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Friday, April 29, 2005
It’s a picture-perfect Saturday afternoon on South Beach the first weekend
in March. There isn’t a single cloud in the azure blue sky.
This particular weekend, hordes of gay men have come to South Beach for Winter
Party. At the Surfcomber Hotel, the site of this year’s pool party, hundreds
of handsome men in seductive swimwear are hanging out by the pool, bumping and
grinding on the makeshift dance floor, parading their rippled abs and bulging
biceps.
I’m standing with a friend soaking up the sea of flesh when our attention
turns to a particularly muscular man with a hairy chest who’s wearing
a red ball cap. He’s absolutely stunning, but it’s not his body
that grabs our attention. It’s his inability to walk without stumbling.
“He’s really screwed up,” my friend comments. “From
the look on his face, it’s probably tina,” he says, though the man
might just as easily be high on any number of “designer” drugs,
such as G or K.
A Winter Party volunteer, wearing the signature pink T-shirt that helps them
stands out in the crowd, approaches the unsteady man and asks if he needs help.
I overhear his friends dismiss the inquiry.
“It’s OK,” they say. “We’re his friends.”
Minutes later, there is a commotion in the packed crowd.
The muscular man in the red ball cap has collapsed. His apparently unconscious
body is slumped, limp in a white plastic pool chair.
Four pink-shirted volunteers have surrounded him now. One of them has two
fingers on an artery in the muscleman’s neck, as if she is checking whether
or not he has a pulse.
A band of volunteers heaves the chair up, and together they carry the unconscious
man away. As they push through the crowd, the woman keeps her two fingers on
the man’s neck, and his pulse.
The crowd hardly pauses, barely seeming to notice that someone has been carried
past them. The dance beat cranks, and the bodies continue to gyrate.
IT’S NO SECRET THAT DRUG USE, particularly crystal meth, is rampant at
circuit parties all around the country.
When I mention the pool party episode to my gay friends, and comment I may
want to write about it, the response is almost universal: Big surprise, stop
the presses. And the drug and crystal problem is hardly limited to circuit parties.
It’s all around us, on a daily basis, and it is wrecking gay men’s
lives every day — financially, physically and emotionally.
But what strikes me most, perhaps, is the nonchalance surrounding the issue.
It’s become so routine, many gay men don’t even seem to notice it,
or perhaps they just don’t pay attention to it anymore. Obviously, the
drug use and crystal problem involves a serious issue of personal responsibility.
But I can’t help but think that there must also be a collective consciousness
to this problem, if we as gay men — as a group of people who have staked
the claim that we are connected to one another in some sort of bond that forms
a community — hope to beat it.
In the early years of AIDS, gay activists combed the streets and the bars
and the bathhouses, armed with condoms and safer sex fliers, gently reminding
other gay men that all our lives were at stake. In our newspapers and our magazines,
at our offices and in private homes, people were talking to each other about
the risks and perils of unsafe sex, and the need we all had to help each other
stay as safe as we could.
It didn’t save everyone from HIV, or replace the personal decision-making
at the moment of truth. But there was, at least, a recognition that we were
all in this together, and that we needed to hold each other’s hands, literally
and figuratively, because even with the best intentions, we are all human, and
we all slip up sometimes.
To some degree, aren’t we all supposed to watch out for each other?
Particularly in places like Miami and Fort Lauderdale, or the Castro or Chelsea
or Provincetown, or any of the other gay ghettos where we’ve congregated
by the droves to create our own little gay Meccas, our insular, protected, safe
spaces where we can fashion the kind of world we think is better than the places
we came from.
Aren’t these places, at least — the places where we’ve worked
so hard to make being gay so easy — supposed to come with something more
than crowded bars and naked pool parties?
Or have we created places where we are so callous to each other that we no
longer notice, or care, if our community is partying itself to death?
After the pool party, much later that evening, I get a poignant reminder about
why, as gay men, we need to care about and care for our own.
THE NEXT DAY, SUNDAY, MARCH 6, I am at Winter Party’s beach party, right
on the gay beach at 12th street.
The enormous swarm of muscled men dwarfs even the crowd at the previous day’s
pool party. It’s another bright, hot Florida afternoon, and everyone seems
to be hanging out shirtless and in sunglasses.
I have my camera in my hand, and I’m taking pictures to publish in the
gay newspaper that I edit in Fort Lauderdale. It’s something I do frequently
at such events, and I understand that different people have various comfort
levels with their face being shown in a gay publication.
Initially, I assume that is why so many people decline to remove their sunglasses
when they agree to have their picture taken. Then I ask a smooth young Latin
man in white pants and a sailor’s hat to pose, and he gladly agrees.
Lean and well-defined, he looks adorable in his little outfit on the beach.
But he would look so much cuter without the dark sunglasses that hide too much
of his face. I ask him to remove them, and he emphatically shakes his head no.
“I can’t show my eyes,” he tells me. “They’re
a mess.”
Soon after, I come across the muscled man in the red ball cap from the pool
party the day before, the one who had been carried away in the chair.
He, too, is wearing sunglasses.
Mubarak Dahir is editor of the Express Gay News in Fort Lauderdale,
Fla., a publication affiliated with this newspaper, and can be reached at mdahir@expressgaynews.com
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