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Do I make a good friend? Sex usually ends up part of the picture. Most of my friends are ex-boyfriends. Others I meet, hang out with for a short time, then either make a move that fizzles out the friendship or awake beside a person I swore yesterday I wouldn't have sex with.

It's a Saturday morning, rainy, chilly, early spring day. Queens is quiet, peaceful, and, like the beautiful boy in my bed, the city sleeps through this new weekend morning. All night out, partying, clubbing, looking for something until sunrise, it's supposed to be just sex, no big thing, hormones we can't control. The sun is coming up, I've only slept a few hours, and now I'm wide-awake. Something tells me I'd be sleeping better if I were only sleeping with one I love but I don't have someone I love here right now. Is my need to be loved today greater than my ability to keep someone that will love me tomorrow?

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One boy says he does, but he does not return. Another acts like he does, but says he does not. Another says he does, but do I? For better or worse, my heart doesn't operate under the rules of reason. I want love here, now, not yesterday or tomorrow. My heart doesn't seem to have much memory or foresight. It is always getting me into trouble, but without it, what would living mean?

Life has definitely been wild coming to New York ten years ago from North Carolina to be free and gay.

I'm paying money I don't have to get into a cramped, hot, rudely staffed arena of shirtless men, glistening sweat, my friends, and my glow-sticks.

It's our world and everybody at some point has to get away and into it. We've been pumped up all day in anticipation of tonight! The energy we can feel from outside, standing in a line created by Studio 54 to make you think getting inside is so exclusive, you have to wait for it. The bum-bum-bum of the music makes the building pulsate. Finally, we make it to the doormen and now I feel complimented by looking young enough to be asked for my ID. One of the doormen once told me I had a nice look, and I thought that made me so cool. It was when I was working the homothug baggy look with connecting sideburns, straight-acting, trying to front something I am not, not yet realizing that acting straight is not nearly as cool as being gay. Masculinity has nothing to do with being straight. What is real? What is illusion? What does it matter? I don't always know what is real or unreal, but I know that which is authentic is preferable to the artificial.

Did we make it in time for open bar? Yes! I spent all my cash on the cover and Vitamin E, so I can have one drink or two with my friends before we drop. This is "The Life" on a budget, but I still have my friends.

Strangers, strangers, and nothing but fabulous strangers! I feel the music beating in my heart, but I take a break from dancing with the crowds and sit down in the lounge on the very top floor. A cute, young blond lays his head in my lap. He's completely fucked up on something, as I begin to rub his back and shoulders. I'm glad I'm not a dirty old man who has to wait for boys to get fucked up to get some. We get closer, closer, then we kiss. Yummy, teenaged lips and tongue give me a hard-on.

Suddenly he gets up, not a single word spoken between us, strangers kissing in the smoky, loud dark, but I am still sad that he left. Later I see him leave the club and I have an urge to follow, but I can't leave the security of the two friends with whom I came. I don't know why I feel empty, something is missing, I'm looking for it, I don't know exactly what it is, or maybe I forgot.

The club is clearing out, it's almost time to go, and I'm coming down. My pill must be wearing off. I'm getting that sinking, falling-off feeling of coming down from a high that felt much preferable to this low. The lights come on in the club, and the night's glamour is revealed to be a dirty dance floor with spilled drinks, broken beer bottles, and dingy carpet that is one big cigarette burn. The remaining people are still desperate for somebody or just dancing to the last possible dance, reluctant to leave the dance floor just yet. I am both.

It's an early winter Sunday morning, cold and quiet, before the city gets loud. It's super cold because I've been hot and sweaty all night. We closed the club, they shoved us out on the street into the snow right after the coat check before I had my coat on! I'm freezing my ass off, my friends are shivering, but I feel jolted by the cold, so the coming down feeling is gone for now. The sweat from the dance floor feels frozen into icicles, but I finally push into a cab with the two ex-boyfriends I now call friends. I put my arm around the one I want back, and we talk about the night on the ride home across the 59th Street Bridge.

