So, at 1 a.m. on a chilly March night, I arrived at the Roseland Ballroom with a mix of trepidation and excitement. Over the course of the next hour, the venue’s enormous dance floor filled up with thousands of sweaty, shirtless men, mostly clutching water bottles to offset their party drug-induced dehydration and dancing wildly to the loud techno music. The attendees were mostly in their 30s and 40s, eagerly showing off their gym-built bodies. The atmosphere was intense, but didn’t seem particularly crazy.

Then I felt a hand in my pants. One of the massive bar areas on the second floor had been turned into a makeshift darkroom. And as I walked a few feet into the dim lighting, I bumped into a group of men getting a blow job from a kneeling figure, though I could only make out vague shapes. In a way, it was exactly the commitment-free sex I’d been eager to try. But as their fingers inched their way into my underwear, and their hands got more and more aggressive, I realized I wasn’t even remotely turned on. I was just uncomfortable. This was nuts: I wasn’t going to have sex with a man, let alone a group of men, whom I couldn’t even see.

The atmosphere grew increasingly debauched. People had sex in every nook and cranny. On the second floor, two enormous porn stars, including artsy French actor (and Salon Man on Top) François Sagat, had oral sex in front of 50 or 60 people. Then they urinated on each other, splashing on the surrounding audience. On the ground floor, a long banquette was filled with dozens of men openly masturbating.

This was what I’d come for: a bacchanal of shamelessness and free sexual expression. It embodied the radical gay politics I thought were lacking in my generation of gay men, so concerned with marriage and adoption and fitting in. But now that I was seeing it firsthand, I found myself strangely disconcerted. It wasn’t just the fact that so many of the men seemed to be on meth or GHB, or the fact that many of them were probably having unsafe sex. It was the sheer frenzy of it. The sex I was seeing didn’t seem erotic or pleasurable so much as compulsive — not an intimate act at all, but a performance.

Then, around 5 a.m, I witnessed a scene that remains seared into my memory. A group of a hundred or so men had gathered around the pool table near the main stage and were watching four men, one wearing a cat mask and another dressed in a boy scout uniform. The boy scout first poured the contents of a beer bottle into the man in the cat mask, who was lying down on the table. The cat masked man shot the contents (and not with his mouth) back out onto onlookers. The boy scout then got rid of the bottle in favor of other implements; first a pool cue — handle first — then four pool balls. As I walked away, I saw him prepare to insert one more object: a magic eight ball.

A few hours later, as morning rose, I walked into my Brooklyn apartment and dropped my clothes into a plastic bag. What had I learned? Never to play pool at the Roseland Ballroom. But also that I wasn’t as bold as I had thought. I’m sure a gay man in any era could have been freaked out by that kind of extreme exhibitionism, but I wondered if my squeamishness wasn’t also a sign of a generational divide. If gay sex in the 1970s was marked by rampant hedonism, and gay sex in the 1980s was defined by AIDS, then perhaps gay sex in the new millennium — a time in which kids like me are coming out at earlier and earlier ages and finding themselves less and less defined by their sexuality — is largely distinguished by its normalcy. As gay culture becomes more and more like straight culture — and increasingly unconstrained by stereotypes — it makes sense that, for better or worse, our attitudes toward sex become more and more like straight people’s as well.

That doesn’t mean that men won’t or shouldn’t keep having sex in dark rooms or on pool tables in front of large crowds, but it means that, as the march toward the mainstream continues, it’ll probably become increasingly uncommon. And it doesn’t mean I’m not grateful — over the last few decades, those hordes of kinky gay men paved the way for my sexual freedom. I like that the Black Party exists. I like that it makes people uncomfortable. And I never want to go there again.