You know how sometimes when you're sitting at the airport waiting for your flight and you look around the lounge and you see all these other circuit boyz and you give that little complicitous nod or smile – and it feels like you're all off on a mission? And then you're in the air and you can feel the anticipation in the plane, everyone kind of buzzing, and then you're grabbing your luggage as you make your way into the city that you're about to conquer with your kind of love.

It's Friday in Montreal and it's pouring rain and so at first it doesn't seem like we've taken over this gentle city. We're at the Hotel Gault, in Vieux Montreal, and it's tempting to remain in its zenlike clutch. For one thing, the Gault is the site of the very first YMCA in North America, built in 1851 – so there's a nice sexual energy imbedded within these Beaux-Arts walls. And the Gault in its current incarnation has that kind of calming serenity which enables us to pause and consider what's about to happen. Four years ago when we first went to Black and Blue, it seemed we were climbing the Everest of the circuit – and so now we know what's required of us and how to pace ourselves.

So we wander through the Villlage just to feel the pulse, drinking beers at Sky Bar while the drag queens perform rain songs and then catching the dick dancers at Stock Bar, one of whom works a bunch of bananas as if auditioning for ChiChi LaRue. It's raining dicks, and back at the Gault we torture Dominick, the sweet night bell boy at the Gault, telling him we cannot figure out how to use the DVD player. We need his assistance; he must come up to our room. And he does, and says, in his sweet French-accented English, with no guile whatsoever, "You just put it in and play." Amen, sisterboy; that's the motto of your city.

Saturday dawns only a little less cloudy than our heads, thanks to our Montreal friends who have hooked us up. And so we linger long in the breakfast lobby of the Gault, eating dragon fruit (for the first time – it's delicious, like a sesame-studded tapioca pear) and getting giddy over Charlie Chaplin who plays on the huge plasma t.v. over the bar. It's Saturday afternoon, and we're hoping to run into Josh and Doug, but we're also on a real estate search, because each time we're in Montreal, we start thinking about how it would be to live here. All of us circling the globe like birds and thinking, "I could land here." And looking at real estate is one way to get a peep into the locals' apartments (although Manhunt is probably faster). And in the Village, we run into Trinity, aka Jamie, whom we know from South Beach, by way of P'town, who's now living in Montreal, who says, "I have friends here and a bike, and I couldn't be any happier." And we wonder if that's a signal, if we're supposed to read that as permission granted to leave New York.

And that night, we hook up with Sylvie Duchesne, who's Serge's sweet sister, and she reiterates what we've been feeling all day, how the city's really revving up for Black and Blue X-Treme 15. How there's something in the air this year, having Danny T. back, and being back in the center field of the Stade Olympique. "This is a city of two seasons," she says, "Winter and festivals." And Black and Blue is the final festival of the season, and you can tell winter's coming closer, and we're not the only ones wearing gloves and hats. And Sylvie's not going to Military because she wants to be full-on for Main Event.

So we head to Military with Marion who's taken the bus up from New York, which, to us, is true commitment. And by the time we get into Metropolis, after a cursory patdown, the floor is packed. Patrick Guay is still playing, the man who's in charge of so much of BBCM's choreography, and we think about Power Infiniti and the connection between those who dance and those who make the music. And then there's the switchover, from Patrick to Manny, and Manny starts off bang-bang-bang which the boyz love. That kind of crowd. Frisky and feisty. Boyz in military garb making fantasy real. Metropolis has that kind of sexual energy – an old theatre where sex and illusion and fantasy worked in tandem – and now it's the circuit's turn.

But first there's a train wreck called CeCe. She just doesn't get it. She thinks she's the show. She thinks she's the sun and we're the planets. And she's wrong. Because one thing the circuit teaches us is that we are all the stars. We all work together to create something bright through the night. She hectors the crowd – which is something none of us need. We get enough hectoring in life – we don't need it on the circuit. You wanna leave the stage, girl – keep on walking. And you can't help but wish for Deborah Cox who is the model of graciousness, who knows how to offer her brightness to us without imagining she's the only source of light.

