Gay Party Tour: More Harm Than Good?

SAN FRANCISCO —  In a cavernous San Francisco exhibition hall, a pulsating sea of mostly white, mostly buff, mostly shirtless men packs the dance floor, swaying to percussive music so loud it makes cars outside vibrate and conversation inside a challenge.

Navigating the crowd without brushing against bare flesh is close to impossible among partyers in black leather, skin-tight jeans and even a few in chaps that show their buttocks.

And fashion statements that would be daring anywhere else--one man wearing only a leash--cause barely a stir.

In the dark beyond the strobe-raked dance floor, men mingle or sit at candle-lit tables, nursing drinks, eyeing the action and each other. A steady stream of couples heads hand in hand for the restrooms, where a sign obliquely reminds them to “Please Party Responsibly.”

This is Magnitude, highlight of the latest stop on the Circuit, a series of weekend-long events built around all-night dance parties for gay men. Held year-round across North America and Europe, these are parties where virtually anything goes and freewheeling sex is de rigueur.

Started as informally organized fund-raisers for AIDS patients 15 years ago, the parties operated quietly on the fringes of the gay community. But in the past two years, their number and size have exploded. Suddenly, the Circuit is at the center of a broad debate within the gay community about AIDS, gay culture and sexuality.

The debate has taken on new urgency in recent months, with medical studies showing an increase in the incidence of gonorrhea among gay men--a marker of spreading unsafe sexual practices that could trigger a resurgence of HIV infections. At the same time, a UC San Francisco study has undermined hopes that AIDS soon will be reduced to a chronic, manageable disease. The study indicated that the new protease inhibitors that have prolonged the lives of patients with HIV and AIDS have a failure rate as high as 53% when not taken faithfully.

On one side of the argument within the gay community are many AIDS organizations that benefit from or sponsor Circuit parties, and the men who attend them. They view the Circuit as a feel-good, even spiritual, experience for a traumatized community.

“A Circuit party gives us the chance to escape the pressures of our day-to-day existence and to enter the altered world where man-to-man sex is not only accepted, but is celebrated,” says the World Wide Web site of Circuit Noize, a quarterly magazine that critiques and publicizes the parties.

“When the Circuit comes to town, that town becomes an instant gay ghetto full of hot men who are behaving as queer as they care to be,” says the magazine.

On the opposite side are other AIDS activists, gay men and epidemiologists who fear that the parties are symptomatic of a deadly new attitude that tolerates unsafe sexual practices and illegal drug use.

“Circuit parties are like piling up wood for a bonfire right in the center of what has been a huge, devastating forest fire that looked like it was just starting to die down,” says Dr. Judy Wasserheit, director of the sexually transmitted disease division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “If you were a virus, you couldn’t think of a more wonderful place to spread.”

*

Although those who attend Circuit parties represent a minority of the gay community, the behavior too often practiced at parties, Wasserheit and others say, is undercutting years of safer-sex education and threatening to reignite the AIDS epidemic.

“I think there is an epidemic of sexual addiction and drug addiction, and the Circuit is where those two paths cross,” says Michael Weinstein, president of the Los Angeles AIDS Healthcare Foundation, the nation’s largest health care provider for people with AIDS. He says his organization has never accepted funds from Labor Day L.A., an annual weekend-long Circuit party in Los Angeles.

Critics within and outside the gay community say it is wrong for AIDS groups to sponsor or accept money from parties that could be contributing to the problem.

“It’s tantamount to the cancer society taking money from the tobacco industry,” says Thomas Coates, director of UC San Francisco’s center for AIDS prevention.

Don Spradlin, a San Francisco psychotherapist with a gay clientele and a producer of a Circuit party called HellBall, says the upsurge in popularity of the parties is not hard to explain. He attributes it to fatigue felt by a community that has lived under the threat of the AIDS epidemic for 15 years.

Gay men in their 30s, he says, “are tired” of being told they must wear condoms, of being afraid of sexuality, of being surrounded by doom.

“It was easy to practice safer sex when everyone thought [the AIDS epidemic] would be beat in a few years,” Spradlin says. “Now people say, ‘It’s going to be around for a long, long time, so I’m just going to do what I’m going to do.’ ”

*

Most Circuit parties still donate some or all of their profits to a myriad of AIDS organizations. But some producers have turned their parties into moneymaking machines. Guests pay $25 to $125 for advance tickets that they can buy on the Internet, at shops catering to gay men in the host city, or from host organizations or individuals who buy blocks of tickets.

Once informal get-togethers, the parties are professionally produced and elaborately staged. There are more than 50 a year, drawing tens of thousands of men, most of them young white professionals with the time and money to jet across the country, across oceans, to attend.

“There are men who plan their year around the Circuit,” says David Perry, a gay publicist in San Francisco. Some party-goers can spend thousands of dollars on travel, lodging and costumes.

Circuit Noize has come up with a glossary of terms for “party boys”: “Juice Break,” for instance, is “when your steroid source gets busted a month before the hottest party of the season.” “Preheating” is “the time from ingestion [of drugs] to buzz.”

Christian Hart, a 36-year-old clinical psychologist who lives in Los Angeles, says he goes to at least a half-dozen events on the Circuit each year--in New York, Miami, New Orleans and San Francisco. He flew to San Francisco last month for Magnitude and several smaller, related parties.

“I had a great time,” Hart says. “I was with my friends and the music was good.”

Unlike Spradlin, who views the excesses of the Circuit as symptomatic of a depressed community, Hart believes that the parties--even their more outrageous aspects--represent renewed hope.

“There is this life coming back into people,” Hart says. “And these parties are a way of reconnecting and coming back out after all the years of death.”

