Wednesday November 11th

I spent last Friday evening at Popstarz, a club that takes place weekly at the Leisure Lounge, a huge hangar like underground space in Central London. An expensive night out, but there are three main rooms, an indie one, a trashy disco one, and a quiet “chill out” one. In other words, you can actually have a conversation there without shouting directly into someone’s ear, dance if you want to dance, or go into another room if you want to dance, but they’re playing something you don’t like.

Like Club V, it’s another gay indie night (though you can dance all night to 70s and 80s disco if you want), but one which feels it necessary to display in large yellow banners across the entrance “PLEASE RESPECT THAT THIS IS A GAY CLUB”. As if they’ve had Trouble there previously. Not nice.

I was there to meet Kate, a gloriously androgynous creature, brimming with style and immaculate dress sense. She used to be called Richard. She looks rather like the Jack Fairy character in “Velvet Goldmine”, though I suspect she’s tired of having this brought up. She tells me about the difficulties of getting a job, looking the way she does. There’s only one thing you can do if you find yourself born into an unusual frame, whether it be hermaphrodite, androgyne, transsexual, transvestite, or just odd to the conformist’s eye, and that’s get paid for being yourself. The Profession of Being, to which we really must all aspire before it’s too late.

Meanwhile, Agnes Apocalypse is in the air: reports of the armed forces being put on standby for New Year’s Eve, 1999, in case the Millennium Bug really does create all the unthinkable events the doomsayers forecast: massive failure of electricity, hospital life supports fail, traffic lights thrown haywire, missiles being launched. And then there’s the Global Economy Crisis. And Honduras lies in ruins. And today Mr Hussein is at it. Again. He’s a one, isn’t he?

Turn the pages: pop stars dropping babies like crazy, while Pro Lifers take the lives of doctors at US abortion clinics, and Jack Straw goes on about The Family. As if the solution to all this forthcoming death and misery is to reproduce yourself as quickly as possible. Babies are sacred, emotive devices used by tabloids to gain favour, to get the populace on Their Side. “Lesbian Moms: A Mockery of Motherhood”. “Mom Dies to Save Unborn Child”. “I Won’t Abort My Baby Because I’m Vegetarian, Says Teen Rape Victim.” As if infants or even foetuses have more use, more worth than fully grown human beings with proven qualifications, resources, training, experience, character, personality. “So what are you saying, that once someone reaches a certain age, they’re instantly off your Wish List?” (Bill Hicks).

Characters like Bridget Jones and Ally McBeal brainwash women into thinking they are slaves to their wombs, that the “biological clock” is ticking, that they’re not Proper Women without children. Childless women are branded, the inference goes, as “selfish”. As if blocking already crowded streets with pushchairs, and breaking the quiet of cafes with the sounds of howling and crying is somehow a far more philanthropic move. Yes, I know that says rather more about me than society, but you get the general idea.

People in the public eye, whether celebrities or subjects of Human Interest features, rattle tirelessly and tediously on about their new offspring being The Most Important Thing In My Life, when really such publicity hounds are talking about themselves. Be honest, kids are great copy, great press angles, great excuses for a spread in “Hello” magazine, great cries for attention, great boosts to the ego in convincing yourself that you’re a Good Person, and nothing else whatsoever. Babies are not beautiful. They all look like Winston Churchill chewing a particularly rancid dead wasp. They add a large side order of Stress to an already stress saturated existence. And I haven’t even mentioned the noise, the smells, the piss, shit, vomit and jam.

“Ah, but Dickon, you’re a MAN. It’s so easy for you to rant on like you do. You don’t know what it’s like to have a WOMB…” And this is it, of course I don’t. Which is why I love the respect Germaine Greer gets when she suggests sterilizing people after freezing their eggs and sperm in banks, only letting them have children when they can prove to the State that they’d make good parents. Exactly like people applying for adoption have to. Ms Greer goes on: you need a license for a dog, why not a permit for a child?

If I said things like that, I’d get into terrible trouble, so I tend to hold the coats and leave it to the feminists, stifling a “right on!” cheer under my cowardly Liberal breath.

But until I come back in my next life as a woman (and boy, you’ll have trouble shutting me up then…), of course I realise it’s as unfair for a man to persuade women not to have children as it is for Pro Lifers trying to stop women seeking abortions. Of course I’m Pro Choice when it comes down to it. It’s just that I can’t pretend this tabloid sponsored relentless rush to breed like there’s no tomorrow doesn’t depress and obsess me more than ever.

Such sprog-worshipping hysteria only really fuels the Pro Life way of thinking: Babies Uber Alles. It’s also a great way of Keeping Women In Their Place, something that people of both sexes still think is actually A Good Thing even in 1998. It’s one of the reasons that throughout the history of civilisation female artists, philosophers, scientists, musicians and so on are somewhat dwarfed in number by their male counterparts, that the Woman’s Section in bookshops is a Minority Section, when 51% of the world are female. It’s the reason for global patriarchy. Female emancipation starts from Day One with both A Room of One’s Own and the right to abortion. But apparently it’s not that obvious to some people, male and female. Actually, I wish it was just “some” people.

You’ll realise I’m not even daring to touch on the subject of religion here. That’s an even more fruitless rant. It’s glib and inappropriate to get into the subject of Faith if you’re an unbaptised heathen like myself that only has faith in the immediately obvious and apparent.

So I’m speaking only of what IS the immediately obvious and apparent to me. Of course abortion is no picnic. But compare it to spending the rest of your life compromised, living a lie, trying to convince yourself daily that you’re a Good Parent, that homelessness and poverty and Just Having A Really Rubbish Life don’t exist, and neither does the world population problem, baiting War and Nature to do some serious levelling even more. It pretty much comes out as the lesser of two evils in my book.

If this misguided trend of headlong reproduction for its own sake isn’t voluntarily, sensitively challenged on our own terms, we may find it gets curbed externally and brutally in the near, dark future. Something’s got to give. And that’s what really keeps me awake at night.

Oh, that and the thought of Oxford Street on a Saturday afternoon. Yes, yes, all right.

Pro Lifers really astound me though. Going so out of their way (snipers?!) to stop people who have already made a pretty difficult decision, as if termination was just some kind of whim, one of someone’s funny little ways. All that campaigning throughout the century by feminists to get abortions available free to those that need them, and it means nothing to these self-righteous idiots. It’s not enough that in Catholic dominated countries, Ireland included, where abortion is illegal, dead babies are regularly found in litter bins, in rivers, in lay-bys. Pro Lifers don’t seem to make the connection at all.

It’s what keeps me going, you know. I can always set a Bad Example. “Don’t have children… they might turn out like Dickon Edwards”.

Or worse, they might grow up to be a Pro Life campaigner.