And yes, FINALLY, the CeCe thing does leave, and we're all better for it, and now that the interruptions are behind us, Manny picks it up and takes off, and for the next hour, there's no stopping, and it only gets better once the stage is cleared again, this time for five flaggers whose ages and body types run the breadth of the circuit, so it's like family on the stage, and they each have these multi-hued flags, and they are working those flags in perfect time to Manny's beat, and every time, Manny bumps up the beat, the flaggers keep pace, and the crowd starts going crazy, applauding like wild, and cheering them on, because it's how we all feel, keeping pace with the music, and the flags represent us, whirling through the galaxy, and for twenty minutes, thirty minutes, the flaggers tag-team with Manny, and with all of us on the floor, and it's great, it's intense, it's wild and ecstatic, and it's just what all of us have been hoping for at Military in Montreal.

And then it's Sunday, Main Event day, and the Village is swarming with boyz shopping, and particularly at Priape. You can't do Black and Blue without Priape where it's all about undies and tees. Boyz from everywhere, we see one boy from Amsterdam whom we met last year in Paris with our London boyz and saw again at Pride in New York and now he's here in Montreal – and that's how it is with the circuit, with gay people, where borders are only arbitrary lines that the world draws around us.

But it's not so easy for everyone. There are so many homeless youth lining St. Catherine. So many French-Canadian boyz and girls, looking a bit too beat for their age. Cyberpunk youths, extras from Mad Max, they smile and ask for money, and we give it and hope they find what they need. There's something about Montreal which speaks of the future, a time when the world is even more class-divided than it currently exists, and you wonder what's going to happen and how any of us will survive.

And that's why Main Event is so beautiful and so necessary. Because Main Event is a model of tolerance and openness, a utopian ideal, an example of all the world's peoples living without fear, the music churning through their bodies. Walking into the Stadium just after midnight, we see the most amazing people, the most cosmopolitan and open-minded people, people free to dress in any way they choose, people unafraid of their fantasies, people who know enough to let music be their religion. Those girlz, so much skin and leather and glitter and that hair and those hats, and the boyz so beautiful, in every age and style. We start through the lines which snake under the stadium, which is so vast, a labyrinth of tunnels and turns, and haunting blue lighting. Security is comprehensive if not invasive, and totally polite. This is not the Gestapo; this is not America. And then we enter into the long blue tunnel, the Black and Blue 15-year hallway with projections of all the past Black and Blues on full-length screens, and there's the year of the thousand-candles ribbon and the year of the Buddha and we remember what we read in this year's program about how every ten seconds, one person dies of AIDS -- which if you think about it, means that during the time that we're going to be dancing tonight, we're going to lose... too many to count, and so we think about dancing for all those who can't, and we exit the blue-lit tunnel, and through a smaller room with an ancillary deejay set-up, and then, there we are, we're at the entrance to the Centre Field of the Stade Olympique for Main Event X-treme 15, and now we know it for sure, we really are living in Thunderdome. It's the future now, and everything's happening.

There's a stage at the far end, the length of a football field, with stadium lighting behind it rising six stories into the sky, and on the stage's far right, there's a scaffolding tower of six or eight stories, with staircases and landings within, and perpendicular to the stage, an entire scaffolded platform runway that runs the entire length of the centre field,enclosing the dance floor where there are seven immense lighting spools from which rise beacons of light and which, we later determine, serve as fluid boundaries to the different neighborhoods on the dance floor. The entire mezzanine is open and people are moving up and down the multiple staircases, dots of glitter and light, and VIP is the skybox closest to the deejay booth, with perfect sightlines to the stage, and there's the chill-out room down a huge staircase into the landing docks where Main Event was held two years ago, and massage tables, and merch stands – but the action is really on the floor, and so we get down to it, and it's so crowded already, but it's the kind of crowd where everyone smiles at you as you make your way through, they put their hand on your shoulder or around your waist and you pass by each other like cellular life under a microscope. And of course we lose Marion as soon as we get in, which is a shame, because it's her first time to Black and Blue and you kinda wanna show the newbies around, but it's okay nonetheless, and we run into our favorite Montreal couple, a coupla hotties we noticed from Diversite, and this time we tag-dance with them, each of us egging the other one on, with only the slyest of eye contact, noticing but not noticing, you know the way we all can be – and building up the sexual tension so that it spills over and spreads onto the floor. And there's Moody at the front lines, with camera in tow, and it's almost one-twenty a.m. which means time for opening show, X-Treme Pinball. Dancers, take your places. Twenty or thirty techno urban cyberpunks, their backs to us, waiting for their musical cue – and then they're whirling across that huge stage and there are skateboarders and bikers and cyclists and the dancers are racing down the runway and up the staircase tower and there's so much energy and life – and maybe that's the point: how it's imperative to keep on living in the face of such darkness. We have to keep on.

