COULD PORTLAND BECOME THE NEW BAREBACK CAPITAL OF AMERICA?

Posted May 29, 2013 11:27 AM by Mike with 0 comments

Portland’s Willamette Week catches up with Damon Dogg star Dice and art-porn filmmaker Andrew Klaus-Vineyard about shooting safer sex (or not) in a city struggling with syphilis. Which got me thinking. If the condom mandate in California eventually passes, could Portland be the new bareback porn capital of America?

Why Willamette Week chose to focus their discussion of safer sex so heavily on people producing porn is curious. Could Portland gay porn industry be bigger than I thought?

John Small has been a porn actor during the past eight years. One of his most recent scenes was made in Portland, and you can see it for $9.99 a month on a website called Damon Dogg’s Cum Factory [NSFW, duh].

In the video, Dice—muscular, well-hung and with his stage name tattooed on his chest—has oral sex with another man. And then the other actor—wearing nothing but a straw cowboy hat and cock ring—flips Dice onto his stomach. The camera then makes the viewer more acquainted with Dice’s anus than most of us will ever be with our own, and the other actor has sex with Dice, without a condom.

Dice, 26, is HIV positive. He says he’s never had syphilis and gets tested for other STDs regularly. All the porn the Portland resident shoots—including this one, filmed on the east side—is done bareback.

When he shoots porn, here and in San Francisco, no one talks about HIV status or other sexually transmitted diseases. “You don’t yuck other people’s yums, if that makes sense,” he explains. “You kind of know what you’re getting into. It’s up to you whether you’re going to risk anything or not.”

Of course, while a recent condom-mandating bill has been shelved for the year due to budget concerns, those both for and against it expect that it will eventually pass. And while I suspected that Paul Morris and Treasure Island would have a hard time duplicating their DIY pro-sex culture in Las Vegas or Florida, I obviously considered Portland. (The city just rejected a proposal to fluoridate their drinking water, so why not extend the libertarian streak to condoms, as well.) Mustaches! Vaccine paranoia! Shower aversion! Even the (gay) mayor secret porn love was named Beau Breedlove, which is about as barebacky a name as I can imagine. Seems perfect, no?