Queer Fear

[-̮̮̃-̃ ̾●̮̮̃̾•̃̾ ™Usenet Legends ªºªandɔa®ole]

At around 4 on a Saturday morning, a time when most of the gay bars
in New York have closed and locked their doors, a steady stream of
young and middle-aged men, almost all shirtless and some stripped down
to their boxer briefs, have found their way down a dark stairwell and
into a maze of basement rooms, where the décor can best be described
as fallout-shelter chic.


They have come to Paddles, an after-hours sex club in Chelsea, not yet
ready to end their evening. They prowl the long cinder-block hallway,
exchanging knowing glances. A husky, bearded man in his 40s lounges on
a corrugated black rubber bench, admiring a chorus line of smooth-
chested 20-somethings, their flesh glowing under a pink neon sign and
black lights. A man in a metal-studded black leather chest harness
strides toward a back room, the hookup room, where a circle of men,
skin glistening with sweat, hover around a swing, watching.

Then, in walks a skinny man in a black baseball cap, with soulful eyes
and a nose that juts forward like the prow of a ship. He stops at a
folding table set up between two video screens showing continuous
reels of gay pornography. He strips off his black leather jacket,
flexing toned biceps in a black muscle shirt. He sets up a red
hazardous-waste bin as nonchalantly as if it were a plastic juice jug
from Costco, arranges some Band-Aids and a bowl of lollipops next to
it, and pulls out a syringe.

This is Demetre Daskalakis, a doctor and gay activist who has come to
spread the message that a new health threat has emerged among the
city’s gay population and that he is there to stop it.

“Have you been vaccinated?” he asks, smiling, his voice warm, as the
half-naked men walk by.

A new, casually transmittable infection — a unique strain of bacterial
meningitis — has cast a pall over the gay night life and dating scene,
with men wondering whether this is AIDS, circa 1981, all over again.
Seven men have died in New York City, about a third of diagnosed
cases, since 2010. And in the last few months, the contagion seemed to
be accelerating. It has targeted gay and bisexual men, and nobody
knows exactly why.

The city’s best hope to curb the outbreak is to vaccinate as many at-
risk men as possible, focusing on those most in danger: men who
regularly hook up with other men whom they meet at parties, bars,
clubs and through apps like Grindr. Dr. Don Weiss, the director of
surveillance for the city’s Bureau of Communicable Disease, has called
it “Russian roulette sex,” because “sooner or later, you are going to
come across this organism and be exposed.”

The health department’s own vaccination efforts at several gay bars
have had limited success. Men out partying want to have fun, not be
told that they may fall prey to a lethal disease by doing so.

Hence Dr. Daskalakis’s early-morning club crawl, medical bag in hand.
Being a nonthreatening gay man who does not wear a white coat helps.
So does his empathy and sense of humor. When this reporter sent him an
e-mail expressing a wish to remain fully clothed while out cruising,
the reply from his iPhone was instantaneous: “I will be in a
burkha :)”

Every half-hour or so, the owner of Paddles, Michael Aulito, makes a
public-service announcement: “If you haven’t gotten a shot, please go
talk to Dr. Demetre.” Once, he adds, “Not Dr. Demento, Dr. Demetre.”

Dr. Daskalakis hands the men a consent form and asks the threshold
question: “Do you have an illness more serious than a cold?”

“Will it hurt?” they ask.

“I’m hitting more than 700 today, my injections have gotten really
good,” he says, grinning proudly.

“Can I get it from having sex?”

“Maybe,” he says, “but not just from sex. You can get it from being
close, like kissing or cuddling.”

This is motivating. Most of the men have checked their shirts at the
door. Some have checked their pants. Conditions for injection could
hardly be better. Before Lady Gaga can stutter out “Pa-pa-pa-poker
face, pa-pa-poker face,” Dr. Daskalakis stabs them in the arm with a
needle, applies a Band-Aid and sends them on their way. All over
Paddles, men are happily sucking on the lollipops he is handing out as
a reward.

“Dr. Demetre told me every person who gets a shot saves four other
people,” Mr. Aulito says. “If he gives 700 shots, that’s 2,800 people
that he saved, an amazing number.” Mr. Aulito has been vaccinated, as
has his wife.

