There have been two HIV outbreaks since 2004. That I know of. The last one as recent as June 2009. The only reason anyone even knows about the HIV positive people in the talent pool was because an anonymous source came forward on a porn gossip site. The testing center, whose sole fucking purpose of existing is to test and report outbreaks to the industry, hid the infected from us. The test center director said, “It’s really not a big deal.”
Why did they hide it? OSHA and other govt agencies are suing them for the debacle of 2004. So they (testing center) let the outbreak of 2009 go unreported, potentially allowing HIV exposed people to continue fucking away with impunity. One HIV positive person can work with five others in a week. Those five each work with five people. You get the idea. It’s an exponential effect.
The Clusterfuck of 2004
In the Spring of 2004, Darren James went to Brazil to shoot porn for TT Boys company, Evasive Angles (company named for TT’s passion for boxing incidentally). If one were to go to Brazil or Thailand as talent one could earn $10,000 in 2 weeks. I am not going to speculate as to how Darren got infected, but it is established that he did get infected while in Brazil.
Darren is the kind of guy that took his STD test twice monthly as I understood it, when industry practice only called for monthly testing. It just so happened that within the week he came back from his trip to Brazil he worked with a lot of girls. Those girls in turn worked with guys and girls who worked with even more people. It was an exponential effect. There were probably 150 scenes shot every day in the valley at the time so all this happened within the space of a week.
DJ went in weeks early for his std test (thank God) as he usually does, and when the lab gave him a “detected” result the entire industry went on lock down. The next step was to find all the people who were directly exposed to DJ. Of those, a few girls tested positive. Both of those girls had “current” tests and if not for Darren testing early those girls and Darren could have infected even more people.
When I heard about this outbreak I failed to fully grasp the scope of the situation. It seemed that I was so far removed from it. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Within the span of an hour my phone was blowing up with calls–people telling me that I had in fact been exposed when one of the girls identity was revealed. Of those girls that tested positive, I had vaginal intercourse with one of them. The fact that she had a current test meant fuck-all. I was officially moved to “first generation exposure” and was immediately put on quarantine.
The first thing I did was tell my girl friend. Then I tracked down every girl I worked with within that week and called them all. The response I got from the girls on the other end of the phone ranged from denial, to shooting the messenger, to gratitude Mostly derision.
I was only 32 at the time and if in fact I did test positive I knew I could never train martial arts ever again, fight, spar, or make love to a woman. It was the prospect of infecting my girl friend, whom was not in any way involved with the adult industry and did nothing to put herself in the way of this except to love me no matter what. That killed me. Joke all you want but after facing those grim prospects I would have been ecstatic to get something like Herpes, or Chlamydia instead. So I put myself and my girl friend through a battery of HIV tests that the industry uses.
The quarantine list grew to if I recall, damn near 100 people from first generation like me to fourth generation. There was a flow chart posted on the net and every day people would look to see if their name would appear on it. Young people searching for their name on a list for exposure. A death list.
The entire industry was shut down. News crews came out it. People were hounding Darren for interviews so he had to flee town. I can not imagine what it must have been like for him. Whatever choices he made to put himself in that situation I had and still have empathy for the man. If you ever met him you’d love the guy instantly. His positive attitude and warmth was amazing.
Risks in the abstract suddenly became real. In the past I’ve had a 9mm put to my head and a shot-gun aimed at my chest (at the same time) by other people looking for a reason to kill me. This was worse. I thought of the life insurance policy I took out not 5 months earlier and considered suicide as a fleeting thought before a positive HIV diagnosis, so that my girl friend would get a payout.
I’m not soliciting sympathy as I’ve made my bed, and it would be grossly undeserved. It’s an offering into my state of mind at the time. Regardless of what I felt about myself for putting my girl friend through this I kept up a stalwart front so she didn’t not see the fear. Having her scared served no purpose.
Eventually after a period of say, a month the fourth generation people were cleared from the “Q” list, followed by the third generation. After taking more tests than I can remember I was cleared too. I still did not go back to work right away. Those two months taking a battery of tests were the longest of my entire life. Being the geek that I am (probably the detachment of denial) my thoughts wandered to of all things game theory and odds. Even if my odds for contracting HIV from vaginal sex with a woman were mathematically infinitesimal, the smallest of odds were of no comfort. Statistics have no memory. Every sexual event with an infected person is a fresh “roll of the dice”. A fresh chance to get infected. I had a lot of time to evaluate my life.
Although I obviously came out of my self-imposed seclusion to work again, my perspective on a lot of things has been changed forever. I’ve seen the worst in humanity. Avarice over human life.
During that time frame of the industry wide shutdown some studios and performers still opted to keep shooting. Like i the outbreak was some abstract event going on in some far away land that had no bearing on their reality. Some fourth generation people on the quarantine list were still working under aliases, or forged tests.
And some studios and directors filmed them. They just didn’t give a fuck.
Talent that was not on the “Q” list sometimes price gouged the studios for 2-3 times their rate. For a period, some studios in self-righteous afterthought and full of shit putting on airs lectured on how safety protocols need to be improved. They called for a town hall meeting open to all the industry. Reality was the meeting was publicity bullshit, full of self dick suckery and circle jerking made only for the “cool kids”, posturing for the press and accomplishing absolutely fuck-all. The big decisions? No scenes where male talent comes in a girls asshole, and the industry went condom only.
Tagged: Creative Memoir
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4 Comments
Enjoy reading your work. Wish you would use spell check though.
After reading that, your comment is about a few misspelled words?
Although I’m not familiar with the people, I think you overestimate that the quarantine-breaking is all ‘avarice over human life’. Often people simply keep doing what they’re doing even though the risk profile has changed dramatically just because they’re unimaginative and have little sense of future anyway. The “I could get hit by a bus tomorrow” mindset can be so extreme that people just don’t adjust behaviour to threat at all until it’s actually a gun in the face.
There’s the “I could get hit by a bus tomorrow” mindset as you go about your life, crossing streets and driving like normal people do, and then there’s playing tag on the freeway.
One is the passive acceptance of a possibility during everyday life.
The other is an active and knowing choice to increase risk, exponentially.