Titan Media Press Release
San Francisco, CA (October 23, 2007)
Titan Media regrets to announce that GAYVN Hall of Fame Director Bruce Cam has refused to accept the DAVID Lifetime Achievement Award. Sponsored by GAYeLINE, a gay adult magazine publisher in Europe, the DAVID Awards were initially considered to be the European equivalent of the GAYVN Awards in the United States. The awards show was held in Berlin on Friday October 19th, 2007. Due to a last minute illness, Cam was not able to attend the award ceremony, but his business partner and Titan Media Vice President Keith Webb was in attendance on his behalf.
“I cannot in good conscience accept a Lifetime Achievement award from an organization that glorifies and promotes bareback content alongside my own,” says Bruce Cam, President and CEO of Titan Media. “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.”
In 2006, TitanMen won the DAVID Award for “Best American Studio”. In addition, TitanMen exclusive models François Sagat and Spencer Quest were awarded ‘Best European Actor’ and ‘Best Non-European Actor’ respectively. 2006 was the first year the awards were held, and at that time bareback films were excluded from consideration, citing the same standards as the GAYVN awards. 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. Had Titan Media been informed of the fact that the vast majority of the nominees were bareback we would not have supported or attended the event.
“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”, said multi-award winning director Chi Chi LaRue.
“We received an award of “Best Actor Europe”, which was totally unfair,” says Thomas Virsov and Ulrich Jung, CEO and Producer of XXX-Project Germany. ”We 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.”
“We were truly shocked and appalled by the overwhelming amount of low end and poorly produced bareback films being honored at the awards,” says Keith Webb, Vice-President of Titan Media. “When it became known to the producers of the awards show that I was going to refuse the award on Bruce’s behalf, the award was pulled and I was refused access to the stage. They did not even have the decency to allow me onstage to voice our opinions and to politely refuse to accept the award on Bruce’s behalf. In my opinion the entire event was a set-up meant to showcase and promote bareback films, and was the most biased and poorly produced awards show I have ever attended. The event was an embarrassment to the entire gay adult industry and I am sad to say we were even represented at the awards show.”
