Gay Adult Performer Ty Mitchell Writes About Visiting Fire Island's Meat Rack. Backlash Follows
On July 4 weekend, porn star Ty Mitchell visited something close to a pop-up event at Fire Island's infamous Meat Rack — the wooded area between the Pines and Cherry Grove where outdoor sex usually runs rampant this time of the year.
He wrote about his experiences in a lengthy BuzzFeed essay "To Survive A Pandemic, We Need To Make Room For Pleasure" that has led Mitchell to be dissed in comments on the site and social media.
In the essay, he writes how when he arrived at the Meat Rack he felt "the strange dissonance between warm familiarity and abject horror, between the thrill of nightlife as I remember it and the recognition that nightlife is now bound up with potentially deadly repercussions. I dragged myself through a sardine tin of sweaty, ecstatic bodies, people who had taken off their masks to kiss a boy and never put them back on."
Over the next few days Mitchell reflected on having gone to the event and how he kept in touch with his housemates and friends to make sure that everyone was healthy. "I didn't catch COVID, nor did anyone with whom I'd been spending time."
But he added what motivated him to head to the Meat Rack in the first place: "We wanted very badly to be with other gay people and to do gay things in a gay place. Nobody had sorted out the details of what safety could look like right now without dismissing those wants altogether. So people improvised."
Meanwhile pics of such parties circulated in the media. At the time, Twitter was dragging an attendee who went to Fire Island over the same weekend despite being in the process of recovering from COVID.
"This footage so thoroughly echoed images of pandemic denialists in conservative communities that onlookers seemed to view them as one and the same," Mitchell writes.
But Mitchell thinks they're not, which may be why he's getting such a pushback on his comments.
"The tricky thing about boundaries," he goes on to write, "after all, is that we rarely know what they are until they have been breached... We have not been encouraged to manage risk through harm reduction — a variety of tactics for blunting our desires into less harmful behaviors — but to rather see safety and danger as a matter of all-or-nothing ethical constraints."
He continues: "It is in part this widespread assumption that you can be either careful or careless that drives people to binge on respiratory droplets for a weekend after months of avoiding human contact, rather than maintain a flexible sense of caution."
That binary approach is something that Mitchell feels is doomed to failure as he addressed the larger issue of government failure in setting firm health policies.
"We can usually chew gum and walk at the same time, but our fixations on individual behavior tend to just further enable the state to neglect its own responsibility for the pandemic and convert resolvable problems of governance into unresolvable conflicts of culture," Mitchell writes. "Plus, stigmatizing people who engage in risky behavior isn't even effective.
"Stigma tends to drive shameful behaviors into secrecy rather than reduce them, and in the context of a pandemic like COVID-19, such secrecy only undermines efforts to keep gatherings out in the physical open and ensure accurate contact tracing," he adds. "The alternative to shame isn't permission to behave carelessly, but coming up with more persuasive and sustainable tactics for keeping each other cautious while we pursue what we want."
Towards the end of the piece Mitchell writes: "Addressing risk in places like Fire Island requires us to acknowledge this natural desire to feel sexually seen and experience social variety, especially when the satisfaction of those desires becomes available very suddenly. We can satisfy some of these desires in less harmful ways than drug-fueled orgiastic free-for-alls, but not if we dismiss what is challenging about them to people who have relied upon gay sexual culture to meet our emotional needs."
The response in the BuzzFeed comment section was overwhelming damning in their appraisal of the essay, with some finding it incoherent while others dismissing it as an example of gay privilege run amok.
"You don't get to make calculated risks that could kill others because you need some leisure time. This is shit journalism," writes tricksiecat.
"On behalf of everyone who's been affected, lost someone, and who took this seriously in March, who still took it seriously in July, and who still take it seriously now... fuck you," writes buzzcat99.
tortillachips saw Mitchell as glib: "Your pathological need to seem chic and cool by writing about going to fire island and smoking a joint and having an aperol spritz just shows that you're as vapid as they come... This article is irresponsible and you should be ashamed by what you think is important to put out in the world."
In commenting on the distinction Mitchell makes between COVID-denying Trump supporters and those partying in the Meat Rack, rebeccae4d5d5802c writes: "Sorry mate - yes, they are the same. I'm not sure what you hoped to gain by this article, but it's bullshit. As stated by others, we all knew well before July 4th that large social gathers were a problem and not advised. It's pure selfishness and arrogance on display."
A reader named Rachel put it succinctly: "That's a lot of words to say "I'm reckless and I'm not remorseful about it at all."
And of the 62 responses posted beneath the article, only a few readers supported him.
One named stockwocket wrote: "Thanks for writing this. The self-righteousness on display in these comments needs to be challenged. Yes, we need to be careful. Yes, gay people need to balance that safety with their need for gay spaces and experiences. It's possible to make a mistake (like go to a too-crowded party) and still have a point. Let's stop dividing the world into black and white, good and bad, 100% right and 100% wrong. The world is full of nuance."