by TIM LAHEY
Porn stars all across Fresno were told to put their clothes back on and go home a couple of weeks ago on the news that a 29 year-old adult actress named Cameron Bay tested positive for HIV.
Shortly thereafter, the Internet lit up. News, judgments, and jokes shot left and right in newsrooms as freely as bodily fluids fly on set. Countless reporters and pundits surely worked overtime to do the deep background: who were Ms. Bay’s co-actors, who did what to whom, and inquiring minds want to know: were condoms used? Imagine the frenzied speculation, all those sticky keystrokes.
Don’t get me wrong: the details of the whodunit have medical import. Public health workers need to find who is at risk. Those who are at risk need testing and education including reminders that early tests can be falsely negative and must be repeated. Since this isn’t the first case of HIV among the scantily clad actors of Fresno, CA, Ms. Bay’s diagnosis demands we try again to get porn stars to practice safer sex. My guess is legal maneuvers will never do much to affect the sex lives of the nude and infamous, but if porn viewers could learn to have fun even if with a condom on set there might be a hope.
Twitter captured all this and more. It showed the diversity of our reactions to Ms. Bay and people like her. Some tweets expressed a sense of inevitability:
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Undoubtedly, it was Ms. Bay’s responsibility to protect herself. Abstinence, Being faithful and Condoms are the ABC’s of HIV prevention. But since millions contract HIV every year despite knowing their ABC’s, I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s not always that simple. Sex is complicated, and not fully encompassed by logic, willpower, commonsensical public health messaging or a few square inches of latex.
Porn stars, too, are easy to oversimplify. Dressed (at least temporarily) in garish or stereotypical costumes, they have sex on camera, they say things most can’t imagine saying, and they behave on screen like simplified primal versions of the complicated people of ordinary life. We project a mixture of desire, disdain, and pity on them, and often we forget to consider the person under all that exposed skin.
Scientific American for more