[Ed. Note: This is the fourth and final part of AVN.com's in-depth coverage of the public hearing on health and safety issues held last Friday. Click here for parts 1, 2, or 3]
When the floor was thrown open for public comment, several adult industry members asked to be heard, including directors Adam Glasser and Steve Scarborough; director/photographer Suze Randall; director/actress Brittany Andrews; Protecting Adult Welfare founder Bill Margold; Joan Irvine, executive director of Adult Sites Against Child Pornography; talent agent Tabetha Yang; and Stuart Grant, who would only describe himself as an “employer in the industry.”
“I heard our heterosexual brothers and sisters in the industry talking about using people 19, 20, 21 years old,” observed Scarborough, a director of gay videos for more than 18 years. “For the most part, our actors or models are a little older. I think that if an actor/model comes to work for us today and they haven’t been made aware of HIV, with all the stuff that’s in the media and particularly in the gay society, they’ve been living under a rock. They either don’t want to know or they’ve chosen not to try to take care of themselves... In my opinion, if a person graduates from a public school in the state of California or anywhere in this country and they haven’t been educated about sexually transmitted diseases today, it’s a failure of the state government, the federal government and the public health services.”
[The current federal grants to public schools for sex education are given only for abstinence education. Discussion of birth control, condoms and other aspects of human sexuality are prohibited.]
Director Adam Glasser, who shoots under the name “Seymore Butts,” took issue with several previous speakers.
“Self-regulation versus imposed regulation seems like the big issue here, and how do you balance that scale when you have people that are saying that they’re threatening to move out and take your tax revenues away from the budget you count on so heavily?” Glasser asked. “My thoughts are these: As far as self-regulation goes, I would challenge anybody in my industry to give us an example, in the heterosexual community, of when we’ve self-regulated anything. I don’t believe we have that ability.”
“In a perfect world, who could not think that condom usage, after what we’ve heard here today from the experts, was the best way to go? ” he continued. “Yet you have to balance that with the threat of – it is really a financial threat, isn’t it? We’re talking about companies moving out, whether they’re moving out of California to another state or they’re moving underground... I’m an owner of a company. Where am I going to go? Do I think it’s going to be safe in Nevada to start opening up? Where is this safe haven that everybody’s talking about going to? Is it Europe? So in other words, everybody’s going to be moving their families and their houses, taking off to Europe? I mean, it’s ridiculous to think.
Glasser also opined that because of the federal requirement that the name and address of the custodian of records for each video production be stated on the video’s boxcover, it would be impossible for production companies to go “underground.”
“This has to be on the box, so now somebody can track me,” he argued. “If a company’s going to go underground – in other words, if they’re going to be putting movies into stores, somebody has to buy it from somewhere. There is a way of tracking; they’re not going to just disappear. They’re going to be generating revenue... So you have to balance the threat against the reality, and I just don’t think the threat is as real as it’s perceived... So just know that when you’re hearing threats of the industry running underground and rogue companies and all that kind of stuff, I say to you that there are ways that that can be controlled, and the number one thought should be the safety of these people that are working.”
Glasser also stated that he didn’t think that actresses had a real choice as to whether to require condom use in their sex scenes.
“Young girls in this industry don’t have the choice,” he said. “They will never be given the true choice of whether or not to use condoms or not... Companies that say they’re condom-optional will just get in their minds the list of the girls that are requesting condoms and they will just not call them. The call will never be made; the girl will never be offered the work once the word gets out that she is a condom-only girl. That’s just the way it is.”
Suze Randall agreed, though she approached the subject from a different perspective.
“When I work with a couple and I make them wear condoms, it’s a little difficult when you know, the day before, the young lady has been doing an anal scene with somebody else without condoms,” Randall explained. “So I’m a good girl, but it gets to be a little ridiculous. I’m a condom-optional company, and I test every two weeks. I make sure I know the people and they know and see the tests... [I]f I do an anal scene, it will be with a condom. And I will not do facials either. If I do a facial scene, it will be safe. That’s how I’m handling my day and I’m trying to have fun, but it’s difficult with condoms. The guys can’t get it up. It really takes a lot of the fun out of it.”
Assm. Koretz pressed the issue: “Wouldn’t you rather have your performers not use condoms because it’s more interesting or more erotic or more desirable.”
“I want a very erotic scene,” Randall responded. “I’m interested in passion and I will use condoms because I’m into passion and I’m going to do it, I’m going to spend time. Nobody said it has to be that easy to make this money. I will spend time in hiding the condoms and in lighting it, but it makes it a lot more difficult... If I’ve got people who are working without condoms with everybody else, it’s hard for me to go that extra step and insist that they use a condom with me. Because people who only use condoms, I’ll use them just with condoms.”
Randall also noted that in the most recent outbreak, all of the HIV infections had apparently occurred during anal scenes.
“I will require it [condoms] for anal, because that’s what kills,” she said.
For his part, Bill Margold opposed mandatory condom use because he felt that, in implementation, the system wouldn’t work, comparing condom use to “a Linus blanket riddled with holes.”
“Safe sex may well be the answer for some major adult companies who must appease their insurance policy providers,” he said, “but sane sexual practices performed in less degrading or risk-taking fashion, with some attempt to entertain as well as educate, would be a wiser set of guidelines to try and establish, and they can be created by working with the adult entertainment industry rather than simply trying to control it.”
“Of course, you’re overlooking the most serious problem within the adult entertainment industry: Drugs,” he continued. “Therefore, I think a movement toward testing for at least intravenous drugs would be the most expeditious way of eliminating those adult performers whose immune systems are already handicapped to the point that they are primed to essentially attract diseases and infections of all sorts... I feel that it is the mental stability of the performers that comprise the adult industry workforce that also needs to be attended to, and I suggest that by looking at the raising of the age of entrance into X hardcore performing, sexual performing, from 18 to 21, you may well be preventing the number of mental as well as physical ‘accidents’ in the future.”
Tabetha Yang’s main concern was time – the time it took to get all possibly infected performers in the recent HIV outbreak into quarantine.
“I want to discuss the failure of that [AIM] protocol,” Yang charged. “What we found that day in April is that the quarantine system that we all thought already to be in place and functional was not. There was no data to quickly perform a genealogy chart of contacts. In fact, there was no data at all. Instead, AIM relied on asking the performers whom they had worked with to construct their list. Even five days after the outbreak, AIM’s posted quarantine list was incomplete at best.”
Yang appeared to promote the establishment of a reliable database to track diseases in the adult community and to head off their spread as quickly as possible – for which she offered the HEARD System, a database program created by her business partner.
“We need all our models to provide complete scene data within days of shooting into a central database system such as HEARD,” she stated. “This database must be run by an unbiased, independent company... Independence from all testing facilities, production companies and talent representatives is imperative so as to be completely accountable to all with no agenda driven by a single viewpoint.”
The entire hearing lasted nearly four hours, and Assm. Koretz admitted that the various panelists had given him and his committee much information to sift through and consider. He told
AVN.com that he had no time frame within which he needed to reach a conclusion – but when he does, it will be one that the entire adult industry will be anxious to hear.
