Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim controlled the only effective Shiite paramilitary force, but had chosen not to direct it against the occupation. Both ayatollahs had been talking directly to American officials and favored democracy. These bombings were undoubtedly intended to terrorize Iraq's clerical establishment and to snuff out the growing dialogue between mainstream Shiites and Americans. That should be of vital concern to the United States, whose fortunes in Iraq will rise or fall with the political sentiments of the Shiites, who make up at least 60 percent of Iraq's population. Hakim's uncle, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Said al-Hakim - has convulsed the Shiite community. The attack, which killed scores of Iraqis, including the prominent cleric Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim-and which came less than a week after a bomb went off at the home of Mr. Posted by Orrin Judd at 8:59 PM CONVULSIVE THERAPY Bombing Democracy in Iraq (REUEL MARC GERECHT, 8/31/03, NY Times)
A more direct conclusion would be that the drug use is consistent with, in fact complimentary to, the sexual deviance. That's one heck of a progression: gay men are attracted to the drugs because the rest of us are mean to them and then it's the drugs' fault that they degrade themselves. 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. 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." 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. Somebody - and to say that there is no such thing as casual crystal meth use!" But I'm only doing it because it might help "I'm a bit hesitant to talk about all this," he said. Posted by Orrin Judd at 11:09 PM HARDLY AUDIE Rufus Wainwright Journeys to 'Gay Hell' and Back (ANTHONY DeCURTIS, August 31, 2003, NY Times)