This story comes in two parts. The first deals with L.A.’s first-in-the-nation civil rights freakshow condom ordinance, and the second offers suggestions of how Porn Valley can use the ordinance to its advantage.
PART I: It’s Not Like Ron Paul Will Stand Up for Porn Stars
It was probably not the way Antonio Villaraigosa wanted to begin his sixtieth year. On January 24, a day after his 59th birthday, the L.A. Mayor, a liberal Democrat, ACLU supporter, personal friend of the Clintons, president of the United States Conference of Mayors, and famously philandering father of illegitimate children, quietly signed a city ordinance requiring male porn performers to wear condoms while filming sex scenes.
The pressure to do this came not from a right wing religious group but from the media-savvy AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), which in the past few years has dealt the Los Angeles porn industry some crushing blows, from closing down Porn Valley’s de facto STD testing facility, AIM, to falsely characterizing L.A.’s porn industry as a hotbed of HIV.
To do this, AHF and its president and figurehead, Michael Weinstein, have deliberately distorted facts, suggesting to a public that doesn’t care to hear otherwise that cases of porn industry HIV infection occurred on-set in Los Angeles, when in fact they did not. Weinstein and company have also trotted out male prostitutes and some of the few performers who were kicked out of Porn’s Big Tent to dance on AHF’s strings.
Why has AHF inserted itself into the lives of a population that didn’t ask for its help?
Porn is a perfect victim, because no one other than those who depend on the industry for their livelihood want to stick their necks out supporting performers’ civil rights. Not even Ron Paul.
READ: Porn industry views on why condoms might be fine for the bedroom but not the set
On March 1, any production seeking a film permit to shoot porn in Los Angeles must pay an additional fee for a City Condom Monitor, Porn Nurse, or some other functionary yet to be determined, who will instantly have One of the Most Ridiculous Jobs in the World.
But film permits are required for movies that aren’t shot on soundstages. Soundstages, from the large one at Hustler Studios (it never closed) to smaller ones like Jordan Studios, TTS, and a handful of other busy, warrenlike affairs around Porn Valley, account for most of the corporate porn and parodies shot today.
This means that there will probably be fewer instances of porn girls clacking their way up spiral staircases in rental McMansions, as those require permits.
Not that all pornographers who rent McMansions bother to secure permits.
Opponents of the condom rule—and all outside regulation of the porn industry, really—sagely point out that the onerous requirement will just drive porn underground or elsewhere (hence the pledge by Simi Valley city manager Mike Sedell to follow L.A.’s lead; Sedell told Reuters that his community is worried about prostitution tied to the porn industry).
It is not my practice when arriving at a private home at which an adult film is being shot to demand to see the permit, and the only busts I have ever seen have come as a result of some disgruntled former co-worker dropping a dime, as opposed to any LAPD sleuthing.
But if there are raised eyebrows at how L.A. realistically plans to enforce this ordinance, we can be sure that AHF will continue pressuring the City, County, and State (as it is now doing in Florida for that state’s smaller porn industry) virtually unopposed, as even the ACLU can’t get behind a campaign to Leave Consenting Adults Alone If They Fuck on Film.
PART II: When Life Gives You Condoms, Make LemonAIDS
Condoms could be the new MILFs.
I have long thought about a side business making parody movies of porn parodies, such as “This Ain’t Not the Brady Bunch XXX” or “The Facts of The Facts of Life XXX: A Parody of the Porn Parody,” in which I Right certain Wrongs and reboot, if you will, movies that are all but forgotten mere months after they were released.
Perhaps I could do this with condoms.
And what about remaking The Great Porn Canon with condoms? Hence “Deep Throat, Deeper Reservoir Tip” or “Debbie Does Dallas But With A Lot More Chafing And Chance of Open Sores”? Or “Behind the Green Door Is Another Layer of Protection Against STDs.”
Weinstein is saying that condomless porn is sending the message (to who?) that safe sex isn’t cool. No, MILF movies featuring women who’ve never given birth aren’t cool; why don’t you scare the Mayor into doing something about that?
Previously on Porn Valley Observed: Humb Day with Lupe Fuentes
I see a pic of Lupe Fuentes with a lemonade stand and I just assume she’s back in business with a new angle on ensnaring young girls.
Great article Gram. If I was an enterprising young fellow I’d be getting into the soundstage business.
I can’t help it- the grumpiness, the lemons- I must do the quote.
“Alright, I’ve been thinking. When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade – make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons, what am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager. Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons. Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down! With the lemons. I’m going to to get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!”
