Cal-OSHA Rejects Condom Requirement For Porn Films

OAKLAND (CBS SF) -- A California safety board rejected a condom requirement for porn films on Thursday.

Heeding the pleas of scores of actors, directors and producers, California officials in charge of workplace safety have rejected a proposal to require that porn actors cover up with condoms.

Spokeswoman Julia Bernstein said the measure was rejected Thursday when only three members of the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health's Standards Board voted in favor. Four yes votes were required for passage.

The Cal/OSHA Board voted down a 21-page set of standards that would have required, among other safety measures, that porn actors use condoms when they film sex scenes.

One after another, the people who work both in front of and behind the camera filed to the dais at a hearing room in Oakland to tell the board that would be wrong.

Several said doing so would force the industry underground, prompting it to film in secret, which would essentially make all those involved criminals. They added it might also put an end to the industry's own requirement that actors be tested for sexually transmitted diseases every 14 days.

"I ask you not to approve this policy that will endanger me and my colleagues," porn actress Maxine Holloway said during the hearing that continued for more than five hours.

Under the proposal the agency considered, so-called engineering controls "such as condoms" to be required by actors engaging in sex to reduce the risk of transmitting HIV and other diseases.

Producers would also have been required to pay for medical visits, treatments and other health-care costs for their performers.

The problem, several speakers said, is that a large segment of their audience loses interest in a film when they see actors with condoms. "Like it or not, there a very real market demand for condomless sex," said one woman who identified herself as a sex worker.

Some speakers said that if the rule had taken effect, Cal/OSHA inspectors could also eventually begin ordering actors to use safety goggles and dental dams, adding no one would want to see a film with that equipment.

"That's pure fantasy on their part," Michael Weinstein, head of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, who has pushed Cal/OSHA for years to adopt workplace safety rules aimed specifically at the porn industry, said before the hearing.

"People have suffered serious consequences due to lack of regulation in this industry," Weinstein said.

Although the provisions make no mention of goggles or dental dams, they do require that sex workers, like those in the medical industry, make sure their eyes are protected from being infected by blood-borne pathogens.

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which also had several former porn actors scheduled to speak at the hearing, said the condom requirement is long overdue. One of the scheduled speakers, Derrick Burts, said he became infected with HIV while making porn films.

Condoms are already required for films made in Los Angeles County, thanks to an AIDS Healthcare Foundation-sponsored ordinance that voters adopted in 2012.

Weinstein has complained that filmmakers, who sometimes work out of houses they rent for just a day are two, sometimes ignore that law.

Cal/OSHA could enforce its regulations with, among other things, the kind of workplace visits it requires of other industries.

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