Join us as we thrust into house music...

Week of April 25 04

This week, finally, the issue of Genre with my long-awaited article on crystal meth and Peter Staley's "Buy Crystal.." ads comes out. It's the May issue and on Tuesday I'm told it will appear on the Genre website. (Note from the future: you can read a scan of the article here.)

Thanks to everyone who sent me their thoughts. Although I couldn't quote everyone for the article, I think I did a pretty good job of expressing our point of view, and I hope that Genre readers appreciate it. Everyone who wrote me agreed that crystal is a problem; not even one person thought the ads were effective. Most were downright hostile towards the ads.

I feel the piece I wrote is balanced, but even still, the Genre editor said that the emails they've already received in response to it would qualify as "hate mail". I suppose this is to be expected. In general, the self-identified gay "community" is only into "diversity" in terms of identity, i.e. ethnicity, race, age, sex, etc. The only kind of diversity that really counts, diversity of thought, is often anathema to these people.

I realize that Peter Staley is a hero to many, especially anyone from the 80s ACT-UP era. But good deeds don’t exempt anyone from criticism. Even Mother Teresa had faults. (Actually she had a lot of them. A fetishist of pain, she allowed herself the greatest medical care in Western hospitals while leaving her patrons to die in the dirty, backwards hospital she kept in Calcutta, and not for lack of funds or donations.)

Staley has said that he placed the ads into order to provoke discussion. Assuming that by discussion he did not really mean the flat roar of agreement, it is discussion in which I have engaged.

To be clear, I don't care that Staley is airing gay (semen stained?) "dirty laundry" in public with his ads. I firmly believe that anyone should be able to say whatever they want, wherever they want. But Staley's ads are dangerous because they provoke the wrong people; drugtaking hedonists ignore the ads, or even mock them; on the other hand, the mainstream press, police and "public health" authorities have been provoked plenty, as detailed in my article. The effect of that kind of attention is counterproductive. "Public health" authorities, no matter what their press releases say, are ultimately an arm of law enforcement, not public health.

In fact, “public health” officials often work against the very thing they’re allegedly for. In the early 20^th Century, brothels were identified as centers for vice, drug use and venereal disease. Huge police crackdowns ensued in the name of “public health” but vice, drug use and venereal disease spread like wildfire.

Since before Stonewall, “public health” has been used as an excuse for the surveillance and punishment of gay men. In the early 80s, bathhouses were closed for “public health” but gay men didn’t stop fucking because the bathhouses closed. Instead they just moved to the piers or the Ramble, where safe sex information and condoms weren’t available at all. If anything closing sex clubs hurt public health because the bathhouse was the one place where safe sex information and condoms could be distributed to the people who needed it most.

The first HIV test, introduced in 1985, and the proliferation of safe sex information - education - are what slowed the spread of AIDS, not any "public health" crackdowns.

Staley hasn’t called for the closing of any clubs or sex clubs, and he's against the criminalization of the crystal problem, but he joins a prestigious list of gay activists from the past who’ve courted mainstream media attention and “public health” authorities in order to beat down on a culture that they seemingly despise.

In 1995, gay activist Jonathan Capeheart sparked controversy by writing about public sex at gyms and gay sex clubs for the Daily News. Though he said that he saw condoms and safe sex information everywhere in one club, and "did not see any unsafe sex”, he went on to conclude that “the club is, in fact, the latest and most extreme representation of a tragic phenomenon: a resurgence in unsafe sex among gays." Within months of Capeheart’s Daily News sponsored crusade, city inspectors had shut down three clubs, conveniently ignoring any of the non-gay identified sex joints that Capeheart documented, like the YMCA.

