While light-hearted attacks on Derek and Romaine are fun and all, our actual enmity is much better reserved for the bare- backing companies. Thank god for Chi Chi LaRue. "I will never make a bareback movie and the day I have to for financial gain is the day I quit the business," swears LaRue. "Is it worth watching models risk their health for your fantasy? C'mon."
The porn community has come out in strong support for LaRue's anti-bareback campaign with directors like Keith Webb and Michael Youens and models like Derek DiSilva declaring their support. The video has also heightened the long-simmering debate within the industry, including a highly charged email exchange between longtime safe-sex-advocate Titan Media and Cybersocket Magazine
over the latter's decision to take an advertising sponsorship from a bareback producer.
Chi Chi herself is currently being attacked by the barebacking
companies who call her a hypocrite for selling pre-condom (movies made
without condoms in the pre-AIDS era). Some have even erroneously
charged her with filming without condoms in her early career. Chi Chi
is having none of it.
"The first feature movie I ever directed, FLEXXX, was in 1987. It was a
condom feature and every single movie that I have directed since then
has also used condoms... When I moved to LA in 1987 and took a job in
promotions at Catalina Video, the AIDS crisis was in full swing. I
lobbied hard to William Higgins and John Travis of Catalina and Chuck
Holmes at Falcon to get condoms on the models "
Chi Chi's video is one of the first to divorce itself from the safe-sex
advocates reliance on a media-effects argument (i.e., watching bareback
encourages people to bareback), shifting the focus to the health of the models
in the film. "I'm not putting my models at any unnecessary risk on my
set. Why are we putting people at risk for porn?"
LaRue gave up a highly lucrative side career in the straight industry
in 2006 when Vivid Video decided to go condom optional and rely solely
on testing, saying that it'd be hypocritical for her to have two
standards for the two sides of the industry.
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