The ad campaign appeared a few months after a veteran AIDS activist and HIV Forum member named Peter Staley spent US$6,000 of his own money to put up posters on phone booths in Chelsea saying: "Huge Sale! Buy crystal, get HIV free!"
But not everyone approves of such measures. In the May issue of the gay magazine Genre, a writer who calls himself Diabolique criticized people like Staley as "nanny nelly liberal activists" and accused them of helping spur a continuing police crackdown on gay night life.
"It combines the worst aspects of over-the-top anti-drug hysteria with the best of `get press at any cost' '80s-era AIDS activism," Diabolique wrote. "The ads don't work on drug-taking hedonists, they work on riling up the news media, public health and law enforcement officials."
"There's a total split in the gay community about this issue," Diabolique said in an interview. "Most gay men I know thought the `Buy crystal, get HIV' ads were ridiculous."
"Crystal meth is a problem," he said. "It's the worst drug problem I've seen in all my years of clubbing. But hysterical anti-drug, anti-sex propaganda does nothing to solve that problem."
The editor in chief of Genre, Bill Henning, said he regards the things that organizations like HIV Forum say as mainly puritanical propaganda. "It's great they're bringing attention to it, but they're not reaching the people they need to reach with all this finger-wagging," he said. "It's the same sort of anti-sex, anti-drug argument that's been going on in the gay community for years."
But Blair, the party promoter, said the message may be getting through. The closings of most after-hours parties, the advertising campaigns and the personal horror stories about the drug are beginning to have an effect, he said.
"Thank god for GMHC and the HIV Forum," he said. "In the last year, things have started to turn around. Using crystal is not something you brag about anymore. There's a growing stigma against it, especially among the younger set. As people get more and more information, they realize the harm it's doing, not just to users but to the community as a whole."
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