SACRAMENTO—Y'know, it's uncanny. No sooner does Kink.com owner Peter Acworth send a letter to AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) president Michael Weinstein, reminding him that in his zeal to force the adult industry out of California, Assembymember Isadore Hall III's forced "barrier protection" bill, AB 1576, would unconstitutionally deprive adult performers of their medical privacy rights—rights that the gay community, which was the first group to be hit hard by HIV, fought long and hard to obtain—and that Weinstein should therefore consider withdrawing his support for the bill, than Hall amends his bill yet again to supposedly protect that very right. What a coincidence!
Yesterday, Hall filed his fourth amended version of the bill, with the only significant change coming in proposed Section 6319.3(i)(1)(B), which deals with the "log of information" that each "adult film employer" is supposed to keep. It now reads, "Each employee performing in an adult film was tested for sexually transmitted infections, according to the recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the State Department of Public Health current at the time the testing takes place, not more than 14 days prior to filming any scene in which the employee engaged in vaginal or anal intercourse, that the employee consented to disclosing to the Department of Industrial Relations that the employee was the subject of a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) test, and that the employer paid for the test." [New material in italics]
Apparently, Hall (and, we're guessing, Weinstein) thinks that merely forcing adult performers to reveal that they've had an HIV test, rather than forcing them to reveal the results of that test, somehow protects their medical privacy rights, even in light of actress Kayden Kross's testimony before the Assembly's Arts & Entertainment Committee on April 29 that, "Under this bill, my information would be kept in a file cabinet by a porn producer in the San Fernando Valley, and that's really unsafe. I know that all of the other medical records that are kept, are kept in a way that is very regulated and private, and my privacy will be jeopardized greatly by porn producers keeping them in file cabinets."
But thanks to Hall's new amendment, the question now becomes, if adult film producers' files are insecure enough that other employees of the production company can gain access to the performer's medical information for their own or others' use, why should performers feel any more safe that their personal information—real name, photo, driver's license number and possibly even home address, not to mention the mere fact that they work in the adult industry—besides being kept in the information log by the producer, might now also be put in the hands of the state's adult industry overseer, the Department of Industrial Relations, and therefore might be accessible by any number of that department's employees?
While supporters of AB 1576 are now left to ponder that conundrum, we're guessing that Hall's amendment represents Weinstein's full and complete answer to Acworth's offer to work together: No thanks!
A .pdf of the fourth amended version of AB 1576 can be found here.
