represent diversity in porn and to display that safer sex is hot sex.
In an interview for my blog, queer porn actor Vid Tuesday said, “Queer porn is very pro-barrier, which makes the performers feel very safe. A lot of mainstream genres rely on testing because so much is done bareback, but a lot of queer porn uses barriers for even oral sex and fingering, and makes an aim of showing and sexualizing safe sex practices.” (It’s a remarkably effective tactic; once surgical gloves, for instance, become equated with hot queer sex on camera, it’s astonishing how quickly our Pavlovian responses set in. I don’t personally engage in much sex that calls for gloves, but just the snapping sound they make when Jiz Lee puts them on for a queer sex scene gets my juices flowing.) Queer porn actors adhere to similar testing protocols as the straight industry, as well, which makes their safety at work possibly better than either the gay or straight mainstream industries.
By allowing actors to engage in the sex they want, with whom they want, and making barrier protection of all kinds available on every shoot, with no negative repercussions for those who choose to use them, and also encouraging up-to-date STI test results, directors like Alyx Fox in New Orleans and Shine Louise Houston in San Francisco have been breaking down the stigmas and traditions of old-school porn. In providing performers who don’t want to do just “gay” or “straight” porn an outlet for their considerable talents, they produce groundbreaking work that refuses to be categorized neatly and succeeds nicely in turning people on while turning a profit. Feminist porn shoots can rarely pay as much as mainstream gay or straight shoots, but many performers are happy to exchange some profit for the ability to have more honest sex and to feel free from unwanted labeling. The queer and feminist porn world is far from perfect, but in some respects, at least, it seems to have a leg up on mainstream porn.
One hopes that an inclusive, safer, and ultimately hot lesson can be learned by all concerned as porn looks forward to a legislative-battle-ridden future. Gay or straight or neither or both, pornographers are all facing massive changes from every possible side of their industry, and only unification may be able to save it. It may be time for the gay and straight and queer industries to consider what they have in common.
Despite the bifurcation between gay and straight porn industries, the barriers in place for men looking to transition from gay to straight porn are ever so gently being torn down. Multiple award winner Ryan Driller, for instance, doesn’t hide the fact that he got his start in gay porn. “When I got into the industry, I was seeking everything out, and they [gay studios] were the first studios to approach me. I turned them down for months and months because I’m not gay. And I’d never done anything with a guy. So it wasn’t in my realm, and it definitely wasn’t what I was looking for. But as I did more research, I saw that there were a lot of other guys before me that had done it. So, I didn’t call them back, but when they called me back, and they kept throwing more and more zeros [into] those numbers,” he accepted and began working regularly in gay films. Once he had gotten his name out there and earned a reputation for reliable performances, he began to get calls from the straight industry, and he has been happily working in it for years now. “It’s still an issue with every guy who does it, who tries to cross over,” he added. “As much as it was presented to me as ‘This is how you get into the industry,’ it was also ‘This is how you don’t get into the industry.’” His success in the mainstream straight industry might be a signal that times are changing.
Other signals are popping up around the industry, too. In 2013, AVN initiated the GayVN expo in Las Vegas, which takes over the Hard Rock the weekend before the
AVN convention. The two shows run into one another, and while I personally still find it discouraging that they’re separated, it’s a nod toward change that the industry’s most recognized trade publication has made the two events as seamless as they have. AVN has stepped up its coverage of gay industry news, as well, now including gay news items on its website’s front page and in its print magazine.
Other industry organizations and events are making subtle changes, as well. XBIZ, which is something like AVN’s younger, hipper cousin, has integrated gay-industry-oriented panels and seminars into the rosters of its numerous yearly conventions, blending gay and straight issues on its website, as well. And even Exxxotica, the smaller cousin to both of these organizations’ trade shows, has added SW!TCH, an LGBT showcase that welcomes performers and personalities from the gay side of the industry to its conventions.
Of course, none of this means that it’s any easier, exactly, for men to work in the gay and straight sides of the industry as they please. And it hasn’t exactly ended the weirdly outdated-yet-relevant debate over testing versus condoms. But any step in the direction of acceptance and integration, I believe, is a good one. And although it pains me to say it, sometimes, in porn, you have to be willing to take what you can get.