Keeping It Safe After the Clothes Come Off

Nov. 13, 2009 — -- Darren James once led a busy life as a porn star.

"Sometimes it'd be 10 women in an orgy scene -- nonstop," he said, talking about his career at its busiest. "And you work from eight in the morning to maybe eight at night. And that's one scene. All these women. Nonstop."

It was part of a job James did successfully for nearly eight years. Until he got the call all porn performers dread.

"I get that call," he said, shaking his head. "Everything stops. I had the virus. I'm like, whoa, what happened? This can't be happening to me. ... I thought I did everything right. And my whole world just crashed."

James learned he was HIV-positive in 2004. And he doesn't know, he said, how he got infected.

"I don't. There was just so many women pressed up in that short period of time," he said.

James passed the virus to co-workers, although "not knowingly," he said.

"I'd known three girls I'd infected and I knew them," James said. "They're nice people and I felt bad."

James' HIV infection shut down Southern California's porn industry for a month. When his identity as the original infection was made public, he says the isolation that followed drove him to attempt suicide.

"I know porn ain't the best business in the world, but it's all I had," he said. "At that point I wanted to end it because I know I couldn't recover."

James is now campaigning to make condom use mandatory in adult films. He predicted years ago that his infection would not be the last the industry would see. In June of this year he was proven right when another performer was diagnosed with HIV.

Sharon Mitchell runs the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation, or AIM, a clinic set up by the adult industry to serve performers.

What sexually transmitted disease does she see most among the performers?

"Chlamydia," she said. "Chlamydia sticks to everything."

"We're not the condom police and we're not the set police," Mitchell said. "We do make it possible for everyone to exchange clean bills of health."

The recent HIV infection of an adult performer was detected at Mitchell's facility. Unlike in James' case, Mitchell says this time the contamination was contained and no other performers were infected.

"The patient zero only had one prior test, it wasn't like this performer had been working for six months and had, you know, a whole history of testing, and so we were really able to take a good look at the people that this performer had worked with," said Mitchell.

Mitchell believes that the latest patient zero contracted HIV outside of the industry but within the 30-day testing period that is now industry standard.

"Yes, most definitely," Mitchell said. "We are really able to tell almost to the day."