"That guy you danced with had a cool tattoo­ he really played good stuff tonight­ Janet's new remix­ I could see a lot of improvement in your glow stick action tonight­ I couldn't believe you actually got up on the speaker­ I saw you kissing some blond kid in the lounge, then I lost you for a while."

The reality is the blond kid left with no idea that he had kissed me. I just had the mouth and tongue there at the right place at the right time. Of course, I was willing to give it up. Even though the Puerto Rican I got with in the stairwell at Limelight was pretty damned hot, it will take a while to admit that I'm feeling too old for this club life, every night the same, every dance floor only a little different, and too many times I end up right here like this, lying next to my ex, cuddled against him, wanting more than he can give. I'm starting to feel unsettled with the way things are. All I can hear are my dick and the sound of loneliness. I want things to be different, but I don't know how different. I don't know how to do life differently.

Coming down from E and half asleep are open windows of opportunity for an old spark to ignite the instinctual need for sex and love. I call it jealousy, but my other ex is really pissed off because I waited for a vulnerability to take advantage of the other so I could get with him and bite his neck hard, like he likes it. How could anyone sleep through getting bitten that hard? He wanted it, I wanted it, he moaned when I did it. But since I'm older, perhaps just because I can do a thing, doesn't mean I must do it. I'm more experienced than these guys. I wish I could be a better role model, but my own needs keep getting in the way. I love them both, but I keep wanting from them I know not what.

Hateful words were exchanged, and almost a year passed before I saw them again last month at the Roxy. We were boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, secret lovers, club companions, dinner dates, past loves, and old memories. (Maybe this is what makes a friend, at least a gay friend.)

Now I'm 30 and, while the 40-plus year-olds come after me, I go after the 20-year-olds. It's like the gay food chain. Eat and be eaten.

What is a fuck buddy? What is a friend? Who is an acquaintance, and by what rules do we follow in our relationships? Should friends have sex with friends? What if they are hot and there is a strong connection that cannot be denied? Does sex complicate matters for some, but not others? We must be our own friends and family. Who has the right to dictate to us the definitions of our relationships? Does all this have something to do with testosterone? There's no wonder we're horny all the time with a world that tells us we can't have what they have.

Sex with no emotional connection is supposed to be easier, but that's a contradiction because sex is an emotional act. I feel an underlying sexual sensation for some friends. Who is to say how close is too close to get to friends, or at least guys I've seen more than once? What is a gay friendship that is just sex? A one-night stand doesn't stay around for the good or bad times. I need good friends there for me when I'm sick and when I'm not sick from HIV. If my boyfriend were here with me, or if I had a boyfriend, I wouldn't need so badly to hold my cute new friend so close. I might be in love with this friend; I love just holding his hand. If I hadn't been with so many guys before, it might make a difference. Maybe I just like him a lot because there's got to be more to being gay than sex and falling in love over and over again.

Why doesn't he call me?

It's another Sunday, and I have dance music playing inside my brain on my headphones. The world is my club, and this city is my dance floor. I've made new friends who help me with feeling sick and lonely. I have a fondness for immigrant guys, maybe because I know how it feels to be in a place where I'm not wanted. God sent me a Mexican boy to love, but Immigration took him away. I'm so tired of this government taking my rights from me. Is it 2003 or 1984? I already have big brothers to watch over me and none of them are from Washington or Albany.

I try to be a good friend. I write poems about how difficult it is to be illegal. I teach myself Spanish and learn a little Portuguese. I want to be strong and the family they don't have. Brazilian boys are beautiful, but I need them to need me. I need my new friends to want me around.

Boom-boom-boom the music pounds my body. My head is lying against his shoulder, our legs are leaned against each other, and this is the best part of the whole night. It's good that he's away from that dude long enough to be with me. I want him to hold me so badly, and these words are in the music. The speakers blast out the emptiness and hurt in my heart, hoping he will hear and put his arm around me.

