I saw a pornographic video involving children recently. I can't go into great detail here; the tape is now with the police. I've never before "shopped" someone, and it goes against my nature to do so, but in the increasingly amoral world that gay men have created, especially with new technology, the twenty-first century seems to be becoming one in which we each have to make our own moral stance and stick by it, and pay the price for it, if necessary.

The "wild frontier" in cyberspace is the shame barrier; it has been blasted to pieces in the name of liberation, of progress, of commerce. The price I may pay now is getting involved more than I want to, associating myself with an issue that is so highly charged that rationality is very hard to maintain. And the police are not known for their sensitivity; the difference between pederast and homosexual is not one that is obvious to the average detective, I imagine.
But what is disturbing to me is that gay men who are only focused on erotic pleasure may not be clear on the difference themselves.
We, as gay men, seem happy to allow the borders of the old morality to be airbrushed away, in the name of tolerance and sexual diversity; acceptance of all sorts of sexual activities is the norm. Now don't get me wrong, I'm glad that whatever I get up to with other men is not subject to outside scrutiny or the law. I am my own worst moralist when it comes to sex; no one else judges me as harshly as I do, and I have yet to free myself of a whole pile of guilt on sexual matters.
But, when it comes down to it, it's my choice whether I choose kindness and warmth or cold perversity and if it's the latter, it's always with consent and always with a sense of trust in the man, which has, I realise, yet to be abused. My biggest mistake has been perhaps to mix the two up; but that's another story.
Children can give no such consent, for they may not know how much their trust is being abused at the time, until later on, when they try to establish a healthy identity as a grown man or woman, and attempt loving relationships. It's a brave few survivors of abuse who can emerge into adulthood as warm and kind people, not seeing themselves as victims, unlearning the lesson that love, sex and trust involves humiliation and manipulation and feeling like an object, a plaything, instead of a whole, loving, confident person with a will and a soul. (But that takes bravery for most sensitive people, regardless.)
The tape was appallingly easily available, and was being offered via a medium that was not overtly pervy; it was just gay men looking to meet or chat with each other. The pornographer was a mild-mannered, easy-going man. I took a great risk in getting involved; my (perhaps naive) intention, when I realised what was on offer, was to do an undercover job to discover just how easy it was to obtain, and, if it was really child pornography, to do something about it, but I didn't know what.
In the time it was in my flat, for about 12 hours overnight, even with the covering letter to the police written, and the envelope addressed to them, waiting for a stamp, I was aware of how my career and reputation were extremely vulnerable to destruction, with a knock on the door and a search warrant.
Even writing about this now is sailing close to the wind; but it's too near to my heart to ignore, and it cuts right to the core of what my beliefs are. I did consider destroying the tape and forgetting about it; but the faces of the children involved would not let me.
Yes, I watched it. I am not sorry I watched it. Men can do the most appalling things in the name of pleasure; the tape was proof of how men can switch off feelings completely, the most damning indictment of men I have ever witnessed since I visited Dachau as a teenager. But this tape was more chilling, in a way, in that the children had to look as if they were having fun; it was in the close-ups on the young faces, waiting to be told how to act, being trained how to please, that the full horror became apparent to me.
This new world, this twenty-first century nation that we inhabit, is not Ireland or the United Kingdom; it is global and anarchic, and not subject to any enforceable laws. While debate goes on about how constitutional democracy is under threat, with fewer and fewer people bothering to vote, the real challenge is far more serious; that voting for a parliamentarian is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Every type of abuse that governments try to control is happening on the Net now, or in the burgeoning unmonitored world of telephone communications.
Terrorists, the most anti-democratic of individuals, gain comfort in finding like-minded people all over the world, and obtain their information on how to make bombs from the Internet, as baby-faced David Copeland did when he was planning to murder gay men in Soho and black people in Brixton and Asians in Brick Lane last year. He saw no shame in what he was doing; he was as insulated from morality as the men I saw in the videotape with those children.
There have always been immoral people; the danger is now that the Internet brings them together and they develop a discourse, a framework that justifies their thoughts and actions, without any challenge or debate, or thought for the emotional impact of their actions.
Morality is unfashionable now, especially among gay men, and most especially when we are looking for sex. The old moral order was nation-bound, formal, institutional, religious, shame-based; twenty-first century morals have no external authority to support or enforce them, in cyberspace, which is our new space, the matrix which is increasingly becoming the world's nervous system.
We can only guide ourselves; and I, for one, am woefully unprepared for the world in which I find myself, for I still harbour sentimental illusions about how the world, my world, should have been.
The answer lies, perhaps, in education; a way of encouraging children to educate themselves about how to live in the new millennium, where anarchy reigns, and to teach them ethical responsibility, developing their own conscience, and to make fundamental decisions for themselves, aware of the implications.
All old notions that the world is a safe and comforting place will have to be discarded; we may fondly wish it were, but it does children a grave disservice to be ignorant of the world's shadow. I do not seek to remove innocence, but to protect it. The computer in the bedroom or schoolroom is a portal to every possible seduction there exists on this planet, more threatening to innocence and love than any dirty old man in a raincoat hanging around a park late at night.
We can keep children in at night; but the devil is within, more than he has ever been before.