AIM Healthcare Foundation’s Sharon Mitchell, PhD, held a press conference this afternoon to let the mainstream press know what she’s been telling the industry all along: The HIV outbreak appears to be contained; safer sex practices should be used; and any attempt at over-regulation by state of federal agencies is likely to be counterproductive.
The press conference was moderated by Ira Levine, AIM’s board chairman, who delivered the organization’s formal address. Also on the rostrum were Mitchell, actress Nina Hartley, AIM medical director Dr. Colin Hamblin and attorney Jeffrey Douglas.
“No additional transmissions of HIV from these cases are expected, either in the adult-performer talent pool or in the community at large,” Levine stated, reading from a press release. “AIM recommends that all production requiring direct sexual contact between performers be suspended throughout the sixty-day testing cycle until the immune status of all those quarantined has been veriried. A return to normal operations should be possible by June 8th.”
But Levine also sounded a warning to the public healthcare agencies.
“Government-imposed supervision of adult video production, whether mandating the use of condoms or prohibiting sexual practices deemed to be high-risk, will have the certain impact of driving production underground and alienating performers from the healthcare system,” Levine cautioned. “If performers do not feel safe to come in for testing, fearing that their sensitive personal information will be subject to hostile bureaucratic scrutiny, thney won’t test and will, in fact, become unsafe for themselves and others.”
He noted during his recitation, and elaborated later during questioning, that for some producers, cooperation with health authorities is a dicey matter, and that both believed that if regulation became perceived as too onerous, some segment of the industry would likely move out-of-state, or more likely simply go underground locally, which would be a disaster for maintaining the good health of the performers.
“I’d like to add, if there’s one thing I wish everyone to take away from this press conference, is the understanding that we share the same goals as healthcare professionals involved in these various agencies, who wish to protect the health and safety of the public,” Levine said. “We agree with what they want to do. We are concerned that their methods may be counterproductive.”
It was a topic to which both the questioners and the speakers kept returning as the press conference, which was held in a ballroom of the Hilton Hotel in Universal City, continued, lasting about 45 minutes in total.
For example, when one reporter asked why, since other high-risk industries are regulated by the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the same couldn’t be true for the adult industry, Levine returned to AIM’s harm-reduction theme.
“We are not necessarily in major opposition to all attempts to work with government agencies in establishing standards,” he admitted. “However, we have a great deal of real-world experience in working in this particular industry which has some rather unusual characteristics, one of which is a strong resistance to outside intervention particularly from governmental agencies. We’re concerned that such an intervention would have exactly the opposite of the desire effect. We are in favor or workplace safety regulations. We simply feel that our system of self-policing as it now exists is effective and that a system instituted from the outside is likely to be less effective.”
One reporter brought up the question of whether more stringent regulation might cause the industry to leave the area?
“Obviously, there are people that make their money in [competition] with European-distributed films that are shot non-condom, “ Mitchell noted, “and the reality of them leaving California and going to Nevada or Arizona or wherever they might end up, where there is no testing center, where there is no regulation, where there is no community-based organization to monitor their healthcare, definitely increases the risk of [disease] creeping into the general population... What we’ve had for the last nearly seven years is a closed population, and there’s some exponential growth to the adult entertainment industry. There’s a lot of people shooting, there’s a lot of people coming in, staying for a while and then leaving, so that is going to increase the risk of HIV and that’s why we stress condom use.”
Mitchell estimated that approximately 80 percent of the adult producers are complying with the 60-day voluntary hiatus on shooting, and suggested that performers who are under contract to video companies avail themselves of the unemployment insurance they’ve been paying for. She also thanked those companies that have arranged for alternative employment for their actors, and noted that a special relief fund had been set up by actress Jenna Jameson to help both the two HIV-positive actors, Darren James and Lara Roxx, as well as any other actors who may suffer setbacks from the lack of work. Contributions can be made to that fund through the Website www.adultfund.com.
The question arose as to whether anti-industry forces in government might try to “make hay” out of the current problem, and Levine responded that he hoped they wouldn’t.
“I would like to think that we all share the same goal of creating a safer community,” he responded. “On the other hand, we’re not unaware of the political attention that this draws to the industry community at a very sensitive political time. It’s an election year; clearly, there is a lot of controversy about sexually explicit material and questions raised in the media about indecency and what the limits ought to be to that. But we don’t think that those questions should bear upon a matter that deeply concerns people’s health and well-being. We hope that no one is operating out of those motives and we can certainly say that we’re not.”
Toward the end of the conference, attention was drawn to certain companies which seem to specialize in shooting what were termed “risky sexual behaviors,” and how AIM intended to deal with that?
“I absolutely hope that this will be seen as a wakeup call for those people who continue to insist that commercial considerations of any sort are more important than considerations of people’s health,” Levine analyzed. “Moreover, as a producer and director who has been shooting condom footage for ten years, I really see no obstacles to creating first-rate effective products with the use of condoms.”
Douglas later noted that he expected market forces to cause a diminution of the number of such tapes.
“The economic benefit of aiming at such a narrow niche is a very short-term form of analysis,” he opined. “Most large distributors and most large retailers are [not] interested in carrying that kind of material, in part because it’s aimed at such a niche market, and so if you have a long-term economic strategy, you want to appeal to as broad a group as possible, and certainly to have as broad an economic base as possible, so if your distributors decline to carry the product, you’re guaranteeing that you’re going to be economically isolated. So the market forces do come into play in that as well.”
