Clarity about
crystal

Crystal meth use is epidemic, a pestilence that, while not specific to gay men and lesbians, is particularly harsh for us. Books and TV films (like Gia) about the devastating effects of the drug on people's lives are beginning to have some efficacy--what was seen a decade ago as recreational drug use is now beginning to be viewed as a wide and perilous path to gay self-destruction.

In the midst of all this, activist and author Patrick Moore's new book, Tweaked (Kensington Books) stands apart. Its literary quality is apparent, and it's a real artistic leap forward from even his excellent 2004 examination of the gay male sex culture, Beyond Shame.

But it is Moore's sly melding of his own personal experience as an alcoholic and meth addict, along with his account of meth rehab sessions, that really strikes home in the book. While the author hesitantly yet proudly proclaims his sobriety, what he reveals allows us to see clearly for the first time the real depth and enormity of the meth problem that our community now faces.

I've known Moore for some time, so I was able to do what few other readers could--that is, ask him about this mysterious and potentially deadly pandemic. Like any real dialogue, our conversation took us to places neither of us had really considered before.

Picano: Having now read Tweaked, I'd like to know what you think causes the abuse of substances such as crystal meth. Is it genetic, psychological, or some combination of the two?Moore: I think addiction is a spiritual disease. The inclination to use drugs, at least for me, came out of a feeling of not belonging to anything--not being connected to some feeling of comfort or well-being. I asked a kabbalah teacher once if his belief system had an explanation for addiction. He said our intention when we use drugs is to communicate with God, but because we're not spiritually equipped to do that, we're damaged when we try to take that shortcut. It's like a child seeing a beautiful flame and wanting to touch it, not knowing it will burn them.

Spiritual, yet you can't deny a physiological connection to drug abuse. Studies have shown that. In my own family there was substance abuse, including alcoholism, and I discovered in my mid 30s that I have a sort of allergy to alcohol, which is the other side of the same genetic coin. When I would go out to dinner with friends, we would have long dinners with a cocktail, wine with the meal, a drink after. All very civilized, and I never got high. But I found myself waking up in the middle of the night with projectile vomiting! Remaining sick hours on end afterward. Did you stop drinking?

I cut down to one or two drinks, tops. I found a limit where I don't get ill, and I stick to it. Your experience points out the difference between an addictive personality and a nonaddictive one. I also got very sick from drugs and alcohol, and that experience meant nothing to me. The negative parts of addiction never slowed me down until they became so extreme that they were impossible to ignore. But having said that, I do agree that whether it is genetic or environmental, our families instill in us a tendency towards addiction. In other words, my grandmother, who I talk about in Tweaked, was a severe alcoholic and addict. I don't know whether it was genetics or behavioral, but my connection to her did play a role in my becoming an alcoholic. If you talk of Warhol's Factory and the people around it, they were creative.

And rebellious and nuts too. And they were part of that milieu. It was an underground that was related to creativity--to the arts. That's significantly different than getting high and hanging at the bathhouse for a week. It was not, it seems to me, a scene that was about isolation.

No, meth was very definitely a group scene. Exactly. So their drug use was about belonging, communicating, rebelling. Some say the same thing about circuit boys, many of whom use crystal to stay up dancing and having sex for days. But those events are time-outs from the rest of life, a pretend time, where there is no reality or no problems. Whereas I think rebellion in the '60s was actually more integrated into larger society. In a way, going to a circuit party is about isolation, because the impetus is to run away to a special place where the normal problems of life don't exist.

What about raves? Aren't those places where people run away to? Yes, but they're primarily for straight people who aren't already isolated and marginalized, at least in the same way as a young gay man.

So is crystal meth use a direct response to a pathology of coming out wrongly? No, I think the issue isn't coming out. I think the issue is that what gay men come out into is a meaningless gay culture that is no longer about liberation or hope but about invisibility and conformity.

How can it be worse than what my generation faced? When we came out, there was no one else out. There was a great deal more resistance from the culture, and the act of proclaiming yourself gay, no matter how you did it, was by its very nature a liberation, just because there was such a void into which we stepped out. You weren't coming out so much as creating a gay world. That means something. My coming-out meant membership in a world that was defined by one thing: AIDS. To come out into a culture defined by AIDS creates a hopelessness. That's what the world was to me in the early '80s.

So we "progressed" from an optimistic generation to a pessimistic generation? Your generation forced incredible changes in the society; it's part of what neocons to this day are still fighting. You looked around, and saw things sucked, and you set about changing that. My generation came out into a gay society that had already been put together but that happened to be in flames. The place that should have been safest for us turned out to be the darkest and the most dangerous.

That's completely existential--in the classic sense of the word. Don't forget, I said addiction is a spiritual disease.

