The AIDS Healthcare Foundation is hoping to get enough signatures on a petition to put the issue of condom use in porn to the voters of Los Angeles for June 2012, AVN reported yesterday. If the measure is approved by voters, all porn productions will be required to use condoms in order to gain permits to film in LA.
Quoting the Los Angeles Times, AVN says that the petition will require at least 41,138 signatures, which amounts to “15 percent of votes cast in the last mayoral election,” and they have to get them by Dec. 23.
Three supporters of the initiative, AIDS Healthcare Foundation president Michael Weinstein, and adult performers Derrick Burts and Darren James, who contracted HIV while working on films, were interviewed for the Times story (AVN notes that no one opposing the initiative was interviewed). Weinstein said this is the first time the initiative has gone before the public.
“We’d rather take our chances with the electorate than with the cowardly political establishment. In the '80s, we didn’t consider gay men’s lives expendable. We don’t consider the thousands of people who we treat in Africa expendable. And we don’t think performers should be treated that way. The message that goes out that ‘unsafe sex is hot’ is unacceptable,” he told the paper. The AHF will hold a press conference on the issue today.
Well, we’ve seen different ways people have of putting condoms on different things—penises, demo bananas—but never a ballot.