Peter DeMartino, 40, the head of an AIDS organization, AIDS/HIV
Services Group, in Charlottesville, Va., says that he is so excited at
finding medical care in a sex club that he feels like waking up his
traveling companion, who is from Philadelphia, to get inoculated, too.
“It’s New York, right?” Mr. DeMartino says. “We know our populations
are very — migratory is not the right word — but it’s not much to have
a weekend in New York. If there’s an outbreak in New York, how soon
before it’s up and down the 95 corridor?”

Freddie Messina, a 38-year-old events coordinator from Bensonhurst,
Brooklyn, said that he got his shot the week before from his doctor,
but he is grateful that, for men who are not insured, Paddles is an
option. “I go out quite a bit,” he says. “You don’t have to have sex
with someone to get meningitis. You go out to a bar on Friday night,
you’re in contact with hundreds of men, and you’re not going to know.
You’re going to think, ‘Oh, I’m hung over.’ ”

The bearded man lounging on the bench, an investment-bank asset
manager who does not want to give his name, says the outbreak has
definitely affected his behavior. “I have to hold back on kissing,
which I normally do as an alternative to more aggressive or deep
intimacy,” he says. He watches others get vaccinated, musing, “This
might be a convenient time,” but is soon distracted by a bevy of
younger men wandering by, and takes off behind them.

A publicist has been dragged in by his “close to monogamous” boyfriend
of 13 years, since they met at N.Y.U. Refusing to take off his jeans,
sport coat, button-down shirt and boat shoes, he grabs the consent
form as if it were a note excusing him from gym class. He studies it
carefully and says he and his companion, who is rushing through the
consent form as fast as he can, came to Paddles specifically in search
of the vaccine. “We left a bar tonight and we got a flier for this
place,” he says. “It had Gay Men’s Health Crisis on it. We had no idea
it was an underground sex place.”

He says he is a friend of a friend of one of the men who died,
horrifically. “I think he just didn’t wake up,” the publicist says.
“I’m like, ‘I’ll take a free shot.’ ”

Meningitis is an inflammation of the lining that surrounds the spinal
cord and brain. Symptoms can come on so fast and seem so ordinary —
fever, headache, stiff neck and a rash — that victims often try to
tough it out and neglect to go to the doctor until it is too late.

The bacteria is carried in the nose and mouth. Though not as
contagious as a cold or flu, it can be spread through kissing,
sneezing or sharing a spoon. (Sharing cigarettes is also bad, but
there is a theory in the literature that this is not because of the
exchange of saliva but because smoking irritates the mucous membranes
and facilitates bacterial invasion.)

The publicist takes off his jacket and pulls up his shirt just long
enough for a shot, then buttons up again.

“How long is it good?” he wants to know.

“It takes 7 to 10 days to take effect and provides up to five years of
immunity,” Dr. Daskalakis says.

Often, men ask him, “What are my chances of getting this?”

“Minuscule,” he replies. The idea, he explains, is to confer herd
immunity by vaccinating as many at-risk men as possible.

After coming out of the closet and AIDS and the fight over equal
rights and gay marriage, they’ve been through enough, some gay men
say. “As one of my guys who I vaccinated said, ‘What are they going to
think of next?’ ” Dr. Daskalakis commiserates.

“It could have picked another social network,” he says. “It picked gay
men. It’s like thinking of the community as a large dorm without
walls.”

Knowing that Dr. Daskalakis has entree where government apparatchiks
do not, the city supplies him with free vaccine. A week ago, he
vaccinated men at a house party in Brooklyn, in a location he did not
want to be disclosed, where the host set the mood by dressing in drag
as a platinum-blond nurse. “The department of health loves that we’re
here — loves, loves, loves,” he says, at Paddles.

So far, the fear is nowhere on par with the AIDS epidemic, which led
to fights over closing bathhouses and protests in the streets that the
local and national governments were not doing enough. But to a bearded
Irishman in his early 40s at Eastern Bloc, the East Village club where
the mood is “Cheers” meets hipsters, this moment is reminiscent of
when AIDS was pejoratively known as GRID (Gay-Related Immune
Deficiency).

“I feel like it’s the next narrative on from H.I.V.,” the Irishman
says, before he walks off with his bicycle and a Venezuelan friend. “
‘Gay something happens in New York City gay spots.’ ”

Another patron, a 21-year-old art student in fashionably square
glasses, says he has felt some backlash from straight people. He
offered a co-worker a cookie, “and they asked me do I have
meningitis.”

