Porn workplace safety

Image by Richard Kadrey / Kaos Beauty Klinik.

Don’t miss: the fantastic, fascinating and chilling piece about porn workplace safety “The Unabashed Queer’s Cut: Workplace Safety for Porn Actors” written by Matt Siegel at The Advocate The Unabashed Queer*. I highly recommend that you take the time to read it. The piece covers, contrasts and compares the gay and straight mainstream porn industires’ approaches to safer sex, HIV/STD prevention (or not), the history of each division’s approach to safer sex (or not) and much more. It’s packed with interviews providing insight from people actively working in porn. The article centers around the push for regulating mandatory HIV/STD testing. Here’s a snip:

To some people, the idea of workplace safety evokes visions of hard hats and safety goggles. Others may hark back to Meryl Streep sporting a shag haircut as Karen Silkwood, a nuclear power plant worker who blew the whistle on poor and unenforced safety measures.

Like Silkwood, porn performers face dangerous exposure every time they go to work … albeit a different kind.

The porn industry operates like an adult version of the CBS reality show Kid Nation; the one where a gaggle of children settle into a ghost town with no adult supervision and have to create their own system of governance. In porn nation, adults — with at least one pseudonym each — settle into the San Fernando Valley with essentially no government supervision and have to create their own system of on-set HIV prevention.

(…) The majority of straight studios (and a handful of gay ones) require monthly HIV/STD testing from Adult Industry Medical. Almost every straight studio frowns on condom use; it’s actually more of a scowl than a frown.

“I’ve had chlamydia and gonorrhea probably five or six times in the last five years,” says porn star Christian XXX, who previously performed as Maxx Diesel in gay porn. “It happens. You take a week off and you retest.”

Tony Malice of JM Productions, a straight porn production company, says the business isn’t really set up for performers who refuse to work on camera without a condom: “If a girl only wants to work with a condom, she can seek out that work … same for men. But it will be much less work.”

While straight performers will be hard-pressed to find a company that will allow condoms, performers who test positive are all but banned from working in straight porn. Adult Industry Medical is touted, as Christian XXX puts it, as “the first line of defense … if you test HIV-positive, guess what, you don’t get to be in porn. We weeded you out of our business, our circle.”

It’s different in gay porn.

HIV-positive performers can and do perform in gay porn, because most gay porn studios don’t require testing. (…read more, theunabashedqueer.com)

* The Advocate unexpectedly, silently and inexplicably removed this article today — after they’d been too nervous to run the piece in full, as it turns out. The Unabashed Queer has the piece in its entirety, including the parts The Advocate was too scared to run.