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Wainwright spent a month at Hazelden, the addiction treatment center in Center City, Minn. I realized that I need help, so I went and got it.'' For a moment, I thought I wouldn't make it back into the world. ''It felt tragic, and it made me wildly depressed. ''I felt like New York was a painting that I was looking at and couldn't enter,'' he continued. I remember hallucinating thousands of boxes of pornography with Jerry Garcia in them!'' He laughed hysterically at the thought of that image. ''I hadn't slept for a couple of days, and I started seeing visions. Wainwright hit bottom last year when a morning line of cocaine designed to lend momentum to an apartment cleaning project led to a sex-and-drug binge that left him devastated. I mean, your mind is just completely ravaged.'' I had a few of those real gay lost weekends, where everything goes out the window, where you want to make pornos or you want to have sex with children.
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On that drug I had really horrible thoughts that turned me on. And with drugs, what's more dangerous is more sexually exciting. ''For years, and I mean thousands of years, the gay man's mind has been treated as perverted, clandestine and dirty,'' he went on, ''and speed reinforces and glamorizes that as an ideal.
But I'm still mentally shattered by the whole experience.''
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I was one of the nerds who did have safe sex, thank God. If you wanted safe sex, you were a nerd, uncool. ''It was a world where people are going so crazy that they're not making sense any more. ''Years of sexual insecurity, the low-grade discrimination you suffer, the need to belong - speed takes care of all that in one second,'' he said. Wainwright believes that crystal meth presents specific dangers - and specific temptations - for homosexual men, and that its use is a menace to their community. ''I'm not talking about a bar in the meatpacking district,'' he said. Wainwright found himself drawn to a subterranean world that he described in the most lurid terms as a ''gay hell.'' Typically in recent years, he would get high, go online to discover willing partners and arrange meetings. Despite creating a body of work whose central theme is the search for true love, he has never been in a serious relationship, a consequence, he says, of having been raped by a man he picked up in London when he was 14. Methamphetamine is one of a number of drugs - including ecstasy, cocaine, K (or ketamine, an anesthetic) and alcohol - to which he has turned over the years to bolster his confidence and to propel his quests for anonymous sex. Wainwright, who is gay and has been out since he was a teenager, was not always convinced of that. But I'm only doing it because it might help somebody - and to say that there is no such thing as casual crystal meth use!'' ''I'm a bit hesitant to talk about all this,'' he said. As he spoke on a humid summer afternoon that was punctuated by a gentle rainstorm, the Metropolitan framed him and gave him comfort. Wainwright chose this location for his interview because of its proximity to the Metropolitan Opera House, one of his favorite places in New York because of his longstanding love of opera. ''Oh, and there were loads of mice in my apartment,'' he said. Wainwright, unfazed, resumed his narrative, adding one now-relevant detail. The mouse darted back and forth in front of the building, but never left. ''There's a mouse right there,'' he said, indicating the entrance to the Vivian Beaumont Theater in Lincoln Center, near the bench on which he was sitting. ''THERE were a lot of 'Boogie Nights' moments, with 20 naked people in my apartment and me in my bathrobe playing 'Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk,' '' said Rufus Wainwright, describing his social life before a scarifying emotional collapse, a stint in rehab and the completion of his gripping new album, ''Want One.''īut as he was finishing his anecdote, he was distracted by a movement on his left.