The Crystal Conundrum

Illustration by Tra Selthrow

If I were to ask a psychologist why crystal methamphetamine has a stranglehold on scores of gay men, she might say that we battle a prevalence of depression 17 percent higher than the national average. A physician will tell me meth is the most addictive drug ever to hit the gay party tableau, and because it releases a flood of dopamine, the brain’s pleasure chemical, its allure to our bacchanal tendencies is especially strong. A sociologist will say that gay men, being men, are conditioned by society to be sexual aggressors and that the introduction of a powerful “sex drug” has, not surprisingly, ejaculated through our neighborhoods like a hormonal teen. And a civil rights activist might shake his head, dismayed, worried that the bigoted Right will use the much touted link between meth use and the rise in HIV infections as fodder against us to take away AIDS funding and undo pro-gay legislation unpopular with Republican theocrats.

I, an HIV-positive gay man who has experienced both the bliss and the peril of crystal meth, am here to report that while each of those critiques is valid, none gets it exactly right. Our crystal problem is much larger than a drug, even one that measures the gay Zeitgeist as cynically as meth. “Tina” has, more precisely, emerged as a dark metaphor for all that gay men have been through and still struggle to overcome.

Over the past few months, I have attended several community forums in West Hollywood on crystal abuse by gay men where everyone from medical and mental-health professionals to sex workers offered a piece of this intractable puzzle. Too stumped to see the whole picture, they instead grasped at social solutions: making meth “uncool,” making meth unnecessary, promoting sobriety and gay sober locales. All were daunted by exactly how to do this, and no wonder: If you believe, as I do, that drug use is an escape, for better or worse, then you understand that the grim state of affairs that queer communities find themselves in can only elevate crystal’s popularity. At these heartening and productive forums — two sponsored by the city of West Hollywood and another by the West Hollywood synagogue Congregation Kol Ami — I couldn’t help feeling like we were missing the point.

At a forum called “Sex+/Meth-” held at West Hollywood Park, in an auditorium that looked exactly like those of our elementary school years — with hardwood floors and a stage decorated with an American flag — a beefy and wholesome-looking party promoter in his 30s sat on the panel, moderated by WeHo Mayor John Duran. The event felt familiar, like a hundred other political forums I’ve attended, but this one distinctively gay in its lineup of handsome panelists, an audience of men in snug T-shirts with shaved heads and tattooed arms, and a smattering of young women who looked like students researching a paper for a UCLA sociology course. Over 200 of us sat anxiously, obediently, hoping by virtue of attending that we would be part of the solution that eluded us.

The party promoter's name was Ken, and he had been sober exactly a year. His boyfriend, a Latino DJ famous on the circuit, with pristine facial features, watched his lover with an expression I wouldn’t call empathetic. Ken described what happened a year ago: “I got online to obtain what I needed. I went missing for five days. For the first time ever, I suffered blackouts while high . . . The experience was like walking through a transparent wall, and on the other side was a black, burnt-out forest.”

In my mind’s eye, I illuminated Ken’s blackouts with scenes from my own past uses of crystal: torching the glass pipe in front of the computer till the shards of meth liquefied and rose in white smoke, inhaling deeply, awaking tiny ghosts to come and erase the day. Then the unending jolt of vitality, fixating intensely on the hundreds upon hundreds of men’s naked pictures and profiles online, for hours, till the sun came up and then fell and rose again, and in the midst, sex in a bedroom, in a living room, at a bathhouse. And always, in the bulldozing moment, it was as if one’s history never existed and future is postponed by this supersonic present tense. What is this unmitigated erasure we crave? I wondered as Ken revealed that he is not able to drink alcohol because it leads him to crystal meth.

For many years I lived contentedly and with unending curiosity in the underbelly cultures of gay men — a brief stint at porn, a bona fide career as call boy, an ebullient partaker of club and drug cultures — this with an inclination toward artists, activists, and anyone interested in fashioning a life of invention and un-convention. In this world there exists a startling honesty around sex, about its multitudes, its infinite psychologies, its private anatomies, and also how sex feels under which drugs, or combination of drugs. To earn a living in this world made it easy to feel whole and not compartmentalized like other queers, who lock up their ids and alter egos until weekends or special times of the year. It was a unique time in my life. I was a student of pleasure, of giving and receiving it. I learned to honor pleasure as fundamental to us all.