From: gunter 
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: The Saint Is Gone
Date: Thu, 25 Jan 1996 22:11:43 -0800

It must have been around midnight, that first night at The
Saint.  The strobes, the light show, the music ... all stop.
Pitch black.  Dah-Dumm ... it's the opening beats of "Also
Sprach Zarathustra."  (Ok - that's the theme from 2001 -
Space Odyssey, doncha'no.)  The music swells and the huge
dome above comes to life with a million  stars.  We stare in
awe, until the disco beat drowns out Strauss and everyone is
screaming and dancing again.  We're gonna live forever!

From the dark balcony you can look down through the scrim into
the dome where a thousand men tangle in an orgy of hedonistic
abandonment.  The White Party, Valentine's Day, is pretty tame;
the Black Party features S&M tableaus and, one year, a ritual
circumcision.  It's too crowded to get a good look, so the
bloody sheet gets hoisted for everyone to see.

Then came the day I saw a young man, crying, tape a scribbled
note to the door, terror in his eyes.  He blames The Saint, and
it's not clear if he's writing about himself or a lover.  Of
course, by then I knew.  Everyone did.  But the balcony never
emptied, even during a long last night, much later.

That was some years ago.  Today they finished tearing down the
walls and tomorrow there will be bedrooms where many men first
started dying.