Porn Performer Blames Blowjob For His Seroconversion

[Bbucko]

From Gawker:

Derrick Burts—who did straight scenes under the name Cameron Reid and gay films as Derek Chambers—spoke to the L.A. Times and says that he must have contracted HIV by doing oral scenes on a gay porn movie set because the only person he has sex with in his private life is his girlfriend (who is also a porn performer) and she tested negative for HIV. Also because gays are gross and have cooties and that is the only way you can get AIDS. Sometimes if you even share a glass with them! While HIV transmission from oral sex is possible, it is incredibly rare.

"Straight" porn "star" (I had to Google him: I'd never heard of him before) Burts claims that he contracted HIV by giving someone a blowjob and goes on to fault the gay porn industry's lack of testing (as opposed to the straight side of the industry, where condom use is exceedingly rare).

The ubiquity of condoms in mainstream gay porn for anal penetration notwithstanding, the conditions for actual risk of transmission due to oral sex make it highly unlikely that he was actually infected that way: note I did not say impossible, just highly unlikely. When I was an active member of an HIV support website, a segment of the membership (myself included) would refer to this scenario as an "immaculate infection"

A bit of digging turns up this vid here on Daily Motion, in which he describes how much he loves bottoming and prefers doing gay porn over straight and why (unfortunately, DM has flagged the vid for "adult content" though it's just two guys giving and interview with no nudity: you need to sign up to see it if not already a member). In fact, there's nothing remotely "straight" about him at all, whether in affect or how he discusses gay sex with such enthusiasm, but maybe that's another topic.

I happen to have several current and retired porn stars in my circle of acquaintances, and understand that they cannot survive on their video work alone. If they want to keep their professional name current and in the public eye, they either dance or work as escorts, and drug use is commonplace (including "slamming" which is IV). Irrespective of what he claims were his "personal" sexual contacts (ie: just his girlfriend), his professional contacts most assuredly led to a much larger risk pool than he's willing to admit publicly.

Instead, he perpetuates the stigma that gay sex is inherently riskier than straight sex (untrue) and that transmission via giving a blowjob is more likely than it actually is. As one of the Gawker comments states: "I mean, seriously, cheerleaders and sorority girls would be an endangered species".

 

[D_Tim McGnaw]

This so reads like a self hating closet homosexual who is quite naturally rather upset about his having become infected and is just anxious to blame the thing he feels most conflicted about in himself.

He's extrenalising his demons in response to psychic crisis.

It's sad that because he has a voice some people (no matter how few) will listen to him and his wrong headed response to his personal anguish will now contribute to a wider infliction of anguish on other people.

 

[TomCat84]

Thank you BBucko for this post

 

[The Dragon]

The self hatred and the lack of personal ownership for his condition is truly tragic.

 

[nudeyorker]

Thanks for posting Bb, hopefully someone in the media will be as sharp as you in their critique of his statements and will point out the flaws and hypocrisy.
But on another note real cheerleaders and sorority girls are kind of an endangered species.

 

[Incocknito]

Some of you need to get off your gay high horses.

If that's what you call an article then so be it but I see no quotation marks and I'm pretty sure there is a point in the article where it goes from paraphrasing something that was said and then adding something subjective about him being homophobic or afraid of 'cooties'. It isn't clear to me that he even used the word cooties (or any of the words written in that article).

It looks more like somone is making a judgement in that article. It's pretty easy to see where the 'reporting' ends and the judgement begins.

This is all the LATimes reported:

HIV-positive porn performer speaks out - latimes.com

So really that is all you should be commenting on with regards to what he said. Everything else in the gawker article cannot be attributed to Mr Burts.

 

[TomCat84]

Some of you need to get off your gay high horses.

Really? I'm sorry that you don't understand it- but the reason we are on our "gay high horses" is because we've seen this story before. "Straight" guy doesn't want to admit he actually likes having sex with dudes, so he blames something bad on the gays.

 

[Incocknito]

I'm sorry but if his girlfriend tested negative then he caught it on a gay porn set. Which is what he said. He did not say anything negative about gays.

He just stated a fact which is that he caught HIV on a gay porn set. I don't think he is intentionally or maliciously "prepetuating" a "stigma". Maybe the story and the circumstances do not reflect well on homosexuality or gay porn / lifestyle but that is incidental.

I'm just pointing out that nowhere in any of the two articles in the OP am I seeing any malice or ill will towards gays from Mr Burts.

 

[helgaleena]

I'm sorry but if his girlfriend tested negative then he caught it on a gay porn set. Which is what he said. He did not say anything negative about gays.

He just stated a fact which is that he caught HIV on a gay porn set. I don't think he is intentionally or maliciously "prepetuating" a "stigma". Maybe the story and the circumstances do not reflect well on homosexuality or gay porn / lifestyle but that is incidental.

I'm just pointing out that nowhere in any of the two articles in the OP am I seeing any malice or ill will towards gays from Mr Burts.

