Andrew Conn/sxc.hu
Last week, an adult-film performer tested positive for HIV at a clinic based in the San Fernando Valley, the nation’s largest pornography hub. The news set off a frenzy of media reports and renewed attention on one of California's biggest industries.
The Los Angeles Times, which broke the story, reported that the clinic is in the process of quarantining and testing the partners of the performer.
The Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation said it would report the details of the case to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. California law requires that health care providers report communicable disease incidents to public health departments within seven days.
Founder Sharon Mitchell claims she opened the clinic in 1998 after discovering that a male porn star had recklessly infected six actresses with HIV. Since then, performers have been required to get monthly HIV and some STD tests. The clinic keeps a database for producers listing what performers are clean.
But when an adult-film performer becomes infected, it’s a reminder that HIV testing alone is not an effective way to keep the virus out of the porn industry, and according to state officials, employers are breaking workplace safety laws every time a performer goes without a condom.
The use of condoms while on the job is mandated by state law – but indirectly. The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health Administration requires "protective equipment” to protect workers from blood-borne pathogens but does not specifically mandate condom use in the adult-film industry.
That could change when state officials converge in Oakland on Oct. 25 to discuss an amendment to the California law.
Wicked Pictures is the only company in the Los Angeles area that encourages condoms on set, said Jeffrey Douglas, a lawyer with the Free Speech Coalition, an organization that represents the Los Angeles-area adult-film industry – one composed of 200 production companies.
Wicked Pictures, Hustler Video, Vivid Entertainment and several other production companies have suspended filming while the industry’s clinic traces the origins of the HIV infection, according to news reports. It’s a complicated procedure requiring notification of ex-partners, quarantining and extensive testing.
But is the number of HIV-infected performers particularly high?
Michael Weinstein with the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, an organization that has been pushing for mandatory condom use, says the number is low.
“It’s a small number, but it’s 100 percent preventable,” Weinstein said in a phone interview.
Douglas maintains there have been fewer than a dozen cases in the past two decades. “HIV in the adult industry is incredibly rare,” he said.
According the Los Angeles-based AIDS Project, the number of new infections among the general Los Angeles County population doubled in the past year. There are about 3,000 new HIV infections in the county every year, according to the public health department's figures from 2007.
The department releases those general figures but does not break down the numbers by occupation. And the results that the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation is required to submit to the department don’t necessarily point to adult-film performers, said Robert Perkins, a spokesperson for the public health department.
Though the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation caters to adult-film performers, that’s not all it serves. Perkins said the number of HIV infections the clinic has reported since 2004 are not confirmed adult-film performers.
Since a male porn star infected three female performers on set in 2004, the public health department says about eight performers have contracted HIV. The most recent case will be the ninth.
Perkins said he did not know the numbers broken down by year. That makes it impossible to know whether HIV incidents have increased or decreased since the outbreak six years ago.
According to the L.A. Times, in June of last year, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health backtracked on a statement that at least 16 unpublicized cases of HIV in adult-film performers had been reported to them since 2004. Department officials admitted that the agency did not know whether those people were working as adult-film performers at the time they were tested positive for HIV.
Perkins pointed to a December 2009 letter from the department to the Board of Supervisors that outlines the difficulties of identifying HIV cases in the adult-film industry:
Since 2004, AIM has reported 25 cases of HIV. However, it is difficult to confirm the number of actual performers infected with HIV/AIDS as not all those tested are current performers and may have other roles in the AFI [Adult Film Industry], or are partners of an AFI performer, or may otherwise be referred to AIM for testing. AIM claims that a minority of the 25 cases are performers, but even if this is accurate, it is reasonable to assume that some of the remaining 25 infected individuals were tested because they wished to work in the AFI in Los Angeles or were partners of performers.
It’s not yet public whether the performer in the most recent case contracted the virus on the set or in their private life. Douglas, with the Free Speech Coalition, said the patient diagnosed with HIV last year acquired the virus in her private life. He says more than half of the HIV cases since 2004 were acquired off-camera.
On Friday, Weinstein urged the Los Angeles City Council to halt the issuing of permits to production companies while the HIV case is under investigation. The county maintains that the regulation of the industry is not its responsibility, but that of Cal/OSHA, the agency that regulates workplace safety.
In 2004, Cal/OSHA and the Los Angeles public health department investigated an HIV outbreak in the industry, which resulted in citations of two employers. Adult performer Darren James, though he followed the voluntary monthly testing procedures, spread the HIV virus to three other porn actresses. He had made direct sexual contact with 13 partners on set after contracting the virus, according to a public health department report from 2005 called HIV Transmission in the Adult Film Industry.
Dozens of production companies halted filming for a month during mandatory testing of all individuals who had made first- or secondhand sexual contact with James, according to the report.
Information on the adult-industry performers is much less available to government agencies than it was at the time of the 2004 investigation. The performer that was diagnosed with HIV last year filed a lawsuit with the ACLU against Cal/OSHA for demanding confidential information and the adult-industry clinic for handing the information over. The Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation now has an injunction against Cal/OSHA.
“The injunction prevents us from asking any information, including employment history,” Deborah Gold, senior safety engineer for Cal/OSHA, told California Watch. “All we wanted was employment history. The argument was that people would be able to figure out who it was.”
Amy Martin, chief counsel for Cal/OSHA, told California Watch that in 2009, the performer tested positive at the clinic and was allowed to work on a an adult movie afterward. “We attempted to investigate that exposure because the employer, whoever it was, was in violation.”
“The industry is behaving responsibly and cautiously, as it always has, by placing a moratorium on filming any person one or two generations removed from sexual contact with the current patient,” the clinic said in a press release last week.
While HIV is a murkier issue to tackle, public officials criticize the adult-film industry for producing rates of sexually transmitted diseases ten times higher than in the general public – that translates into 20 percent of adult performers.
But Douglas argues that while Wicked Pictures may successfully require condoms on its film sets, it’s unlikely that other studios could do the same.
“There’s a limited audience for condom features,” he said. "With state-mandated use, production would go underground and we would end up with a more dangerous situation than we currently have."
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