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“I'm a bit hesitant to talk about all this," he said. "I don't know what the impact will be. But I'm only doing it because it might help somebody — and to say that there is no such thing as casual crystal meth use!"
Rufus Wainwright, who is gay and has been out since he was a teenager, was not always convinced of that. Methamphetamine is one of a number of drugs — including ecstasy, cocaine, K (or ketamine, an anesthetic) and alcohol — to which he has turned over the years to bolster his confidence and to propel his quests for anonymous sex. Despite creating a body of work whose central theme is the search for true love, he has never been in a serious relationship, a consequence, he says, of having been raped by a man he picked up in London when he was 14.
Typically in recent years, he would get high, go online to discover willing partners and arrange meetings. Eventually Mr. Wainwright found himself drawn to a subterranean world that he described in the most lurid terms as a "gay hell."
"I'm not talking about a bar in the meatpacking district," he said.
Mr. Wainwright believes that crystal meth presents specific dangers — and specific temptations — for homosexual men, and that its use is a menace to their community. "Years of sexual insecurity, the low-grade discrimination you suffer, the need to belong — speed takes care of all that in one second," he said. "It was a world where people are going so crazy that they're not making sense any more. If you wanted safe sex, you were a nerd, uncool. I was one of the nerds who did have safe sex, thank God. But I'm still mentally shattered by the whole experience."
"For years, and I mean thousands of years, the gay man's mind has been treated as perverted, clandestine and dirty," he went on, "and speed reinforces and glamorizes that as an ideal. And with drugs, what's more dangerous is more sexually exciting. On that drug I had really horrible thoughts that turned me on. I had a few of those real gay lost weekends, where everything goes out the window, where you want to make pornos or you want to have sex with children. I mean, your mind is just completely ravaged."
Mr. Wainwright hit bottom last year when a morning line of cocaine designed to lend momentum to an apartment cleaning project led to a sex-and-drug binge that left him devastated. "I really crashed," he said. "I hadn't slept for a couple of days, and I started seeing visions. I remember hallucinating thousands of boxes of pornography with Jerry Garcia in them!" He laughed hysterically at the thought of that image.
"I felt like New York was a painting that I was looking at and couldn't enter," he continued. "It felt tragic, and it made me wildly depressed. For a moment, I thought I wouldn't make it back into the world. But I did. I realized that I need help, so I went and got it."
-- Anthony de Curtis, “Rufus Wainwright Travels to ‘Gay Hell’ and Back,”
New York Times, Aug. 31, 2003
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