Transforming gay men, sex and drugs: from fear to pleasure

• In Event: Producing Transformations: Drugs, Bodies, and Experimentation 1

Abstract

Representations of gay men using drugs in their sex lives (colloquially called “chemsex”) in the period between decriminalisation and the AIDS epidemic beginning often portray drugs as incidental to sex and rarely give them agency to direct gay men’s lives and pleasures. However, contemporary representations in films, novels and plays almost always implicate drugs as powerfully causative agents in relation to tragedies, traumas, deaths, sexual assaults and HIV seroconversion; resulting in claims repeatedly being made that chemsex is one of the biggest crises in the gay community since AIDS. As such, a sense of fear develops about the purported risks of chemsex and it becomes abjected in an attempt to conserve gay male sexuality. Calls are then made for gay men to uncritically replace chemsex with reliable, repeatable and stable intimate relationships as if they were the same thing or gave the same outcomes. In this paper I will draw on longitudinal qualitative interviews with gay men who engage in chemsex to explore how they are aware of these contemporary representations, but frequently resist the conservative force of fear by: developing and sharing strategies to transform the risks of chemsex into pleasure; and, engaging in social networks that develop liberal rather than conservative forms of pleasures.

Author

• Maurice George Nagington, University of Manchester