He also spent plenty of time on straight porn sets, where there is less use of 'protection'. That's the point, Incocknito, and has nothing to do with whether his gf or bf gave it to him. He is in a high-risk industry anyway. If he hadn't done any gay work would he still blame it on his job? Probably not so loudly.

 

[Mem]

I'm sorry but if his girlfriend tested negative then he caught it on a gay porn set. Which is what he said. He did not say anything negative about gays.

He just stated a fact which is that he caught HIV on a gay porn set. I don't think he is intentionally or maliciously "prepetuating" a "stigma". Maybe the story and the circumstances do not reflect well on homosexuality or gay porn / lifestyle but that is incidental.

I'm just pointing out that nowhere in any of the two articles in the OP am I seeing any malice or ill will towards gays from Mr Burts.

He was a make hooker on rentboy. Several somebodies probably offered him and extra hundy for bareback.

 

[D_Tim McGnaw]

Some of you need to get off your gay high horses.

If that's what you call an article then so be it but I see no quotation marks and I'm pretty sure there is a point in the article where it goes from paraphrasing something that was said and then adding something subjective about him being homophobic or afraid of 'cooties'. It isn't clear to me that he even used the word cooties (or any of the words written in that article).

It looks more like somone is making a judgement in that article. It's pretty easy to see where the 'reporting' ends and the judgement begins.

This is all the LATimes reported:

HIV-positive porn performer speaks out - latimes.com

So really that is all you should be commenting on with regards to what he said. Everything else in the gawker article cannot be attributed to Mr Burts.

You need to get off your straight high horse (though tbh I've never heard of a gay or a straight high horse so I'm pretty unsure what either would be), the essential elements of both versions of the story are the same.

 

[D_Tim McGnaw]

I'm sorry but if his girlfriend tested negative then he caught it on a gay porn set. Which is what he said. He did not say anything negative about gays.

He just stated a fact which is that he caught HIV on a gay porn set. I don't think he is intentionally or maliciously "prepetuating" a "stigma". Maybe the story and the circumstances do not reflect well on homosexuality or gay porn / lifestyle but that is incidental.

I'm just pointing out that nowhere in any of the two articles in the OP am I seeing any malice or ill will towards gays from Mr Burts.

No well you wouldn't, that's fine why would you?


In any case what makes you so sure he absolutely did not catch HIV via any other means? The testing system which straight porn stars use to justify not using condoms in the US is notoriously a figleaf.

 

[Incocknito]

So the fact is that no one really knows who he caught it off or where. All I really wanted to point out was the obvious slant and poor journalistic quality of the gawker article.

The "essential elements" are not the same. And if they are maybe some of the repliers to this thread should stick to those essential elements and not discuss comments that cannot be attributed to Mr Burts and are quite obviously an attempt at sensationalism by the gawker article writer.

And I am assuming horses can be gay or straight.

I'll retract my previous statement that he caught it on a gay porn set. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't.

 

[D_Tim McGnaw]

So the fact is that no one really knows who he caught it off or where. All I really wanted to point out was the obvious slant and poor journalistic quality of the gawker article.

The "essential elements" are not the same. And if they are maybe some of the repliers to this thread should stick to those essential elements and not discuss comments that cannot be attributed to Mr Burts and are quite obviously an attempt at sensationalism by the gawker article writer.

And I am assuming horses can be gay or straight.

I'll retract my previous statement that he caught it on a gay porn set. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't.

I don't think there really has been a lot of discussion of the slant put on this story by Gawker.

But as you rightly say no one really knows who he caught HIV from, it's the very fact that he chooses to go on the record to state that he's sure he caught HIV from having unprotected oral sex with a man that gives the steer to what is really going on here.

He's probably pretty gutted about his diagnosis that's fair enough. What's not OK is that rather than admitting that he had sex with lots of people for money, and had lots of unprotected sex with people (the likelihood being lots of unprotected sex with women) in the process and therefore probably cannot be certain how he contracted HIV he instead chooses to try to rekindle misleading misconceptions of gay sex by simply presuming that its more likely he caught HIV via a very unlikely method simply because he was having sex with another man.

The business about the clinic telling him they suspected he'd had sex with another known HIV positive performer is slightly dubious too, I'm presuming we only have his word for that. But in any event even if they did tell him this that only increases the likelihood that his infection occurred during heterosexual sex since gay performers as the article points out do not use the clinic in question as much as heterosexual performers do, because they tend to use condoms instead. And yet he's still rather anxious to jump to the conclusion that he caught HIV from a man via oral sex...



P.S. the subject of sexual orientation in animals is a compicated one, but strictly speaking terms like "straight" or "gay" aren't really applicable to non-human animals.

 

[Bbucko]

Some of you need to get off your gay high horses.

If that's what you call an article then so be it but I see no quotation marks and I'm pretty sure there is a point in the article where it goes from paraphrasing something that was said and then adding something subjective about him being homophobic or afraid of 'cooties'. It isn't clear to me that he even used the word cooties (or any of the words written in that article).

