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What a defeat! What a disappointment! What an extraordinary waste of time and money, and -- worst! -- of fine, naked, dusty men still gallivanting around the playa without me. From Black Rock City I drove to Reno and visited an octogenarian friend whose recent stroke confined her, lame and virtually wordless, to a convalescent home. There I spent an hour with her, stewing in the exile and isolation of illness. I knew a better life was going on back on the playa without us.

I also knew a story was unfolding that I was supposed to cover. What was queer Burning Man? I had this idea it had to do with drag and art and a city that rises and falls every year, reinventing itself the way each generation of queer people must reinvent itself, or the way transvestites reinvent themselves every night of the week. This enduring promise of self-regeneration draws queer people to Black Rock City the way it has drawn us to San Francisco, a place charged with the energy and fear of having burned to the ground four times between 1849 and 1906.

And now there was this grim summons from the erotic playground. Two days of dehydration and heat stroke is not fatal illness, much less a plague, just as an annual festival in the desert is not a life. But I could not escape the fact that illness had once again engineered an erotic disappointment, that sexual liberation once again was receding just as I had prepared to seize it.

I'll probably never go back to Black Rock City, or stop searching for some place like it. I felt such an affinity for the festival; it was the closest imaginable realization of my ideal habitat; it was the restoration of a withdrawn promise. There was one thing wrong with this paradise, however: I could not survive in it. Queer or not, our lives have no more common epitaph.
salon.com | Sept. 16, 1999

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