Say what you will about bareback porn’s erotic allure, but it’s still dangerous:
Three performers became infected with HIV last month during the production of a gay bareback movie, according to gay online magazine Boyz.co.uk.
The models were working with a 26-year-old actor who apparently had tested negative using a standard HIV antibody test. However, standard HIV testing allows for a three-month period when HIV antibodies may remain undetectable, and when the actor went for monthly testing just a few days after the production shoot in question, he was found to be HIV-positive.
You know how this could have been prevented? (Pictured).
faghag
You know , the same thing could be said about straight porn , most hetero porn movies are strictly bareback , the porn industry ,be it gay or straight, needs to start behaving responsibly.
Woof
So are you an enabler if you enjoy watching bareback movies, however still practice safe sex?
Rt. Rev. Dr. RES
While porn is not in my diet, I appreciate that all persons act responsibly whether gay or straight in the prevention of STD infections, including hepatitis and AIDS.
There is nothing loving about what is called “the gift” by youngsters who will become HIV+ and probably live with AIDS with all the medications and complications that infection requires.
adamblast
I think that’s something we all have to grapple with, Woof. For myself, I have absolutely no interest in seeing rubbers in porn. I want to see dicks. For the last dozen years have been trying to make due with old pre-AIDS classics, etc.
My dick is thrilled that bareback porn (e.g. neg-looking hunk & twink porn) is a reality again. My brain, however, isn’t so thrilled. It’s not an easy call for me.
I also think that if we were to abstain for porn because of seedy or unsavory practices within the industry, none of us would be watching condom-porn either.
Porn has very rarely ever been anything but cavalier with its performers, male or female, gay or straight. We ignore that mostly because porn is by its nature shallow, objectifying and purely visual.
If I were to go to imagination-land and try to guess whether each performer’s story is a sad or happy one, I wouldn’t be watching.
Mr. B
“Neg-looking”? *sigh*
I like vintage porn because 1) I like vintage everything and 2) I appreciate the body hair and the non-nicheness of much of it (it isn’t all the land of twinks and bears and pumped up muscle studs and so forth). Yet when I watched the first two movies in the Joe Gage trilogy (Kansas City Trucking Co., El Paso Wrecking Co., LA Tool & Die), I couldn’t get over the sadness it left me with. At first I thought it was just the barren scenery and the gloomy, distant music (these are kind of “arty” and the camera tricks can sometimes play havoc on the eyes–definitely not a lot of close-ups in this one), but then it occured to me that yes, at least half the cast was dead, and many of them from AIDS.
Not that I’m here to blast vintage porn. I’m certainly not. It’s just that I, personally, can’t divorce myself from having grown up in the age of AIDS. A condom on a penis doesn’t bother me because that’s how it’s always been in my sex life, so condom in use=part of sex to me. (They certainly don’t bother me any more than dicks that continually go floppy, another real-sex reality that people would probably rather ignore).
I understand the concept of fantasy–the condom debate comes up in the world of erotic fiction, too–but it’s easier for me to just relax and enjoy if the condoms are there. It’s not like you can’t still see what’s under it, or what’s being done with what’s under it.
Brandon85
Bareback in straight porn is definitely the standard, so this unbalanced obsession on “safety” in gay pornography tends to irk me..especially considering that many of them that believe they’re being so safe, engage in activity that while isn’t deadly, isn’t risk-free either, like rimming, cum in mouths, and extreme penetrations. (results: hepatitis digestive ailments and other std’s) Nevertheless, I don’t think it’s smart for actors to bareback, (not including those amateurs who bareback with their real-life, long-term, monogamous partner) Personally, I think it only exists to induce some kind of thrill to compensate for something else. But, it’s not necessary because (a) there are those “invisible condoms” that can safely simulate what would be a dangerous activity and (b) producers should simply employ genuinely beautiful and sexy models. I’m actually tired of all this porn that pushes one further and further into kink at the expense of some really satisfying erotica.
Mr. B
Vivid is an example of one predominantly straight studio that is gung-ho about condom use. I forget what (straight) studio it was that had the HIV outbreak a few years back, but that definitely smacked a lot of people into reality about AIDS not just being a gay disease.
