A quiz show with good questions and a chic design, raunchy shirts and a rubber tail: a prize-worthy awards ceremony took place in Berlin on Friday. Federal Health Minister Philipp Rösler was also in attendance
At first glance, everything looked like a normal awards ceremony: there were celebrities, an award made of acrylic glass with a strange name ("Sirius"), lots of laudators, tense nominees and great emotion when the winners were announced.
And yet things were different here than at, say, the German Film Awards. The celebrity was the Federal Minister of Health Philipp Rösler (FDP), one of the laudators was Dirk Sander, the gay representative of the German AIDS organisation Deutsche AIDS-Hilfe, and some of the enthusiastic award winners were schoolchildren with pithy words such as "Ficken?" or "Gang Bang?" on their T-shirts. In one of the introductory films, the audience could see a condom being pulled over a very realistically designed stiff rubber cock, which shortly afterwards disappeared into a rubber anus. The simulation went even further, but we won't go into all the details here.
No pop star performed in the show block, but rather the Aids-Hilfe Bonn with a "multimedia prevention quiz". One of the categories: "When the front itches and the back bites". Questions were asked such as "What is chlamydia?" (correct answer: sexually transmitted bacteria) or "Which German tennis pro was caught wearing a condom at the airport in a commercial by the Federal Centre for Health Education (BZgA)?" (Correct answer: Boris Becker)
And here is the solution to all the puzzles that have arisen: the prizes for the national AIDS prevention competition organised by the BZgA and the Federal Ministry of Health, with financial support from the Association of Private Health Insurance Companies, were awarded yesterday at the Kalkscheune in Berlin. Motto: "See new ways, take new paths". The six winners each received 7,500 euros, while two further projects received recognition prizes, each worth 2,500 euros.
The film came from the award-winning project "Have a LOOK(S)" from Cologne, which produces educational material for young hustlers who have little knowledge of reading and German. The highlight: the video and audio files also run on mobile phones!
The enthusiastic boys and girls with the cheeky T-shirts were part of the "School newspaper editors as peer prevention actors" project organised by the Berlin AIDS service organisation. The young people do what the project's unwieldy name does not suggest: educating young people in their own language about HIV and other sexually transmitted infections in clear terms. (The back of the T-shirts read: "But safe!")
The Bonn quiz, which was designed primarily for use in the gay scene, was also among the winners. The ICH WEISS WAS ICH TU (IWWIT) team was particularly pleased about this: "We are a partner of the project!
The Bonn-based company developed it and docked onto IWWIT because the quiz and campaign are a perfect match: Both emphasise good questions, clever answers and chic design. IWWIT set the tone for the quiz projection on the screens at the awards ceremony, while Oliver Schubert from Aids-Hilfe Bonn skilfully played the showmaster ("What use is Boris Becker's condom at the airport if he needed it in the broom cupboard?").
"We're delighted with the prize," said Oliver after the award ceremony. "We will finally use the money to buy really good buzzers for the game. They can then be borrowed from IWWIT so that our quiz can be used in as many cities as possible."
Also "honoured": "DARKANGEL - safer clubbing" from the Berlin project manCheck. DARKANGEL gives gay men in the nightlife scene the opportunity to make a "commitment" to safer sex - for example with a sticker that glows in the dark with the words "safer tonight".
In his laudatory speech, DAH gay rights officer and jury member Dirk Sander particularly praised the fact that DARKANGEL helps to publicise how many gay men prefer safer sex: "We know that the protective behaviour of gay and bisexual men - contrary to the repeated insinuations of 'increasing carelessness' - remains high". It is important to "emphasise and reinforce this".
To help people protect themselves, we need, as Minister Rösler said in his lively and knowledgeable speech, "new ideas and approaches all the time". There were a lot of damn good ones on show in Berlin yesterday!
(Holger Wicht)
All nominated and award-winning projects on the competition homepage
