I get asked about bare backing all the time so I finally felt that I had to makes my feelings public.
I will never, ever make a gay porn bare backing movie – though I have often been approached to do so. Making bare backing films is a personal choice and it is my right not to make one – no matter how much money I am offered.
I am not alone in my feelings about bare backing. Chi Chi La Rue at Channel1releasing has just made a wonderfully directed video against bare backing. (Go to: safesexishotsex.com.) Its is skillfully shot and edited, a way cool MTV-like piece and she gets an A+ in my book for being a role model to her audience. Bruce Cam and Keith Webb over at Titan Films have also come down hard against Bare Backing, and I salute them, too. Kudos to JCAdams and Will Clark and so many others who have spoken out against bare backing.
AIDS has tortured our planet but also has humanized it with a potent gay civil rights movement. But do our new-found civil rights include the right to spread the disease to models who inject the virus into the ‘gaping anus’ of young porn stars? I applaud Chi Chi La Rue, Bruce Cam and Keith Webb for their bold anti-AIDS/anti-bareback position at the David Awards. Those of us who were making porn back in the pre-condom days have seen the AIDS deaths of most of the stars of that era.
In the late 1980s, I put down my porn camera and started making documentaries about AIDS. I was jailed in Houston with many ACT UP activists who joined me to protest the first George Bush Republican government’s wish for our quick demise. While in Houston’s Harris County Jail, on TV I saw Pat Buchanan, from the Republican convention floor, calling for a moral cleansing of our country. To me that meant ‘get rid of the AIDS fags and their perverted ways’.
Many of my friends were sick; many of my lovers were dead or dying. I know very few porn stars who survived those days. Is making more money worth the death of those who perform in our films? How many more gay boys need to die? How can I look at myself in the mirror in the morning if the night before I directed some young guy to shoot his viral load into another boy’s ass?
To many it is just gay product – a lucrative niche. To me it is a matter of life and death. Condoms save lives.
Act up! Fight back! Fight AIDS!