Porn Actors With Hiv

Porn Actors With Hiv

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Originally published June 13, 2009 at 12:00 am

Health officials in Los Angeles said Friday that 22 actors in adult-sex movies had contracted HIV since 2004, when a previous outbreak led to efforts to protect employees in California's multibillion-dollar pornography industry.
Health officials in Los Angeles said Friday that 22 actors in adult-sex movies had contracted HIV since 2004, when a previous outbreak led to efforts to protect employees in California’s multibillion-dollar pornography industry.
The officials accused an industry-supported health clinic of failing to cooperate with state investigations and of failing to protect industry workers and their sexual partners.
“We have an industry that is exposing workers to life-threatening diseases as part of their employment,” said Dr. Jonathan Fielding, director of public health for Los Angeles County.
The latest controversy began Thursday, when the Los Angeles Times reported that an adult-film actress had tested positive for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS. The infection was confirmed by the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation, a clinic founded by a former adult-film actress.
The foundation’s Web site states that the actress tested negative for HIV on April 29, but a positive test result was confirmed June 4. The woman performed in a film June 5. A second test came back positive last Saturday.
Co-stars of the woman have tested negative for HIV but have been quarantined from acting for the time being and advised to be retested in two weeks.
Clinic officials refused to comment Friday.
Dean Fryer, a spokesman for the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health, said the clinic “is not cooperative with us.”
“We don’t even know who the employer is in the most recent case, we don’t know who the talent is.”
Regulations require filmmakers to provide protection against the transmission of disease, such as condoms or using film techniques that involve simulations. “There is no reason these infections should be occurring if these employers are following these precautions,” Fryer said.
The pornographic-film industry is centered in the San Fernando Valley, northwest of downtown Los Angeles. An estimated 200 production companies in the region employ up to 1,500 performers, making up to 11,000 films and earning as much as $13 billion a year.
Some health advocates have pressed for legislation requiring condom use in sex scenes.
Steven Hirsch, chief executive of the sex-movie company Vivid Entertainment, said condoms were optional among its actors. “Performers have the right to choose to use or not use condoms. They’re adults, they know what industry they’re in.”
Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.

