While it is true that there are tests for the AIDS virus, AIDS is still very hard to detect in its earliest stages. Essentially, in order to be completely safe, all parties involved must be tested three times at approximately three-month intervals without having had unprotected sex at all during that period. This is not practical in the gay porn industry, thus the use of condoms.
The straight porn industry has taken a different approach, one of continual testing. Essentially, they trust performers to be smart enough to have protected sex only, or to have sex with safe partners only, when off the set and they require current HIV/AIDS testing for all performers before each shoot begins. This approach is good but not one hundred percent effective. Every now and then, you will hear rumors of a pocket of infection and a few more stars will quietly disappear from the porn sky.
Unfortunately, HIV/AIDS exists. When people in the gay world realized what it was and how it was spread, we responded with safe sex practices which have saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives.
The safe sex message and its results worked so well that some people have begun to believe that the problem has gone away. This is especially true of young men who are just coming to terms with their homosexuality. Most are at an age where they consider themselves to be invincible in the first place: they take the attitude that HIV/AIDS can't happen to them.
The results are devastating: HIV/AIDS is on the rise among young men in their teens and early twenties. And, with all the very, very expensive drug cocktails available, HIV/AIDS is still lethal and there is still no cure.
This is why most people in the gay world consider the new interest in and production of bareback videos to be a very negative and irresponsible development.
~ GaySatyr
Edited by - GaySatyr on Jun 19 2002
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