Circuit: Queer Pleasure as

Queer Memory
By Joseph Osmundson

OCTOBER 22, 2019

00110000 

A CIRCUIT PARTY has a bunch of

gay guys in it, and they mostly look
just like one another.

Wearing a shirt at a circuit party is akin to wearing a shirt in a pool in the

summer: it doesn’t distract, no, it draws attention to the body, oh God,
the queens think Brett like totally got fat this winter, didn’t she. Beach
bodies are made in February, darling.

We don’t wear shirts, you see, at a circuit party. Possible tops: harness;
singlet; fitted hats.
Pupils get dilated at circuit parties thanks to molly or G or speed or T or
Tina or whatever the kids are doing these days, God help them.

Did y’all see that video of the fight breaking out at dawn at a circuit
party in Mykonos between two white muscle queens who look just
exactly alike among a crowd of other partygoers who look like them,
too?

Four-pack abs are a requisite for entering a circuit party, six-pack abs
preferred, and an eight-pack will get you like super laid.

Unless you’re hairy enough to be a bear, a separate category of man, and

welcome at (some) circuit parties.

The circuit is New York, Los Angeles, Madrid, Berlin, Paris, London.

Or these days a circuit party is  — apparently  — an invite-only event

thrown by a singer, mostly full of straight white women doing blow,
which is subsequently used to sell a $60 T-shirt with a neo-’90s PrEP
logo on it.

The circuit might be born from disco, but disco died. So much has
changed in gay life, and culture at large, since the 1970s. But the circuit
is still around. It didn’t go extinct, not in 1978 when  Dancer from the
Dance was published, and not in 1983 when HIV was discovered to be
the cause of AIDS, and not in 1995, when 50,000 people died of the
virus, and not in the subsequent decade when Giuliani and Bloomberg
were sanitizing New York.

I want to know why.

A circuit party is a gay dance event that might technically begin at 10:00
p.m., but all the queens know not to show up until 2:00 a.m. It won’t get
good until 4:00 a.m. and the club is likely to stay open until 8:00 a.m.,
maybe even noon.
Dancer from the Dance is Andrew Holleran’s novel that — in 1978 —
wrote the circuit down, using that very word, for the first time.

Never lose your sense of humor! And dance! For god’s sake, I hope you
can dance, Sutherland tells Malone in Dancer.

What, we may well ask, is there left to live for? Why get out of bed?
Sutherland asks Malone. We may still choose to live like gods, like poets.
Which brings us down to dancing. Yes, that is all that’s left when love has
gone. Dancing […] there is no other love in this city …

He was writing of New York, my city.

00110010 

First things first: I am not an engineer. My degrees are in Biology (BA),

and then Molecular Biology (MS), and then Biophysics (PhD). I did my
post-doctoral research, though, in Bioinformatics, which is the use of
computations tools (i.e., computers) to analyze biological data.

Which is to say: I use computers a lot, and so I use interconnected

electrical circuits that process and store information in bits and bytes.

We’re getting to some definitions, and this whole deeply unfun part of
this thing is going to start slow, and proceed slowly.

Circuits aren’t complicated, until they are. They are simple things:
electricity moving through a wire. They’re physical things: wires (which
transmit electricity) and insulators (which prevent its transmission),
capacitors (which store electrical flow in an electrical field) and
transistors (which store the same electrical flow but in a magnetic field).
These physical things can be connected in seemingly endless
conformations to do all sorts of magic, like add two plus two, or type
these words, or save these words to bits on a physical drive (itself a
magnetic device that can save each bit as a 0 or a 1, and erase, and
rewrite this information).
Are you doing okay so far, am I going slow enough, does it hurt? Do you
need a hit of poppers?

So circuits are a physical thing, placed together in an order, sitting there

waiting, doing absolutely nothing. They’re waiting to be turned on, and
for that you need a current. You need electricity. It’s the electricity that is
pushed down path A or path B, path A1 or path A2, path A2c or A2d,
and so on and so on until it ends as a 0 or a 1 written down on the surface
of a magnet.

Flip a switch, turn on the lights, let the electricity flow (A -> A2 ->
A2c…), and then the magic can begin. Once the magic begins, we can
begin to remember.

00110011

Dancer from the Dance is about Sutherland, a drag queen (?) or gay man
(?) or non-binary queen (?) or camp goddess icon (!). Sutherland is
campy, with his perfect French and impeccable taste, and he’s a circuit
queen, always on speed (to dance) or Quaaludes (to sleep), always ready
to go dancing, always up on the gossip of who’s fucking whom.

