How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [21]
Rubell didn’t like to admit large numbers of single women, because 54 was not a straight pickup bar.
“Is it a gay bar, basically?” asked Colacello.
“It’s bisexual,” said Rubell. “Very, very, very bisexual. And that’s how we choose the crowd, too. In another words, we want everyone to be fun and good-looking.”
Rubell, who later served a short jail term for tax evasion and died of AIDS in 1991, invented the blueprint for a new social life—an elitist yet utopian party where gays and straights mingled together in the constant quest to be hip. His influence can still be felt at the velvet ropes of exclusive clubs, and especially any place that celebrity is worshipped excessively, such as on the E! network or at awards events.
Although Studio 54 turned out to be fairly short-lived, the gay spirit of celebration lives on in different kinds of totally gay “black-and-white parties” held across the nation: circuit parties.
Born in the late 1980s, circuit parties are a no-holds-barred hedonistic ritual of gay life. “Circuit boys,” the young, buff, bedrugged participants in parties around the country, are a potent symbol of the gay lifestyle, which may or may not still exist. While circuit-party participants represent the joie de vivre of gay life, they also represent danger, drugs, and unsafe sex.
Not many employed or partnered gay men have the time or energy to follow the circuit, but each party in each city spotlights and reaffirms that the gay community is here to stay. Every circuit party presents a Mardi Gras situation—sort of like a homosexual version of spring break, or Girls Gone Wild, come to think of it. Large circuit parties include the Black Party in New York (in March), the Cherry series in Washington, D.C. (in May), the White Party in Palm Springs (April), the Black-and-Blue Ball in Montreal (October), and smaller events, like Fireball in Chicago (February), the Purple Party in Dallas (May), and Blue Ball in Philadelphia (January).
In past civilizations, regular citizens have always been given license to go insane during brief periods of time. Fast nacht in Germany, for example, was supposed to be a time when husbands and wives could get drunk, escape from each other, and possibly even have a sexual encounter with someone outside their marriage. The only vestige of such events today exists in the gay community, which shows how much we straight people need such arenas. I predict that these gay-specific events will leave their mark on heterosexual populations, as other gay party rituals have.
Halloween: The New Gay Holiday, and Going Straighter Every Year
Halloween has been called the gay Christmas. But the actual gay Christmas is fun enough—why not just examine the enormous influence the gay population has had on how we celebrate Halloween itself?
Halloween has a long, storied, pagan past that has nothing to do with its current commercial appeal, of course. But in the 1960s, 1970s, and even well into the 1980s, the holiday was completely juvenilized. Halloween was by kids, for kids, and about kids. I remember, in the late 1960s, that my father was the only adult who put on a costume in our suburban neighborhood.
Then the tide began to change. First came the many trick-or-treating food scares, which started to force Halloween off the streets and into homes and party halls. Then, in the late 1980s, Halloween merchandise began to appear as early as back-to-school time, before Labor Day. Some people have traced the new adult fascination with Halloween to an inability to mature. Baby boomers wanted to have as much fun as their children. But does