On occasion, when an actor volunteers that he is HIV-negative, Gardner has refused to hire him.
“They’re adults, and adults have the absolute right to have the kind of sex they want to have, as long as there is consent.” “We tell them they must assume that everyone in the video that they work with is HIV-positive,” Gardner said. Although Gardner does not inquire about the HIV status of the actors he hires, or require HIV testing, the company warns each actor in writing about the risks he will be taking. “Just like in most gay men’s real lives, we assume everybody is HIV positive and take action accordingly,” he said.īy contrast, Hot Desert Knights also assumes its actors are HIV-positive and therefore is unrepentant about making films without condoms, said Bill Gardner, a co-owner of the company, which is based in Palm Springs. We’ve shown that profit and protection can go hand in hand. 1 in sales of gay studios in the U.S.,” he said.Ĭontinuing, Webb said he thought the company was “one of the most profitable. “There is an upsurge of taking 18-, 19-, 20- and 21-year-olds and making unprotected-sex movies, which to me is horrifying, absolutely horrifying.”įinancially, the company never has suffered for its condom-only policy, he added. “We were getting a lot of younger models who were starting to apply to work for us and finding in the interview process that they had done bareback videos,” said Titan Vice President Keith Webb. “There may be an adjustment period, both culturally and from a business model, but in no way, shape or form should safer sex be the death knell to the industry.”īut gay-film producers, a couple of whom met with county health officials Tuesday, concede that their experience points to another lesson as well: A consensus in favor of condom use is hard to maintain. “For them to say ‘The sky is falling, the sky is falling!’ Well, it’s not the case,” Ged Kenslea of the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation said, referring to the producers who oppose condom use. Roughly half of the actors in gay pornographic films are HIV positive, health officials estimate, but that reflects the population the actors are drawn from, not the practices on the films, according to producers and AIDS activists. Since then, condom use has been the norm in gay adult films. Starting in the late 1980s, widespread AIDS deaths among actors and outcries by healthcare advocates prompted gay-porn companies to voluntarily adopt safe sex as an industry standard. As health officials struggle to get producers of pornographic movies to require their actors to use condoms, AIDS activists and some producers of films aimed at gay men say the rest of the industry could learn from their experience.