The parties, he says, are much more than promiscuous sex, flamboyant dress and drug use.

“There is some sort of tribal sense you get, something very affirming about yourself when you’re gay and you go see 1,000 other gay guys in the same space. These are good-looking guys who take care of themselves and look healthy. It is a way of saying: We are not all dead. We’re here, we’re alive and strong,” he says.

Not everyone sees it that way.

Ben Collins, an HIV-positive activist with San Francisco’s Project Inform, an AIDS educational organization, sees the Circuit’s popularity as painful evidence of how AIDS has decimated gay culture--nearly wiping out one generation of gay men, leaving few behind to counsel or mentor the next.

Before the onset of the epidemic, Collins says, the gay community was developing a rich, avant-garde culture, much of it now lost. “Gay culture has become dull, flat, boring,” he says. “You go to a gym now and it is filled with gay men, 95% of whom are pumping up for the weekend.”

Los Angeles psychotherapist Betty Berzon, a lesbian who sees only gay and lesbian patients and has written books on single-sex relationships, says more and more of her clients are pinpointing the Circuit as a source of trouble.

“Men are coming to me because they want to get off the Circuit,” Berzon says.

Her clients tell stories of using Ecstasy or crystal methamphetamine to help them stay awake for days at a time, to get “up” for the parties, Berzon says. They come down with the help of a tranquilizer called K or Special K, or more recently, GHB, the so-called date-rape drug.

“The stories I hear horrify me,” Berzon says. “You go there Friday night. You don’t sleep Friday, Saturday, Sunday, maybe even Monday. You use drugs. You have sex and then you have a hard time getting home. You get to the airport and can’t remember what city you’re in. You don’t remember what you’ve done with your luggage, can’t remember flight numbers or where you are going.”

*

The first thing many clients who want to get off the Circuit have to deal with, Berzon says, is their psychological dependency on the anabolic steroids they take to build their physiques.

“I’m getting very, very emotional about this,” she says. “The reason a lot of middle-class people like me are astonished by this is we have worked for 30 years to make life better for gay and lesbian people. Did we work for the privilege of partying, for people to be free to use destructive drugs, to go out and get laid?”

Berzon and others worry that the growing visibility of the Circuit could mean fewer donations to AIDS organizations from government sources and private donors.

“This is now becoming very public,” Berzon says. “The more Circuit parties there are, the more drugs and unsafe sex, the less money people are going to donate.”

Producers of the parties argue, however, that the Circuit’s image is being tarnished by gay “conservatives” who object to having multiple sexual partners.

Although the producers acknowledge that illegal drug use is a problem at parties, they say it is neither encouraged nor condoned.

“This is all new to us, to be faced with this controversy,” says Spradlin, who revived the Halloween HellBall in San Francisco last year and expects this year’s version to draw 2,000 men.

“I do not do this to be a bad person,” Spradlin says. “I throw these parties because I really believe in the value of a special event. These parties offer a traumatized community a chance to celebrate.”

Most parties provide free condoms at the door, Spradlin and others point out. In New York, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, one of the nation’s oldest and largest AIDS organizations, provides safer-sex workshops and harm-reduction sessions for alcohol and drug users in preparation for its Morning Party each August.

Despite those steps, gay author Michelangelo Signorile recently blasted the AIDS organization for hosting the event. The Morning Party, which attracted 5,000 men and raised $500,000 for the organization’s programs this year, is considered a highlight of the Circuit. But last year, Signorile pointed out, one reveler had to be taken to a hospital after overdosing on GHB. “There is something hypocritical about groups that try to encourage healthful lifestyles but that benefit from parties where drugs have become a problem,” he wrote in a New York Times opinion piece.

Such criticism infuriates Lauren Foster, an assistant to Los Angeles-based party producer Jeffrey Sanker. “We have done so much good,” Foster said, noting that Sanker produces 39 Circuit events annually, including the Easter weekend White Party that draws 20,000 people to Palm Springs.

“We raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for AIDs organizations,” she says. “People meet, friends meet, lovers meet and business associations are formed at these parties.”

But even Foster acknowledges that illegal drug use at the parties is troubling. “We’re having to call ambulances to our parties and we’re getting a lot of flak, so we’ve had it,” she says. “We’re having signs made up that say that anybody caught with drugs or overdosing with drugs will be turned over to the authorities.”

And a trio of deejays popular on the Circuit recently posted a plea on Circuit Noize’s Web site, warning party-goers that police, who generally have a hands-off attitude toward the parties, may not continue to be so tolerant.

“If there is a proliferation of bad press, we really do run the risk of having police intrusion on our parties and having them shut down,” wrote the deejays. “The last thing we need are reports of people overdosing and being carted off to hospitals.”

*

Many in the gay community say the parties show why prevention efforts must expand beyond urging the practice of safer sex and offering free condoms. The focus, they say, should shift to the psychological and social problems of gay men who have lost friends and lovers and on coming up with alternatives to the Circuit.

“As a gay man, whatever it is that motivates my brothers to feel the need to take drugs, to engage in what they know are unsafe practices, saddens me deeply,” says Anthony Turney, executive director of the Names Project, the AIDS organization that maintains the memorial quilt for those who died of the disease.

Turney says that although he deplores the attraction Circuit parties hold for some gay men, he had no problem accepting money from Magnitude, the San Francisco party in September.

“Whether the Names Project should be a beneficiary where it is believed that the potential exists for unsafe sex is a moral dilemma that King Solomon can probably deal with better than I,” Turney says. His organization has experienced a 25% decrease in funding this year, he says.

“Every dollar we raise toward using the quilt to help end this epidemic is a dollar very well spent. I don’t lose a lot of sleep about where that dollar comes from.”