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We should take a closer look at porn, according to some health experts.
The adult film industry is using the lessons learned during the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s to develop similar protocols of testing to keep performers safe during the coronavirus crisis.
“When we first started talking about COVID, we felt very well prepared because we have a whole history of testing within the industry as well as contact tracing and production shut-downs,” Mike Stabile, the spokesman for the Free Speech Coalition, a trade association for the U.S. adult entertainment industry, told Reuters.
Starting in the mid-’80s, porn actors, directors and producers had to learn to adapt to the devastation caused by the HIV crisis, which began taking the lives of performers during that decade.
The first AIDS test, which was released in 1985, was adopted by the industry, but not in an effective way.
“[During that time] we had the ‘Blood Truck’ at casting calls,” Humphry Knipe, an author and adult film director, told The New York Times in 2012. “It was an ambulance that drew blood. But you’d have to wait two weeks for results.”
To make matters worse, those early tests looked for the presence of antibodies in the blood, which means that it could take months for a performer to receive a positive diagnosis.
In the late 1990s, after an actor forged an HIV test to give to a producer, new protocols were put into place.
Former adult film actress Sharon Mitchell, who’s now a sexoloigst with a doctorate in human sexuality and training, created a system to test performers for sexually transmitted diseases every 14 days.
Known as PASS (Performer Availability Scheduling Services), the system requires actors to enter the results into a database that can be used by producers and directors to see who’s available for work.
Even though COVID-19 is a much more contagious virus, Stabile said that other industries can benefit from the expertise the adult film industry gained when it learned how to deal with HIV/AIDS.
“The challenges for sports, for Hollywood and the porn industry are all different but in reality, we each have things we can learn from each other,” Stabile said.
According to Reuters, the U.S. film and television industries are currently brainstorming on ways to restart production, while keeping everybody safe. Some ideas include temperature testing every 12 hours, quarantining cast and crew for the duration of the shoot, and adding more health care personnel to sets.
“This is obviously a different type of virus, this is a different type of threat, but we understood in general how it would work and what we’d need to do in order to protect ourselves,” Stabile added.
“In many ways, what they are doing is a model for what we are trying to do with COVID,” Ashish Jha, a physician who directs Harvard University’s Global Health Institute, told Stat News.
“The adult film industry teaches us that as a proof of concept, this can work. We just have to scale it up,” added Jha, who advocates for widespread national testing to contain the new coronavirus.
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