March 26, 2009 | Health Matters

Safer sex vid confuses the issue

Eight gay-porn models - Andy Kay, Phillip Ashton, Jayden Taylor, Krist Cummings, Jacob Wright, Zack Randall, Ryan Conners and Angel Benton - have issued a video with the tag line: "Safe Sex is Hot Sex."

Their target: the gay porn industry.

"There has been much talk about safe sex when gay porn is concerned in the past," a joint statement noted. "With the fear of STDs, many companies have come to worship the condom as the saving grace. Unfortunately, there is one avenue that many of these companies do not take, and that is the matter of full-panel testing."

They say companies are choosing not to test their performers because of the cost involved.

"It's just like it is everywhere else: politics and money," they continued. "A company might lose models if they tested and found them to have HIV or an STD. A company would also lose large sums of money due to testing costs.

The chorus "Condoms aren't enough" is chanted numerous times throughout the video.

Not included in the video: the implication that HIV positive models would be banned from making porn films. We're also not told that Andy Kay works for a company that is about to launch a bareback site. The company tests for HIV and bans models that test positive. Given that even frequent testing is not 100% guaranteed to screen out all HIV we find it odd that anyone can assert that  "Condoms aren't enough" but that testing alone is enough to protect models.

You can check out the video after the jump ...