(It was one of the completely awesome ideas which got pissed on from a great height by the luminaries of our industry. I shall return to it one ...]]> A million years ago, when the Internet was young, I was researching supertankers for a project I had in mind for a film.

(It was one of the completely awesome ideas which got pissed on from a great height by the luminaries of our industry. I shall return to it one day…)

But one of the things I ran across – aside from taking on board a great deal of information about Dry Weight Tonnage and single- versus double- or even triple-hulled ships (if you are a shipping concern and you still use single-hull, you basically suck) – was a few pages of a journal written by a gay man about the gay supertanker subculture during the 80s.

Yeah, that one kinda caught me off-guard, too. Apparently, though, there was a thriving and weird and wonderful scene on the long-haul cargo ships, picking crews for the sexy and gossiping and what-all else. The whole thing got absolutely decimated by the HIV/AIDS epidemic and faded away (I suspect also as the demographics of crew nationality and culture changed, though that may be effect rather than cause). But the journal was staggeringly moving, sad, and funny, and I saved it to my desktop for later reading.

In 1993.

So funnily enough, I’ve been through one or two computers since then, and that folder is gone the way of all carbon. I just Googled the topic rather randomly, and you will imagine that I got some very odd results and none of them relevant. But I always wanted to read the rest of the thing and I hoped the author would put up more, or that someone would publish him.

So if anyone knows anything more, or if the thing ever got printed, or whatever… you will get many, many Harkaway Points. I will send you wine or something…*

[Harkaway Points awarded on a capricious basis, wine is a cypher for possible physical rewards, entirely entirely at my discretion, only first successful applicant judged entirely by me on whatever criteria I care to use will be given random plonk or whatever, this is not a competition. I say all this because I have, in the past, been rash enough to involve myself with serious compers on an ad hoc basis and was... amazed... by the response.]