“For them to say ‘The sky is falling, the sky is falling!’ Well, it’s not the case,” Ged Kenslea of the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation said, referring to the producers who oppose condom use. Roughly half of the actors in gay pornographic films are HIV positive, health officials estimate, but that reflects the population the actors are drawn from, not the practices on the films, according to producers and AIDS activists.
Since then, condom use has been the norm in gay adult films. Starting in the late 1980s, widespread AIDS deaths among actors and outcries by healthcare advocates prompted gay-porn companies to voluntarily adopt safe sex as an industry standard. As health officials struggle to get producers of pornographic movies to require their actors to use condoms, AIDS activists and some producers of films aimed at gay men say the rest of the industry could learn from their experience.
