Inspectors visit AIM, and porn luminaries discuss testing and condoms

darkfigureCalifornia health inspectors paid a surprise visit to Adult Industry Medical (AIM) today, during a week in which the clinic has been accused by various officials of not being forthcoming with patient information.

AIM is also being criticized for not offering up information on a director and production company that let a woman who turned out to be HIV positive work without a verified current test.

AIM founder Sharon Mitchell, who was not there during the drop-in, continues to maintain that the clinic is not breaking the law.

After inspecting the premises and speaking with employees, the officials left without any paperwork, but say they plan to subpoena it later this week.

The HIV diagnosis is an occasion of fear for not only the woman who received it but also for the adult industry in general. In the two weeks since the diagnosis, the industry has been taking stock of itself, and different camps are questioning the frequency of testing, debating the merits of condom use in porn films, asserting their position, and/or attacking their attackers.

The Los Angeles Times, detractors will say, is the anti-porn newspaper of record. In the past two weeks it has become the mouthpiece of city and county health officials who say that AIM has been stonewalling. It has interviewed Darren James, who was Patient Zero in the 2004 HIV outbreak (he had tested negative, the paper reported, before his fateful scene, and later sued and settled with AIM for an undisclosed sum) and, according to director and Taboo editor Ernest Greene, has misrepresented the number of HIV cases in the porn industry since 2004.

In fact [Greene writes in Pro-porn Activism], eleven of those cases involved male performers in gay porn who are not part of AIM’s client base and who do not test with AIM and four were private citizens not affiliated with porn who sought testing at AIM for personal reasons…In point of fact, there is no way AIM, [County health officer] Fielding or anyone else can know that the cases involving the gay performers were porn-related, as AIM does not monitor that population.

But the Times also printed that L.A. County backtracked on its assertion that AIM failed to disclose HIV diagnoses, admitting that it did not know if the cases were porn performers or not.

Anyone can test at AIM who has the cash; it’s not just for porn performers. I’ve tested there several times and I am not a porn performer; I merely inspire it.

On state regulation of the porn industry, Greene calmly urges reason.

This, put simply, is insanity. In thirty-five years of legal pornography in this country, not a single clinical death has been correctly attributed to HIV transmission in the making of heterosexual porn. During that time, thousands of sexually active young Californians from very similar demographic cohorts have died of AIDS contracted in circumstances utterly unrelated to porn, including a significant number whose cases were contracted in bathhouses and sex clubs where HIV prevention has been the province of governmental oversight.

AIM is an institution that is controversial inside the adult industry as well as out. Clearly a moneymaker, it is Porn Valley’s testing hub for the hundreds of performers monthly who pay approximately $120 a pop for its PCR-DNA test, which checks for the presence of HIV DNA in the patient’s white blood cells (as opposed to the virus’ antibodies). AIM also tests for other grievances like chlamydia and gonorrhea. Then AIM will furnish the results to the performer and the production he/she is working for.

So what’s the problem? Well, moneymakers are always suspect in a tight economy (and porn, no matter how much money it is said to make, has always been a tight economy), but there are other factors, such as how AIM has no more real competition, that I will leave to any thoughtful person who knows the story better than I do.

The Times does report that AIM has admitted to issuing conflicting reports about when the performer was diagnosed and that, regardless of the diagnosis date, the performer’s test was still out of date if she worked on June 5.

Dr. Colin Hamblin, the clinic’s medical director, said Monday that he was mistaken last week when he said that the first HIV-positive test for the performer came back June 4. Hamblin said that although the woman was tested June 4, her first positive test result was not returned to the clinic until June 6.

Regardless, clinic officials have maintained that under the industry’s 30-day testing policy, she should not have worked June 5 because her last negative test was April 29.

“Someone let her work,” Hamblin said. Either she “or the company made a mistake. It’s really the responsibility of the production company. If they keep on doing this, they’re going to end up with legislation up the wazoo.”

In other words, if the performer knew she was HIV positive on June 4, then AIM has more explaining to do, considering the performer worked on June 5. If the performer was made aware of her status on June 6, then the performer and the production company are at fault, because she would not have a June 4 clearance but an April 29 clearance, which would by then have been several days expired.

Greene also disputes both Darren James and AIDS activists about the need for condoms in porn, but I will quote Belladonna here, who wrote on Babeland that, as a performer, condoms are no good for taking it “hard in the ass,” nor are they necessary if testing could be more frequent.

Condoms just don’t feel good to suck on, or to take in the ass, hard and fast. If I were required to use condoms, my performance would most likely suffer, and in the end I would suffer.

Belladonna, unless she is occasionally brought in as a ringer for a high-end production, runs her own show and requires performers to be tested three days prior to working with her or on one of her projects.

Since [her three-day rule], it has been over 5 years since I’ve contracted Chlamydia or Gonorrhea. I knowingly caught over a handful of performers with STDs by using this rule. As a female in this industry, I can say it feels DAMN good to not have to spend every week at the doctor’s office clearing up an STD and being out of work.

We’ll see what happens when the subpoenas roll in. Right now it is not looking good for the production company. Luckily, I have gas and drink receipts from Vegas on that day.

Previously on Porn Valley Observed: LFP on HIV
See also: Belladonna on safer sex; Porn star recalls nightmare of testing HIV positive (latimes); Greene on Pro-Porn Activism

About Gram the Man 4399 Articles
Gram Ponante is America's Beloved Porn Journalist

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