I’ve watched a good bit of straight porn and it bugs me when I don’t see condoms there, too.
Brandon85
I’ve seen some videos with no penetration or much movement at all, but that were the most sensual and arousing sights I’ve ever seen.
leomoore
When other stories appeared on Queerty in the past on this same topic, I talked about personal responsibility of all parties involved in this particular tango, but in the porn industry, I think there is an additional responsibility.
All these people are supposed to be adults and in the main, the video companies in the U.S. are very strict, I think. The legal consequences are severe for them if they don’t. I believe the porn industry whether producing bareback videos or not should adopt (or be required) to provide the most sensitive testing available before the start of the production. Furthermore, I believe that if a worker in one of these videos is subsequently infected while working despite assurances from testing, the company involved should be responsible for providing ongoing health insurance to cover the cost just as a worker who is permanently injured at a construction site or in a factory. This should be treated as a job like any other. It isn’t actually illegal work and shouldn’t be. If the fundamentalist prats have their way and drive it underground, it will still exist but will now prey on the desperate and many more will die.
I am HIV+, but it isn’t from performing in videos. It was from my on personal foolishness not because I was making a living from having sex for the stimulation of others. I have to maintain my own access to health care. So far, I have not been forced into the pathetic, public health care system in the U.S.
WWH
These guys were consenting adults who took a risk knowing that despite the test there is an incubation period. They lost the gamble. If they want to act in bareback porn for whatever reason, it’s their right as is it one’s right to watch it.
Sidebar: hey Mrs. Fuckwad Campbell, are you under your rock or something? Where are you to come tell us that there is no such thing as AIDS and that it’s just a conspiracy? Maybe I finally shut the dumb bitch up (but I doubt it).
nn
The porn companies that make these bb films should be required to put profits into a fund to provide healthcare for the actors and actresses who develop expensive illnesses from these jobs and don’t have health coverage. It may be their right to do it but their recklessness and immaturity ends up costing the rest of us a lot of money.
fanboi
I think commercial BB porn should be outlawed. If people want to make their own that’s one thing. But to have some corporate fatcat making money by filming some cash starved twink or wanna be porn starlet risking infection because some think it looks hotter is plain WRONG.
Qjersey
FYI:
Adult Industry Medical (AIM) in CA works with the hetero porn industry.
Performers are tested for STDs as well as HIV using the viral load test…which only has a 5 day window period. Performers aren’t “cleared” to shoot, lol, unless all the tests are negative.
The gay BB porn producers working with “negative” performers could do this, but they are too damn cheap.
Regardless, for anyone who attended the Gay Erotic Expo in NYC last weekend… I find it disgusting that Treasure Island Media has a booth (every year) …and always placed somewhere prominent…so you have to walk by it. And if any of you got to read the story on bareback porn (was it OUT or Genre?), the quotes from the guy behind Treasure Island Media reveals what a scumbag he is.
Lastly, most bareback porn… bears NO similarities to “pre condom classics.” Pre-AIDS, gay porn may have shown lots of oral cum shots, but there wasn’t this “fetishing” of cum that we see in BB porn… “oh yeah cum in my ass” or directing actors to shoot their loads on their partner’s anus.
Mr. B
>
Excellent observation, Qjersey. In fact, the term didn’t even have the connotation then that it does now (nor was it even used much to relate to sex, especially gay sex where there was no risk of pregnancy).
I think what makes me sad when I see pre-condom classics (even though I still enjoy them) is not that the men aren’t using protection, so much as that the poor guys had no idea whatsoever what was going to happen in just ten years.
Qjersey
Spoke too soon, and they are acting too late
Found more info here:
http://www.gaynz.com/articles/publish/3/article_5146.php
Seems that the producers will switch to PCR testing for HIV as a result of this
rawTOP
I’m finding the story hard to believe… One bottom, sure, but both, after just one exposure when they didn’t get cum in their ass? Sorry, HIV is harder to catch than that…
Until the story is fully verified I’m saying it’s just not true…
steve
Here’s the full UK story http://www.boyz.co.uk/pdfs/843/pdfs/06_BOYZ_In_The_Know.pdf
James Lenaghan
Bareback is disgusting and those involved are asking for HIV/AIDS.