How Monkeypox Killed NYC Gay Sex Parties and Slowed Down an Epidemic
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As monkeypox became an imminent threat, New York City’s most popular places for people to engage in gay sex took matters into their own hands and began shutting down.
“It definitely affected our business,” said Chris Hawke, organizer of another ticketed weekly gay sex party and social club called GBU (Golden Boy USA), with meeting locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn. “It was like a double whammy after the 18-month pause with COVID.” But he said stopping the parties was the right thing to do to protect attendees. He explained, many guys who usually attend GBU were “freaked out and a little shell-shocked” by the images of monkeypox they saw online.
Members Only Club announced that it was shutting down on July 15 due to “unfortunate circumstances that quickly extended beyond our control” that included monkeypox. Meanwhile, gay bars with dark rooms for hooking up such as Club Q, The Eagle and The Cock, helped get the word out about monkeypox infections.
“We have been aggressive in educating our clients through social media and in-house,” said a representative for The Cock, located in NYC’s East Village. “We continue to require COVID vax proof and are frequently posting monkeypox info and vax availability on Twitter, Facebook and Insta.”
A new CDC report says gay men are proceeding with more caution. One-time hookups account for “50 percent of daily monkeypox virus transmission,” according to the report, and the center has found that men who have sex with men have indeed reported decreasing their partners. Achieving a 40 percent reduction in one-time partnerships among gay men could delay the spread of the virus “by 20 percent to 31 percent,” the CDC report explained.
The CDC report shows that these efforts have been working to lower transmission as men who have sex with men stop hooking up as often.
In New York, “we have seen cases begin to fall, and transmission slow,” explained Dr. Ashwin Vasan, MD, in an Aug. 24 presentation to the New York City Council. The slowing transmission rate is “due in no small part to our city’s efforts to get tens of thousands of people vaccinated, the heroic efforts of community leaders and advocates to disseminate messages around primary prevention and behavior modification,” he said.
“Most of the gays I know, who are out and about, are vaccinated,” a gay friend who works in beauty told me. “(They) aren’t doing random hookups anymore. Some guys are keeping their clothes on at parties or clubs.”
As more people have received their first monkeypox vaccine dose, they are becoming more confident to rejoin the sex scene, GBU party planner Hawke said. After putting a pause on GBU sex parties since July, Hawke hosted his first event on Saturday, which he said was “at full capacity.” There was one change though to the parties of old—a New York Department of Health van administering first doses of the monkeypox vaccine onsite.
“They were great and were with us all night,” says Hawke, but they weren’t authorized to give second doses to New York residents. “Almost everyone had their first dose and were asking if they could get their second. Some guys from out of town were able to get their second dose since they weren’t in the NYC system. But besides that there weren’t many shots given.” He added, “Hopefully by next Saturday’s ‘GBU Kegger’ event in Park Slope, they will be allowed to give second doses.”
With monkeypox predominately hitting the gay community so hard, there were bound to be comparisons of the virus to HIV, said Hawke. But this isn’t that, he said.
“Having lived through that, I found this to be much different,” he said. “I think the best time in history for us to be gay was the 10 years between 2009 to 2019 when we could all be on PreP, get married and not feel the social stigma or shame in being gay.”
He added, “Then in 2020 came COVID and now monkeypox. I don’t think we fully appreciated what a great decade that was.”
The current outbreak has led to questions about whether monkeypox is a Sexually Transmitted Infection (STI), explained CDC press officer Scott Pauley. “Monkeypox can more accurately be described as ‘sexually transmissible.’” There have been more than 18,000 monkeypox infections across the country, nearly 3,000 of which in NYC are affecting gay men, according to the CDC.
For content creators on OnlyFans, the spread of the monkeypox virus has at times meant less sex and more solo play. A handful of performers have openly shared with their followers that they are taking a break from filming after contracting the virus, including NYC-based creators Timothy Champagne and Boomer Banks. Houston-based porn star Silver Steele shared a now-viral Instagram post documenting his battle with monkeypox during July.
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Others have opted out of mentioning the virus at all. The Daily Beast reached out to multiple OnlyFans performers who preferred not to share their experiences.
Photo by Scott Sanker on Unsplash
