In Which We Eat Gail Dines’ Lunch: Notes on Porn’s So-Called HIV Crisis

“Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.” ~ Albert Einstein

Gail Dines’ latest jeremiad for radical “muckracking” website CounterPunch, The HIV Crisis in the Porn Industry, finds the radfem anti-porn propagandist at her most disingenuous and insipid. Anthony Kennerson has addressed many of the lies and distortions in Dines’ latest story at RedGarterClub, but since Dines saw fit to take TheRealPornWikileaks (TRPWL) to task for its reportage, we decided her essay demanded a direct response.

Dines writes,

Last month porn performer Cameron Bay tested positive for HIV, and since then three other performers have come forward, making a total of four who have been diagnosed with acute HIV infection. At first the porn industry expressed sympathy, but now they are circling the wagons and sharpening their knives, going after the infected performers who took part in an AHF press conference on September 19. At that conference, Cameron Bay described how, in her last shoot before testing positive for HIV, her partner’s penis was bleeding, and even though he wasn’t wearing a condom, the filming continued. She described another shoot in which one of the actors she was working with was cut. Rather than stop shooting, the director went on to film an explicit scene.

Like most of Dines’ assertions, this paragraph is comprised of a string of half truths and falsehoods hung upon the hook of a single fact: that Cameron Bay tested positive for HIV in August. (Even Dines’ claim of a September 19 press conference is wrong – it occurred a day earlier.)

It’s not accurate to state that since Bay’s positive test, three other performers “diagnosed with acute HIV infection” have “come forward.” Cameron’s “partner” Rod Daily, a model in gay porn and escort who offers services to men, did announce his HIV status (on Twitter), but he refused to test within the adult performers’ testing system, Performer Availability Screening Services (PASS). His refusal to do so not only potentially hampered the efforts of PASS affiliated doctors to notify his possible partners among the adult performer community, but it also made it impossible to compare his viral specimen to those of Cameron and the young woman known as “HIV positive performer #3.” More on this, infra.

Performer #3 did test within the PASS system, and her positive test was announced by her agent, but she never came forward publicly, nor did she provide much in the way of cooperation with PASS-affiliated doctors who were tasked with partner notification establishing a genealogy of her infection; she basically just faded into obscurity. It should also be noted at this point, “Performer #3” has been a personal friend of both Bay and Daily, for some time. Sources in Arizona claim that Bay, this performer and Daily are former roommates in the Phoenix area, and have suggested an intimate relationship between both women and Daily

The fourth performer Dines mentions is a male who phoned in to the AHF press conference from an unknown location. He claims to be a crossover performer who “performed” with both men and women (he offered no testimony as to what types of performances or how often), and described an irregular HIV testing pattern that seems out of line with PASS standards. He also claims to have become infected within the last six months, so there exists grave doubt as to whether he is a new “acute” infection, if he is indeed infected at all. Furthermore, since neither his identity, nor any details of his purported experiences are known, it is impossible for the “porn industry” or anyone else to “go after” him. Until and unless he and/or AHF provide any evidence regarding his claims, he is little more than a voice on a telephone.

And this raises another issue, which Free Speech Coalition (the group that administers PASS) highlighted immediately after the AHF press conference:

We have been given no real information of a fourth performer. If there is real evidence of a fourth performer, then the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) should have contacted the adult industry for assistance in generational identification. It is unconscionable and irresponsible for AHF to use any individual as a political pawn in a press conference, rather than work through the necessary protocols to make sure that any partners are identified and tested for the safety of all concerned.

Dines also asserts that during Cameron Bay’s “last shoot before testing positive for HIV, her partner’s penis was bleeding, and even though he wasn’t wearing a condom, the filming continued.” She then misidentifies that same shoot as a different, presumably previous shoot, as one in which after the male performer was “cut,” the director kept filming anyway.

Clearly Dines is trying to impute causation, i.e., that Bay became infected via an exchange of blood on an adult movie set. Conveniently, however, Dines neglects to mention that ALL of Bay’s scene partners have tested negative for HIV several times since her last shoot on July 31st.

Instead, Dines quotes AHF’s smug toadie, Mark Roy “Wolverine” McGrath (who considers the adult industry “quasi-human trafficking,”‘ and has stated that “I don’t give a shit about their jobs,” while questioning whether “these [are] the types of jobs we need in California.”):

In order to definitively prove how HIV was transmitted, you would need to do detailed molecular analysis of the HIV strains of known cases. This includes genotyping the viral strains, determine nucleotide sequences, then compare these sequences phylogenetically to comparable sequences from available reference strains.

