On Halloween, the second biggest holiday in the gay world, I'm sitting in the Culiacan Mexican Grill in Revkjavik, Iceland, spending $20 for a tasteless burrito.
Back home there is an endless round of parties, dinners, parades. You spend weeks deciding on the best costume, putting up decorations, buying candy for the trick-or-treaters (in gay neighborhoods, cute guys, not kids).
They don't celebrate Halloween here.
Why am I in Reykjavik? And not in West Hollywood, or New York, or even back home on the Plains?
Yuri is so deeply rooted in gay culture, living in the heart of London's gay neighborhood, hanging out only with gay men, discussing masculine beauty and gigantic penises at every opportunity, that it is difficult to imagine him outside that world. But in fact, he's a well-known atmospheric scientist who has published important research on climate change.
He has brought five of his advanced students to Iceland to see the aurora borealis, and test how they have changed due to global warming. Something about emission spectrography and astronometric oscillations. I'm along for the ride.
His students are cute -- five guys in their early 20s, fresh-faced science students, boisterous and energetic. But I don't even know if they're gay, and besides, I can't cruise Yuri's students. I'm like a chaperone.
The full story, with nude photos and sexual situations, is on Tales of West Hollywood.