You hear the music before you get off the ferry. You're right there at the watery edge of downtown Fire Island Pines -- a total of maybe eight medium-sized buildings -- and one club's outdoor sound system provides the soundtrack to the entire enclave. Unfortunately, the Sip & Twirl's music collection stops dead at 1982.

Bananarama serenades me as I check into the Hotel Ciel. You can tell this is a hotel for gays even before you go to your room and see complimentary condoms and lube on every horizontal surface. It's not kept up as well as it should be, because who wants to play handyman with all these hunky, nearly-naked men running around? Still, it's cheap and cheerful, three stories of cement block bunker painted a glossy white with oceanic blue accents. I drop my luggage in my room and go explore.

You know, there's a reason why, aside from strobe lights, discos are completely dark. It's because we're totally embarrassed to be dancing to repetitive, third-grade crap. When you're totally drugged, it's fun. When you're admiring the huge white yachts at the harbor, or trying to order a slice of pizza, you realize that a life accompanied by the Pet Shop Boys is really no life at all.

Nobody else seems to notice. No one seems bothered by the fact that we can't escape some of the worst music ever recorded, or that songs exist that weren't first recorded on wax. Me, I've been around. I know the limits. There's a reason why dance clubs have eighty exits, and it's not to give you a quiet place to snort coke.

I hook up with friends, and friends of friends, and they lead me straight into the belly of the beast. I don't complain. They're gorgeous, and absolutely hysterical. They're chorus boys in a certain Broadway musical, and though they spend their nights dressed as women they have more muscles than me. We get drinks at the Sip & Twirl's bar, and then they hit the dance floor where, oddly, no one looks twice at hunky young men doing tour jetés. At midnight, the boys scurry off to the weekend homes of gracious businessmen, and I go back to the Ciel.

My neighbor is lounging on the third-floor deck. He's hot. We lock eyes. He has clothes on, which is oddly sexy after so much nudity. Despite the soundtrack, I like it here. It's a gay, gay, gay, gay world. I like my room, with six pillows of various firmness. I ignore the greasy handprints on the mirror over the bed. Like, you know, somebody was standing on the bed and needed to brace themselves. And I think I'll like it even more tomorrow, when I head to the nude beach. Ten minutes away, it has to be out of earshot.

I crank up the air conditioner and the sounds of the Sip & Twirl blissfully fade away. In fact, I can hardly hear the shrill sex squeals of my neighbor that last until three a.m. Which is all the more impressive when you know he's sitting on my stomach all that time.