HIV-Positive Porn Actors Call for Condoms
The two adult film actors at the center of the porn industry's HIV scare broke their silence Wednesday and talked openly about unsafe industry practices.
Cameron Bay and Rod Daily, two of the porn stars who tested positive for HIV within the past month, held a press conference Wednesday alongside AIDS Healthcare Foundation President Michael Weinstein, who has long argued that condoms should be mandatory in porn productions.
"Ultimately, it's just a big industry, and their main concern is money," said Daily, who tested positive for HIV shortly after girlfriend Bay tested positive. "If they do care that much about the performers, they would use condoms."
Read about Rod Daily's twitter announcement of his HIV-positive status.
The Free Speech Coalition, the porn industry's trade group, has fought the AIDS Healthcare Foundation on mandatory condoms and is currently appealing a Los Angeles County law passed last November that mandated them.
The coalition called two production shutdowns as a result of three porn actors testing HIV-positive. It also announced mandatory STD testing, which would include HIV testing every 14 days instead of every 28 days. The actors are required to pay for these tests.
Although the AIDS Healthcare Foundation said there was a fourth HIV-positive performer, the coalition said the fourth performer was "a lie" concocted to further the foundation's agenda.
Read about what both sides have to say about the fourth performer.
The diagnoses prompted the porn industry to test porn actors who performed with Bay, Daily and the third performer, but they concluded that the HIV infections were not contracted on set and had not spread on set.
In response to the press conference, coalition CEO Diane Duke said the industry was working constantly with doctors to better its testing protocols, and that it "needs to do more" to help performers protect themselves against sexually transmitted diseases in their off-screen lives.
"While producers and directors can control the film set environment, we can't control what performers do in private," she said.
But Bay described a shoot in which her partner got a cut on his penis but continued filming an explicit sex scene with her anyway. She said the industry ignored her after she tested positive.
"When you first start, it's great. They want you. They have to have you," she said. "But as soon as you test positive, you become just a liability."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.