In the same year, activist Gabriel Rotello visited Zone DK and wrote of the experience in New York Newsday, “..when it comes to challenging the morality of some gay men, especially the culture of promiscuity that some see as the birthright of gay life, suddenly the rhetoric of crisis drops away, replaced by the weak tea of ‘education’ and ‘outreach’ and ‘condom availability’…”

Is that the real issue for these activists? Not unsafe sex, or drug use, but rather a culture of promiscuity and decadence that they object to and therefore, want destroyed? Whether or not promiscuous sex can be safe or drugs can be done safely is irrelevant to them. Worse, they ignore the historical reality which is that fucking and drug use have never been legislated or punished away; and that heavy-handed tactics often just make things worse.

Michelangelo Signorile is one of the best known meddling gay liberals. In 1997 Signorile wrote an editorial for the NY Times about GMHC’s fundraising event, the Morning Party, and the year next he released a pompously titled anti-circuit party book called Life Outside: The Signorile Report on Gay Men. Due to pressure from Signorile and others like him, GMHC cancelled the Morning Party, losing $500,000 a year in funds and pushing queens to other parties that had nothing to do with charity and which lacked any of the safe sex or drug information that GMHC provided at theirs.

Moralists like Signorile, Rotello and Capeheart often hide behind the curtain of AIDS fear-mongering to mask their real identities as sex police. But Signorile's real purpose came to the forefront in 2001 when he outed gay conservative Andrew Sullivan’s raunchy bareback sexcapades in the name of journalism; surely a low, indefensible mark in the history of public debate. Signorile’s attempts at painting his smear as journalistic heroism ought to scare anyone into avoiding him at parties (or in sex chat rooms).

Apparently Signorile believes not just that the government should regulate our sex lives but that he should too. Well, here’s the Diabolique report on Signorile: he stinks.

Larry Kramer is the granddaddy of all nanny nelly liberal activists. He built his career on a disdain for gay club culture and doesn’t bother to hide it. In 1997 he told the NY Times “The whole culture has to change. We have created a culture that in fact murdered us, killed us.”

In fact, Mr. Kramer, gay culture doesn’t kill people. Getting fucked in the ass without a condom, on the other hand, might get you HIV or AIDS but even that doesn’t kill people as it once did. It’s as simple as that, and no one wants an angry gay hornet buzzing over their shoulder when they're getting fucked in the ass. No matter how good the intention, Kramer's message is lost in an angry miasma.

Prodded by activists like Kramer and the rest, in 1995 alone then Mayor Giuliani spent an estimated $400,000 sending "public health" inspectors to gay sex venues all over the city, totaling in over 1400 hours of surveillance and notetaking which resulted in the closings of numerous theaters and clubs - all gay identified - and mostly due to blowjobs. Horror! At the same time, he eliminated the city Office of Lesbian & Gay Concerns and tried to destroy the Department of AIDS Services. Is that a fair trade, or would that precious time and money have been better spent providing safer sex guidelines and education to gays, or in keeping the Office of Lesbian & Gay Concerns alive?

Public health officials make no distinction between safe and unsafe sex. The licking of a scrotum (which falls under section 24.2.2 of the city health code) is just as illegal as bareback ass fucking. And as we saw in the 90s, public health officials and the police hold a scorched earth policy when it comes to drugs. Entire clubs can be shut down and padlocked if even only one patron is caught with a pill or a bag, even if the club’s owners have nothing to do with it, and even if they’ve tried everything in their power to curtail drug abuse.

The government can't even keep drugs out of prisons or schools, and yet clubowners and party promoters are responsible for making sure that no one on their premises has or uses any drugs. This is the dangerous environment Staley threw his muckraking ads into.

Unelected, self-righteous, egotistical, "community"-deified gay spokespeople seem to have no problem conspiring with the mainstream media and law enforcement to harass or shut down gay clubs “for our own good”. Limiting our pleasures, in order to ostensibly save us, is gay activism at its condescending worst.

Andrew Sullivan has said that he’s conservative in politics so that he can be radical in every other human activity. This makes sense to me. The liberal impulse to do good often becomes indistinguishable from fascism. “Politically correct” speech censorship is one example of this. Those liberal gay activists who try to shape gay culture with their iron gloves are another.