And so on we move around the floor, exploring other nabes, because you want to see what else is happening the world over, and who else there is to see, and the more you see, the more you think about other people who would love this party, people like Joe Caro, and Nurse, and the rumor is that she's here, but where, and then there's Patrick again, and Marion, too, and you're thinking how it used to be said that anyone ever lost was found in San Francisco, but maybe now it's how we all end up in Montreal at Main Event.

And Chus and Ceballos are playing now, and it was only a year ago that we heard them for the first time, at Main Event, and then in March at Black Party, and now here they are again, with their
intoxicating Iberian rhythms, and there's no way we're leaving the floor, not while they're playing, and we keep moving around the lighting tower spools, the beacons of light, which shoot blue into the stadium sky. Pinspots of blue into the worlds beyond. And sheets of yellow from the stadium field lights which blanket the crowd. Beautiful lights and beautiful music and beautiful people = a beautiful world. What's not to love about every moment of this?

And then it's time for Priape In Extremis, and the BBCM dancers are writhing together and copulating on the staircase tower, moving in tandem, and making love the way circuit boyz do, in the most public of places, without shame or fear. And just then the video screens start with the equations about safe sex is good sex and good sex is passion and then the screens fill with the faces and words of HIV-positive people, and the number of years they have lived with HIV, including Jean-Pierre Perusse, BBCM's artistic director, and it's Seal who's singing,"Solitary brother, is there still a part of you that wants to live? Solitary sister, is there still a part of you that wants to give?" and there's a choir in white robes, and please, we're wrecked, it's so very emotional, to see such beauty and so much love and to see how it can end if we don't take care of each other. That's what we're here for tonight. It's about what we can do together. And now more than ever, it seems that all of us in the Centre Field of Stade Olympique at Main Event Black and Blue X-Treme 15 are one, and we're dancing as one, smooth and easy, happy and carefree, and there's no way we're stopping, because we're not feeling any pain, not with the music carrying us—

And now it's Danny T. who's taken over the booth and he puts us in a trance, keeping us moving in that dazed kind of delirious happiness where it seems as if everything you do is effortless. And he's shining his flashlight and dancing with a huge smile and then there's the sound of drag-car racing, vrooom-vroom, the engines revving up – and now it's the parade of Montreal's best girls, the ones who've been walking these streets, werking those pumps, for the past fifteen years – and they strut that runway, they werk their moment— And some can't be persuaded to leave the limelight, not with all the coaxing from security.....

Oh, it's such a good party, and you want to hold it still right there. We're standing on the mezzanine, watching the lights slide and glide over the crowd. Such an immense circle of happy people – you're the eye in the microscope looking down onto the cellular movements and you can watch all the shifts and dodges, the groups moving as one, and the beauty of so many people dancing. You just want to hold it right here. You want to keep it like this. You want to expand this moment indefinitely and let it multiply exponentially into the galaxy beyond. But we're not there yet, not yet there as a species, and so we have to accept this moment for what it is. And as if to remind us, Danny starts into "Safe From Harm" and that's the key right there. It's our obligation and responsibility, what we must do. We must keep each other safe.

And on that note, we leave – out into the cool Montreal morning where it's a holiday called Canadian Thanksgiving, and so we give thanks for all that this so very kind and gentle city so often gives to us. We read somewhere that New York is a man and Paris is a woman, and so maybe Montreal is the child within all of us which knows what is right.

With many thanks and much respect to all the people who make Black and Blue such a meaningful weekend, and to all those who make a point to come to Montreal, to share in such warmth, and with the hope that many more make the journey to see all what Montreal does so well.