I can still see both of my parents holding cigarettes and telling me to never smoke. I also recall the yearly refrain from my pediatrician, whose size-XXL scrubs barely contained his belly, telling me I needed to lose weight. Those contradictory messages from the "do as I say, not as I do" school of thought confounded us all as children who didn't have the life experience to put them into context. Now, as adults, with President George W. Bush's push to declare Iran in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty - while introducing legislation to repeal the decade-long ban on domestic development of small-yield atomic weapons - the outrageous duplicity is not confusing in the least. It's infuriatingly transparent and self-serving.
While we have come to expect the current administration to give us nothing other than spins that are at odds with the truth, it is much more difficult to accept that many companies working the gay adult arena do the same every day when it comes to the use, or lack thereof, of condoms.
After all, we make porn, not message films. But do our movies send our community a message about safe sex? Many question the impact of a 30-second message about the importance of practicing safe sex, since it's shown right after the opening credits and followed by 120 minutes of fluid exchange that outdoes a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant. Some say the short safe-sex message is better than nothing, and others say it's far from enough.
Another camp wonders what - as gay men producing erotica for gay men - our role is in the promotion of safe sex. The roads that brought us all into this profession have two things in common: We arrived via our own paths, and we didn't sign up for the fluid-police beat. Still, we have that duty, regardless of whether we acknowledge it.
It seems as if there's a new bareback website each week. And on the video-on-demand channels, the flicks with fluids stay on top of the "most watched" lists. Giving people what they want is the foundation of capitalism. It can be argued that if there was no audience for bareback content, it wouldn't be as widely produced and profitable as it is. It also can be proposed that bareback porn allows people to live vicariously through the actors instead of having unsafe sex themselves. At the same time, according to a 2005 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, after decreasing during the 1980s and 90s, the rate of new HIV infections in gay men has begun to increase. That is something no one can deny.
With mainstream gay publications filled with full-page pharmaceutical ads showing happy, hunky men living seemingly normal lives as a result of taking a one-a-day pill, a stunning decline in AIDS education, and the popularity of bareback parties and bathhouses, the increasing number of new HIV infections should come as a surprise to no one, especially those who work in this industry.
It's easy for detractors to say bareback sex glamorizes and therefore promotes unsafe sex. It's just as easy for proponents to say that despite all the educational outreach and years of condom-only policies maintained by many studios, the resurgence of HIV infections means pre-movie precautions have no real effect on curtailing the disease. In the end, we all need to be able to respect the person we see in the mirror each morning. Part of that is being proud of what you do and how you do it.
Every actor, producer, distributor and program owner needs to put diligence and soul searching into establishing his or her own condom policy. Once that line in the sand is crossed, there is no turning back.
Even though condom use is for each of us to decide individually, we should remember that doing one thing while saying another contributes to the problem, not the solution.
Harlan Yaffe is a co-owner of
PrideBucks.com.
This story first appeared in the February 2008 issue of AVN Online magazine. To subscribe
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