SAN FRANCISCO—The Sacramento Business Journal was only one of the news organizations that covered the California Assembly's passage, by a small margin, of Isadore Hall III's AIDS Healthcare-sponsored mandatory "barrier protections" bill, AB 1576. And like most of the stories about that event, it took at face value the lies and distortions voiced by the bill's supporters, most notably AHF president Michael Weinstein and former adult stars Cameron Bay and Rod Daily. But thanks to Kink.com CEO Peter Acworth, the Journal was required by none other than the LA County Health Department itself to retract at least one of those falsehoods—even as County Health continued to muddle performer STD statistics.
The author of the article in question, Allen Young, reached out to County Health at the insistence of Acworth, and the agency issued the following statement affirming the AB 1576 opponents' position that no adult performer contracted HIV on a porn set in 2013—as both Bay and Daily had implied that they had.
"The previous statements made by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health regarding sexually transmitted disease (STD) prevalence among performers in the adult film industry were based on estimates, as the total number of adult film performers is unknown and individuals are not required to report their occupation to receive STD screening," a spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health said in an official statement.
"Since 2010, the reporting of occupational information for adult film performers has declined due to several factors, including the closure of AIM Medical, patient concern with privacy, and the likely substantial decline of adult film production in Los Angeles County (LAC). Furthermore, most performers have private sexual lives and non-film related sexual activity in addition to their work in the adult film industry, and so it is difficult to determine where STDs may have been acquired—as a result of personal sexual choices or on set. Therefore, we cannot determine the current rates of STDs among adult film performers in LAC.
"In 2012, a total of 64,979 STDs were reported in LAC, with an unknown percentage associated with the adult film industry. The total includes all reported LAC HIV cases but does not include gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia or other non-HIV STDs in Long Beach and Pasadena."
The Health Department also issued an additional correction, which it asked Young to make to his article, which reads, "In 2013, the Department of Public Health did not confirm any cases of HIV among LAC residents that can be attributed to the production of an adult film."
So let's sum up: The county doesn't actually know what percentage of the STDs reported to County Health belong to adult performers, nor where they got them, but it does know that none of the five claimed on-set HIV transmissions actually happened on adult sets.
As the Boss Rojak character states in the movie My Favorite Year, "Fightin' is rounds. This is round one." For the adult industry the "rounds" number is a lot higher—but at least it won this one.
