LOS ANGELES (AP) — If voters give their OK, pornographic film aficionados could be seeing a new movie prop — the condom — making an appearance in every sex scene of every Triple-X-rated feature made in California.
The requirement is at the heart of Proposition 60, the so-called Safer Sex in the Adult Film Industry Act, placed on the Nov. 8 ballot by voter-signed petitions.
Those in the porn industry, including many actors themselves, vehemently oppose it as an unneeded overreach they say wouldn’t improve worker safety but would drive their multibillion-dollar business out of California. The measure also includes several other provisions aimed at protecting the health of porn performers.
Proposition 60’s chief proponent, the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation, says it would simply extend the same kind of protection to sex workers as the state already grants hospital employees and others in professions that expose them to infectious diseases.
“The young people who are needed to make these films, they are regarded as disposable, and I don’t believe that any life is expendable,” said AHF founder and president Michael Weinstein, whose organization has pumped nearly $2.9 million into its effort to pass the measure. Opponents have raised about $350,000.
AHF previously campaigned successfully for a condoms-in-porn ballot measure that Los Angeles County voters passed in 2012. Earlier this year the organization pressed the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health to fine porn actor James Deen’s production company nearly $78,000 for making a film in LA County without condoms.
That prompted Weinstein to scoff at the industry’s threat to leave California, but filmmakers insist they will have no other choice.
“We would 100 percent stop,” said Steven Hirsch, co-founder and co-CEO of Vivid Entertainment, one of the industry’s largest porn producers. “We and the entire industry would 100 percent stop producing movies in the state of California, and any revenue that goes along with that the state would lose.”
