The Disturbing Homophobic Motives Behind Porn Wikileaks

Porn Wikileaks, which quietly launched in December 2010, isn’t some kind of benevolent database of information on porn stars, with the hope of making the industry more transparent. It’s a wiki mainly devoted to naming and shaming porn stars at high risk of HIV and AIDS, and it’s supposedly sitting on a cache of thousands of STD test results from the Adult Medical Healthcare Foundation.

As if this weren’t disturbing enough, it appears the main reason for the site’s existence is an intense hatred toward homosexuals, who it claims are ruining the industry.

One of the site’s main categories, “high risk HIV”, contains a list of performers that have connections to the gay porn industry. Or, as the site explains,

To get put in this section you are either gay or you fuck fags. The gay adult industry is not tested and is mostly HIV “known positives”. The straight adult industry uses testing and you are endangering the living of others in straight.

It turns out that this may have been the primary reason for the site’s inception. At the Daily Beast, the wiki’s anonymous creator recently explained his reasons for building the site:

“To get the gays out of straight porn and illegal gay pimps that have ruined porn and shut it down making condoms mandatory by the government now. The fag loving has got to stop. California is full of gay Mexicans and now they can even marry which is so wrong.”

Gays aren’t the sites only targets. In general, the website reads more like the bizarre and offensive internet wiki Encyclopedia Dramatica rather than the more authoritative Wikileaks. Women in the business are targeted as well, and all actresses are referred to as “pornographic whores” and “hookers”.

Among the site’s targets are Isis Taylor (NSFW link), whose ethnicity is referred to as “Jew/Wigger”, while her cause of death is listed as “when her black crack head husband beats her to death.” Monica Foster’s entry is similarly unsettling, and refers to her ethnicity as “N*gger”. The vitriol spills over into site’s forums as well, with anti-semitic threads like “jews in porn”, with users claiming some kind of Jewish conspiracy with their enemies “the gay mafia”. Yeesh.

A number of industry-related blogs have pointed fingers at washed-up porn star Donny Long, who is known for long-winded homophobic rants about gays in porn. It appears he has made several enemies in the industry, and the number one Google result for “donny long” brings up donnylongisaconvictedfelon.com, which includes documents that appear to show prior convictions for everything from battering to burglary.

In a blog post Donny denies any link to Porn Wikileaks, but says they are doing the right thing by targeting gays. He argues that since many male porn actors have performed in both gay and straight films, gays have brought HIV into straight porn, thus “ruining” it by adding a raft of health concerns to the industry and putting pressure on lawmakers to require that performers wear condoms, which are often poo-pooed by connoisseurs and actors alike. (When Vivid Video made condoms mandatory for its actors for seven years, it saw sales drop by 20 percent. They’ve since dropped condoms.)

In a community where sexual conservatism is taboo, the topic of gays in straight porn gets little public attention. But as Richard Abowitz notes at the Daily Beast, it’s a cause for concern among industry professionals. According to a recent study by the CDC, men who have sex with men are 44 times more likely to contract HIV than those who don't.

Although monthly testing for STDs has become the norm in straight porn, in lieu of condoms, some have questioned its effectiveness in stemming HIV and other STDs. In gay porn, where it is assumed that many of the performers are HIV positive, condoms are often required, while HIV tests, the results of which could damage their careers, are not. A number of gay performers are “known positives” – actors whose contraction of HIV is known to those in the industry.

While the site claims it wants to improve standards for an industry where health remains an obvious concern, it seems more focused on using the health issue as an excuse to make bigoted hate speech and ruin lives. Certainly the porn industry has more than a few issues to address. It’s hard to imagine, but perhaps a website with some very obvious issues of its own could be just the thing to start a bigger positive conversation – and one that doesn’t include trolling, bigotry and mean mental masturbation.