Should porn productions require condoms?

So there is a big brouhaha in Porn Valley right now because a performer has tested positive for HIV. It may or may not be someone with the nom de porn of Cameron Reid. If so, Cameron Reid has a girlfriend who was also a pornstar and he performed in both gay and straight fuck films. And escorted on the side.

Basically, mainstream adult video uses a service, primarily from an organization called AIM, to have all on-camera talent tested once a month for HIV, and to share those results with video producers. Porn actors and actresses must have a current test showing a clean bill of health, at least for HIV, before they are allowed to have sex on camera. Back in 2004, there was another HIV scare where someone named Darren James (don’t recall if that was his porn name or name name) was outed by AIM as patient zero because of a positive test. Apparently AIM ended up paying him a bundle when he sued them, even though he must have known that the whole point of getting tested by a centralized service for the porn industry was to share precisely this sort of information.

At any rate, fast forward half a dozen years, and producers as far away as the Czech Republic are freaking out because AIM hasn’t sent out a press release confirming or denying that Cameron Reid is patient zero in the current potential outbreak. Tempers are running very hot. One guy started a public thread blaming OC Modeling, Cameron Reid’s former talent agency, for somehow not doing something or other they should have. I don’t know what else they could have done, besides have their performers tested and pull any potentially exposed performers off their available roster. XXJay, better known to Blue Blood readers as Dick Delicious of Dick Delicious and the Tasty Testicles, shot back with a public missive with the following summary:

“In A Nutshell: Expect to be hearing from our lawyers. You will be sued. You will lose. You will pay us money. If that doesn’t work, see me out in public, I’ve survived a year in prison in Atlanta without being killed, I am not a pushover. I’m not afraid to slap you like the bitch you are.”

There are industry professionals, who normally do not strike me as being total imbeciles, saying that nobody who does homosexual porn should be permitted to do heterosexual porn. Plus a bunch of other nonsense suggestions of what to make performers avoid doing in their personal lives. These are the same content producers who will declare it a miracle if all the performers for a day’s shoot show up on time and ready to work, but somehow they think they will be able to dictate who they can have sex with in their off time and whether or not they will have private sex for pay via Rent Boy or whatever else has replaced CraigsList.

I would point out how much of this industry is based on the sexual performances of women who are willing (and preferably eager) to have sex with both men and women. I would point out that having unsafe sex with an infected person (combined with bad luck) is what you get HIV from, not man-on-man action. But pointing out inconsistency or hypocrisy to hysterical people doesn’t usually get them to pay attention to anything other than their personal freakout.

An odd difference between how gay and straight porn productions work is that gay studios almost all require condoms and straight studios almost all either strongly discourage condom use or plain won’t hire someone who insists on condoms. I am a fan of technology. If we have technology (condoms) which make it easy to have sex with lots of partners with fairly minimal chance of getting pregnant or getting any of numerous diseases . . . well, I’m a fan of technology. The fear of mainstream hetero adult video producers is that nobody will want to watch porn videos with condom sex in them.

Now here is where there is (and I’m giving thanks for this today) a huge difference between what I shoot for Blue Blood VIP and porn porn. I’m not into telling other people who to have sex with. If I can artistically document a genuine sexual moment between two or more people who would have sex, whether or not the cameras were there, that is awesome. If the people I am photographing would normally use a condom, then I shoot them with condoms. If they normally would not use a condom, then I shoot them without. Simple. Nobody is going to catch anything on one of my shoots because they aren’t going to be doing anything they wouldn’t do anyway.

I’m honestly turned off when pals of mine who do the porn porn route talk about how they want to get paid to fuck so-and-so or how they didn’t want to do this person they hate but that is who was booked etc. The State of California OSHA would like to regulate how people have sex on porn sets and require condom usage. But who determines what is porn? Will OSHA fine HBO if Anna Paquin and Steven Moyer are not using condoms on True Blood? Will OSHA officials be all eager to do free overtime to get to watch live sex shows? I kind of feel like the testing in place now seems to be mostly addressing the issue. I don’t care whether or not there are condoms in a scene I view, in terms of how enjoyable I find it.

I don’t know. The whole thing does seem to have folks in a tizzy. What do you think? Should porn productions require condoms? Does condom use make a difference to how much you enjoy watching a scene?

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Posted by Amelia G on October 14, 2010. Filed under Sex. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry