Men behaving badly.

In the time it took to pull apart a Marquis Hotel ballpoint pen and use it to snort a line of cocaine, the White Party in Palm Springs, Calif., went from dreary to dreamy.

"I was drunk off my ass, tired as hell, and annoyed that these megastuds had energy to keep going all night long when I was ready for bed--by myself," explains Jim (not his real name), a 26-year-old Los Angeles professional who, says he did cocaine for the first time--and second and third--at this year's White Party, one of the "circuit parties" that attract gay men from around the country.

"I badly wanted to be up `there,' wherever `there' was, with everyone else. I must say, the coke did the trick," he says, adding sheepishly, "I definitely had a good time."

As the night wore on, Jim says, he felt charged by the thumping music fierce lights, and beautiful bodies: "We were all shoved against each other, totally sweaty, but in a very sexy way, passing around poppers, groping, making out."

Later that night Jim went back to his hotel--one of the many so-called "encounter resorts" in Palm Springs--and cruised the grounds. In no time, he says, he found a dark corner and a hot man. "People were giving each other blow jobs all over the place. What a wild weekend!"

It's not Fire Island, N.Y., and it's not the 1970s. Nor is it a setting unique to Palm Springs or a circuit party.

As the summer heats up and the gay flags unfurl, the party's everywhere--in nightclubs and sex clubs from Los Angeles to Miami and in private homes from Chicago to Atlanta. And as on Fire Island in the '70s, sex and drugs are on the invite list.

In some cases the impact of such reckless behavior extends beyond the circle of the actual participants. News of the 50th birthday bash for openly gay San Francisco political consultant Jack Davis in early May gave the religious right plenty to talk about. The X-rated party reportedly included, among other things, a 300-pound sadomasochist performing a live sex act.

"Ralph Reed and Jerry Falwell love to read this stuff every time," San Francisco gay activist Frederick Hobson told the Los Angeles Times. "It makes us all look like fools and perverts." Davis later issued a written apology to attendees who took offense at the party antics.

On a more local level, citizens in certain neighborhoods in Seattle and Los Angeles have complained in the past year about problems associated with cruising. In both cases antigay rhetoric made its way into the discussion.

Many gay activists agree that gays and lesbians, like members of other minority groups, seem to be held to a stricter standard when it comes to how they're expected to carry themselves. After all, if you're going to fight for civil rights and ask for money to combat a disease that's ravaging your community, shouldn't you be model citizens?

Consider the case of Bill (not his real name), a high-ranking official in one of the country's largest AIDS service organizations. A longtime supporter of Bill's organization recently told him she's through writing checks.

"She said, `My heart doesn't break for them anymore,'" Bill recalls, pointing out the woman's frustrations about the continuing high rate of HIV infection among gay men despite safer-sex education.

What's worse, Bill knows exactly what she's talking about. After ten years in the safer-sex business, Bill knows the rules. Still, one night he found himself in a terrifying position after snorting too much cocaine. "I ended up having oral sex with this guy [who was also high], and he started to bleed," he recalls, the fright of the incident still fresh in his voice.

Bill immediately got tested and, sure enough, turned up positive. He called doctors all over the country and asked what he should do. After taking a cocktail combination of protease inhibitors, he says, he's testing negative again, but he's unsure whether the drugs worked or if the first test just gave a false reading.

Regardless, he knows he's lucky. "For an hour of pleasure, I was going to pay for it for the rest of my life," he says. "Where's the responsibility? That's what's driving me nuts."

What drives gay men to throw caution to the wind has long been a cause for debate. Some say they're simply letting off steam. Others argue they need an escape from the pain of being HIV-positive or the anguish of losing friends to AIDS.

Gay psychologist Larry Harmon, who practices in Miami, links destructive behavior among gay men to self-esteem issues that go way back. "There isn't a gay man alive," he says, "who can't instantly relate how he felt when a classmate said `fag.'"

For years, he reasons, gay men have been rejected by other men--whether it be a cruel classmate, a father who made gay jokes, or a more masculine brother favored by the mother. "In the backs of our heads, we feel a lack of confidence [around men], so we ... take a drug that's going to override that program."

Perhaps the highest-profile place for gay men to forget their past and celebrate their present is the circuit party, a phenomenon that has exploded in popularity in recent years. This year circuit king Jeffrey Sanker will put on about a dozen such parties, most of them similar to the Palm Springs White Party. Other promoters have also wired into the circuit mystique.

Interior designer-turned-circuit party DJ Mike Mitchell admits that drugs are prolific at the parties, saying, "They're going to go where they can dance and party and have a good time, `cracked on.'"

Many of them party with the intensity of a chest-pounding techno mix. At this year's Palm Springs party, rooms were often littered with the remains of a virtual pharmacy of illegal drugs. Often tucked between Calvin Klein briefs and Mossimo T-shirts in the suitcases of the attendees were cocaine, a sensual-enhancement drug called ecstasy, and anything else that would help them gyrate in wild abandon with thousands of other men.

Mitchell cautions that the drug use is recreational and should not be perceived as epidemic. "I think most of the time they're not living their lives like that," he says. "They're professionals, they have income, and they know how to regulate [drug use]." For those who don't, he believes, help is as close as a good friend. "Usually they're surrounded by enough people who care about them ... who will intervene."

Sanker says he believes drug use on the circuit is subsiding, even though four paramedics were called to this year's Palm Springs party when some revelers became sick after taking GHB (gamma-hydroxybutyrate), a sedative with unpredictable side effects.

"I think, compared to other communities and things going on, this is small. I think it's the GHB that's making us call ambulances," Sanker explains, pointing also to the prevalence of the drug at straight "rave" parties.