I actively avoided reading  Dancer  for years, preferring the stunning

novels of James Baldwin. I didn’t need — I thought — to read about a
bunch of overdrugged and oversexed homosexuals. The novel, before I
read it, represented the worst of homosexuality.

See: Gay people can be homophobic too.

So I bought the book, and I read it, and I saw myself, and I saw my
friends, and I saw a beautiful world that a fucking virus (and indifference
or hatred from politicians, culture, media, everyone everyone everyone)
almost killed.

Sutherland rescues Malone, a younger gay man who becomes, over the
course of the novel, isolated by his own beauty, and who isolates himself
in his insatiable quest for “love.”
Because of the HIV/AIDS crisis, a generation of gay men died. Because
of the crackdown on queer nightlife and sex spaces, the geography of
New York pre- and post-AIDS is not the same. I spent my 20s in New
York mourning my lack of mentors. I didn’t know many older gay men,
and I blamed the virus for this.

And then: Dancer.

Sutherland and Malone go dancing. Malone and Sutherland talk shit

about other queens. Malone does poppers, Sutherland does speed.
Malone and Sutherland (and our narrator) go to Fire Island, Sutherland
and Malone (and our narrator) come home from Fire Island, the city is
hot, they cruise, they stay up all night talking shit in the park where I
used to walk a borrowed dog, Sutherland and Malone fuck (but never
each other, these two sisters) in subway stations and parks and empty
warehouses, Malone fucks on the beach, Sutherland fucks in apartments,
they fuck for fun, Malone fucks for money, and the money gets paid to
Sutherland.

Sutherland and Malone, you see, a closed circuit (amplifiers) within the
larger circuit of New York’s gay nightlife (high in computational
memory, low in long-term storage).

Why was I so afraid to read this book? What to fear? Pleasure, sex?
Friendship, love?

Books can tell us about who we were, and who we are. And they can
connect us to a generation of faggots we lost, and to a city — to a New
York — full of crime and grit and public sex, full of cheap housing and
working-class fags, a version of this city that is unlikely to ever exist
again.

The gritty neighborhoods of Dancer are now all luxury neighborhoods I

could never afford.

Dancer paints a version of New York that I never knew, but that, through
the culture and art made there, helped make me.
They warn you about drugs, but this city is the worst drug of all, warns
our narrator, himself, of course, a circuit queen.

That sounds familiar to me: that is New York I know.

I came to New York in 2006 because, after living in small towns in

Washington State and Minnesota and even a small town in France, I was
ready for a big city. Not just any big city, but this one. The gayest one of
all.

What he was truly in love with  —  or any of us for that matter  — our
narrator writes of Malone —  was not Rafael, or Jesus, or the man we
had been watching on the dance floor for four years now, but our own
senses, the animal bliss of being alive […] what he loved, finally, was
only the city.

00110100

You see, I dated a supposedly reformed circuit queen once. He never

took me dancing.

After we broke up, and he wanted to win me back, he said we should go

out together. We had drinks, and then we met up with his friends for
more drinks before arriving early at the club, around 1:00 a.m. It was a
circuit party in some converted warehouse in Bushwick, a club only for
that night, not glam. Just a disco ball hanging from a ceiling with a
temporary bar made out of the cheapest plywood.

At our pre-game, all his friends were doing coke, but it turns out they
weren’t. No one does coke anymore, darling. Who can afford it?  They
were snorting K. I declined. We all popped a molly in the cab to the club.
I noticed when my ex’s molly hit; his pupils dilated and he spun around
on the dance floor, embracing the queen I think he always had inside.

His wrists went limp. I loved him again for a moment then.
Later in the night, when I said I didn’t feel the molly, he opened a second
pill and poured it directly onto my tongue. We left shortly after that
because he didn’t feel well. At around 3:00 a.m. There were cute boys.
I’d danced. I’d had fun.

But I never got high. It wasn’t the fault of the drugs; all the others got
high on their molly, and we took from the same stash. I didn’t trust him
enough, and it was my first circuit party, and so even though the drugs
were there, physical, a fact of my body, the circuits of my brain just
couldn’t give in. They never let go.

I never let go.

00110101

Binary code, essentially the language of computational circuits (which

combine electrical circuits and magnetic storage devices) translate all
information into signals in one of two states. You have the 0 and you
have the 1. Since there are 128 characters (numbers, upper- and lower-
case letters), you need seven bits of information to give each 128
characters a unique binary identifier. Modern code uses eight bits, both
because eight bits are now a standard byte, but also to leave space for é’s
and è’s used by other languages.

So, “a” in binary is 01100001 and “A” is 01000001; “0” is 00110000 and
“1” is 00110001.

Get it?

And if you use more bits, you can encode all sorts of things, like a heart-
eyes emoji (four bytes in unicode 32) or a Liz Lemon eye-rolling gif
(644,000 bytes).

It doesn’t much matter much what code you use. It only matters that
everyone agrees on the code, so that when I type a sentence (like this
one) on a computer, any other computer can take the 0s and 1s and put
them back together to make the meaning for you that I mean here, now,
as I think and work and write.

So you need a code to write, and a code to read. Without that code, all
meaning is lost.

Dancer from the Dance  became part of the decoder I needed to

understand the pre-HIV queer past, something that I thought was dead,
but that actually I see reflected, refracted, and reproduced not only in the
world, but in myself.

00110110

Holleran’s book feels remarkably current in voice, in character, in the

way they had sex, in the way they grew older.

One aspect, though, feels dated: the gay men in Malone and Sutherland’s
world lamented their sexuality because it meant they couldn’t get
married and live happy lives in the suburbs.

Of course, now it’s 2019, and faggots can get married and live happy
lives in the suburbs.

In  Dancer, the word love is used endlessly. Everyone is searching for
love. But love never lasts long — maybe a night, or two, or maybe a
week or month. Lasting love doesn’t feel possible.

From the opening letters: Gay novels can only be very sad because what
everyone wants is a house in the suburbs and gay men just couldn’t have
that.

Malone explains: I would LIKE to be a happily married attorney with a

house in the suburbs, 2.6 kids, and a station wagon, in which we would
drive every summer to see the Grand Canyon, but I’m not! I’m
completely, hopelessly gay!
And so the circuit. If we can’t be happy (in the American sense), at least
we can dance!

But since the 1990s, when gays started to more seriously integrate into
the institutions of American life, we learned a tough lesson that
assimilationists of all sorts have been learning for generations. Nuclear,
atomized American families with 2.6 kids and a station wagon, who go
(on their 10 days of paid vacation) to see the Grand Canyon are often
motherfucking miserable.

The smiles in Norman Rockwell paintings? Well, to borrow Sutherland’s

explanation of why everyone looks so happy on the dance floor, A smile
is often a shriek.

What happens when we realize that the thing we’ve been fighting for, the
thing we imagine will make us happy and healthy and whole, arrives,
and it turns out we are just about as miserable as we always were? What
then? What now?

00110111

I’m not a circuit queen, but I like going to the parties. They scared me,
too. I’m uncomfortable in my body. I used to hate being shirtless around
other gay men. They’re ruthless, and I was never in the gym enough. I’m
busy! I said to myself. I’m trying to finish a PhD!

But something drew me to them. The beautiful men, for one, and their
inaccessibility, for two. The pleasure I once imagined being contained in
those spaces. The pleasure I now know does indeed exist there.

Love is difficult, love is impossible, help me make it through the night.

Sometimes, making it through the night is enough, and on those nights,

the circuit is there.

00111000 
Yes, the circuit queens do drugs. Our brain is a circuit, and mood comes
from our brain. Our brain is a circuit, and memories are stored there.

Electricity runs the computer where I sit and type, but it also is the only
thing that runs my brain. Our brain is full of cells — neurons — that are
electrically charged, always, and ready to transmit signals, where the
magic begins.

Most of us don’t understand computers, but there are people on this earth
who do. People who in fact design and build them.

No one on this earth understands the circuits of our brain. We have 100
billion neurons, those electrified cells, and each cell makes a median of
1,000 connections, and so those 100 billion wires have 100 trillion
connections, and each connection can insulate, amplify, or change and
modify the circuit itself. It’s a clusterfuck.

Memory, pleasure, kindness, connection, touch, sight, smell? We

understand aspects, but never the circuit itself, never the entirety of input
and processing and hard drive and storage.

Every second I dance, my muscles move and my eyes see, my skin

touches, my ears are sheared open by the sound of the bass, the treble.
All this information flows to my brain, makes a map of my world and
myself in it. I feel. I feel, and I know this as magic.

And what most drugs do to augment all of that, we don’t understand

either.

For the fact was drugs were not necessary to most of us, because the
music, youth, sweaty bodies were enough.