Dines adds: “Of course, no such research has been done by the industry; it has been too busy digging up dirt on the performers.”

No, Ms. Dines, because of medical privacy laws, such research was made impossible by the actions of Rod Daily and, (it would appear) after the fact, his handlers at AHF.

Furthermore, it is not known when AHF and Daily began their association. In the wake of his partner Bay’s infection, did AHF counsel Daily – who had been testing with the PASS system since December of 2012 — to suddenly switch to a private doctor in order to mask his culpability?

As for the matter of whether the director kept shooting filming after Bay’s partner, performer Xander Corvus was discovered to be bleeding, sources who present at the shoot in San Francisco have confirmed to TRPWL that shooting halted, and Rod Daily was set to step in and complete the scene in Corvus’ stead, but Bay chose to continue shooting. One witness stated, “the choice to continue shooting was up to EVERYONE, including her. Seems like she’s trying to pin her poor decisions on others.”

The day after the AHF press event, AVN reported:

Corvus verified that he did sustain a cut on his penis from Bay’s teeth during the shoot, and that he bled “a little bit” from the wound. He also maintained that the decision to continue with the scene was a group one by all participants while shooting was stopped, as much of Bay’s volition as his own.

“I asked her if she wanted to keep shooting, and she said, ‘As long as you’re OK, you’re not hurt,'” Corvus told AVN.

Next, Dines takes a jab directly at TRPWL, having foreshadowed her attack by bleating that, in the wake of Bay and Daily embracing AHF (which is “paying for all the[ir] healthcare needs”) the once sympathetic “porn industry” is now “sharpening their knives, going after the infected performers.”

Dines attempts to bolster her claim with this laughable paragraph:

The Real Porn Wikileaks has claimed that porn actor Derrick Burts is wanted for outstanding warrants for reckless driving, as if this explains how he got HIV, and has posted Cameron Bay’s juvenile arrest record on the website above the question: “Is Cameron the kind of person who would lie to evade responsibility for her actions? Let’s see what Maricopa County and the State of Arizona have to say about that….”

In reality, as the article to which Dines links makes crystal clear, we make no claim that Burts’ driving abilities or oft-repeated unwillingness to comply with the orders of courts in several jurisdictions, is related to how he got HIV. And moreover, it was the sociopathic Burts (or as we at TRPWL call him, “The Talented Mr. Rentboy”) who contacted us following the AHF press event to offer a new series of pitiful alibis and excuses for his behavior both during the time period relevant to his HIV infection and since.

Not only did Burts seek to minimize his criminal wrongdoing, but he also changed a crucial part of his story relating to his activity as a gay escort. The point is not simply that Burts has had numerous run-ins with the law, and was in fact a fugitive from justice while appearing at events under the auspices of AHF, but rather that he is a conniving liar who has given unreliable, contradictory accounts of his sexual history, his experiences as an adult performer, and the circumstances of his HIV infection. There is simply no way to reconcile Burts’ various accounts; logic requires the conclusion that he is lying.

As for Cameron Bay, TRPWL did not suddenly elect to explore her troubled past in the wake of her running into the loving arms of AHF. We had reported back in February 2012 (more than a year before she headed west to enter the pool of professional adult talent) that Cameron – then known by her given name, Cameron Adams — was a deeply disturbed, reckless felon who had stalked and threatened women in Arizona, including adult star Taryn Thomas. Furthermore, as we noted on September 12, Cameron’s history had been reported on other sites, as well.

Proclaimed feminist Gail Dines is now championing a woman who has been convicted of battering other women, and who has threatened a female member of a marginalized community with violence and gang rape.

Only in a bizarro Gail Dines alternate universe would evidence that an individual has repeatedly lied to evade responsibility for her actions be irrelevant to the issue of whether or not she is presently lying to evade responsibility for her actions.

Then again, how could one ever expect anything less from an academic fraud who, having previously claimed that she had a “slew” of evidence on her side, later admitted that, “there is no study, argument, or theory that will persuade us [i.e. radical feminists].”

As writer Sarah Ditum noted in 2012, “Confronted with her own misuse of the research, she states that the research has never influenced her beliefs anyway.”

Why should the actual facts in the case of AHF’s manipulation of the Cameron Bay, Rod Daily and Derrick Burts narratives be any different?