Bump and grind, the gay tribal dance of sex, lust, desire, and need shows this night is a lot about who we are, who I am. The music is loud, the lights are psychedelic, the bathroom is crowded, there's a backroom, there's an isolated play porch above the back bar, and it's impossible to avoid the sweat of others. Pushed up against each other so that touching is inevitable­ no rush-hour subway could compare to this expanse of humanity all packed voluntarily into a space that doesn't look nearly as big when it's emptied out and the lights are turned on.

The new unconstitutional smoking law nonsense just took effect, so you have to get stamped and go outside onto the smoking porch. However, it's ironic that you don't need the stamp to go to the dark room and fuck strangers in the dark. I used to do the backroom a lot, and there's nothing to say I can't do it again. I believe in love and I'll have it, or I'll die looking for it. I've just stopped looking for love in backrooms.

Being pulled by opposing forces, by this dance floor where the extremes meet: the highest and the lowest, it's impossible to get any higher. I'm happy to just be holding his hand. An old classic comes on that has been remixed, and I sing the words, but does he know I'm singing to him? All I want is him to hold me, but when I see him kissing somebody else, it hurts so badly, but not that badly. If I were to let a guy get to me that much again, I wouldn't have a prayer.

To be young again, not a young 30, but a young HIV-negative 20, I would be a part of something, and I would know so many more ways to have fun without hurting myself and others, or perhaps I'd be just as oblivious all over again. I could keep up with them on the dance floor, but I am far ahead in different ways. I can have fun like a kid when everything was new, and I can be responsible, cool, and calm because I'm so much more experienced now. I've been where they are and I know what to expect and not to expect, I hope.

The drugs, the Life, and shady people are my reasons for saying, "Be careful." The city will teach the tenderhearted lessons in heartbreak, and who survives without at least one painful or tragic story?

What place has love on this dance floor, in the backroom, or at the bar? I love the music, but if I were to love one of these hundreds of boys and not so boys, it would only be for tonight. Is that love? Or is it our gay love: temporary and fleeting, as light as a feather? It is carefree, but too much so for me at 30. I think it was not for me at 20 either. I am at the perfect age to attract both older and younger guys. Unconsciously, my ego reaches out for guys' attentions. I need to fit in somewhere, but all I ever want is a boyfriend.

Before me is a sea of sweat on the countless chests of men. I answer only to me. I'm in New York, where I always wanted to be, and I can have any kind of guy I want. What a sentimental fool I am, for us gay boys love exists only from one night to the next. So I guess I can flirt with everyone, kiss, dance, and fuck as many as I possibly can. The future does not yet exist, there will be plenty of time, but right now we forget about STD's, getting off on seeing just how many guys we can get with.

Faster and faster, higher and higher, we go looking for the core of life, the meaning, the reason we keep going, the something that makes life worth the trouble. Every weekend, maybe every night, the same place we go doing whatever we do over and over and over again.

These young friends of mine learn quickly. They discovered E. I tell them to include me next time. I don't want to be excluded from what my friends are doing and I don't want them to accidentally kill themselves. Someone needs to teach them the ropes of drugs and, as much as possible, responsible drug use.

He wants to try crystal, but my connections are old. Dealers don't advertise in the yellow pages, but it is still amazingly easy to find chemical fun in this city. After a yearlong relationship, when my high came only from inside a Mexican, I came up dry. My friend did not. I have $13 to last me a week, but I'll find some way to get the $50 I need to be able to go out and party with him this weekend. It'll be his first time with crystal, and I want to be the one to share his first time, look after him, and have fun with him.

