I am Christopher Aqurette, an independent writer and academic student of religion and philosophy at Lund University. My areas of interest include social theory and applied ethics. I live in Malmö, a port in southern Sweden, situated on the Öresund opposite Copenhagen.
I was born in May 1972 at Höllviken, a coastal community situated 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, the 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 gay community Qruiser.com is by far the largest in Scandinavia. I had little to do with this immense success, but I am proud of the company I fathered.
In April 1999, I left Sweden again and took up residence in the Netherlands. I studied Dutch at the University of Amsterdam for one semester and began soon after to work with customer relations for Hewlett-Packard. It was meant to be a brief detour from my career as a writer and freelancer, but I continued to work with computers for nearly four years.
I moved back to Sweden in the summer of 2003 partly because I felt a longing for a sufficient education and sought a future in academia. I decided to aim for a master’s degree in either philosophy or religion, which is why I enrolled at the university in 2005.
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 a majority of the seats in Parliament and could 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 juryman of the Malmö City Court, and a member of the local tax committee.
Aqurette.com has been my online home since I bought the domain name in April 2000. The first two years it contained only some notes, articles, and fragmentary diary entries. In 2002, I began a half-hearted experiment with blogging. Unfortunately, I lost nearly all material in a server crash in the spring of 2005. That experience made me aware of how important the blog had become to me, so I invested money in proper web hosting. Today, Aqurette.com is an online journal of politics and culture from a libertarian and humanistic perspective. The journal is mine alone and so reflects my interests and temperament. However, on occasion, I do invite other writers to contribute to it.
In June 2007, my husband and I registered as civil partners.