Making safe sex sexy

Porn stars and real life boyfriends Steve Cruz and Bruno Bond, in Australia last week for World AIDS Day, are part of a new breed of adult performers bringing a sense of social conscience to the industry.
“I think it is important that we’re here during World AIDS Day,” Cruz told Sydney Star Observer during their visit.
“The people who I miss who’ve died from AIDS would want this message to be out there — that prevention is all we really have without a cure.
“That’s what I feel like I’m doing when I speak about this; I feel like I’m taking the voices of my departed friends and giving them life, and hopefully sparing people the fate my friends met.”
The pair both said that, as porn stars, they feel a responsibility to use their position within the gay community for good.
“When I would go to gay pride fairs back in San Francisco, the HIV prevention stalls would be kind of small and sad, tucked away down some alley,” Cruz said. “The stalls people flocked to were for Falcon, Titan and Colt — everybody wanted to meet a porn star.
“I thought, wow — if we could just get the porn stars to deliver the message, we could really save some lives.”
Bond, a relative newcomer to porn with only one year of filmmaking under his belt, said the opportunity to deliver safe-sex messages was one of the reasons he got into the industry.
“I was in a long-term relationship for about seven years, and when I got out of the relationship in 2005, I was shocked to find that young guys on the scene now don’t seem to use condoms as much. I felt that I would have a bigger voice in the community if I was something of a gay celebrity. Of course, that wasn’t my only reason for doing porn,” he grinned, winking at Cruz. “But it was a big part of it.”
Thanks to safe-sex policies at major gay porn studios, the pair don’t encounter unsafe practices in their work lives, but they’ve both had personal experiences they’re keen to share.
“We need to talk more about the pressure to bareback,” Cruz said.
“I’m trying to bring more and more into my campaign the experiences in my real life where I was pressured to take a risk.
“Whenever I’ve come closest to HIV, it’s been when a guy I was dating or a guy I liked asked me to do it ‘just this once’.
“We want to be clear about safe sex, but at the same time, we’ve really tried not to shame or come across as holier-than-thou. One, it’s not sexy, and two, we know this is a human discussion — we know people are going to make mistakes, and maybe trust people they shouldn’t. Sometimes good people make questionable choices.”

Win Steve and Bruno’s undies

After our interview, Steve and Bruno kindly signed a couple of pairs of aussieBum underwear for us to give away to our readers. We have two pairs of signed underwear to give away from the aussieBum Spin range. For the chance to win a pair, email your details to [email protected] with the word AUSSIEBUM in the subject line. Entries close 5pm Friday December 11 and winners’ names will be published.