Drugs don't come with a paper from the pharmacy listing interactions, effects. Do's and don'ts must be passed along informally. Though my friend came through by getting the stuff, I'm the one with the experience, so it is my words of wisdom. "Don't drink any alcohol with it, and especially no alcohol if you ever do GHB because you could die. A sniff is called a bump. If you do too much you will soon not feel it and your bag will be gone, so do small bumps at a time. Your hands can shake so be careful with your bag and don't drop it in the toilet. Be careful of grinding your teeth; chew gum. It's like ecstasy times ten and lasts a lot longer, but is much harder on the body and has a hard crash. If either of us start to freak out, we'll be there for each other, agreeing upon a meeting spot. Right now, imagine a safe, wonderful place that you like and, if you have a feeling like you're slipping or falling emotionally, go there until the feeling passes. Don't grind your stuff up in the bag because it will make a hole in the bag."

Everything is new again, I'm young, and it's been a long time since I lived in a club world. Are we having fun yet? Oh no, not yet. It's Friday night, even though part of me is jumping ahead into Saturday where this is New York and nothing is impossible. I dreamed that this would be the night for us to finally be alone together, tweaking with all barriers between us broken down by the drug. I thought it might actually be my first chance to kiss him. It didn't happen that way.

With no expectations I wouldn't be disappointed, but with no expectations I'd be in the same place, never moving, never wanting more, always satisfied with whatever life or others decide to let me have. I'll keep dreaming big, but instead of allowing disappointment to extinguish the dream, I'll try to make the best of whatever happens. After all this crazy gay life, I've learned to reserve a hidden place inside myself that is only for me. Hurt cannot touch it. It's the part inside that knows, no matter what, life will continue moving along. My health and writing must go on.

I have become bigger than my pain. I love boys more than ever, but since I lost my Mexican love and so many others before, no boy will ever again be able to take me from myself. I've had so many loves, so many disappointments, so much freaky, kinky sex, and HIV. Some boys don't care, but a lot don't want an HIV-positive boyfriend. Can I blame them? Maybe that's how my friend feels.

We're going out again this weekend, and I've been out more over the past month than over the past year. I have friends again, but how do I keep them? Who said I couldn't be happy all the time? I know I can't, any more than I can stay high, feeling good on something all the time. I can deal with being sad some of the time. It is part of who I am, sometimes I need it, but unhappiness and negativity are like disease, enemies of life to be engaged by the forces of good.

A bunch of misguided old queens mixed in with a lot of misguided young queens who are here every weekend acting as if all this were something new, but it has been going on here for countless nights. The music is new, the drugs are stronger, more plentiful, but the reasons for doing them are the same. Getting high off the drugs, others' highs, or the music, moving to the beat of the sound pulsating through your body, being surrounded by others who are of your own homosexual kind, feeling belonging, and for the first time in your life, you are on top of the world knowing you are busting out your own style of moves and a look that is all yours. There is something here on this dance floor that exists nowhere else during the week but on this Saturday night that is really Sunday morning. You live six days so you can exist here for six or 12 hours feeling good and away from your reality.

Today's the first day I've seen him since I gave him sort-of-a-love letter, but I don't know what his reaction meant. Maybe it didn't mean anything. He said he's confused. Maybe I come on strong when I don't intend to come on strong. Being ten years older comes on strong by itself. Is it a power thing or a need to be loved thing?

I took a long nap today and I dreamed that together we bought a big beautiful bulky fat bag of crystal and he came in and told me I'd done too much of it. I went through the house doing bumps all day, little bumps that ad up to a lot and, before you know it, somebody is telling me that I did a lot. I didn't do that much because, just like in real life, my little bag got a little hole in it. In the dream I lost more than in real life. I told him that I didn't really do that much, and we discovered the hole in the bag, Thereafter my tongue was numb from eating all the little pieces of crystal on my T-shirt, in the bed, on the floor, and on the bathroom countertop. Damn. It sucks to lose drugs like that, but it was just a dream.

