What Happened To The 2005 Bareback Video Awards?

I’ve received a few emails ~ not nearly as many as I might have expected ~ asking when the 2005 Bareback Video Awards will be happening. As you may know, we’ve run the past five BBVA’s in the fall of each year, between September and November. We were gearing up to present last year’s awards during the same period when we were hit with a salvo we hadn’t expected. Instead of coming out of left field, as is usually the case with such things, this one came from the extreme right.



The simple explanation is that the BBVA became a victim of the Bush Administration. More specifically, it came under indirect attack from Alberto Gonzales, the Mexi-Nazi* who became appointed as US Attorney General following the welcome resignation of John Ashcroft. You may recall that Gonzales is the one who more or less put his personal stamp of approval on using torture at Abu Ghraib. Well, that pint-sized, lisping closet faggot* also launched an attack on the entire adult entertainment industry under the false pretense that his war on porn was designed to protect children from being exploited by big bad pornographers. Gonzales’ new rules really don’t contain anything significantly different to achieve that goal. Instead, they are designed to shut down the adult industry piece by piece. And his new regulations are being challenged in court. Even so, that hasn’t lifted the mantle of fear that now saturates all adult-oriented business done on the web.


When we started putting together the BBVA last summer, we needed to find a new way to legally present the awards, and more specifically the video clips which are central to the awards, to the public. Gonzales changed the rules and the stiffened the penalties for non-compliance. Failure to comply could be met with steep fines and a 5-year jail sentence for all involved.

In the past, we had been able to direct you to each of the participating studios’ websites where you could view the clips they had nominated for the various awards. As the volume of bareback video production increased this became a vital part of the awards. But under Gonzales’ new rules, each of these sites would have to verify your age prior to showing you any of their action clips. And the only way the law recognizes the internet user as an adult is through the use of a credit card. This became problematic for several reasons.

First, it meant that you, the audience and voters for the Awards, would have to whip out your credit card at each site you visited, just to view their nominated clips. And the studios using a third-party processing company (such as CC-Bill or I-Bill) would have to require you pay a few dollars, as these billing companies insist on collecting a minimum transaction fee (remember, they’re sort of like banks, and banks always have minimum fees…). Well, we knew that wouldn’t go over well. The more studios we had participating, the more you would have to pay. Plus, it wouldn’t be fair to those who don’t have a lot of disposable cash on hand, and those on disability. So we sought out a different way.

I then proposed having a single place where clips could be shown and legal age verified. We contacted our billing company to see if they would allow us to use their service at no charge for the Awards. They would not. We asked if they could charge your credit card a small, insignificant fee just for verification purposes, and then refund it, thereby keeping it all so very democratic. They wouldn’t. So then we asked if we could charge something small enough to not overburden some of our viewers ~ a single dollar. They said they could not.

Undaunted, we went on to contact DRM (a Digital Rights Media company which handles the encoding of video streams for both the adult and non-adult businesses on the net) to see if we could host all the clips through them. They said no. It seemed that we suddenly had a hot potato on our hands… one which nobody wanted to touch. And we just don’t have the bandwidth to run the thing on our site ~ unless we opted to charge you an arm and a leg to participate.

We pursued this from different angles for a couple of months until the various companies stopped responding. They weren’t interested, even if it meant an increase in business to them. It was all too risky. And without an acceptable means of verifying your ages and streaming the videos in a manner that wouldn’t cause hardship to either the studios or the public, or result in questionably legal searches without warrants and fines and jail sentences to the companies involved, we finally dropped the hot potato. The Mexi-Nazi* had won. He and his goose-stepping neo-conservative insurgents in the Department of Justice had sufficiently frightened the businesses we now needed to operate legally under the new rules, and the businesses turned their backs to us. After five successful years of running the Bareback Video Awards, we would have to quietly surrender to the pressure coming down from the Attorney General’s office. And thus, until either Gonzales is overturned by the Supreme Court (which, believe me, they are in no hurry to do), or he and his band of hooligans is put out of office and a new Attorney General reverses his policies, our ground-breaking and wildly popular Bareback Video Awards will have to be a thing of the past.

Bear in mind, if Gonzales gets his way in court, his policies will significantly alter the way websites will handle even the mundane aspect of personals and profiles. If he wins, you will be required to submit federal or state-issued proof of age to webmasters in order to post your hot nude photos. This applies not only to yourself, but for anyone else exhibited in your photos. That means you’ll have to submit your driver’s license information and photo as well as the driver’s license info and photo of the other guys in your photos to every single website you wish to advertise your body parts on. If you move, you’ll have to update every site you have profiles on. You probably won’t get in trouble if you don’t. However, the website owners will face fines and incarceration if the feds should discover that their information on you isn’t up-to-date. This is why I call Gonzales a Mexi-Nazi. His new policies aren’t that different from registration policies used in Germany under Hitler.

No matter how you slice it, Gonzales is a fuck. A stinking, mean-spirited nogoodnick who has been given way too much power for this country’s own good. And, it’s my esteemed opinion that he’s a repressed homosexual. Regardless of my personal opinion of him, his actions go beyond the scope of bringing an end to the exploitation of children, and seriously invade our rights as adult Americans. For more information on the Mexi-Nazi’s war on porn and what you can do to help stop it, you can visit Jack’s Outburst Page. In the mean time, I ask that you continue to support us, and the porn studios that create the videos you like to watch. And I'd like to encourage you to take some civilian action. Your letters to your congressmen protesting Gonzales' war on porn are your BBVA votes this year!

Bareback Jack

*(just stating my heartfelt opinion here.)