March 6, 2010 | The Biz

British porn stars unite

Thierry Schaffauser has been working in gay porn in Britain for a few years now and he isn't happy. It's not that he doesn't like the sex. It's just that he doesn't think actors - literally the bone(r)s of the industry - are being treated well. So he took to British tabloid 'the Guardian' to have his say.

"On average, we earn £300 for a scene" he wrote in an open ed piece. "[This] may seem a lot based on other jobs' hourly rates, but given that you're not shooting films often, you can't really make porn your main occupation. Unless they are famous and popular, most porn actors have to do other jobs within or outside the sex industry."

Worse, he says, is that "our images may be used over months or years, but we don't receive royalties as those working in the "conventional" cinema industry do."

This feeds into other problems. Bareback porn is on the rise, with producers usually offering more money to actors willing to engage in unsafe sex. It shouldn't be surprising, he added, that many of these bareback videos are shot in "poorer countries where actors are more likely to accept the risk of HIV infection – the same countries where there is little or no access to anti-retrovirals."

The solution? Actors should unite. They should start their own companies and produce porn as a collective. "We could not only film each other, but have control over our own images and improve the quality of our work, because we could spend more and better time doing it."

And you thought all gay porn stars were right-wingers!

You can read the full article here.