On his face was an expression of radiant exhilaration; that expression

led people to think Malone took speed, when he didn’t. It was his joy that
there were men who loved other men.
I’m a scientist. Sometimes, to be honest, I’d rather forget about all that
biology. Personally, I might like a drink, but I don’t need drugs.
Sometimes, I’d rather use my brain to close my eyes, listen to the music,
look at people dancing, and dance with them.

00111001

“What do we all have in common in this group?” I once asked a friend

seriously, when it occurred to me how slender, how immaterial, how
ephemeral the bond was that joined us, and he responded, “We all have
lips.”

00110001 00110000

What of sex on the circuit? What of that pleasure, there?

The baths are not the circuit and the circuit is not the baths. In Dancer,
when the discos closed or emptied at six or seven or eight in the
morning, the remaining men would parade to the bathhouses where they
would fuck. They’d kissed and flirted and danced all night. The baths
were about business, about actualization, about the pleasure not of
pursuit but of penetration.

The baths still exist, of course, in New York and elsewhere. HIV and late
capitalism couldn’t kill the circuit, and they certainly didn’t kill
bathhouses.

These are threads that tie the geography of New York from now to then.
The threads it took me years to see.

In New York City, we have saunas (Korean, Russian), sex clubs

(Paddles, The East and West Side Clubs), and parties (GBU, NY Jacks,
NY Jocks, Inferno).

And in the last few years circuit parties have pushed into the territory of
the bath, The Black Party being the most obvious example. At The Black
Party, there are live sex shows (fisting!), with everyone in leather, but not
much of it (jock straps, harnesses), and there’s a big back room where all
pretense drops.

You check your phone at the entrance. No photos allowed.

Of course the culture of the baths and circuit parties, the sex and excess,
didn’t end in response to HIV, but it did shift, and maybe it shifted away
from pleasure and toward safety. Maybe.

What a false binary! I hear a savvy reader thinking. I agree, friend. And
I’m happy to report that, in 2019, public health and cultural
consciousness are starting to break apart that binary as well.

00110001 00110001 

You want to know what’s not impossible but pretty difficult? Finding a
condom and lube in a circuit party or at The Cock. Sex parties of course
have stores of them everywhere, just waiting to be used. But the circuit is
about beauty, not functional lube dispensers placed at sensible locations.

The baths aren’t about beauty and they’re certainly not about taste. The
decor, darling! The old porn blasted on wall-mounted TVs! The sticky
leather couches, sometimes with tape holding them together! The
crepuscular rooms making it difficult to see the person you’re touching!
Function over form at the baths.

If you want to fuck at a circuit party, it can be … a spit-filled adventure,

Brokeback style, and let me tell you something, spit is not sufficient lube
when a condom is being used.

So: The rise of circuit parties with backrooms has come alongside a
cultural shift in the way gay men (in New York, San Francisco, Los
Angeles) have sex. Many, many gay men are choosing to use Truvada to
lower their HIV risk and, with Truvada, to use condoms less frequently
or not at all.

If taken before HIV exposure, Truvada prevents the HIV-negative

individual from becoming HIV-positive (seroconverting). It’s more
effective than condoms (99 percent versus 70 percent) at preventing HIV
transmission, but Truvada doesn’t protect against other STIs.

In my time on Truvada, I’ve had gonorrhea (thrice) and chlamydia (one

time only).

At the same time, research has clearly demonstrated that HIV-positive

people who are controlling their infection with anti-retroviral drugs quite
literally cannot transmit HIV.

This year, I got fucked on the roof of the Eagle on Pride Sunday by a
friend of mine from California, and he looked so good in the moonlight,
and I just had to have him inside me. Spit. His fingers first. We found a
corner, and he was inside me, I pushed back into him, a small crowd
gathered, passersby passed by, some looking me in the eye. He told me
to shut up. I shut up. I ended the night my ass full and wet with his half-
cells in the cab ride home, holding his hand, and both of us smiling. We
fucked again in my apartment, where it was my turn to top. I’m on PrEP,
and so was he. I didn’t worry about HIV once, and I had been worrying
about HIV for the three decades my brain could worry about anything at
all.

In the last five years, the world has turned upside down and inside out in
terms of how we think about HIV, condoms, and risk.

And thank God. HIV was certainly a nail in the coffin of disco, and it
changed the circuit of dancing queens (by actually killing so many of
them). Its effects have lingered all these decades since. These seismic
shifts in the last few years (Undetectable! PrEP!) in how we think about
HIV has enabled parties, here in NYC, with backrooms, where condoms
and lube are hard to come by, but pleasure is easy to find.

