Once at the apartment building, we hit the buzzer for 1A, and a 20-something black man ushers us into the apartment’s kitchen, where we pay the admission fee and quickly stow most of our clothes in drawstring bags. “Don’t — you might get cold from the air conditioner,” says another man, looking up from a computer at a nearby table, as I begin to shed my shirt. (I later learn he is the party’s co-promoter.) I walk with Evans into two adjoining rooms. Inside, I spy a box of condoms by the door — and the occasional Magnum wrapper on the floor — but clearly not everyone is using them.

Every week in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, such as East New York, Crown Heights, and Spanish Harlem, promoters throw for-profit sex parties like this one, where condom use is left up to the participants.

Attracting a largely black and Latino clientele with private e-mails and postings at sex hookup sites like Adam4Adam.com and Web groups like Nubian Muscle, these savvy, albeit ethically challenged, self-made entrepreneurs cash in on admission fees ranging from $5 to $25 while taking a decidedly laissez-faire attitude toward safe sex. Trading on the appeal of thug-life fantasies and questionable notions of “down low” identity politics, they turn their apartments into commercial pleasure domes, knowing that many gay men, regardless of ethnicity, will play unsafe if given the chance — and if no one’s looking.

“This is a business enterprise that’s exploiting our community and putting people at risk,” says veteran AIDS activist Phill Wilson, executive director of the Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles. “They’re peddling death.” (more. . .)

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