James Morrison

I was on the original organising committee of the 2013 Sex Awards. My involvement began the year before, in the run-up to the inaugural ceremony, and I’ve been closely associated with the programme in one capacity or another ever since. When the editorial project was relaunched, it was suggested — reasonably — that someone ought to maintain the historical record. That job fell to me, largely because I still had the paperwork.

My role now is part archivist, part historian, part occasional obituarist. I write retrospectives on the 2013 awards, the categories that appeared and disappeared over the years, the winners and nominees whose careers we followed, and the broader industry context that shaped what the programme was trying to do. I also maintain the internal archive of ballots, sponsor materials, category development notes, and the correspondence that accumulated around the programme in its early years.

I’m not, temperamentally, an industry booster. I don’t think the 2013 awards were flawless. Some categories, in retrospect, were poorly defined. Some winners haven’t aged well. Some of the industry politics around sponsor selection was uglier than we admitted at the time. My retrospectives try to tell the actual history — the good decisions and the bad ones, the moments the programme got something right and the moments it didn’t. Hagiography is boring and readers can smell it from a mile away.

The programme mattered, in my view, because it took the adult industry seriously as an industry at a moment when almost nobody else was doing so. Recognition programmes are a fundamentally optimistic gesture. They assume that quality can be identified, that craft can be honoured, that a field can be more than the sum of its worst actors. Whether the 2013 programme lived up to that ambition is a question my retrospectives keep coming back to.

Outside of this work I write occasional history pieces for a British quarterly and I’ve been threatening to finish a book about British magazine culture in the nineteen-nineties for about a decade.