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.

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.

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.

At the predictable-down-to-the-minute GayVN awards, Raging Stallion AEBN won everything, including the lovely shoes worn by Mr. Mapa. Not that anyone expected a different outcome, but one note worth mentioning: Ricky "Stubby" Sinz as best top. Who knew 4 inches will get you an award in San Francisco!

And then there's Michael Lucas. Grabbing the microphone. Saying something stupid. Not letting it drop there. Stop me when I've said something new.

Yes, they stuck their head further up their ass.

It seems that the bareback genie has been put back into the bottle, at least as far as the awards go. It seems the barebackers couldn't give a shit, and the condom nazis weren't going to tolerate it.

So the rumor going around now is that the 2010 awards will include bareback videos but require testing.

Models who start their own studios are, of course, a dime a dozen. For every Kristen Bjorn, Chip Daniels, and yes Michel Lucas (ugh), there a dozen others who fall by the wayside.

Sure working on the set can be fun! It's those other pesky details of websites, paysites, distributors, and hangers-on that can turn porn into drudgery.

Colin O'Neal has certainly found out the hard way as his deal with Raging Stallion crumbles before our eyes. His World of Men line of movies is currently being pimped out by Raging Stallion at an 8-dvds for $99.99 special. For the mathematically challenged, that's only $12.50 per movie.

Raging Stallion has flooded the market with similar product, and is finding out the hard way that sometimes, more is actually less.

News that the GayVn awards will accept bareback content has leaked out as the marketing for the event begins. The question on everyone's lips was "Would Chi Chi actually hand out an award to a bareback film?" How could she!!!

Ah but the devil is always in the details as it seems that Miss Larry will be hand picking the nominees herself based upon whether HIV testing was performed on the set. Several bareback companies such as HDK and Puppy have made statement about testing and serosorting of models, while most have said nothing publicly. How Miss Larry will determine this is anyone's guess. But I don't expect an onstage handshake between Chi Chi and Paul Morris anytime soon.

There's little doubt that the International porn empire known as Eurocreme is going through some tough times, but it was in a sense inevitable. The key to understanding ECs current and future situation is to examine the events that were out of their control, as opposed to the consequences of their own actions.

Built through a merger series of production and distribution businesses, EC tried to industrialize porn production with a high volume/low margin strategy that relied on several factors.

A) International Market
B) Continuous product flow from both Eastern and Western European sources (in-house, contracted, distributed)
C) Successful Integration of Smaller Businesses into a Larger whole (studios, distribution, retail, web)