Circuit boy

A gay man who follows the big circuit dance parties around the world: muscular, shirtless, and planning his year around the next weekend.

A circuit boy is a gay man who follows the big dance parties: the weekend-long events in Miami, Palm Springs, Barcelona, Sydney or Montreal where thousands of shirtless men dance until noon. He is usually muscular, waxed or neatly trimmed, tanned, and dressed in very little. He plans his year around the party calendar, his diet around the parties, and his gym program around being seen shirtless at the parties.

The word is half description and half eye-roll. Circuit boys are admired for the bodies and the stamina, and teased for the sameness: same harness, same shorts, same playlist, same face at four in the morning. Despite the "boy", they are grown men, and plenty of them are well past forty.

Where it comes from

The circuit is the network of big gay parties that tour the year, one city after another, and its regulars move with it like a band on tour. The sociologist Christopher T. Conner traces its roots to the underground gay clubs set up by Black and Latino men in Chicago and Detroit, and to "circuit house", the style of music played there; the network of clubs and parties simply became "the circuit". Over the years it grew from an underground refuge into a big, very commercial business.

A circuit boy is the regular of that world, and a circuit party is where you find him.

The body and the rules

The circuit has a look, and it is not gentle. Conner describes a scene built on hyper-masculine beauty standards, muscular and lean, with a "body fascism" that polices who belongs and who does not. That is the source of most jokes about circuit boys, and also of real pain for men who feel invisible there. The type overlaps with the gym bunny and the muscle boy, and has little room for the bear or the twink, who long ago built their own parties.

The health side

Circuit weekends are long, and many men use drugs to get through them: ecstasy, ketamine, GHB, and sometimes crystal meth, which brings in chemsex and PnP. GHB is the one that sends people to hospital, because the difference between the dose that gets you high and the dose that causes an overdose is very small. Harm-reduction services keep the advice simple: measure it with a syringe or dropper, never by eye; start low and go slow; write down the times of your doses; avoid mixing it with alcohol or other downers; and call an ambulance at the first signs of an overdose.

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