A second porn performer who worked mostly out of Kink.com here in San Francisco revealed his positive HIV test this week, and if you didn’t read any further, you’d probably just think “OMG, an HIV epidemic in porn!”
But it turns out the 32-year-old, whose screen name is Rod Daily, has been dating last week’s HIV positive adult performer Cameron Bay for the past year. All of Bay’s co-stars have tested negative, and the evidence seems to suggest that Daily contracted the virus and passed it to Bay.
Daily performed exclusively in gay scenes, [Kink CEO Peter] Acworth said. The industry standard is for actors in gay scenes to wear condoms to protect against transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. Condoms are optional for actors in straight scenes, but testing is mandatory.
“We can say with some degree of confidence that there was no transmission on set” involving Daily, Acworth said. “Rod Daily wore condoms in all his scenes. The strong indication is that Rod contracted it and transmitted it to Cameron Bay.” [SF Chronicle]
Industry standards have performers tested every 28 days, but the FSC is considering increasing protocol to every 14 days. FSC testing procedures work by detecting the HIV viral load itself rather than antibodies produced by the immune system, meaning that results are accurate for any possible exposure to the virus that occurred more than 2-3 weeks prior. [FullDisclosure]
Meanwhile, most of the other articles quote adult industry news’ go-to publicity whore, Michael Weinstein from the AIDS Healthcare Foundation:
“After lifting its self-imposed moratorium on shooting last week, the porn industry and the Free Speech Coalition do not have one shred of credibility left with the news now of performer Rod Daily’s acute — i.e. recent — HIV infection,” AHF President Michael Weinstein said in a written statement. “We wish Mr. Daily good health with his newfound sero-status, and know that people can live well with HIV. However, we remain gravely concerned the porn industry continues to endanger its workers by ignoring prudent health and worker safety laws by shooting adult films with out condoms.” [LADailyNews]
I’m not trying to give credence to some “condoms aren’t sexy!” argument, but let’s look at this logically: if you have two HIV positive performers, who both contracted the virus off-set, and didn’t pass it on to anyone they performed with, does that suggest that the current testing standards aren’t working? I tend to think that it suggests that they are.
In any case, good luck to Daily, who seems to be taking the news much better than I would.
