Two weeks after the porn industry lost an appeal against a law requiring performers to wear condoms, California public health officials have announced that they believe a porn actor contracted HIV on a shoot out-of-state. An actor who tested negative for HIV just before the shoot had unprotected sex with several people, including one man who has since tested newly positive for the disease.
The alert, issued on Monday night, says the Health Department found “very strong evidence” that an actor who didn’t know he was positive transmitted HIV to another man during the shoot, which an unnamed health department official told the Associated Press had taken place in Nevada. From the AP:
The Department of Public Health said the male actor tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS after engaging in unprotected sex with several other male actors during two separate film shoots. He had tested negative before the shoot.
“During the second film shoot, he had symptoms of a viral infection,” the alert states. “The actor went to a clinic and had another blood test that showed he had recently become infected with HIV.”
One actor from the second shoot has since tested positive for HIV. According to the health department, lab results indicate the first actor who tested positive “probably transmitted” HIV to the second.
In other words, the first actor had been very recently infected, so he was still testing negative. The alert adds, “[T]he actor and production company thought he was HIV-negative during filming. Shortly after his negative test, HIV levels in his body rose rapidly to where he could infect other actors through unprotected sex.”
The new infection comes after a long fight between the porn industry and California public health officials over Measure B, a 2012 Los Angeles County ordinance requiring all actors to wear condoms during shoots. The Free Speech Coalition, an adult industry trade group, had argued that the measure violated the free speech rights of performers, as well as being impractical and potentially injury-causing. It also appears to have led to many more porn shoots being filmed out of state: the AP found that just 40 porn companies applied for permits in L.A. in 2013, versus 485 in 2012.
Michael Weinstein of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, a nonprofit that’s advocated for Measure B, said in a press release, “The big lie the industry has been saying all these years, there are no on-set transmissions, has been proven to be untrue.”
The FSC has yet to comment on the HIV transmission, and it’s unclear how porn actors are supposed to respond to the alert. The last confirmed on-set HIV infection happened in 2004. The actor who tested positive, Darren James, later became an advocate for condoms on set.
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