Frank Ocean is right, though: Not enough people know about PrEP. Like
a lot of activists, I’m not sure that a circuit party alone will fix this
problem, especially the one he ended up throwing with its VIP-only list
and mostly white dance floor. Branding is not enough, exclusion is part
of how HIV kills, and the people at the most risk were certainly not at
Frank’s party.
HIV infection is a circuit in a way: it connects people through bodily
contact and the sharing of a virus; it connects activities like sex and drug
use to a binary state of infection. Negative: 0. Positive: 1.

I am happy to report that PrEP and U=U have been salt water on that
circuit. U=U, the notion that an HIV positive person cannot transmit the
virus if they’re properly treated and the virus undetectable, has rendered
HIV positive people the  most  safe sex partners, upending so many
decades of myth and fear. I’m negative and on Truvada as PrEP. I have
no virus in my blood but anti-retrovirals flowing through my lymph. I am
a new HIV possibility. Five years ago, I couldn’t imagine myself.

We rewired the circuit. NYC in 2019 feels again like NYC of the 1970s,
where men fucked in clubs and saunas and bushes without the specter of
death, the certainty of a virus, also present with each thrust or grunt or
moan.

00110001 00110010

Circuit parties are expensive. Tickets to the Black Party this year cost
$190; the Pines Party cost $199 if you purchased your ticket weeks in
advance, or $359 for a weekend pass. I don’t make Black Party money
and probably never will.

This obviously alters the type of people who can go. Namely, you have
to be kind of rich to imagine that spending $200 to get into a party is a
reasonable thing to do. Not to mention the price of drugs or booze or
both, the taxis there and back. Many people simply can’t afford these
prices.

Holleran’s queens — Malone and Sutherland — didn’t pay to get into

their circuit parties. They just had to know the right people (or look the
right way), and the doors opened right up. At times, the queens in
Holleran’s 1970s gay world couldn’t afford to eat, or sold sex for money,
but they could always go dancing and find drugs.
Social capital still works, but not at the Pines Party, which is — now —
big business.

The geography of a party starts with how much it costs to get in the door.
Only the bodies allowed inside are allowed to twirl to the music together.
Capital is everywhere, social and financial, and while the circuit might
be about escapism, and queers of all races and classes might want to
escape the world’s homophobia (and various –isms), only certain faggots
can afford a respite from the violence of their lives by dancing from
midnight until the sun comes up. That only some queers can afford these
parties, then, can make for spaces filled with the very violence that we
are trying to escape. What I’m saying, my dear faggots, is there’s no
amount of molly and four-on-the-floor beats that can get us out of the
bind our bodies and late capitalism place us in.

The circuit claims, in so much as a geography can claim anything, to be

about beauty, pleasure, music: about The Night. Beauty, of course, is a
social, living thing, and people of color in the queer community are often
excluded from what we call beautiful. Circuit parties are damn near
body-fascist. They worship — because the people within them worship
— tall, angular, muscled men. Men who have this look wander a circuit
party in a special way. There seems, to me, to be a small wake around
them; no one dares get too close. At the same time, men follow them
around, from point A to B to C on the dancefloor, waiting for the perfect
moment to try to talk, or, more likely, to dance.

And this beauty — who owns it, and why — is of course political, and is
also the nucleation point of the pleasure we go to the circuit party
seeking.

The party isn’t just about the twirl, of course, or we’d just go to a straight
club. Circuit parties offer the possibility of drugs and sex. They’re about
who we might meet there, what we might do with those people, and how
that will feel.

00110001 00110011
And look, everything I said about the cost of circuit parties pertains to
race as well. Class is raced, duh. Some of my gay friends hate circuit
parties because the music is boring. They prefer hip-hop parties and
clubs, and this city has plenty of those, too, and those are mostly not
white.

And OMG Dancer from the Dance suuuuuuuucks in how it talks about

race. WASPs are cold and bad at sex. Most of the white men are
obsessed with the sexual prowess of Latinos. Asian men are … ugh, I
don’t even want to say. Edward Said would die. That the book accurately
represents the racist circuit queens of the 1970s doesn’t feel like a
sufficient excuse. It makes the book, for all its beauty, for all its sad
humor, hard to read.