If the FSC had better representation other than (Michael Whiteacre) then the majotity of the adult industry would get behind effort against the AHF. Who wants to rally behind someone who routinely bullies and cyberstalks people on Twitter & other social media. Diane Duke needs to get control of the situation quickly or Mr. Weinstein will suceed on a more massive scale.
Not that all pornographers who rent McMansions bother to secure permits.
I was going to be very surprised if any pornographic film/loop/whatever shot in at least the last 30 years had been shot anything but guerilla.
Actually I’ve “pulled” permits for several productions via FilmLA. I’m not saying that most of the shoots I’ve been to haven’t been guerilla, fingers-crossed affairs, but Porn Valley can at least say it has left a paper trail of legal filming.
Must research now.
While the industry — performers and producers alike — stand uniformly against government intrusion into free speech and personal liberties (such as the liberty to engage in intimate consensual sexual conduct as protected by substantive due process under the Fourteenth Amendment — see Lawrence v. Texas), this ordinance, although a clear harbinger of future harassment, is in and of itself widely seen as a nuisance within porn production circles.
Personally, I think it will have a sterling, positive effect that will inure to the benefit of porn viewers: producers will finally be motivated to move to new, fresh locations whose addresses have never been linked to porn film permits.
This ordinance is essentially an income redistribution law which will place more money into the hands of sound stage owners, non-City of Los Angeles private locations, and (especially) local homeowners looking to break into the (suddenly more lucrative) porno location rental market.
My 2-bedroom in Canoga Park is totally available.
Just sayin’
I expect that LA County will follow in the city’s footsteps and cave to Weinstein’s demands. Simi Valley is threatening to do the same. As I see it, porn needs to move to a more tolerant community very quickly if it expects to survive. I suspect that community will be the Bay area of California (San Francisco, Marin and Alameda Counties). San Francisco doesn’t dare pass something like this as Kink.com and several other niche porn producers each pay hundreds of thousands of dollars into their treasury every year (the payer diversity that LA has does not exist in SF, they run porn out and they are likely bankrupt). When LA was prosecuting every porn producer that dared produce in their community, Marin County was welcoming porn with open arms. Oakland (central Alameda County) was also a prime location for porn (but now the criminals pretty much own Oakland so I wouldn’t locate a lemonade stand there personally, certainly not a business that requires mostly defenseless women to step foot into that town).
I think porn will come out of this just fine if they pull up stakes and move. The city and county of LA will not, porn may not be a large percentage of their tax revenues but I bet they lose $1-$2 billion in tax revenue a year off of their stupidity when you include porn people spending their paychecks there. Before porn leaves they should pay their employees and talent in two dollar bills and advertise it so people see how much porn contributes to LA and make the Board of Supervisors look like the asses they are!
I love the 2-dollar bill tagging idea; it’s like microchipping sharks!
I disagree with the notion that the industry “will come out of this just fine if they pull up stakes and move.”
In 2009, our friend Ernest Greene warned, “And for those who don’t think what happens here matters all that much to freedom of sexual expression elsewhere, ponder this: if a handful of motivated bureaucrats can inflict this kind of damage in a state where the porn industry has functioned without major interference for three decades, imagine what can happen in places with no such history and no established precedent for legal operation.
“Without laying a glove on Miller v. California, it might very well be possible to make porn production illegal everywhere in the U.S. through the abuse of regulatory procedures. If we lose that fight here, we’re unlikely to win it elsewhere.”
San Francisco doesn’t have to pass any such ordinance for troubles to follow the industry there — city and county ordinances merely represent (illegal) enforcement avenues for existing (also unconstitutional and industry-inappropriate) state Cal/OSHA rules. AHF, or some other busybody group, will keep filing third-party OSHA complaints on “non-complying” shoots.
These unconstitutional attacks on the adult industry have to be stopped now, on the federal level, else they will follow the industry all around the US. The blueprint exists: Miller v. California, Citizens United, Lawrence v. Texas, et al. A line has to be drawn in the sand.
I approved this comment not because I agree with it but because it shows how quickly people like the comment author, famously the target of Pornwikileaks privacy invasion last year, turns around to reveal the real name of an “enemy.” This person used an IP-disguising service and cleverly(?) incorporated two names on either side of the PWL case as her own.
With regard to the meat of her comment, though, Whiteacre is a major reason why many in and out of porn are aware of the threat to civil liberties the AHF antagonism represents. People who would let AHF run roughshod over a very basic freedom just because they don’t happen to like Whiteacre have much larger issues to deal with.
your blog is nice im going to bookmark this..
——–MILFKISS.TK
Thank you, Thomas. You get one free spam approval.