Sanker says undercover security guards at his events keep an eye out for drug use. If they see it, they seize the drugs and kick the person out of the party. He says the drugs are burned at a military base and that the police never know.

Sanker also says that officials at the Palm Springs convention center (where the party was held) told him four paramedics is the minimal number that should be on hand in the context of 6,000 attendees and that much larger problems have sprung from smaller, nongay events. Still, Sanker's ads for his events now read SAY NO TO GHB. "You want to tell people, `This is idiotic,'" he explains, "But we need to take care of our own."

According to Sanker, past White Parties have included safer-sex seminars and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for sober partygoers. And condoms are always handed to men as they leave the event. "You can only lead a horse to water," Sanker says. "We just try to be careful of people going over too far. Have fun, play safe ... it sounds corny, but you just have to be responsible."

Why anyone wouldn't protect themselves boggles the minds of those who do. After all, in the '90s there's an unwelcome, albeit well-known, party guest whom revelers of a previous generation didn't know had sneaked in to bust the bash.

The party pooper is HIV, of course, and some mental health professionals wonder if some gay men are looking at the virus as less of a bully than they once did. "The younger guys cannot put it in context in light of all the new drugs and the positive things coming out about the protease inhibitors," says Dave Rigg, substance abuse treatment coordinator at Health Crisis Network in Miami.

In Miami, Harmon says, protease inhibitors have definitely changed the mood of his clients, many of them people with AIDS. "Where in the past people came here to die, now they come to feel alive," says Harmon. For them, part of "feeling alive" is working out, looking beautiful, and doing whatever it takes to have fun. "It's no coincidence they call it ecstasy," Harmon says of the popular club drug.

Ecstasy acts as a stimulant and a hallucinogen; users take it for a sense of well-being and sensory distortions (it makes the disco lights trippier) and to stay awake. But according to the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, club users risk exhaustion from nonstop dancing, and some have died from heatstroke.

Because people who use drugs generally keep it secret from those who might shake a finger, it's difficult to get a grip on just how prevalent drug use is. Harmon believes more and more gay men are dabbling in illegal substances, however: "My sense is that it has become normal for a gay man in his 20s to experiment with coke and pot and even crystal meth once in a while."

In Los Angeles the signature gay drug is crystal meth, according to a recently released city-commissioned report, "The Social Construction of a Gay Drug: Methamphetamine Use Among Gay and Bisexual Males in Los Angeles," by Dr. Cathy Reback. The study examined crystal use in bars, dance clubs, sex clubs, bathhouses, cruising areas, and coffeehouses, among other places. More than 60 men, ages 17 to 51, participated in the study, half of them white and the others Latino, African-American, Native American, and Asian or Pacific Islander, their vocations running the gamut from prostitutes and drug dealers to businesspeople and artists.

Most of the men who use the drug, the report concludes, do so to intensify sex. Crystal-enhanced sex is "an earth-shattering experience," said one study participant. "It sprays farther," reported another, referring to his orgasm.

And among gay men, many experts agree, when it comes to taking drugs, it's all about sex. "I think the comment we're hearing from people is, there's an increase in drug use and disinhibition when it comes down to sex-unsafe sex," confirms Rigg.

The Los Angeles study theorizes more explicitly about the connection: "For older gay men, sex on crystal is reminiscent of sex during the gay liberation era of the 1970s. AIDS has robbed gay men of a form of sexual expression. Young gay men live in the shadow of death, with only history to teach them that gay life was ever different. The transmission of a lethal virus through sexual activity has inextricably linked sex with death for gay males at this historical moment." Among the study's conclusions: HIV prevention must take into account not only the city's epidemic of crystal use but also its link to the cultural impact of AIDS.

But while those concerned with substance abuse and unsafe sex expand their efforts, will the behavior of a few pose a public-relations threat to the gains gays and lesbians have made over the past several years? Most gay activists say it won't. Every minority group has its bad apples, they say. "Gay people are not immune to the influences of society," points out David Smith, spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, a gay lobbying group based in Washington, D.C.

In the end, activists trust that the general public will look beyond these egregious examples of bad behavior and recognize the diversity that exists among gays and lesbians. "We have all kinds of people in our community, just like anyone else does," says Mark Johnson, spokesman for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, a political group. "Men behaving badly are only part of who we are."

RELATED ARTICLE: Life beyond the circuit

Steve Troy has left the dance floor. Troy, a former ad agency executive, isn't your average middle-aged disco bunny: The 47-year-old retiree is one of a handful of promoters who have elevated the gay party circuit to its current prominence. His Los Angeles-based Dance On Productions is responsible for such legendary bashes as the Big Guns: Dance On Manhattan party, which in 1994 raised $250,000 for the American Foundation for AIDS Research.

Despite a string of similar successes, Troy recently split the scene after reading Michelangelo Signorile's Life Outside: The Signorile Report on Gay Men: Sex, Drugs, Muscles, and the Passages of Life. "Mike's book had a profound effect on me," Troy says. "After reading it I realized that, as a produces of these events, I was helping to recruit young gay men into a lifestyle that featured drug abuse and promiscuity. I no longer wanted to be responsible for furthering that kind of dangerous activity in my lifetime.

Troy's own HIV-positive status has informed his decision to leave and hastened his plans for an alternative to the drug- and sex-fueled party scene. "I'm working on a couple of different high-profile gay events that deemphasize drug use, " says Troy, who says he makes no money from theses events. He plans a "Great Gatsby-style" lawn party and a music festival featuring well-known gay and lesbian performers.

Troy has met with some initial resistance from fellow promoters. But he asked for, and got, an antidrug statement in the promotional literature for this year's Labor Day L.A., a weekend of gay-themed parties. "I'm determined," he says, "to create new entertainment concepts that won't kill us off while they're entertaining us."