[Ed. Note: This is the second part of AVN.com's in-depth coverage of the public hearing on health and safety issues. The first part of the article can be found here.]
Yet the government has not always handled the confidentiality of adult performers with great care, and their indelicate approach has already created at least one problem, as Mitchell later testified.
“In one instance,” Mitchell recalled, “a female who was on the quarantine list, whose contact information was given to the county health department – she was very low risk on the quarantine list, but she had articulated to AIM that she did not want to remain in the industry [and] she did not want to come in for any further testing. Apparently, a county health investigator was on her mother’s doorstep for several days, and her mother found out she was working in the adult entertainment industry as a result of this. So we’re very, very concerned about confidentiality at AIM and the way this has been handled in conjunction with the health department.”
Though the exact number is difficult to ascertain, it is known that several performers in the adult industry have not informed family and friends of their occupation, and such situations have led, in the past, to such performers leaving the industry when their “secret” has been exposed.
Mitchell was one of the primary spokespersons for the adult industry at the meeting, and she spoke at some length about the responses that her organization, Adult Industry Medical (AIM) HealthCare Foundation, had made to the recent HIV outbreak, as well as its general capabilities.
Mitchell described AIM’s current protocols, highlighting one important change that she had made since the discovery that one actor had apparently brought an HIV infection back from an assignment in Brazil.
“All travelers and new talent, when they arrive into town, will test once, wait two weeks and then have an additional negative test at the end of two weeks,” Mitchell stated. “They must either use condoms during the two-week waiting period or refrain from working, and I got the non-condom companies to agree to let them be condom optional during that two-week period.”
She also noted that all new performers (referred to as “talent” within the industry) will be required to view a 20-minute version of AIM’s popular “Porn 101” tape during their first testing procedure. Mitchell said that she had instituted the procedure to combat the fact that not all new performers, she had learned, were being allowed to review the full “Porn 101” tape.
“Often-times, certain entities – they might be agents or renegade producers – when they bring the girl in for the test, will take that informational tape away from them,” Mitchell explained, “and we’ve found that that tape has so much information about worker health and safety practices and psych/social information pertinent to acting in adult entertainment, that some of the agents and producers don’t want the talent to see it, which is why we have now put a 20-minute tape in place so they will have to view this, and this will have the core issues of HIV/STD transmission there, before they get their first blood test.”
Two things upon which most of the industry panelists agreed were that they all supported the use of condoms in sex scenes, and that most believed that if mandatory condom rules were put in place, many adult companies would either drop from sight or move to other areas. Additionally, Gil Sperlein, representing gay producer Titan Media, felt that the same would hold true if the government required HIV testing for all performers.
Most typical of the panelists’ beliefs was Free Speech Coalition (FSC) board chairman Jeffrey Douglas’.
“I’ve been an attorney representing the industry for 22 years,” Douglas stated, “and during that time, I have always supported universal condom use. It’s the only logical and safe thing to do. The question is, is legally mandated universal condom use the appropriate way to get to where we all want to get?”
“It’s unfortunately but extraordinarily easy for the adult industry to disappear from the regulatory capacity of the state or county. We have seen that happen before. In the late 1980s, there was an attempt by the LA County District Attorney’s office to criminalize adult filmmaking by characterizing it as prostitution and pandering. Since there had just been an amendment to Penal Code Sec. 266i to make it a three-year mandatory prison sentence, no probation available, that threat was a very real one. Local law enforcement saw this as a great victory, apparently because they were ashamed of the fact that the adult industry was thriving under their jurisdiction.
“However, what occurred was, the industry simply became invisible, and this was despite great efforts on the part of law enforcement to have a series of informants within the industry, which was relatively easy for them to do,. But because of the decentralization of performances and the fact that when films are made, they are always made to be as low profile as possible because of the potential for offense, it became incredibly easy for the industry to disappear – and it did.”
Douglas noted that even with the Freeman decision in 1988, which legalized adult filmmaking, the industry remained somewhat underground for the next six years due to the lack of production insurance, which was necessary before the county would issue a shooting permit, without which filming in the county was illegal.
“The capacity to become transparent and disappear is remarkably easy,” Douglas claimed, “and it is easier today than it was 10 years ago or 15 years ago because the components of a production have now been technically reduced. A camera appropriate for making an adult film fits in a hand. You don’t need special lighting. You don’t need anything except a camera that costs $2000 or less... and a couple of people in a room in your home.
“And with the advent of the Internet, the ability to distribute the material is infinitely easier than it once was. All you need is access to a phone line; you can distribute your own material... When it is a small production company, when you’re talking about an employee base of one, they will make movies without condoms, whether the state law requires it or not.”
Douglas also detailed the problems created by that situation.
