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Gay ethical dilemma: You are a Catholic Conservative gay man – a commentator and writer for mainstream America. You have written a book called Virtually Normal, which is a frustratingly anaemic book advocating a very basic view of whatever the equivalent of liberal feminism is for gay people. You argue a lot about how the ‘Gay Plague’ is essentially over – how HIV and AIDS is not an epidemic. You also write a lot about how gay people should stop indulging in the hedonism of sex, dancing and drugs that the rest of the world believes it to consist of.

Now someone else disagrees with your politics – but more specifically believes that you are damaging the lives of gay man by denying a disease that directly affects them. That person has found out that you advertise for sex on the internet – that you advertise specifically for unprotected group sex. And they decide to tell the world. Which one of you is the bigger hypocrite? [Salon 1 | Salon 2]

I really desperately need to get my mitts on Conquest of … and Escape to … The Planet of the Apes. Into London with you Tom. You can do it.

Today on Barbelith: Situationism in a nutshell: “The SI are known to most people through their supposed links to punk rock. However these links are at best tenuous and at worst spurious.”

There have been a lot of responses to Ralph’s article on Barbelith on “Evil Gap Clones”. There’s an interesting piece on Shrapnel.org which includes some strange lines: “If we worried so much about child labor and animal slaughter, we would be seriously depressed and warped people.” and there are no less than three related threads on the Underground: On why shopping in GAP is a good thing for sweatshop workers, On a possible answer to global homogeneity, Gap Clones.

As part of an experiment in ‘Googling’ people – ie. finding out information about individuals by simply putting their name into search engines and intelligently filtering the results, I decided today to take a random name “Leon Fleury” and create a profile of him. Unfortunately, it turns out that there’s rather too much (or too disturbing) information about the young man in question on the net, and so I’m going to restrict myself to mentioning that he played one half of a cow in “Jack and the Beanstalk” and that he graduated from the drama department of Exeter University.

Today on Barbelith: ‘The Prisoner’ in a nutshell”: “Episode after episode showed Number Six fighting every attempt to win his secrets and gaining no ground in the battle with his warders.”

A long conversation with a random punter via AIM leads to the statement that I look just like Dave Matthews of the Dave Matthews band. I go to the net at once. Do I really look like this man?

Weird evening / Weird party: After which I felt even more as if everyone in the entire world thinks I’m pointless and cruel. Weirdest part of the evening was weighing myself while trying to avoid conversation by hiding in the loo (where I was rung by someone I’d recently wronged ironically enough) and discovering that I’ve lost 12 pounds over the last couple of months – purely from not feeling like eating and being stressed. I’m now a trim eleven stone of firm muscle. Go figure. If it wasn’t for the ever-growing beard, I’d no doubt be having no end of sexual antics.

A strange place to find a link? Infonie.fr posts about Barbelith (translated wonderfully by babelfish: “The libertarian site of a revolutionary series of Grant Morisson: The Invisible Ones. Or how the data base can become political. Cliquez here for accËder with the site.” I particularly like ‘cliquez here’. See the link in context (if it hasn’t been removed already).

ANNOUNCEMENT:

Today, at 1pm GMT, the Barbelith Webzine was launched, after many many months of procrastination.

Destroy the evil GAP clones
“Thus began the GAP’s supervillianous campaign to end diversity and herd the world’s population into marketing categories.”
by Ralph McGinnis

Morrison’s Debt to Moorcock
Gideon Stargrave, King Mob’s possibly imaginary alter ego in The Invisibles, is based firmly upon Michael Moorcock’s ’60s cult hero, Jerry Cornelius.
by Lee Ravitz

Aum Shinri Kyo
“Clad in vibrant pink robes, Asahara preached about the coming apocalypse and how to survive it.”
by Grant Balfour

Chaos Magick in a Nutshell
“Life may be magickal in a nihilistic, incomprehensible way but it is still magickal.”

Queer Theory in a nutshell
“Queer theorists agree that sexuality is a historically specific construct and that our society oppresses those outside its categories of sexual normalcy”
by Jackie Susann

We are now looking for more features and opinion pieces – and for anyone who notices something horribly wrong to let me know (mail me)