Overboard on the High Seas?
Written by Steve Weinstein
03/14/2011
As everyone now knows, the gargantuan Atlantis 20th anniversary trip to the Caribbean produced one biggish (a few grams of crystal meth, nearly 150 tabs of Ecstasy) drug bust and a smattering of GHB overdoses.
While this is certainly not optimal behavior, I can’t join in the collective hand-wringing some of us seem to enjoy.
The latest to pile on is porn entrepreneur (a cliché title, but he deserves it — he really has built up a nice niche in the industry with generally classy products) Michael Lucas. Lucas loves to court controversy, as he has proven with his screeds about Islam being fundamentally opposed to gay rights and Israel as a beacon of gay freedom in the Mideast desert.
In his latest op-ed for the Advocate, however, Lucas takes on a non-geopolitical issue. He asserts that gay men need a “drug intervention,” as the title has it. The essence of his argument is not so much that the big drug bust on the Allure is an indication of the pervasiveness of the drug culture in gay life (although he does make that point). Rather, it’s that media, including mainstream outlets like CNN, picked up on the story.
“What makes this episode particularly unfortunate was the fact that the mainstream press caught wind of it, and the likes of CNN and the Associated Press aired our dirty linens at full mast,” he writes. “This endearing display of what it means when gays “party and play” comes at the same time we’re trying to convince straight society of how deserving we are of marriage and the right to adopt children. These drug-bust episodes only give comfort to our enemies, who seek to portray gay people as irresponsible, self-indulgent, and drug-crazed party boys.”
OK, let’s take this point by point:
• As several commenters on the Advocate site and elsewhere have pointed out, illegal drugs are hardly limited to gay cruises. Websites that track crimes on the high seas point out many, many drug busts on mainstream cruises, some of them for amounts of really bad stuff like heroin that make the Allure bust very small potatoes.
• Lucas’ supposition is that, when it comes to news reports, the bad about us drives out the good. I’m not so sure. Maybe I’m overly optimistic about Americans’ ability to discern news, but I’d like to think that people of good will would understand that such drug busts and OD’s represent only a few people out of the 5,000 on board.
• To look at the cruise another way, here’s a boat of 5,000. You don’t hear of any physical altercations I did anecdotally hear about four, but they weren’t a big deal, and face it: Put 5,000 testosterone-laden straight men on a boat floating in the high seas and see how many fights the crew is breaking up.
• It’s an old point, but one worth making: Gay men are probably no more drug-addled than straight people who go out dancing.
• As an avid monitor of our enemies’ websites, I can testify that they would twist whatever is said about us to try to use it against us. To make the argument that we shouldn’t do this or should do that because of what our enemies would think is as empty as asserting that Jews in Germany in the early 1930s should have behaved in a certain way to stave off Hitler’s hatred of them.
That example is a good one, because one of the most salient aspects of anti-Semitism is its fundamental irrationality. Like other blind hatreds, anti-Semites can somehow justify two diametrically opposed positions: in this case, that world Jewry is conspiring to take over capitalism via Jewish bankers and stock brokers; and that world Jewry is conspiring to turn the world over to Communism, via left-wing agitators and thinkers.
Similarly, our enemies believe that we are limp-wristed pansies incapable of serving in the military — but we’re also proto-Nazi storm troopers, super-muscled bullies. We’re sexual predators, constantly seeking to get our rocks off with whatever’s available as often as available — but we’re also prissy, asexual pantywaists. Lesbians are flannel-shirted fat bull dykes — but also hyper-feminine, gorgeous sexual bimbos. You get the idea.
• Besides, why should individual gay men believe that they have to be role models? The whole argument reminds of the “good Negro” stereotype of the Jim Crow era. Blacks were told they not only had to be good, they had to be perfect. Every black man and woman reflected the race. It’s a heavy burden — and an unfair one — to impose on anyone trying to live a full life.
• If you talk to the crew of any ship chartered by Atlantis or another gay company, they will tell you that the gay cruises are by very far their favorite. Not only are we great tippers (since every gay men has worked in the service industry at some point in our lives); we’re also, well, fun. We don’t belly up to the buffet like it’s feeding time at the trough, but we’re first-on, last-off on the dance floor. You tell me which is preferable for a crew member out to sea.
• Finally — and this is the most important point — the people who were irresponsible on the Allure probably represented, at very most, 1 or 2 percent of the passengers. Everyone I spoke to who was on the cruise had a great time.
While not condoning bad behavior (and what’s up with taking GHB, a narcotic that puts you to sleep, when you want to dance all night anyway?), we all don’t have to don hair shirts for the conduct of a few.
(Originally published in EdgeMediaNetwork.com)
Reader Comments
It is always the same old thing keep the slaves busy fighting with each other and keep the distraction coming. But, you dont hear much on main stream media about the CIA planes that were stopped from taking off from south America headed to the us filled with illegal drugs. Illegal drugs constitute the largest single enterprise on the planet based on shier amounts of money which I might add is laundered by your friendly neighborhood Wacovia (now BofA) Bank.
By Daniel Abboud on 05-21-2011
