Last week, the porn industry voluntarily ceased production after a Miami-based male performer for the MoFos.com web network tested positive for HIV. It turns out the initial test appears to have been a false positive, and the performer has since retested negative. Now the industry is back to work.
"The industry will be abundantly cautious as we try to nail down the reasons for what now appears to have been a false positive result on a previous test," Free Speech Coalition spokeswoman Diane Duke told the Associated Press.
Porn performers are often given HIV tests designed to detect the virus early. However, those tests can sometimes be oversensitive and rarely come back with a false positive. They must be backed up by another test before the diagnosis is confirmed, and in this case it seems the performer is actually negative.
Not much information has been released about the performer in question because of privacy concerns. But the male actor appeared to have been prolific in Miami-based scenes shot for MoFos.com, a porn company owned by the same parent company as Brazzers.com. Though the test occurred in South Florida, southern California's much larger porn industry was also shut down as well.
When news of the initial positive test spread, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation continued its call for the use of condoms in porn. A spokesman for the organization tells the Los Angeles Times he's glad the performer tested negative, but the organization still believes the use of condoms in straight porn is far safer than relying on regular testing.
"We don't know how they validated it," AHF President Michael Weinstein told the L.A. Times. "It's like if you were dealing with mine safety or construction or food contamination, and we would have to be satisfied with what the company involved is telling us about it. The whole scare around this and the confusion that it's generated just reinforce that relying on testing to protect the performers is wrong."
Follow Miami New Times on Facebook and Twitter @MiamiNewTimes.
