I remember my very first night in a gay club. It was back in New York when I was a freshman in college. I got in with a New Hampshire drivers license -- a hand-me-down from my roommate’s big sister. Her eyes were green. It worked anyway. I remember parking in the church lot across the street and crawling out from the backseat of a two-door Honda. Some six of us girls crossed Lark Street within the epic silence that glows under street lamps after midnight. It’s the kind of quiet only winter can bring and the kind of electric anticipation that burns in the moments before a big night on the town.

We tugged the door open and bass beats spilled out onto the crystalline sidewalk. We made our way through the small dance floor to the back bar. It was dark, save for the neon glow of rainbow Bud Light signs and a disco ball spinning on the touch screen jukebox. We took shots in the corner and watched the men that filled the room bounce to the music in their cut off shirts. After a few rounds I slid off my stool in search of the restroom. What would follow was one of the most significant impressions ever made on my young, gay life.

I took the steep staircase to the bar’s second floor. It played trip-hop music and had a pool table. Skinny men leaned against the wall like cue sticks and others were draped across the sturdy green felt surface. There was a unisex bathroom door that was closed and two people stood waiting their turn. A few feet away was another bathroom; the door had been taken off the hinges but there was a translucent fringe hanging from the top of the door frame and the floor tiles beneath went back several feet suggesting it had a few stalls. I entered. Inside were three men hanging out at the counter ashing cigarettes into the sink basin. The one in the spaghetti strap tank nodded hello as I went into a stall. I remember the stainless steel bathroom tissue dispenser was empty. Its powdery flat surface was eye level with me as I squatted hovering over the toilet seat. I washed my hands in the faucet that never stopped running and went back downstairs.

It wasn’t until the next time I was back in that club and ascended the stairs to the restrooms with a few of my friends that I learned my lesson. As I approached the fringe overhang to the familiar bathroom, a friend grabbed my shoulder and looked at me alarmed. When I told her I’d been up there before her eyes darted towards our upperclassmen friends whose faces were laced with disappointed failure. How could they have let the kid stumble into “the drug bathroom.”

It only took a few years to learn that most clubs have drug bathrooms. Once you’ve seen one you've seen them all and everything kind of makes sense. The girls with the dusty white finger tips; the agro gay boys firing rapid affection at the femme girls’ shoes. The touching. The bleeding eye liner. The constant motion. The eyes rolling back into heads. The cold sweats.

At some point in my life it all seemed neatly isolated and self-contained -- there were special bathrooms to get dosed. Ones I could avoid. But now as I am engrossed in Hillcrest and L.A., Palm Springs and San Francisco and every other urban, gay enclave, I see something has changed. As white parties and prides become circadian parts of life, it seems that drug habits aren’t just for Saturday nights in the last stall, anymore. It’s as if muscle relaxers are a prereq for Sunday brunch and Adderall is a must for weeknights out. White parties are the perfect excuse for mounds of powdery coke and the day after can’t possibly unfurl without painkillers.

At the risk of sounding hopelessly square (which anyone who knows me would already contend) I’m taking a stand. I’m writing this column in defense of myself to make sure someone (anyone) knows that a gay scenester must not a druggie hipster make.

I realize that I’ve seen so much must-medicate-to-mingle group-think taking over that I’m starting to assume everyone at the party is doing drugs. But if there is anyone reading this who ever wondered, or worse, ever assumed that I’m one of those broads with a pocket full of pills and a hotel room nightstand dusted with straws and mirrors, I want you to know that I’m not.

And you don’t have to be either.

I understand why so many gay youth experiment with drugs and fall into patterns of addiction. I understand the self-loathing and depression that many queer kids are made to feel in their struggle to fit in and/or come out. My heart goes out to the generation that is in position today as those can be some of the most trying years of your life. To be clear, this isn’t a pointed condescension or heartless critique of those whose lives are torn apart by real addiction. This is just an opinion, or more accurately, an outward dissension from the ranks of so many gay adults who refuse to grow up.

The coke and the pills and the inability to be present within yourself for even a few hours is such a pathetic expression of adolescent insecurities. The unwillingness to go out to an occasion (whether a classy awards ceremony or a random happy hour) without being dosed is a cowardly cop out from adults too weak to manage their own emotion or independently produce a clever response to even the most pedestrian of social situations.

Adults in their late twenties and thirties want so badly to be hip – or so badly to avoid looking unhip – that they do drugs so they’re able to bear the truth of the matter: We’re not as young as we used to be.

We don't have any more excuses.

So, as gay party season swings into full effect and my thirtieth year gains on me, my plan is to kick it with my crew, just like I always do. I’ll sip cocktails on rooftops, turn my white skins red, stumble home the mornings after and all the while leave the B.S. in the last bathroom stall, right where I found it.