The heavily awarded performer boasts not only a bustling fan site business, but also has his own growing underwewar company 10Seven, a collaborative lube brand dubbed Ride Rocco, as well as a collaborative line of toys called Rocco by Perfect Fit. This year, he even launched the second season of his YouTube series, "Just Oral." In addition, Rocco has long been open about his status.
When Charlie Sheen came out as living with HIV in 2015 , Steele was on hand giving interviews and helping to educate the masses. He speaks often online about being undetectable, a status he achieved a month after being diagnosed and has maintained since 2012.
Having gotten his start in the adult industry in 2013, Boomer Banks has done it all. He’s started a porn family of sorts with children like Beaux, Calvin, and Brock Banks. As we detail in a 2020 cover story , Banks also pursued his career as a fashion designer and used his platform to talk about important social issues. Of those issues, he’s consistently fought against stigma aimed at those living with HIV.
In our cover story , Banks explained that he was diagnosed in 2001 and prior to getting into the adult industry, worked as a vocal HIV activist.
Though he's fresh on the scene, having made his studio debut in 2019, Brock Banks has made a splash. He's racked up award nominations and wins, and has been traversing the globe in a porn career that's been blessed. He counts Boomer Banks, from whom he pulled his name, as one of his parents in the industry but Austin Wolf also provided advice.
But, since he began, Brock has been open about his status and spoken out about how those who are undetectable are treated in the industry. In an interview with Plus , he explained that because so many studios have straight staffers behind the camera, they aren't as educated when it comes to U=U and other sexual health statistics.
Born in Poland, Kayden Gray got his start in the U.K.’s porn scene back in 2013. He made an outsized name for himself working for some of the largest studios, exclusively doing scenes featuring condoms. In a moving video posted to YouTube in 2017 , he told his fans that he had been living with HIV for the three years prior and opened up about how stigma led him to stop having sex for months after being diagnosed.
This year, Gray filmed his first condomless scene in a project he wrote that was meant to serve as a public service announcement for the Undetectable = Untransmittable campaign . He has gone on to structure his releases in ways that will educate fans and viewers about sexual health and STIs in a project called Kayden Unwrapped.
Throughout his career, Jacen Zhu has scene adult entertainment as a venue to have conversations with consumers. He started doing studio work in 2016, but launched on fan sites like JustForFans in order to “be more open about HIV issues.” He’s posed as a spokesmodel for the D.C. PrEP Squad campaign, and in 2018 even launched a campaign of his own called #TakedownTina aimed at addressing crystal meth usage . He's even spoken out about problematic studios and habits he's seen in the industry . All of this while managing his career as an out performer living with HIV.
Zhu said he was diagnosed at age 16 in 2005 by his physician who thought he might have leukemia at the time. After being given an AIDS diagnosis at age 19, he went on medication and has maintained an undetectable status since.
Two-time GayVN Award winner, Teddy Torres hails from France but lives in Montreal. The married performer began his career in 2016 but outside of the industry works as a hairdresser — he previously worked for L’Oreal.
While his career started in order to fulfill a specific fantasy he had in mind, he says that he continues his career to show that those living with HIV can work despite the virus.
American performer Nick Fitt started in the adult industry win the mid oughts, doing a series of scenes. Then, after a decade hiatus, Fitt returned as not only a performer working with studios like Icon Male, but also an agent of change.
He’s served as a board member of PASS, the industry’s STD testing program, and alongside multiple nonprofits in sexual health advocacy for underserved communities. He has been undetectable since 2006 and has been pushing conversations within the industry about treatment of undetectable performers.
John Thomas started doing porn in 2017, kicking his career off with TimTales. While he had always been open to those working in the industry, as fans began to message him about HIV and sexual health given he was filming some scenes without condoms, he decided to “come out” as living with the virus in order to raise awareness. Since, in addition to winning awards for his onscreen work, he’s begun to work with organizations like 56 Dean Street and even Terrence Higgins Trust on a variety of sexual health campaigns.

