I'm too goddamned complicated for my own good. I'm back home in San Francisco finally after my crazy weekend in Palm Springs, and I'm still trying to process it all - the good, the scary, and the bad. While other people float through such a weekend without torturing themselves, I bedevil myself with self-doubts, like: "am I really enjoying myself?", "this is so trivial", and "I feel unattractive and all these compliments just make me feel worse".

Saturday night was the main event - the White Party proper. I arrived at B's hotel around 9.30, and met him upstairs in B2 & S's room. B2 & S are a couple who've been together many years, and I found them both rather appealing. S is tiny - a lithe teddy bear, while his boyfriend B2 is my height, but about twenty pounds lighter than me. When he's dancing, he carries this amusing look on his face of "Oh, we're so above all this aren't we". Since things between B and myself are progressing quickly, it was important to me that I hit it off with his best friends, and that seems to have happened. They had quite an entourage down there; by ten thirty on Saturday night, there were eight of us in the room, all in white, and there was much fussing around with last minute preparation: push ups, chemistry concealment, just the right t-shirt. But my self-consciousness was nagging at me, and my exuberant facade felt a little thin.

We all trooped through the parking lot to the Convention Center and checked into the VIP entrance. The main hall of the center is cavernous, and the dance floor, as yet not completely filled, seemed vast and impersonal. B2 & S and their crowd immediately went to dance, and I told B I wasn't up for it just yet, so he went with them while I stood by myself on the edge of the dance floor. I soon fell in with my friend T, who was feeling, much like myself, like he was at the wrong party. In his case, he hadn't had any sleep for almost fourty eight hours.

But, just the same way it happened on Friday night, I somehow started to enjoy myself despite everything, and the hours passed in a moment. We all danced, and flirted, and made small talk with acquaintances and strangers alike. I find that when I'm enjoying myself at a club, I want to make other people happy, so I go up and talk to people who look like they're all on their own, such as a tremendously tall young drag queen who was attending her first ever circuit party.

The performance that took place around two was spectacular. It started simply enough, with classically trained dancers springing around on stage to music by Beethoven. Suddenly the curtains opened to reveal that a small symphony orchestra had been supplying the music. We all gasped, and oohed, and screamed. There was what looked like a huge, white Christmas ball about fifteen feet in diameter at the center of the stage. It slowly revolved to reveal it was actually a costume, with an elaboratedly painted diva at its center. She sang a heavily remixed version of one of my favorite recent songs, "Into the West". It's from "The Return of the King" closing titles; I looked around and I think I was the only one mouthing the words.

B & I stayed on the dance floor until 4.30 again, until we both felt ourselves winding down. I was starting to feel a little weird. As we walked back to his room, I struggled to put it into words, but they wouldn't come. We lay together in each other's arms, talking, for an hour or so, then tried to sleep. I gave it an hour before, still wide awake, I left a snoring B and drove back to Tom's house to sleep by myself.

I felt rather depressed when I finally got up around 1.30 in the afternoon. B had called half an hour earlier and left a message asking me if I wanted to go up the mountain with him, so I called him back and got his voice mail. My voice sounded thick, low and hoarse to my ears. But I put a smiling face on when I drove up to the hotel to pick him up an hour later. It was good to be doing something "normal" again.

The mountain in question is San Jacinto, which looms over 10,000 feet above Palm Springs. You can drive up to the base station then take a huge, revolving, suspended cable car almost all the way to the summit. It's spectacular as you rise swiftly up the mountain; jagged outreaching crags, shining in the sun, sail majestically past, and you begin to see that Palm Springs is just a deceptive little oasis in a huge desert valley. Each time the car passes a tower, the whole car swoops down a little and everybody in the car groans with excitement and fear. Further up, the mountainscape changes and huge boulders look poised to crash back down the mountain obliterating the towers. Further still, and pine trees appear, growing at precarious angles straight out of what looks like bare rock.

Looking down 8,000 feet from the cable car - Palm Springs is barely visible on the right

View from the summit. B is just visible, shivering, on the lookout platform.

At the top, there's a large station, with viewing balconies, and a nature trail that leads through the surprising tree-covered plateau just below the peak. It was cool in our tanktops - just fifty degrees, and snow nestled in the darker cracks.

B and I on the summit.

Meanwhile, back in Palm Springs, the next party was cranking up - the tea dance. It had already begun by the time we got back to the hotel. But we had other business to take care of in B's room. We emerged close to sunset, and walked over to the newly renamed White Party Park. There seemed to be an almost impossible number of extremely hunky shirtless men. Any alien spaceship that happened to land in the park would immediately think they'd landed amongst a group of pagan warriors. We ran into B2 & S and they led us into the middle of the densely packed dance floor, where we joined in with the mass of men and pretended we were having as much fun as everybody else, even though we were both completely sober.

Thoughout the weekend, I'd had so many compliments from B and his friends; they all made it quite clear that they thought B had hooked a great catch. But I can never truly believe such compliments; the next day I felt bad that I'd been so graceless in the way I'd accepted them.

The evening did feel a sense of magic, as the night increased; dancing outside arm in arm with someone who feels increasingly special, in the warm evening air, surrounded by thousands of guys who all seem to be feeling the same spirit, with the huge San Jacinto mountain still visible against the stars. The party ended with fireworks, and we all began to drift off one by one, B and I to the hotel to have our first real meal of the day, others to get ready for the closing night party (yes, the thing STILL wasn't quite over). I was almost persuaded to go to the final party, but in the end I was just too tired, and too over it. So I kissed B goodbye, and drove back to Tom's for a good night's sleep.

When I got home here this afternoon, I felt depressed again, with a feeling of anti-climax. And a feeling of not having yet processed everything that I saw and felt over the weekend. I'd had some great times, but mixed with plenty of angst. Yet by the evening, I'd received an email from B where he told me he thought I was a beautiful man, inside and out. It was so unexpected, coming at a time of such self doubt. That somebody could feel that way about me. Suddenly I felt very close to tears