I broke my own rule, and went directly to the apartment of a trick I met on Manhunt without meeting him for drinks first.

He was cute when he opened the door, and looked just like he did in his pictures. I breathed a sigh of relief. Then I entered the apartment.

Dresses. Bright, glittery, gaudy dresses, strewn everywhere. A make up table, overflowing with cosmetics. A huge mirror. High heel shoes. Wigs.

“Oh, sorry,” he said, catching my stare, “I live with a drag queen.”

My immediate thought was: That’s like saying ‘I’m just holding this porn for a friend.’

My next thought was: Am I about to hook up with a drag queen?

“This is a lot of stuff,” I said.

“Yeah, she’s at a show tonight,” he said. “I design her costumes.”

Skeptically, I began to investigate further, trying to be subtle. There were indeed two bedrooms. QueenysLittleHelper was leading me, presumably, to his. Entering, there was a similar mess, but it was slightly different. Less dresses, more... fabric. The same marabou, silks and satins, but they were parts rather than dresses. Fortunately my good friend MartiniFun is a costume designer, and I recognized the typical tools of the trade. Fabric scissors, measuring tapes, little boxes of pins. And standing in the corner were two dress forms.

As he began to put his hands on me, I once again sighed in relief. I wasn’t about to sleep with a drag queen.

I may as well have.

As soon as I laid on the bad I felt little bits and pieces sticking to my back and arms.

“What the...?” Sequins. Beads. “Are these rhinestones?”

Instead of apologizing, he just kissed me. We had sex, but it seemed that every time things got hotter and heavier, so did the costume nightmare. With every thrust, there was an explosion of sequins, tinsel, and false eyelashes. Bedazzled fabric was flying through the air. Boa feathers drifted about. Glitter rained down.

When it was over we showered, but I was still flicking mirrored bits of sequin and tinsel off my clothes as I walked home. And those tiny persistent flecks of glitter stuck around for days. What a drag.

As I pack my skimpy bathing suits and search for lube that comes in airline-approved 3-oz bottles, I can’t help thinking about the first year I attended Gay Days at Disney World.

My friend Mattitude had gone to college in Florida, so having him as my roommate that first year came with a distinct advantage: he knew all the locals. Even though Gay Days is a huge Circuit Party destination and attracts gays from all over the country, it’s also a huge draw for all the Florida gay boys living anywhere within 2 hours of Orlando. The locals are a tight clique, but being there with Mattitude was like having the key to the city – once you had an in, all the doors opened.

Friday night we went to the Beach Ball party, which takes place at Typhoon Lagoon, Disney’s water park. Though not the biggest, this is debatably the most popular party of the weekend, with good reason – hundreds and hundreds of gay boys, running around a water park, wearing next to nothing, with full access to all the rafts, pools, and slides. To make the formula for a perfect night complete, remove the few elements that usually ruin an amusement park (lines and children) and add in a massive dance floor, a DJ, and copious amounts of alcohol .

Saturday night the big circuit party was at MGM Studios. However, because of the high ticket price some of the local boys decided to skip the madness and hit a neighborhood bar called Parliament House. I had no idea what I was getting into, but looking at the number of cute Florida boys who were going, I quickly agreed. It turned out Parliament House was no little local bar. That night there were live performances by Kimberly Locke (who gave a surprisingly good show) and Bananarama. And as much as I love a cruel summer, what really put me over the edge was the disclosure that there was a Foam Party.

I had wanted to attend a Foam Party for years, but they rarely exist, especially in New York. It requires a room (or in this case a large, sort of fenced-in area in the back yard) that gets filled with what is basically soap suds. Everyone jumps in to dance and gets covered in the foam, and it becomes playfully sexual pretty quickly, because everyone is soaped up and slippery, and because usually the foam is at least waist-high and no one can see what’s happening underneath.

I was shocked to hear that the majority of the group wanted nothing to do with the foam.

“Are you kidding?!” I cried. “It’s amazing! It’s fabulous! It’s foam!”

“It’s disgusting.” They replied. “It’s gross.” “It’s slimey” “You may as well lather yourself with STD.”

Undaunted, I announced that I was going in. One guy in the group, a cute Russian boy with reddish brown hair and pale skin, seemed less reluctant than the others. I honed in on my target, certain I could convince him. It didn’t take much.

“Hey,” I flirted, “We’re wearing the same bathing suit!”

“Almost,” he said, looking at the stripes down the side. “The stripes are different colors.”

“Close enough!” I said. “I bet if we switched, no one would even notice.”

He laughed. “You’re probably right.”

“We should go in the foam and try it,” I winked.

3 minutes later, CzarsAndStripes and I were waist deep in bubbles, while the rest of the group headed back to Bananarama. It was entirely as fun as I expected. We danced, we flirted, we groped inappropriately. Despite the general consensus that the foam was gross, the pit was pretty full of soaped-up gay boys. Most of them were having the same innocent fun that we were.

But every once in a while, we heard a scream.

“AHHHH!”

We both looked, but it was hard to see through the sudsy cloud. A few minutes later, it happened again, this time from another direction, the scream from a different mouth. And then, a minute later, another. Sometimes the screams were followed by laughter, other times by cries of “What the fuck!?” or “What in gay hell was that?!”

Curiosity finally got the better of me and I reluctantly took my hands off CzarsAndStripe’s soapy bottom and moved toward the source of the screaming. For a moment it was quiet. And then out of the corner of my eye I noticed something moving. I turned just in time to see a figure, completely covered in suds, rise up from out of the foam, look around, and slowly sink back to the ground until he was completely submerged. Although I was loving the foam, even I thought it was a little gross to put one’s face completely under it. Plus, how did he breathe under there?

My thoughts were interrupted when, 10 feet from where I’d just seen the figure appear and then submerge like some creature from the gay lagoon, a blonde twinky boy screamed.

“AHHHHH! What bitch just grabbed my ass!?!”

I couldn’t help but laugh. This guy was actually crawling around under the foam, sneaking up on unsuspecting boys, and helping himself to a handful. I didn’t know whether to be appalled or to applaud.

“Maybe it’s time to go,” said CzarsAndStripes.

Part of me wanted to stay, but I agreed, thinking: there’s always next year.