Introduction
I am Christopher Aqurette, a Swedish writer and student of philosophy at Lund University. My areas of interest include social theory and ethics. I live with my husband in Malmö, a port in southern Sweden, situated on the Strait of Öresund opposite Copenhagen.
Aqurette.com is my personal journal and so reflects my interests and temperament. It offers commentary on politics and culture from a libertarian perspective. Topics run the gamut from current affairs to religious ethics, with a particular commitment to gay rights and civil liberties.
In the early days of this journal, most entries posted were written in Swedish. This has changed over time, and English is now the main language. The reason for this changeover is twofold: firstly, I want to retain my bilingualism and better my written English; and secondly, I want to partake in the global discourse on the issues that interest me.
Autobiography
I was born in May 1972 at Höllviken, a coastal community at the southernmost tip of Sweden and the Scandinavian Peninsula. I spent my boyhood in Höganäs, a small town about 100 kilometres (62 miles) north of my birthplace, where I attended the local municipal school until I moved further north for a final year at a private boarding school at Lake Vättern. After I had completed my nine-year compulsory education in Sweden, I headed for England and became a sixth-form student in East Sussex. Due to a combination of school fatigue and teenage restlessness, I did not take my advanced-level qualifications until after I had left the college.
As a young adult, I returned to Sweden and settled in Stockholm where I began to work as a freelance writer. In 1994, I briefly held an internship at Reporter, which was Sweden’s most important gay periodical at the time. The publication was folded in July the following year, which created a gap in the market for a quality paper targeting the gay audience. With the launch of QX in September 1995, I became a founding co-owner of the leading gay and lesbian publication in Scandinavia. A decade later, this business venture had grown to be one of Europe’s most successful publishers of its kind. With more than 100,000 registered members, QX’s online community is one of Sweden’s largest. I had little to do with this immense success, but I am proud of the company I fathered.
In April 1999, I left Sweden for the Netherlands, where I studied Dutch for one term before being hired by a large computer company. It was only meant to be a brief detour from my career as a writer and freelancer, but I stayed on for nearly four years.
I moved back to Sweden in the summer of 2003. I wanted a sufficient education and decided to aim for a degree in either philosophy or religion.
In 2004, I became a member of the Moderate Party. It is the second largest of seven politic parties in the Swedish Parliament and organizes conservatives, moderates, and libertarians. In the general election on 17 September 2006, the party and its three allies gained enough parliamentary seats to form government after twelve years in opposition. Sadly, the party did not do as well at local level; the City of Malmö is still governed by a socialist majority. For me, the election meant that I became an elected representative for the first time. I am now a district councillor, a lay juror of the Malmö City Court, and a member of the local tax committee.