But there are important differences. AIDS was considered a death
sentence, until antiretroviral drugs were developed to keep the virus
in check. Meningitis can be treated with antibiotics if caught in
time. The vaccine will prevent someone from getting it, and possibly
reduce the ability of a carrier to spread it.

The current strain was first detected among drug users in Brooklyn in
2006. In that outbreak, 23 people were infected and 7 died. After the
city conducted a vaccination drive at drug treatment centers and soup
kitchens, there was a three-year lull. Then there was 1 case in 2010,
4 in 2011, 13 in 2012 and 4 so far this year, all among gay and
bisexual men living in New York City. Of the 22, 7 have died. (City
officials say there has been a 23rd case in a man who lived elsewhere
in New York State but frequented the city.)

The archetypal case is an African-American man 20 to 40 years old who
is socially active and lives in a cluster of Brooklyn neighborhoods:
Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville, Bushwick, Clinton Hill, Crown
Heights, Downtown Brooklyn, Dumbo, East New York, Prospect Heights and
Williamsburg. Half of the men have been black, 18 percent Hispanic.
Often, they are not out about their sexual activity, making it
difficult for the health department to reach them. There have been 10
cases in Brooklyn, 7 in Manhattan, 2 in Queens and 2 in the Bronx. One
man was homeless.

Of the 22, 12 were H.I.V.-positive, a possible risk factor because of
their compromised immune systems. The last confirmed case was Feb. 15.

Epidemiologists are puzzled as to why the latest outbreak is attacking
men but not women. “We don’t have any evidence that it’s different in
some biological way, we just know that it’s different,” says Dr. Jay
Varma, the city’s deputy health commissioner for disease control. “And
what is concerning is that it is largely restricted to men who have
sex with men. So we don’t really understand why that is.”

Last month, the death of Brett Shaad, a West Hollywood, Calif.,
lawyer, fueled concerns that the outbreak had spread west. Los Angeles
County health authorities and the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention have since confirmed that the strain of meningitis that
killed Mr. Shaad was different enough from the one in New York that it
is unlikely that is how he was exposed. But the C.D.C. has asked state
health departments nationwide to be on the alert for cases among gay
men.

If meningitis were spread by mere contact, you would expect it to be
ripping through No Parking, a gay bar in Washington Heights. After 1
a.m. at a popular Wednesday night party, the men (and some women) are
squeezed in shoulder to shoulder. Underwear-clad go-go boys hop down
from the bar, flashing their rock-hard backsides. Patrons tuck dollar
bills into the dancers’ waistbands. A dancer leads a fully dressed
customer behind a curtain for a lap dance. There are communal hookahs,
but the bar passes out plastic-wrapped individual mouthpieces.

“I think of it as a safe haven for people to come out and be
themselves,” says Romeo Romero, the party promoter, draped in gold
chains. “I don’t want to be a party pooper, but we’ll make the
announcements: ‘H.I.V. testing around the corner.’ So there are
options. I don’t think they’re worried about it that much, although
it’s potentially dangerous and harmful, and they should be.”

Indeed, a striking number of the men at No Parking say they have no
idea of a meningitis outbreak in New York. “I’m scared right now, I’m
shocked, I didn’t know,” says Fabio Reyes, 21, a cook’s assistant,
after being told. “He’s shocked, too,” he adds, indicating the man
standing next to him, Wilson Columna, 25, a home attendant.

In one positive sign, the number of vaccinations in the city has been
rising sharply, to 10,200 as of May 13.

“We have our fingers crossed,” Dr. Varma said. “One of the reasons we
can’t be 100 percent confident is that there are a number of Gay Pride
events coming up, where there are a lot of people coming into the
city, a lot of people interacting together, so we want to get through
that period before we are really celebrating controlling it.”

It is now dawn on Saturday at Paddles, though you would not know it
from the darkness underground. The asset manager shambles out of one
of the back rooms. “Somebody told me my breath is too fresh,” he says,
mock insulted. He blinks at the lithe man in the black muscle shirt,
still holding a syringe, as if seeing him for the first time. “So
you’re a doctor?” he says, and steps up for his shot.