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Jake Hall
November 22, 2021

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In the U.K., proper education around HIV has significantly decreased stigma around HIV+ porn performers. Stateside, we’ve still got a long ways to go
In early 2019, the power players of porn descended upon Las Vegas for the annual AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, an event known for its mix of panel talks and hardcore parties. For Valerie Webber , a PhD candidate, porn performer and board chair of industry STI testing system PASS (Performer Availability Screening Service ), one panel in particular caught her eye: HIV Stigma and Prevention in the Porn Industry .
The primary talking point was research that unequivocally shows someone can be HIV+, but take medication to lower their viral load to “undetectable” levels. Basically, the long-stigmatized virus is no longer a death sentence, and science has irrefutably proven that undetectable people can’t pass the virus on , not even through unprotected sex. The last few years have also seen a huge rise in the accessibility of Truvada (also known as PrEP), an HIV prevention drug proven to be 99 percent effective when taken as prescribed. PEP, the HIV equivalent of the morning-after pill, can also significantly lower transmission rates.
These innovations have changed the sexual landscape for HIV+ people and their partners — to quote panelist and porn performer Bella Bathory : “I know for a fact that if someone is HIV+ and undetectable, I can fuck them, eat the shit out of them, fist them and drink their blood and I will not contract HIV.”
Many of these tweets have since been deleted, but a 2019 Jezebel article summarizes a few. As one unnamed performer wrote, “Let’s talk about the elephant in the fucking room: Are we just going to let it be ‘okay’ for HIV+ performers to be allowed to perform within the industry?” According to Bathory, some HIV+ performers were outed , doxxed and pushed from the industry as a result of the panel.
Meanwhile, the PASS testing system — an industry standard for most mainstream porn studios — currently bars performers if they test positive for HIV, even if their levels are undetectable. Prior to the panel, this wasn’t the case. “We’ve known for a while that HIV+ folks in the industry aren’t being served by us, and our current system isn’t meeting their needs,” explains Ian O’Brien , PASS’ executive director. “An idea being floated around the time of the 2019 AVN panel was the creation of a system specifically for HIV+ performers and what that might look like. It’s an idea we were toying with.”
The backlash after the panel stopped this from happening — in fact, testing became stricter after the conference due to the chaotic fallout. “There was so much fear created around this idea of undetectability that one lab added antibody antigen testing — which wasn’t previously PASS protocol — to their testing for the sole purpose of screening out HIV+ folks,” explains O’Brien. “That hostile policy was created solely because we broached the conversation.”
By merely debating potential solutions to this exclusion, both “FSC and PASS were accused of secretly and knowingly allowing HIV+ performers into the PASS database,” continues Webber. “There were even accusations — again, seemingly deleted — that this was part of a concerted effort to ‘infiltrate’ the straight performer pool with HIV, to use the industry for HIV drug experimentation or to destabilize the porn industry.”
It’s clear HIV stigma in the U.S. porn industry is alive and well, but worldwide, this isn’t always the case. Performer John Thomas was diagnosed as HIV+ in 2010, but that didn’t stop him grabbing the European gay porn industry by the balls in 2019. In just a couple of years, he’s racked up plenty of accolades, including a prestigious Grabby for “Best Bottom.” “My status hasn’t stopped me getting work, at least not that I know of,” he tells me.
European companies usually have different testing requirements, but in the U.S. as well, plenty of gay studios have operated outside of the PASS system for decades. (It’s an opt-in system, but most mainstream, heterosexual studios require it). “In the European model, your status isn’t disclosed to other performers,” Thomas continues. “When I was working with Timtales , I disclosed my status [to the studio] as part of my application process, and only filmed with other models who were happy filming with HIV+ models. They weren’t told that I was positive, and I wasn’t told whether they were positive or negative. I think anyone on set who was HIV- was on PrEP anyway.”
As a gay man growing up in the shadows of wildly homophobic U.K. laws , Thomas had HIV stigma drilled into him from a young age. “There’s still a persistent association with HIV and gay men in particular,” explains Thomas. But there’s also a silver lining: Because gay men have been the targets of such stigma, many of them have also become de-facto experts on the latest innovations in HIV treatment. “Partly because of that, there’s better knowledge amongst gay men of what ‘undetectable’ means,” he continues.
Advocates have aimed to bridge this knowledge gap amongst non-queer porn communities with initiatives like the PPSD Pledge , which encourages porn performers, creators and studios to actively pledge non-discrimination against HIV. “The idea is to place pressure on particular American straight porn companies,” says Jason Domino , a key advocate behind the pledge. He’s been regularly meeting with PASS representatives to “nudge them in the direction of supporting undetectable performers, but they’ve really been slow,” he explains.
Lost in the shuffle of these debates are HIV+ porn creators themselves. There are a handful of successful, undetectable performers in the U.S., but almost all are gay, and therefore, they’re likely to be working with studios outside of PASS. It’s also clear that speaking openly about such a controversial issue is still taboo — one undetectable bisexual performer I spoke to asked not to be quoted over fear what that would mean for their career.
Again, this is largely due to lack of education around what “undetectable” actually means, particularly in the U.S. “The important thing about HIV campaigning in the U.K. is that the rise of education has made it no longer feel essential for me to disclose that I’m undetectable,” says Thomas. “I stopped disclosing my status with hook-ups because I knew I could confidently go home with them [without risk]. Before that, if I was in a bar, I would tell someone I was HIV+ and then go to the bathroom. That way, if they didn’t want to have sex with me then I wouldn’t have to actually see them walking away.”
Activists have campaigned for decades to make HIV education freely available, and at least within some communities, there’s an understanding that undetectable performers can’t pass on the virus. But for now, people like Thomas feel the PASS system takes us back to the days where stigma overshadowed everything. “People are still being outright rejected,” he says. “And for something that isn’t really a problem.”
Jake Hall is a freelance journalist, fashion features editor and author. Their debut book 'The Art of Drag' is scheduled for release in May 2020.

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