Circuit party

A big gay dance event, often a whole weekend: star DJs, thousands of shirtless men, and a calendar of cities that the most devoted follow all year.

A circuit party is a big gay dance event, usually a whole weekend of it: a main party with a star DJ, a warm-up the night before, a recovery party the morning after, and thousands of men with their shirts off in between. The "circuit" is the calendar of these events, city after city, and the men who follow it from one to the next are circuit boys.

It is not just a night at the club. People fly in for it, book hotels months ahead, plan outfits around a theme and spend the rest of the year at the gym getting ready. It is part holiday, part pilgrimage, part the biggest gay party of your life, depending on who you ask and at what time of the morning.

Where it comes from

Gay men were already talking about "the circuit" in the early 1970s, meaning the round of bars and discos that welcomed us. Bruce Rodgers recorded it in The Queens' Vernacular in 1972. The circuit party as a named event, the big ticketed weekend for gay men, shows up in print by the end of the 1990s, when a writer described "gay circuit parties that brought together thousands of gay men in celebration of sensuality".

How it feels

The look is famous: muscle, tan, tiny shorts or none, harnesses, glitter. The music is big room house and tribal, built to peak at three in the morning. The crowd leans toward the gym bunny, and plenty of men who love dancing say the body pressure is the one thing they do not love. Others go exactly for that: one weekend a year when looking at hot men is the whole point and nobody pretends otherwise.

Underneath the glitter there is something older. For many men the first circuit party is the first time they are surrounded by thousands of other gay men, out and happy, and that feeling is hard to forget.

The health side

Circuit parties have long had a reputation for drugs, and research backs it up. In a 2001 survey of 295 gay and bisexual men from the San Francisco Bay Area who had been to a circuit party in the previous year, three in four reported ecstasy, more than half ketamine and about a third crystal meth on those weekends; one in four had had a drug "overuse" incident in the past year, and drug use went with more condomless anal sex. The same men said they went mostly for the music, the dancing and their friends.

Today the harm-reduction advice from gay health groups is simple: know what you take, measure it and do not mix, drink water but not too much, take breaks, keep an eye on your friends, and get on PrEP if you are going to fuck. If the party turns into chemsex or PnP afterwards, the same rules apply, and anyone who collapses or cannot be woken needs an ambulance, not a nap.

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