Circuit parties, when I first moved to New York, had the reputation of
being all-white spaces. This has changed, but only a little, and slowly.
Most of my friends on the circuit are men of color. They have that circuit
body: broad shoulders, skinny waists, six to eight visible abdominal
muscles. One’s a college professor. Another works at a desk job at a
hotel. And one has a job, now, as a professional party promoter.

It’s 2019, and being able to pay $200 to get in a club creates a small
group, a little circuit of like-minded men, where you can be both hot and
black as long as you have the money to pay the cover, broad enough
shoulders, and a six pack.

00110001 00110100 

Oh, wow. So I just realized that I am shitting on circuit parties, and like,
okay, yes, a lot of people do that, and it’s easy to do. They’re fucked up.
It’s not rocket science.

But.

Human beings are allowed pleasure. Yes, even faggots. We are allowed
joy. No one is required to live only to end oppression. Oppressed people
especially. Take it up with the Reaganites about why HIV still exists.
They killed enough people, maybe they should spend some time making
up the deficit of life they created. Maybe they should give up doing some
of whatever the fuck they find joyful (golf? beer? beating their wives?).

Spaces can also change. What might a better queer circuit party look
like? A second wave of less expensive, more music-minded parties —
parties that attempt to be more diverse — have invented themselves:
Horse Meat Disco in NYC, Ostbahnhof in Los Angeles.

Circuit parties could have sliding-scale entrance fees, campaigns to end

racism, sizism, sexism, et cetera et cetera et cetera, And designated ways
to care for those of us who decide to do drugs, and strictly enforced and
monitored rules of consent.

We are allowed to dance.

If we have to live only to consider our suffering and try to upend it, we
actually fail to live at all. The oppressions, then, win. What a bunch of
dour, suffering faggots we’d be, and my favorite thing about faggots is
our ability to play and to laugh and to create and to give each other joy,
sometimes in the form of a well-made martini, sometimes in the form of
a loaf of bread made with a sourdough starter so-and-so got from what’s-
his-name, and sometimes in the form of a blow job with three well-lubed
up fingers sliding in and out of one’s ass, as one sits in a sling, four or
five guys all watching.

I hope circuit parties last forever, even if I die, or, worse, stop going. A
string from the here and now to the then and there. I hope they last
forever because they’re one of the things that connects us to faggots past,
faggots who died. I hope they become more “just” spaces, more
accessible, and therefore freer and freeing. Circuit parties — and the
circuit — connect us to the carnal joy of being bodies, of being men who
love men, as Malone puts it. Sometimes, joy is reason enough.

00110001 00110101 

Flesh can still do things that circuits cannot. There’s something that
remains magical about life beyond computers, phones. Getting off
Grindr. Interfacing face-to-face. Sucking a real fleshy dick. Dancing with
real wordly bodies.

Some things are just better in analog than in 01001001001010010010. I

hope, I pray, that as long as I live, the singularity will not yet arrive, AI
will fall short, and getting coffee with a crush, imagining the boyfriend
he could be, the life we could live together, will remain the biggest
pleasure of all, a memory written in the circuit of my brain. A beautiful
small moment, not ever erased until the plug is pulled from all the
circuits that make me “me.”

00110001 00110110

One of the circuit parties I went to while researching this piece was,
according to rumor, shut down at around 6:00 a.m. when two
homosexuals were found in the bathroom ODed on G.

We know the risks. In 2018, minor TV star Joel Taylor (Storm Chasers)
died aboard an Atlantis gay cruise, basically a circuit party on the water.
He’d ODed on a mix — apparently — of G, molly, and coke. Deaths and
ODs on gay cruises are borderline common news, and while the jokes
about the hot tub gonorrhea write themselves, their regularity illustrates
the potential consequences of the circuit: it is entirely possible to dance
oneself to death, or at least into misery.

The circuit is dangerous, as anything that promises transcendence is.

Marathon runners die of heart attacks. There’s a certain amount of risk in
anything we do to forget our bodies and their limitations. Or to feel them
more.

Malone told us,  Everything is beautiful here, and that is all it is:
beautiful. Do not expect anything else, do not expect nourishment for
anything but your eye  —  and you will handle it all beautifully.  The
narrator said, Living for beauty is all very fine, but it’s a hard regimen
and it burns up the heart very quickly.

I’ve read too many articles that engage in hand-wringing about the
“new” effect of chem sex on gay men and gay life. Destructive drugs and
destructive sex are nothing new, particularly in a community whose
members are socialized to hate their bodies for the pleasure they feel, to
never speak of their desires without risking social or physical
death.  Dancer  shows us “chem sex,” and sex addiction, and lost loves
and lost lives. Things have gotten better. Much better. But gays are still
gay, and the world is still mostly a straitjacket, and sometimes it just
feels so goddamn good to run from all that into a blotted-out world that
consists of nothing but pleasure.

