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Recently in Salon Health & Body

Urge
He knows me, he knows me not
How can Matt know her so well and not at all?
By Tracy Quan
[09/16/99]

Bringing 'em back alive
How anesthesiologists keep you from drifting away forever.
By Eleanor Stacy Parker
[09/15/99]

Urge
I hate myself
After my marriage fell apart, I learned the culture of gay self-loathing.
By Daniel Reitz
[09/14/99]

Urge
Swooning over the messenger
She can't decide what makes the man: Brawn, brains or big brothers.
By Tracy Quan
[09/13/99]

Urge
Toy story
Oh, the adventures of a gal's first vibrator. Mr. Stubbies could charm the pants off anyone. Almost anyone.
By Jennifer Parello
[09/11/99]

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Then, like the dust devils that periodically wend their way around Black Rock City, the word spread through the playa about an extraordinarily durable and vertical hard-on sighted at Camp Sunscreen. If I hurried, I could still see. With this advisory, I overcame my shyness and soon found myself standing at the camp's far table, applying runny blobs of SPF 30 to the calves of a buxom 20-ish woman while sneaking as many glances as shame would allow at the famed erection across the table. It lived up to reports by pointing skyward for another 25 minutes, flying from its apex a fine spider's filament of pre-ejaculate.

The erection was attached to an eccentrically sexy guy, bantam and bald, mid-30s, white like virtually everyone else in Black Rock City. He and I were the last holdouts at our table after a dust storm chased the others away. Dusted with a light coat of white powder, he gave me an utterly unerotic, bone-crunching massage. When it was my turn, I was thorough but skirted his asshole. Then I kept finding myself back near it. A sign hanging from a shade structure told us to ask about boundaries when we were unsure. I asked.

"Go crazy," answered the rakish baldie. I did what I was told.

Go crazy indeed. Under this ethos, a queer subculture has bloomed in the Black Rock Desert over the last few years. This year, for the first time, the makeshift city had a de facto gay ghetto as half a dozen queer camps banded together under the auspices of M*A*S*Hcara, a "ladies' militia forced-aid camp." But the heart of queer Burning Man is not so much the queers who go there, but the queer heart of the festival itself. Out in the Nevada desert in the last week of summer, everyone's a freak -- and they're playing by our rules.

"Write about how queer fashion sensibility has swept the playa," suggested Eric, a childhood friend whose Day-Glo drag confections lit up the desert day and night. "Write about all the straight guys who look like they're gay. But how it doesn't really matter because everyone's friendly and flirty."

The fashion, sex and art of Black Rock City form a dizzying jumble: men in skirts, men in nothing; topless women, bacchants of both sexes crawling over each other in the playa mud, hard-ons leaving a thin trail of slime over male and female thighs; casual couplings initiated by glances, invitations delivered by water pistol or laser; wigs and merkins, slips and dresses, pubic shavings, cock paintings, sex standing up, sex in public, sex on camera, sex at odd hours, after breakfast. It is a city whose highest structures -- the expressions of its highest values -- are flammable sculptures and disco towers.

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