The stunning news of last week's bankruptcy filing by Colt's parent company Prowest Media, as well as that of it's owners, partners John Rutherford and Tom Settle, put into perspective the impossibility of the Colt deal, and the on-going effects of the Great Recession on the gay porn business. Combine that with the other trend-setting events of the week, and the gay porn business has been rocked like the San Francisco earthquake.

It's been quite a couple of weeks in the gay porn industry; at this point, nothing would surprise me.

First is the big news from Colt, which my co-blogger Ronnie so aptly covers. Condolences to John and Tom at this difficult time.

Titan's suit against the British tube sites is a welcome event in the online gay porn world. GayForIt.com (itsallgay.com, jerkofftube.com) et al are a fraud.

Titan will be successful because gayforit has a financial interest in the streaming of the content. It is selling access to that content on a subscription basis. It leases/controls the servers @ LeaseWeb, and it is making editorial decisions at minimum about some of its content. It is a financial model built on pirated content plain and simple.

Last night I had a brief exchange with Kurt Wild on Twitter that ended up rather poorly, and I was branded as as sock puppet of Damon Krueuzer's. The big piece of evidence was that my site was alleged to be run on the same server; the truth is that I host my site on GoDaddy.com, and so does Kruezer. And so do some 39 million others.

Ah, Twitter, you've already taught me so much, and it's only been a month! You've reintroduced me to JRLChartsonline.net via a lovely little tweet that caught my eye regarding Titan Media pulling all content from the AEBN network.

Now, first, I have a problem with JRL. Frankly, they seem a bit too willing to give their advertisers positive coverage. Make that exclusively positive coverage. I respect their charts (as oposed to AVN's, which are a joke), and afterall, JRL is trying to cover the dwindling wholesale market, and they have built some credibility on this front.

A couple of weeks ago, however...

Now, who does AVN think they're kidding? Really, not one Treasure Island title in the top 100 sellers of some recent month (they don't state for what month, but this is from the January 2010 issue)? And we're supposed to believe that Jason Adonis Unseen sold more copies than either of Lucas' Israel crap?

I counted fewer than 4 pages of content, including one full page of reviews. The book was 300 pages this issue, due mostly to it being a show issue. Of course, only two gay companies are bothering to exhibit at the AVN show. Wow, we've gone from being pissed about being shoved off into the corner to not even meriting a mention in the index.

And they wonder why nobody buys ads.

Everyone in the industry bitches about piracy and content theft, and at least a couple of studios will go after theives (and there's always Titan), but these infringers of copyright have been getting away with it for years.

Is there anyone out there that is not aware of the relationship between GayPornBlog, which is owned and operated by NakedSword, a division of AEBN, which in turn, owns Raging Stallion?

Several weeks ago, GayPornTimes linked to an Advocate article since removed and republished at the author's blog, The Unabashed Queer’s Cut: Business Before Pleasure? -- enough links yet? -- that skids a little too close for comfort, apparently.

Oh, the hypocrisy. Falcon "Classic Bareback" movies, compiled into convenient compilation form, on sale now!

I guess what escapes them is that if there was ever a time when we'd actually see a seroconversion take place on screen, these films were made during that time.