At a "Buy Crystal, get HIV Free"-inspired forum on crystal and HIV held earlier this year, I had to suppress my amusement when moderator Harvery Fierstein referred to Peter Staley as "a shining example of how we can take power over the world."

Rotello, Capeheart, Signorile, Kramer, Fierstein, Staley. Is the gay "community" out of control? Or just out of their control?

Former drug addicts who issue hysterical warnings about drugs are ripe for satire. The most extreme example of this is Florrie Fisher, the 50 year old ex-con junkie whore who used to "cook her breakfast up in a teaspoon"; the user, boozer, loser, anti-drug loony-toon who Amy Sedaris used to create Jerri Blank in the tv show Stangers With Candy.

'The Trip Back' with Florrie Fisher

Staley hasn't gone that far, of course, but the mock-joyous "Buy Crystal, Get HIV Free!" ads come very close.

The fact is that however horrible a drug tina is, there are many users who do not use it for bareback sex orgies and who do not have a problem with it. I don't condone their behavior and certainly, many of the people who think they can handle it aren’t going to end up in a good place, but ads like Staley’s ignore the complexity of drug use and therefore get dismissed by anyone my age or younger who has a brain instead of a fried egg, and that's all of us, despite what Staley's 80's era equivalents might have said.

We all grew up in culture of doom. Don’t smoke pot! Don’t do drugs! Don’t suck dick! Don’t swallow cum! Don’t fuck ass! Oh, but use a condom! Always use a condom.

As a result, the wild abandon of crystal is a potent poison. We can’t help but disregard hysterical warnings about it, especially since many of the early anti-drug, anti-sex warnings we processed were so outrageously exaggerated. Is it any wonder then that the "Buy Crystal, get HIV Free!” mantra has no effect whatsoever - except to make us roll our eyes and laugh?

As my 24yo partygirl friend Janine said upon seeing the posters, “Who would honestly look at the picture of a guy with a disco ball for a head and regardless of what it says, think, I'm going to stay away from that!"

Why don't any of these activists actually try education?? Imagine that?? To this day I've never been handed a flyer or pamphlet about the real dangers of crystal meth or other drugs at any gay party or club. (On the other hand, this has happened to me at non-gay parties, or raves.) Isn't education at least worth a try before calling in the government with ridiculous, hyperbolic ads, ads whose faux-flyer design seem to implicate all of club culture?

A crackdown from police or "public health" authorities will only do for crystal what the same did for ecstasy in the 90s: shut down our clubs, get a lot of non-violent drug users arrested, and strengthen everyone else’s resolve to keep it up, or even turn it up a notch in defiance.

If Staley’s posters were intended as wake up call to the gay community, let my words stand as a wake up call to gay activists.

It is the job of the gay activist not to condemn, but to enlighten. Not to tear down, but to uplift. Not to alienate, but to educate. It is true that there ought to be more to gay culture than circuit parties and tweakers dicking each other in back rooms. But the best way to achieve this is through education and example; not hysterical anti-drug, anti-sex propaganda and further government crackdowns in our already embattled lives.

Educate yourself. I respect you enough to know that you can make your own decisions.

Resources I recommend:
Dancesafe - simple, reliable factsheets for crystal and other drugs 
Erowid Experience Vaults - a collection of activist-free user experiences
Tweaker.org - info for guys who use crystal primarily for sex
Lycaeum - the chemistry of meth

A resource I wouldn't recommend:
Life or Meth: This site is really over-the-top, so much so that it almost seems like the guy writing it is on speed himself. Prone to wild exaggeration and questionable statistics, he not only holds club owners legally responsible but also DJs (!!) for the spread of crystal in gay clubs. Ugh.

until next week, remember..
when you dance, we are a part of what you feel.

-