“There is today extraordinarily high compliance with the AIM protocols, and the fact that there is testing and that the pool of performers continue to interact with one another, and that assists with at least having the testing done,” he described. “Now, if there was state-mandated condom use, it is a certainty, a tragic certainty but it is a certainty, that a portion of the industry, and I think a very substantial portion of the industry, would not be compliant, would no longer participate in AIM, because if the AIM protocols require you to specify who you’re working with and when you’re working and what sex acts you’re performing in order to notify, you couldn’t provide that information because one would be providing a record of criminal activity.
“It would mean there would now be an economic disincentive for rogue producers to not comply with AIM, which means the amount of testing that AIM does would be reduced. So it would increase the direct health hazard, not only for the talent pool but also for the general community, because if there were a rogue industry, it would have the effect of reducing the coherency of the adult acting pool, and that coherency is one of the things that protects the general public on the occasion that HIV does appear in the adult community.”
Douglas also noted that as the adult industry has become more visible and commercially mainstream, working conditions have improved for the performers, and he feared that those conditions would deteriorate if producers became more covert in their activities.
“Don’t let the desire for the perfect defeat the good,” he cautioned. “The situation that we have now is good. It can get better... but if you mandate it because of the goal of trying to achieve perfection, you risk making the current situation substantially worse.”
Also present was Kat Sunlove, FSC Executive Director and Legislative Director, who presented to Assm. Koretz a “Code of Best Practices” approved by the FSC board, and who testified in accordance with some of those issues, as well as regarding some of her personal experiences in the industry.
“I’ve watched the evolution of the industry from a small, wild, wild west world of semi-legal underground productions utilizing hippie chicks off the street to the current standard of very professionally run businesses and savvy, well-paid performers who voluntarily and consistently utilize the services at AIM for testing and treatment and counseling,” Sunlove summarized. “As other speakers are going to point out, it’s very easy for production to move underground and become virtually invisible to law enforcement. None of us want to see that happen. On the other hand, with the recent HIV outbreak having been limited to only four out of 50 odd people exposed, it seems obvious that our voluntary testing program worked extremely well in this instance as it has for a number of years.”
“The idea of passing a law to mandate either mandatory testing or condom use is superficially very attractive, even to many of us within the industry who would love to see more companies become condom only,” she continued. “But a government mandate on these issues would no doubt force many in this industry underground or out of state, which an undesirable result of our good intentions... I would encourage the committee, and the Free Speech Coalition board of directors does as well, to continue working with us as we move to implement our Code of Best Practices which includes strong recommendations for condom use, and with AIM as we work to constantly improve this program as the best, most cost-effective system for protecting adult entertainers from HIV and other STDs. I certainly as the lobbyist look forward to working with the committee as we move forward in this investigation.”
Veteran actress Nina Hartley, who also has training as a nurse, was present to give a performer's perspective, and much of what she said confirmed others’ fears of the response some in the industry would give to mandated condom use.
“State-mandated condom use does not encourage security on the set because the people that that person will be working for will be underground, and away from any kind of oversight protection,” stated Hartley, who personally favors condom use. “So again, it’s a question of inducing and encouraging people to participate in their own health and safety that is the better model for this particular population... [I]t is a question of increasing talent education and not pushing us out of the fold of protection by making something illegal that cannot be made to go away. The use of condoms can be encouraged but they cannot be required with any kind of efficacy.”
Noting that she had lost some performing jobs because of her insistence, at times, on performing with a condom-clad partner, she stated, “I decide whether or not to use condoms based on my confidence in my working partner.”
As the gay adult industry’s representative, Gil Sperlein explained why he felt mandatory testing for all performers would not be workable. For one thing, he noted, the gay video industry is too spread out, with centers in both San Francisco and Los Angeles, but with performers coming in from all around the world to participate. He also felt that many gay performers would consider it a violation of their privacy to be required to present their HIV status to potential on-screen partners.
Beyond that, “We are a condom company, as are virtually all of the major producers of gay films,” he declared. “We don’t see any additional benefit to testing for HIV when you’re using latex condoms, and in fact, there may be a tendency, if testing is done, to presume that people are negative when they’re not, which we know is a possibility.”
“We wouldn’t encourage a system where the two systems [universal testing and mandatory condom use] were married as we talked about earlier,” he summarized. “We think it makes more sense to refine and make each of those systems better so they can operate, and to the extent that mandatory regulation or testing is enacted, we would suggest that companies that require the use of condoms be excluded from that, and that might serve a secondary purpose of encouraging people to move to a condom-only policy even more quickly, so they may avoid the expense of regulatory schemes and testing.”
Sperlein also noted that the major distributors of adult films won’t carry bareback videos, and that “The folks that are creating the bareback movies are not professional companies; they pretty much operate in a more underground status already.”
Cont. here.
