Michael Weinstein: The Condom King of the AHF

AHF is a Los Angeles–based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with an operating budget in the billions, as of a 2017 New York Times article. According to its Wikipedia article, the Foundation currently serves well over a million people in 45 countries through clinics that provide HIV testing, HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, as well as pharmacy services. It is the world’s largest AIDS organization. 

It would seem to follow that the man who leads this behemoth of activism and do-goodery would have plenty of things to keep him busy—namely helping to care for over a million folks living with HIV/AIDS. But in the late 2000s and well into the 2010s, Weinstein spent a large amount of his time and energy—not to mention millions of his organization’s dollars—on making porn stars use condoms, instead. 

It started in 2004, when Darren James famously contracted HIV on the set of an adult film. When that news went public, AHF began lobbying the state of California to require that male porn actors use condoms on set, to register complaints against those who did not, and to protest outside of industry-friendly testing sites. To a degree, these pro-condom efforts make sense—even if it’s an uneducated and unhelpful kind of sense. An organization combating the spread of HIV/AIDS would, naturally, like to see barrier protection used in sex scenes, thus normalizing their use in the civilian population.  

But Weinstein’s focus continued to narrow on the condoms-in-porn issue for over a decade. For instance, there have long been whispers that those protests outside of AIM locations led to much worse—the 2011 leak of the AIM testing database’s sensitive information has been linked to AHF by more than one adult-industry sympathizer. That leak resulted in the venerable institution’s closure that same year, amid rumors that AHF was attempting to insert its own testing services in its place.

In 2012, AHF pushed through a city ordinance requiring condom use on all permitted porn sets in Los Angeles. But to get around the new law, many LA-based porn studios stopped getting permits to film, retreated to in-house production, or simply filmed outside the city. In response, Weinstein went on the offensive with Measure B, a ballot initiative that required condoms in all licensed porn films in the entire county of Los Angeles. Weinstein used over $2 million of AHF’s money on Measure B’s advertising and signature collection. And its expensive efforts worked—Measure B passed. In due course, applications for adult film permits in LA county plummeted, and pornographers started moving elsewhere—Nevada, Arizona, Florida. Anywhere but LA. 

But Weinstein was just getting started. He sponsored AB 1576, which would have forced condoms on adult actors across the state of California. He agitated for regulations suggested in a 2009 complaint (which AHF had lodged), which would have forced protective gear (up to and including gloves and goggles) onto the bodies of porn actors. And he famously sponsored Proposition 60, a ballot initiative that would have given Cal/OSHA the ability to prosecute anytime a condom was not visible in a porn film—and to allow any resident of California to sue the pornographers involved, thus obtaining their personal information. If that weren’t enough of a middle finger to the porn industry, there was also the fine print, which stipulated, according to The Sacramento Bee, “If the initiative wins and is challenged but the state fails to uphold the voters’ will and defend it in court […] Weinstein would be sworn in as a state employee with standing to defend the initiative himself, and he couldn’t be fired without a majority vote of both legislative houses. Oh, and the taxpayers would be on the hook for his legal expenses.”

AHF reportedly spent about $4.6 million supporting Prop 60, which would have vindicated Weinstein’s bizarre fixation on the porn industry and possibly installed him as the de facto condom tsar for the state of California. But the proposition failed to pass, and, thankfully, that was more or less the end of that.

Since the 2016 election, Weinstein’s Sauron-like eye seems to have turned away from the porn industry in California. He’s focused instead on capping drug prices, blocking real-estate development near AHF’s offices, expanding rent control, and bad-mouthing PrEP—a true head-scratcher for someone whose organization is supposed to be combating AIDS.

These activities have made AHF—and its president—very unpopular in AIDS activism circles, earning a reputation The New York Times said was akin to “the Koch brothers of public health.” The entire adult industry despises Weinstein and his Foundation. And one has to imagine that courts and legislators are sick to death of ballot initiatives, private litigation, and all the rest of it. So, what drives this incredibly successful activist to steer his organization into waters that make him so poorly received? 

Speculation has flourished, but the simplest answer is likely the truth: AHF’s bottom line.

According to the Times’ 2017 article, Weinstein “runs his organization as a ‘social enterprise’” rather than as a standard non-profit, “meaning that it generates most of its revenue not from grants and fund-raising but from adjacent businesses.” Its main source of income? Its vast network of pharmacies and clinics, which provide care to tens of thousands of patients around the United States, where most of AHF’s patients “have their insurance claims paid by government insurance programs like Medicaid.” AHF then collects excess income from those programs to fund their other activities, including serving hundreds of thousands of international patients for free—and funding ballot initiatives, ad campaigns, and lawsuits galore.

And how does AHF manage to recruit so many patients for its pharmacies and clinics in the first place? Ah, there’s the rub. Per the Times, “In 2015, two former employees filed a whistle-blower suit arguing that A.H.F.’s patient incentives amounted to illegal kickbacks,” mostly for recruiting new patients to clinics and pharmacies. As described by Mark S. King on his blog My Beautiful Disease, the 34-page suit charged the Foundation with “ten counts of defrauding the government, conspiracy, and a ‘multi-State kickback scheme’ to maintain service quotas and keep the government-funded gravy train rolling.”

“When someone tested positive in an AHF clinic,” according to King, “they were offered cash or other inducements to be linked to care in AHF clinics. Furthermore, AHF staff were provided commissions when they successfully linked someone with a positive test result to AHF services.” These practices were completely illegal. But they were also highly profitable. And they may explain, in part, some of Weinstein’s behavior.

PrEP? A miracle drug for those at risk for contracting HIV/AIDS. And a menace to the potential size of AHF’s customer base. The fear-mongering ad campaigns that appear on billboards around Los Angeles? Drive high-risk individuals right to AHF’s clinics.

Oh, and the condoms-in-porn fight? It just so happens that AHF launched its own brand of condoms—LOVE Condoms—in 2008. Per lovecondoms.org, “Since the inception of the LOVE Condom campaign in 2008, AHF-branded LOVE Condoms have gained great popularity among millions of people across Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America.” 

Of course, it’s impossible to say whether Weinstein hoped to secure an exclusive contract with Cal/OSHA to supply all porn sets in the state of California if Proposition 60 had passed and been enforced. But whether he did or not, his hopes to force barrier protection onto the bodies of porn actors surely became an obsession for over a decade. As of now, his efforts seem focused elsewhere. But pornographers may want to keep one eye open; AHF is still the world’s largest AIDS organization and it seems unlikely that its president’s particular brand of “advocacy” will be going away anytime soon.