"For most black people, being black is very central to who we are, and it's hard to name that in a meeting because you feel like you're hurting people's feelings," says Crumpler.
There, he started attending a 12-step fellowship specifically for meth users, who were almost entirely gay and mostly white. After that, he started going to 12-step meetings and eventually embraced a more loving and accepting form of Christianity, enrolling in the progressive-minded Union Theological Seminary in New York. "I thought the whole city had a conspiracy against me," he says.Ī military veteran, he went to a VA hospital, which connected him to a homeless shelter, then a 90-day treatment program. It felt like a radically tolerant, open space."īut that seeming utopia eventually gave way to losing his job and apartment - and to extreme paranoia, a familiar meth side effect, especially after continued use. It was all about the drug and the sex, and even if you didn't want the sex, you had the drug, and vice-versa. "There'd be old and young, black, white, Latino, tops, bottoms, HIV positive and HIV negative" at meth parties, he says. This is what I want to do.' I found that thing and the social group that I'd been missing." With meth in the mix, he didn't feel stigmatized.
"The first night I did it," he says, "I thought, 'This is it. "It's no surprise to me that this drug has spread to the most marginalized members of the gay community," he says. Add to that the racial (and often economic) stressors faced by gay black men, and it only increases the drug's appeal. That, he says, explains meth's allure among gay men in general, who have long battled homophobia, both external and internal, and fear of sex related to HIV. "Meth is powerful and makes you feel hypersexual, undoing everything bad that you feel about yourself. "Meth use is socially and behaviorally transmitted and, in New York City, where we're all on top of each other, it will spread," he says. Why the shift? Gay and HIV-positive Perry Halkitis, Ph.D., M.P.H., who heads Rutgers' school of public health, says that he was warning as far back as the early 2000s that it was only a matter of time before meth use migrated from gay white men to gay black men. We're seeing rapid increases in meth use among black MSM alongside declines in meth use among white MSM." But that began changing five to seven years ago.
The only drugs they used more than gay white men were marijuana and crack cocaine. "Historically," he says, "gay black men were far less likely than gay white men to use drugs associated with condomless sex, such as poppers, crystal, ketamine, GHB or X. That's echoed by Gregorio Millett, M.P.H., a gay black man who is vice president and public policy director at amfAR. Conversations I've had make me think it's really quite serious in Atlanta, D.C., New York and other places." (The link between meth use and HIV infection has been well-documented.) "In the last five or six years, I know far more gay black men dealing with meth addiction than I did a decade ago. "Absolutely, there's been an increase in use among gay black men," says Kenyon Farrow, a gay black man who is the health policy director at Treatment Action Group, an HIV/AIDS think tank. Rice is not the only one to pick up on this trend. "I had to make a stand in my community and raise my voice about this," he says. (Rice says that he had two conversations apiece with subjects before shooting to make sure they understood what they were getting into, then had them sign releases.) Currently, Rice says he is refining the doc and talking to various well-known online viewing platforms about showing it. That led to parTy boi, a raw and heartbreaking documentary Rice has made in which New York City gay black men talk (sometimes incoherently) about both using and dealing meth, sometimes while doing those things.