It looks more like somone is making a judgement in that article. It's pretty easy to see where the 'reporting' ends and the judgement begins.

This is all the LATimes reported:

HIV-positive porn performer speaks out - latimes.com

So really that is all you should be commenting on with regards to what he said. Everything else in the gawker article cannot be attributed to Mr Burts.

I'm unclear why you linked to the same LA Times article that I did in the OP. I'm not on any "gay high horse", either.

Bashing Gawker as bitchy and sarcastic is much like critiquing LPSG because we talk a lot about dicks around here: it's what they do. And believe it or not, Gawker frequently beats political blogs to the punch (including TPM and Politico) on topics much more serious than blind items and whatever Lindsay Lohan happens to be doing. At no point do they attribute the word "cooties" to Burts.

If you watched the video embedded in the LA Times piece you linked, you'd have noticed how he's abdicated responsibility for his seroconversion. He repeatedly refers to "the guy who infected me": all he needs to locate the guy who infected him is a mirror. As Hilly said, "He's externalising his demons in response to psychic crisis." And as Mem pointed out, he was actively working as a gay escort, which I presumed in the OP. Condom-only rentboys make less money, and prostitution is all about the money.

He also blames the differing standards between straight porn (no condoms but constant testing and vilification of anyone discovered as being poz) and gay porn (ubiquitous condom use but no testing and the distinct possibility of mixed-status casting), feeling that the former is somehow superior. Of all the flaws in his logic, the over-reliance on testing is the most revealing, because there's a 6-13 week gap between infection and the production of antibodies, during which time the person is absolutely infectious but will test negative. Tests, in the context of porn production, mean little.

The probability of his having contracted HIV from giving a blowjob is about the same as being hit by a meteor. He's in his mid-20s and presumably in fine health otherwise. In order for that blowjob to have caused infection, three criteria need to be met:

1) The HIV+ person whose dick was in his mouth needed to have had a very high viral load (ie: unmedicated): so high his precum was infectious;

and

2) There could not have been any saliva in his mouth; saliva is acidic and contains several enzymes that deactivate HIV (which is actually very delicate, unlike Herpes, for instance);

and

3) He needed to have had an actively bleeding sore in his mouth; clotted cuts of any kind are an effective barrier to HIV transmission.

The first criterion is possible. The HIV+ porn participant's identity and medical records are private, unavailable to both Burts and the production company who filmed their scene. We'll never know unless he comes forward. However, if he can prove a low-to-undetectable viral load at the time when they were shooting, he could easily prove that he played no part in Burts' seroconversion.

The second criterion is extraordinarily unlikely. As you are 100% straight, it's safe to assume that you've never had a dick in your mouth. As someone who's had many hundreds of dicks in his mouth, I can assure you that doing so without causing saliva to be produced is highly improbable. If he had been smoking Meth just prior to shooting the scene, his chances of being unable to produce saliva went up. But if they know the scene when he supposedly was infected, then they can review it to see if saliva was present or not. At any rate, everything that I've heard is that taking drugs on a mainstream gay porn set, though it happens, is rare and considered poor form.

Now comes the bleeding, open sore. Maybe he just finished brushing his teeth? Who knows? But most people would opt for gum in such a situation, as the risk of bleeding gums is very well known, and has been presumed for at least two decades now.

If you had clicked on the Daily Motion link I provided in the OP, you'd have seen how exceptionally enthusiastic he was about performing in gay porn. Even if it were partially scripted (which it now doubt was), there's an unmistakable ring of the true in his performance. Considering how popular "straight" guys are in gay porn, he could have butched it up and acted at least a little tradey with mentions of a girlfriend. Teh gayz like that shit.

Instead, his affect, demeanor and words are all those of a gay guy enjoying gay sex. At the very least he's bisexual; claiming heterosexuality now is fraudulent. It's a lie he's repeating for some reason or other. My guess is that he's planning a lawsuit.

 

[tgirlsrgreat]

here's a nice black high horse

Google Image Result for http://www.breedersguide.com/images/Walking%20Horse%20COVER%2006.JPG

 

[TomCat84]

Look, I don't think Incocknito gets it. The dude probably caught it having sex with a man, yes, but it's my guess that it wasn't from a porn actor. He's probably trcikin on the side (either for pay or pleasure or both) with dudes unprotected and caught it from that. His claim of never having personal- sex outside of his relationship is bogus.

 

[Bbucko]

^^^^

Of course it is, as is any specious claim that women troll rentboy for escorts.

Anyone who doesn't understand that Burts is perpetuating a stigma regarding his sexuality and spreading disinformation regarding the actual nature of his infection is obviously living a very different life from yours or mine, where such things have no negative repercussions in his world: must be nice.

 

[Snozzle]

Well I came here because I misread the header as
"Porn Performer Blames Blowfish For His Seroconversion"

Glad to clear that up.

 

[Bbucko]

Anything to oblige, Snozzie.