I am maybe twice your age and back in the 80s and 90s I spent many a night on the dance floor with my friends during that golden era of the Saint and Probe, and remember quite well that feeling we were the inventors of this kind of new and specific communing experience, with a gloss of taboo that lend it an erotic charge. Of course there was a context to our times that was inescapable. The drugs made us forget, deny, put out of our mind, what was happened to so many of us and our friends. Between those walls, we felt safe, until dawn at least. Our joy was no pure.
I have often wondered when and if gay culture would finally get to the place it would have been had AIDS never happened, and your piece gave me a sense of what it would be like, and what it is actually becoming. There’s a lot to be said for a touch of hedonism, without apology. Something happens on that dance floor that is more than the sum of its parts.
I wrote a poem looking back at this era, I’d like to share with you.
