October 24, 2007 | The Biz

Barebacking disrupts DAVID Awards

President and CEO of Titan Media, Bruce Cam, has declined his DAVID Lifetime Achievement Award, handed out in Berlin last Friday.

“I cannot in good conscience accept a Lifetime Achievement award from an organization that glorifies and promotes bareback content alongside my own,” says Cam, a GAYVN Hall of Fame Director. "I have worked my entire adult industry career to promote and eroticize safer sex content in all of my films. 

"It would be against every single fiber of my moral being to accept this award.  Silence is acceptance and I can no longer sit by and watch the industry where I have worked and helped shape be destroyed by others seeking financial gain at the expense of performers and the entire gay community.  I cannot and will not accept this award as it is tainted with the blood of others."

Only in its second year, the DAVID Awards (the European equivalent to the GAYVN Awards) have managed to attract the ire of many heavyweights in the industry. Whereas last year the focus of the show seemed to be quality, with bareback videos excluded from the competition, this year the show's direction has made a total about face. As per a Titan Media press release: "It appears that this year's list of nominees were kept from Titan Media and other nominated studios in an apparent attempt to conceal the amount of bareback films and studios being nominated." [more]

Condemnation of the awards has been swift. Chi Chi LaRue admitted, “I was really disappointed that the DAVID Awards seem to have taken the focus off good film making and quality movies in many of the categories and turned to honoring and promoting all things bareback."

Even some smaller studios who won awards were less than impressed. Thomas Virsov and Ulrich Jung from XXX-Project Germany received the "Best Actor Europe" award but believe they "got the award because we paid to sponsor the show, and other awards were given to companies which paid for adverts in the GAYeLINE magazine. We tried to communicate this while we were at the stage, but they took away our microphone. We gave back our award and didn't take it. We are more than happy that also Titan refused to accept their award."

Virsov and Jung's assertion was supported by Lucas Entertainment CEO Michael Lucas, who claimed that “this year the organizers told us point-blank that they will need sponsorship in order to give us a nomination, and depending on the amount of money we would give they could even guarantee a win. We refused.”

Not that we would ever editorialize in a situation like this, but it looks like young DAVID has some growing up to do.