We all know people who say they want a husband and a home and a
picket fence and a dog if not children, but they’re too addicted to nights
out and hookups to make partnership work — as if partnered people
aren’t allowed nights out and hookups anyway.

Spoiler alert:

Sutherland, one of my favorite characters in fiction, dies of an overdose

at a circuit party he’s throwing, and Malone, who’s too pretty to be
interesting to me, leaves that same party to swim across the bay back
from Fire Island to Long Island, which takes a ferry 20 minutes. He’s
never heard from again.

I was into heavy SM. Now all I want is a hug and a kiss.

Get you a man who can do both, darling.

David Foster Wallace, himself an addict, defined addiction as when you

go to The Thing to avoid the troubles that are created by The Thing.
Drink so much your wife leaves. Drink to forget your wife leaving. Go to
circuit parties because you’re lonely. Let circuit parties be the only
pleasure you imagine.

We’re shamed into believing that risks are eventualities. Most people on
the circuit never OD, nevertheless die from their drug use. We can build
parties that care for people who do drugs, and that try to ensure consent
even when some people are likely overindulging.
Most people I know on the circuit are addicted to more subtle things,
things that don’t make click-bait headlines the way “chemsex” does.
Like a lot of homosexuals, we might be addicted to the way we have to
make our bodies look, for example, in order to imagine we’re worthy of
attention; the notion that sex and a night out are one and the same, and
that sex with a beloved in the afternoon can’t match the same high; that
sex is for the night, and work is for the light of day.

These addictions don’t kill us. These addictions, though, might just keep
us from fully living.

I’ve always believed that people who can’t let committed love into their
lives aren’t letting themselves live fully, because life — as I have wanted
to live it — required intimacy. And intimacy — I was taught — required
romance.

What a shallow view of life.

But those of us who reject the capacity for joy created in nightlife, at
circuit parties, those of us who reject the possibility of public pleasure,
well, I’m not sure we’re living fully either.

00110001 00110111

It feels straight and white and upper-middle class and cis to have the fact
of death-of-old-age be the most traumatic part of your life. All those
writers who write about pills that make you no longer afraid of death are
straight white men: DeLillo and Franzen and fucking Roth going on and
on about “his narrator’s” impotence.

Queers are too busy trying to survive to worry about existential death.
Death is always close, and so — I think — we live hard while we’re
here.

Circuits are powerful, as you can see. They’re also vulnerable. They’re
built by worldly things: wires and metal, electricity flowing; cells and
membranes, electricity flowing.
One evening, watching TV and writing, I spilled a glass of rosé on what
was then my laptop. It wasn’t my laptop any longer. Water —
particularly salty water, but most water will do — will short a circuit.

A short circuit is when electricity flows along an unintended path, which

allows it to flow unimpeded. Circuits are great, you see, at controlling
themselves. An out-of-control circuit will heat, will melt, will die.

The HIV crisis was a short circuit between gays of the ’70s and the
generation I am part of. Homophobia short-circuited the lives of gay men
in the ’70s, making them believe that the only pleasure was love, that the
suburbs would make them happy, but that they’d never see their own
white picket fences.

O–, were homophobia no longer a short circuit in the lives of too many,
including my own. O–, had HIV not stolen so many years of my own
pleasure, safety, little deaths without a larger one looming. O–, were the
world built to handle our excess, to buffer the pain any human might
feel.

What are we doing here, in this short time on this dying rock? What am I
doing here, in this body, this body that loves so many so deeply, this
body that will either be lost or lose its loves one by one? We are — I am
— trying to do the impossible. To build a circuit — a love, many loves, a
community, a culture — a circuit so robust that no overflowing cell could
bring down the whole.

00110001 00111000

I finished reading Dancer on my couch, in the New York City apartment

I share with a roommate, a close friend of mine who hates circuit parties
(It sounds like one long boring song that no one with actual rhythm can
even dance to). He wasn’t home and so I had a temporarily quiet island
four flights of steps above the city that never sleeps.

When it was over, Sutherland dead, Malone disappeared, our narrator

depressed, his friend gay-married and in the South, I shut the book and
sat, just sat, for a moment. I sat for a moment and then opened the book
back, from its front cover, to the opening letters. I read those again. And
then, again, I read the closing letters. This time I cried.