I'll have no money to spare. It's good that I've had to limit buying cigarettes. I had to sell some pot, and I hope this will be enough money for the weekend. I didn't count in my weekly Metrocard or coffee money, so it's all or nothing. Sometimes, things work themselves out somehow.

It's another Friday night, and he says he's feeling sick, so maybe we should take a weekend off. There's nothing wrong with that and we could save some money. I'll miss the morning after, like last weekend when we walked outside for countless blocks all day in the bright sunlight feeling good, comfortable, lowered inhibitions, and talking on and on about anything, revealing who we really are and how we feel on the inside. We sat beside the Hudson River by the great warship USS Intrepid, and I picked for him a yellow spring-time daffodil.

Of course, we went out anyway. I'm bored with the hookupwithstranger4sex-now.com. I'd rather go with someone that matters to me, someone I love. Without him, I could have fun, but not as much as if I was with him. With or without drugs, I return to this place: wanting one boyfriend, the real love when the breakup never comes.

I went out every Saturday this month, but this one will be the last one, at least the last one before next week, for a while. Again, I'm trying to live my life as if I was 20; I can't do that and survive. Jealousy has reentered my life. How do I always end up here in this place again? In a room full of thousands, I feel totally alone. It's amazing how I can be this high feeling so good about feeling so bad. I see all these guys with bodies that everyone but me has decided are perfect. I get a few looks here and there, but I barely notice. They're all strangers to me, until I see my two old friends from way back in the beginning. It's been at least nine months and we three were genuinely happy to see each other. They congratulated me on my big break of first being published, we hugged, and they told me they loved me. Hopefully soon we'll be hanging out again.

Tonight is the most crowded I've ever seen this club since everyone believed Madonna was coming. To get into the bathroom is a shoulder-to-shoulder struggle of pushing and refusing to be moved from the goal of making it into pee. There is so much hot breath and body heat that you can see the steam in the air. I am drenched not only with my own sweat, but that of countless others. Why do people pay $15 for this? At home I could walk straight into the bathroom and there is no line or waiting to pee. Of course, the music isn't as good and there's no one in my bathroom jerking off by the toilet trying to get a look at my shrunken crystal dick. I was trying to hold onto my friend's hand not to get separated, and I decided that, not only can I not deal with this throng of crowds when sober, this night would soon begin a break in my recent record of resumed clubbing. More times out in one month than the past year is enough for now.

This place is familiar; I've been here before. It is the same, but I am not, so it feels different. Everything changes while everything remains the same. It is the contradiction of life that keeps existence in balance. It is the best and the worst of gay life. This club is the first one I came to when I got to New York and it has changed very little. They actually made the dance floor smaller by adding in the dark lounge in the back that is a good hiding away area. I got lost the first time I came, but now I could navigate it with eyes closed. It might not be a good idea to try now, because I'm so high I can't walk straight with my eyes wide open. Tomorrow I don't know who will be my friends or boyfriends. Gay relationships are different and we must make our own rules. We are both friends and family to each other.

The friend upon whom I had a brief crush that I came with may not be my friend anymore after I made my feelings clear. I love him, or is it that I love the idea of loving him? He pushed me away and kissed someone else, so I stormed out without saying a word. Gay drama overfloweth and the boy of whom I speak was only a temporary transfer point of attention between a never-to-return Mexican love and a new Latin American love.

I met him after another breakup two years past and he is back, just at the right time. He's the kind of hot that makes me proud to be seen with him in public. He made me feel alive before, as if love was not lost. This time, he renewed the very fountainhead of my life's energy. He said I look cute even sick as a dog on my new HIV meds. If I look cute to him when I'm sick, imagine how I must look at my best. We'll see how this goes. I'm going to try to stay cool, but regardless of what happens, I love myself, so I can love others, and everything is OK.

Author Profile:  Mitchell Luna

Mitchell Luna lives in New York City, and his website is ussfearless.blogspot.com . He can be reached at mitchell.a.luna@verizon.net