It was one of those weekends you want to do exactly the same again. All your worries about the weather and bombs and searches and snafus out the door. It was exactly as it was supposed to be, just what you wanted.

Friday at midnight, Fred and Wilma come up from Bal'meer, park themselves in a PR suite at the W, Times Square. Perfect base camp for the parties. Also conveniently around the corner from the Gaiety -- which they've never been to. And hey, neither have we -- so we go. Naked boys with big dicks, very big, engorged -- thanks to rings of leather and hair twists for their heads. Who knew? We're there longer than we were thinking -- how to break away from that seemingly endless parade of flesh. Then over to therapy for last call.

Saturday, it's all about the entrance tee. Must find just the right one at Whitall and Shon or Body Body. Everyone else tossing shirts left and right. Lunch at Cafeteria, the sun and cells are out, chatter chatter. Anticipation. Everyone's smiling. Then sunbath on the Christopher Street Pier. The Gay Central Park. Boys with cockatiels and puppies and snakes. The endless parade, the boardwalk promenade.

Victor's Jungle:
We're there at one, after a pre-party at W Base Camp. The floor is crowded, but not yet peaked out. The room is darker than previous years, and bare of those misspelled MASTERBATION words from last year. There's a huge disco ball which lowers down above the crowd -- is this new? Or was I blind last year? The top mezzanine, the one with seating above the ballroom, is closed. The lower mezzanine, and lounge, are open, and soon packed with people dancing above the crowd. On the stage is a tilted scrim with images from Africa or Hollywood's version of Africa. Black and white footage of tribal dancers. Amazing dancers: you think about your own place in the scheme of dance. The crowd that Victor attracts is all over the place. Not like Junior's exactly, but more varied than the Alegria parties. More women, for example, and more women in heels, and more diversity in dress, even for the men. At one point, there are six or eight drag queens, but the skinniest dq's in the world, on boxes in the center of the crowd, and they are fierce. Working. Stripping, kinda. Moving seriously.

Then there's the percussion band show. The scrim tilts and Victor brings it down to a low roar and then the percussion people pick it up and it is wild and ongoing and then there are these tribal dancers, about twenty of them, who come out and dance in front of the percussion section, and it's amazing how fast everything is going. There's such tremendous energy pouring off the stage -- and it kind of picks up the whole crowd, which is not to say that the crowd has been slouching in any way. Just that the energy notches upward.

Then later it's Kevin, joined by two other dancers, and these two others are making Missy A. work harder than it seems she's worked before, and they are all three incredible, dipping into the crowd and then back up onto the stage, and Miss A has a kind of Donna Summer black wig on with bangs and this blue Esther Williams swimsuit which keeps slipping because she's working so fast.

Meanwhile, up on the balcony, Fred and Wilma are witnessing some kind of dreadful drama. Their first fall-out encounter. One boy surrounded by his friends, he's obviously in trouble, and his friends are patting him and fanning him, but after thirty minutes, Wilma has seen enough and goes for security who comes and then it's the paramedics and the boy's friends are crying, and the boyfriend nearly hysterical and the fall-out is carried out in a wheelchair like thingie, all plugged into tubes and air -- and it totally freaks Fred and Wilma out.

The downside of the life we choose.

Throughout the night, Victor's music, to me, seems exactly as it
should be, and as someone else said, better than he was in Miami for New Year's. This party is his, and almost his alone, and it best reflects who he is each year. It seems to me the rough equivalent of Junior's B'day party, given that it's about Victor and what's happened to him, and his music, over the past year. And it's wonderful to be a part of a deejay's evolution.

We bought his CD on the way out the door at six a.m. and took some grapes and walked out into the sunlight of Gay Pride Sunday.

THE PARADE:
23rd and Fifth at one-thirty. Just in time for all the corporate floats: Starbucks and Delta. We've come a long way, baby. Everyone wants the gay buck now -- now that we're nearly full citizens. Or at least no longer illegal. That's the subtext to the parade/march. Lambda Legal gets a huge roar of applause. Kevin and Hedda are waving from atop a car. Cheer New York does a routine, tossing one member twenty feet into the air. Gay Square Dancers -- doesy-doeing to "It's Raining Men." There's as much to watch along Fifth Avenue's sidewalks as walking down the lavender line. The sun is splendid, and so is the breeze. So much noise. So much happiness. Smiles. Everyone's friendly. Boys holding hands, and girls holding hands. No one's worried. Public affection everywhere. And guess what -- the world doesn't end.

We make it down to Hudson, eat and cocktail at Shag. Then over to the Pier at Christopher Street where everyone is wandering and dazed and giddy. So much beauty on display, so much humanity. Such diversity. What a rainbow indeed. We are so many people.

ALEGRIA: SPECTACULAR SPECTACULAR.
Never has the title of an Alegria party seemed so apt -- for us. From the moment we arrived at Sound Factory at two a.m., it was clear to us that Abel was working at the peak of his abilities. He set down a rhythm which seemed so contagious, so magnetic, so consistent, that it was virtually impossible for any of the thousands of people packed inside not to move, regardless of whether they were upstairs in the VIP or downstairs in the basement lounge. Every floor, every level, of this club was dancing to Abel's incredible music. What was it? How to categorize it? Latina steroid? Just enough aggression and just enough soul, a combination of the X and Y chromosomes, mixed together in the most sexual way, so that everyone felt sexual and looked sexual, dancing and moving and bouncing. No matter where you were: along the balconies or in line for the bathrooms or in the middle of the floor or on the mezzanine overlooking the crowd, the music grabbed your booty and made you shake it. The joy of these parties is the total lack of restraint, the lack of self-consciousness. Something about the absence of shirts, maybe, or the fact that it's so damn hot and therefore, why pretend that any of us looks our best. Abel knows this place and the boys there know him and it is a combination that seems unbeatable, or so it seemed to us on Sunday night and all morning Monday. Nurse was drenched, of course, her arm pumping wildly in the air, and then later, from Abel's booth, where she was like a kid in a candy store, overlooking all the boys. And we saw our favorite It Boy, and watched him work the crowd. There's such a sense of community to this party, because Ric Sena's boys seems to support him almost unequivocally, and why not? Ric was there, overlooking the crowd, very hands-on, and watching to insure that the shows went on as planned. There were beautiful dick dancers, one in particular, and we all know who I mean here, and he kept it happening, and hard. And sure, maybe the shows aren't the most polished, in certain ways, but for God's sake, these people are working on a stage the size of my desk, and you're putting twelve people on that stage, so hey, I think it's a miracle they move at all. And they did move. And all that RED. Those red velvet curtains and red velvet swags and the sign over the bar: THE GREATEST THING YOU'LL EVER LEARN IS TO LOVE AND BE LOVED IN RETURN (from a song called "NatureBoy" once sung by Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, and a thousand others) and the big heart on the stage curtain and the ALEGRIA LOVE around the lights over the dance floor. All that red and all the subliminal references to LOVE set the perfect tone for this party, and as someone else said, when you go to an Alegria party, you just accept the fact that it's going to be a sauna, and you deal -- (although, I must say, the VIP room does provide much-needed solace when the need arises to vacate the hysteria).

For us, this Alegria party was the best Alegria party we've been to, and it was also the perfect embodiment of what we felt the entire Gay Pride Weekend, and month of June, to be about: LOVE. Abel made us so happy to be able to move and dance and Ric Sena's production values made it a luscious place to celebrate community.

And now it's Tuesday, and it could be a terrible Tuesday, save for the fact that when a weekend is as beautiful as this one has been here in New York, for so many of us, then it's hard to feel anything but gratitude.