I didn’t want to finish the last page, to put these people and this time
behind me. I wanted to live in it still, in their world, and not my own,
fully aware that the apocalypse that is HIV was waiting for them, the
ones still alive. HIV had, in fact, by 1978, we now know thanks to viral
DNA sequencing studies, already arrived and claimed lives in New York,
in San Francisco.

I closed the book, Holleran’s world died, and I was left again with the
wreckage of my life now, the wreckage of our country, too.

How to forget about it, if only for a night? Poppers on the dance floor?
Vodka and ice and the kiss of a man?

Zero. No. No, not tonight. One. Sometimes sadness and loss must be
faced, cried over. Zero. Sometimes we can dance tomorrow. One. The
gay disco will always be waiting. Zero.

00110001 00111001 

Every day is one day closer to the end of our lives. The thing that makes
me want to cry is remembering how good it felt to wake up in the arms
of a man I loved. Every day for two years, I woke up in his arms. The
biggest pleasure I’ve known was not a twirl, a fuck, a drug, a beat. The
biggest pleasure I’ve known was feeling him twitch, half awake and half
asleep, in my arms, the warmth and smoothness of his skin almost
impossible to bear as I pulled him closer and closer. I wanted him to
crawl inside my flesh. Sometimes he did. Was he mine? My God, my
God he was!

Right now, I wake up alone, and while my days are full of friends I love
and work I love, nothing matches the pleasure I felt waking up in the
home we shared, next to him.
Every day since he moved out has felt, in some small way, a wasted day,
and we only have so many.

So why not dance? Why not fuck? Why not do drugs, get naked, twirl?
Trust me, circuit parties aren’t the high I’m chasing.

Committed love, living with a man, cooking for him, fucking just him,
spending the holidays together, that is the high I’m chasing, and — if
you pick the wrong man — it can be a destructive high as well.

That boyfriend and I went to circuit parties together. I dated him after
the-circuit-douche-from-15th-street. My new man was a man who could
do both, darling. We went to the Black Party, which I didn’t like much,
and also Brut, and Horse Meat Disco, and some shit I don’t remember in
Barcelona. He bought molly, and we did it together, and I felt something
bubbly up inside me. With him, I could let go, give in, get high. He was a
dancer, and so we danced, but when I was high, I just kept telling him I
loved him, because I did, and also talking about all the books I couldn’t
wait to write, including this one. I talked and talked and talked about art,
about home, about him and our life together.

I talked until he said Shut up, I love you, and took my hand, and pulled
me out onto the dance floor where he could feel the bodies of shirtless
men against his own body, where he would put poppers to my nose, one
nostril and then the other, then his own nose, and then put his hand in the
small of my back and pull me into him. We twirled. Kissed. The beat of
the music and the fact of our bodies consuming the whole world. He was
beautiful and perfect and there and now and here and now and mine.

Remember when that aging bear of a faggot Walt Whitman wrote I am

large / I contain multitudes? Remember when gay icon Elizabeth Lemon
shouted, I can do it, I can have it all, while shoving a sauce-laden hoagie
in her mouth hole? It’s 2019 and faggots have been through it, honey,
and we haven’t won much, but my God it is possible to have the
beautiful husband and the peaceful house in the South (I can smell the
wisteria now, see the late afternoon light being cut into lines by the slats
in the porch). We can have the road trips to the Grand Canyon, even the
2.6 kids, and still have the booze and the twirl of the night (*takes a hit
of poppers*) and the way only his hand could feel pulling my body in
toward his. His body, the one I loved, because it carried him, the man I
loved, through the world.

I didn’t get to have all of that with the boyfriend I loved so much. It was
the fault of everything but the circuit. With the right man, I believe it’s
possible: I can do it, I am large, I can have it all.

I know that I can share dancing and fucking with my beloved. The
circuit. The baths. These things aren’t stopping me. And I can share
waking up together the day after, hung over but in his arms, head
pounding, my body knowing — as it pulls him toward me, as it drifts
back to sleep — the animal bliss of being alive, a closed circuit of
dopamine naturally won, a joy beyond pleasure and a pleasure beyond
joy.

While I’m waiting for my next him, let’s — let us — dance.

Joseph Osmundson is a scientist and writer based in New York. He has a

PhD in Molecular Biophysics from The Rockefeller University, his
research has been published in Cell and Nature Structural and Molecular
Biology, and he’s currently a clinical professor of Biology at NYU.