Then what about the generation younger than you? People in their 20s? For the most part, I think my generation has left them with far less than your generation left me. The one thing that we did give that generation was a specific model of activism and media manipulation around the AIDS crisis. Yet, for the most part, I don't see any tendency toward activism in a younger generation. For me, my time in ACT UP was the first moment of real hope in my life.

Because that was about people taking on a real problem in the real world, in real time, with possible real solutions? It was not "existential." That's not how I viewed it. For me, it very quickly became a way of belonging. It was my first moment of hope. Some people got involved with ACT UP to achieve specific goals. I got involved because it represented a community I could belong to. I ultimately cared less about specific goals than creating a different kind of culture.

That was before your crystal meth use? Yes. Then ACT UP just went away.

So were your crystal meth years a way of moving into a new community? Or of rejecting the world? It was more about rejecting the world. At my age, without any kind of support to get me through the experience of widespread death in my 20s, it was pretty much my way of dealing with those feelings and shutting them down.

Odd--in my own personal experience with amphetamine, it wasn't a particularly successful drug in terms of having sex. It seemed beside the point. It wasn't like mescaline or even good pot. You never come on crystal meth. That's the point. The intensity is never broken. There isn't a release. There's this kind of continuing, obsessive quest.

And that would make it psychologically attractive? Because it was unfulfilling? It wasn't fulfilling--it was filling. It eats up all of life. It fills up the day. It spends time. In other words, it shuts out any thought except thoughts of the drug.

In that regard, it's very close to alcohol and very different from psychedelics. It is basically escapist. That's exactly right. It is an escape, a refusal of the world.

Tell me more then about your own particular sexual connection with crystal meth and how it relates to feelings about being gay. When I used drugs for sexual experience, it was in a positive, joyous manner. I think that's exactly what I missed, because I came out in the early '80s when AIDS had made that impossible. At the time, I was also living a lie. I'd fallen in love with someone, and I thought that I had to have and should and could have a monogamous relationship.

That's a problem a lot of people have, because that's the hypocritical view of our society: We advance monogamous relationships as the ideal and the norm; at the same time, we're surrounded by barrages of sexual images telling us to have sex outside our relationships. That's especially true for a man in his 20s living in the middle of New York City in the 1980s. But that could have been overcome had I known that it was possible to negotiate sex, and to talk about sex. But I didn't think I could, especially because sex had become so dangerous.

Didn't you ever have older gay men or mentors the way I did? No, and I think that was a critical absence in my life. I guess older gay men were either dying or caring for other people who were dying or were already gone. I would have really benefited from knowing older gay men.

Older gay men instructed my generation in many ways, sexual and non-sexual. An "auntie" would give you information I couldn't ask my only slightly older boyfriend. I think we have to bring back the aunties! I think that idea of a nonsexual, older gay friend is so important!

Very young gay men seem to be doing that again. Instinctively, almost. I think there are almost no role models in my generation for younger gay men. They're looking to what's left of your generation.

You mean because we survived? So we represent something hopeful? Yes, and that's what I love about recovery. In that context, I have relationships where I mentor other gay men and am mentored in a nonsexual way. And that's deeply fulfilling.

For me, the most vivid portions of Tweaked were when you wrote about rehab sessions you were involved in. But they also struck me as extremely ego-destructive for the participants. Is that really part of the process? Is it essential? First, a rehab is not the same as a 12-step meeting. My relationships with people I know in 12-step recovery are different than my relationships with people I counsel in rehab. The difference is that many of the people I see in rehab have tried for years, facing unbelievable consequences, to get sober--and yet they continue to get high. To get through to them involves a kind of therapy that from the outside seems brutal. But I see that those methods are appropriate to their life-and-death-situation. No hand-holding is appropriate when people are at death's door because of their own willfulness, because of their own ego.

So their ego needs to be destroyed? Yes, ego is the most destructive part of the addict's personality.

Has an addicted person's ego been so distorted by the disease that it can no longer support life? Twelve-step literature talks about how our disease takes natural desires and turns them against us. And I believe that's right. I believe that there is a core of our worst character defects that started out as beneficial, natural, and instinctive. Addicts take those instincts and turn them inward as weapons against happy lives.

So a general reader is going to say, "I have a friend who is maybe using and I don't know what to do." What does he or she do? This will also sound brutal: If you think someone is addicted to drugs or alcohol, you have to let them go. You have to tell them that you can't be in their life. There is nothing you can to do to help them. They are the only person who can help themselves. Of course, if they get sober, then your love and forgiveness can mean everything. But anyone who believes that they can love someone sufficiently to get them sober is fooling themselves. In terms of mentoring, the benefit of mentoring comes before someone falls into addiction or after they get sober and are trying to build a new kind of life. My own personal experience is that the friends who let me go because of my addiction helped me the most. That got my attention.

How did that get your attention? They told you to get your shit together and then they might talk to you? More than that. I could see that there was a price to my addiction. And it helped me to begin to realize that the price was too high if people I loved weren't even willing to be around me anymore.