I really can’t remember exactly when I first heard about AIDS. I only recall that all of a sudden there it was, killing off people I knew.

Somewhere in the mid-eighties is my best guess. There was a lot going on then. Cocaine was ruining lives. Ecstasy was called MDMA and it was legal. Crank was the new speed. A lot of folks were living dangerously but gay men were dying in inordinate numbers. I saw so many people wither away before my eyes.

"Look. I know I'm being idealistic. We can make a difference by distributing a socially responsible product to hundreds of millions of people all over the planet."

When I moved back home to my small town I was sad to see the heterosexual community so blind about HIV and AIDS. I worked in a nightclub there where everyone went home with strangers and the condom machine in the bathroom went untouched. I used to think they were such fools but I wasn’t any better.

I went virtually condomless in my sexual prime. Even during the time when my friends were dropping like flies. I was an idiot. It wasn’t until I moved back home and lived with an AIDS counselor that I finally got the message. Infection knows neither race nor gender.

Remember that? Remember the AIDS awareness era? It wasn’t that long ago. Maybe ten years ago. Everyone was getting the message then. Even the clueless customers at that nightclub started to understand the consequences of unprotected sex. It’s sad that a lesson learned so recently can be forgotten so fast.

I like hardcore porn but to tell you the truth I didn’t see that much of it before I went on the Internet. It was just too embarrassing for me to go out and buy it. I sure as hell didn’t want those brown wrappers in my mailbox. What would the postman think? When I finally got to view all the fucking my little 14.4K modem would download I was rather surprised. Nobody was wearing condoms.

I’d seen enough hardcore to notice the change in trends. Back in the seventies I saw the hard porn was all about insertion and positions other than the missionary. In the eighties they introduced more extreme stuff like anal sex and the cum-squirting money shot. I went through the first half of the nineties without a glance at porn. Then I got a computer and an Internet connection and discovered things had definitely changed since disco.

Now we got bukkake and gang bangs and creampies. Now we see every possible sexual act known to humanity. People did this stuff before the Internet but it sure was a hell of a lot harder to find. The web made all adult acts possible and now that the public has had a taste, they only want more.

The fact is that most of us would never be in the pornography business if it weren’t for the World Wide Web. The veterans of film and print smut dropped the ball when it came to selling cybersex and a bunch of neophyte geeks gained control. Geeks figured out how to get porn, how to advertise it and how to make money from selling it on the net. Now those veterans come to us because we have the mojo.

Yes, Larry Flynt is the man. Yes, Ron Jeremy is a legend. Yes, Vivid makes hot porn with the biggest stars. Yes, California is still the capitol of adult entertainment. Yes, that area makes millions of dollars through print, video, DVD, cable and satellite distribution. But adult webmasters have learned to work outside the cloistered clique of porn’s Hollywood. We learned that some of the rules that apply to print and video don’t apply to the net.

We learned that image quality and great lighting don’t matter as much as load time. We learned there’s a lot of folks who like their models to look like amateurs or housewives. We learned that people will pay to see almost any kind of porn in a six hundred million-member market. We’ve learned how to successfully sell everything from balloon content to sites with nothing but chicks smoking cigarettes. If anyone can market the concept of condom porn, we can.

Look. I know I’m being idealistic. I understand the bottom line. Condom-free porn sells better. I’m not saying that fact will change. What I’m saying is we have a choice those poor folks in Chatsworth don’t. That hierarchy does not bind us. We don’t have to buy or create condom-free content. We can make a difference by distributing a socially responsible product to hundreds of millions of people all over the planet.

Next time you need content, consider condom only. Think of it as another niche.

The recent HIV scare didn’t happen because that’s just the odds you take making porn. It happened because of a lack of condoms. This isn’t just about HIV or AIDS. It’s also about herpes, syphilis, chlamydia, trichomoniasis, gonorrhea, and lives.