You are no longer having sex without drugs,
and you are no longer having drugs without sex.
LGBTQ+ people use drugs
at far higher rates than straight people.
This connection goes to the roots of both modern queer culture
and modern drug culture.
In this episode, I’m finding out why.
I’m JS Rafaeli.
I’ve spent years writing about drugs—
why people use them,
and why our governments chose to declare war on them.
At VICE, we make a lot of films about drugs,
but in this show, I get to dig a bit deeper.
I get to talk to fellow expert drug nerds
about their research into the crazy world of mind-altering substances.
[NEWS ON DRUGS]
Jay Jackson has written extensively
about the intersection of queer life and drug use
and is currently head of public affairs
at the drug policy think tank Volteface.
Jay, thanks so much for joining us.
Absolute pleasure.
OK, so LGBT+ people tend to use drugs
at significantly higher rates than straight people.
Can we just get a picture of the numbers
and what's going on here?
Yeah. So even when we’re controlling for age and gender,
because LGBTQ+ people are more likely to be younger,
we still find significantly increased rates, like you say.
We’re talking, I think, according to the latest figures,
about twice as likely.
And so just sort of breaking it down into what that looks like,
one in eight, I think it is, 18-to 24-year-old people
who identify as LGBTQ+
use drugs at least once a month,
which is quite a lot when you think about it.
So there’s a consistent pattern in terms of increased use.
And obviously there are a number of theories as to why that is.
And in a way, there are some connections between
the LGBT+ experience in society
and the experience of drug use in society, right?
Yeah, 100 percent.
I think we see quite a few similarities,
one of which is the fact that
both groups are obviously hugely stigmatized,
and there’s a shame put on them from the rest of society.
What they do in private, their private lives,
what their private practices are
are intimately examined and criticized
in a way that a heterosexual person or a non-drug user
doesn’t have to deal with.
You know, up until only a few decades ago,
if you were a man, and you wanted to have sex,
consenting sex with another adult man in a private space,
you weren’t allowed to do that
for no other reason than bigotry and stigma.
And even today, like you say, LGBTQ+ people and drug users,
both their outward-facing identities
and their inward-facing private practices,
the things they choose to indulge in,
the things they choose to spend their time doing
are ultimately at the whim and the approval of heteronormative,
prohibitionist societies and policymakers.
I just see drugs as another norm to be,
just like gender or sexuality,
that just needs to be deconstructed,
that needs to be explored, needs to be liberated by people.
And this goes back quite a long way.
I mean, queer communities have been central to
pretty much every major drug scene of the past hundred years.
Yeah, whether we’re looking at Christopher Isherwood
and the sex workers and the gender non-conforming people
and the lesbians and the drug users,
or whether we’re looking at William S. Burroughs and the Beats,
or David Bowie and the Velvet Underground,
the Detroit house music scene in the late 70s and the early 80s again,
scores of Black gay men coming together
to create what we now know as modern dance music,
doing that under the influence of these newly synthesized,
popularized club drugs that they’re using to form communities, to bond,
to pleasure each other, to gain a sense of self-identity
and self-expression.
It sort of reminds me of what Benjamin Disraeli,
the 19th century British prime minister,
said about Manchester, which is where I’m from.
He said, “What Manchester does today, the world does tomorrow.”
And it feels like with queer people,
whether it be with taking progressive stances on social justice issues,
or whether it be taking club drugs,
what queer people do today, the rest of society does tomorrow.
And let’s talk about that, actually, a bit more.
Let’s talk about the gay bar,
queer nightlife, drug use, and how these all intersect.
I think the gay bar
holds such an important place in LGBTQ+ communities.
These places are places of self-expression,
they’re part of relationship formation
and bonding and consumption
and pleasure and intrigue.
Gay venues are often the first place
where a queer person can really be themselves
outwardly in public for the first time,
away from the shackles of family and work
and heteronormative expectations.
These are places of liberation and expression and exploration,
and drugs ultimately help facilitate that.
And they’re places where...
people’s own identities are forged
but also where they realize that
they’re part of a community that’s bigger than themselves.
It’s absolutely no coincidence at all
that the modern gay rights movement was born at the Stonewall Inn,
at a gay bar.
It’s a place where queer people could come and talk to each other
and almost consciousness raise, in that sense.
What are some of the problems in the way that queer drug use
is talked about and represented, particularly in the media?
I think it's really easy to fall back on
a stereotypical view of queer drug use
being viewed through the lens of
either bacchanalian, hedonistic debauchery—
you know, ravaging gay orgies and just purely mindless excess—
or it’s a trauma response.
It’s a coping mechanism.
It’s an analgesic.
It’s used to numb the pain of oppression
felt from heteronormative societies.
Actually, I think that loses a lot of the nuance
and a lot of the stuff in the middle about self-expression.
Queer people use drugs to form part of their own identities.
I think it helps people come to terms--
You know, in the same way that people use psychedelics to open their minds,
queer people use empathogens and stimulants
and other such drugs to form communities
and form bonds with other people
with whom they share that lived experience.
It’s about liberation.
It’s about liberating one’s own personality
and personal identity.
OK, let’s talk about a specifically modern form of this connection,
which is chemsex.
Now, when we talk about chemsex,
we’re not just talking about people getting high and screwing.
This is a very particular phenomenon within the gay community.
Can we just delineate what chemsex is and what it isn’t?
Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. Because chemsex could be anything.
It could be taking Viagra, couldn’t it?
It could be having a drink with alcohol.
It’s basically the idea that, in the first instance,
men who are having sex with men would use hook-up apps
and then would use drugs such as mephedrone,
methamphetamine or GHB to enhance their sexual experience.
Those drugs could be ingested in a number of ways.
They could be [taken] orally, nasally, or they could be injected,
which is a technique known as slamming.
Now actually, if you look at interviews with the doctor
who coined the term in the first instance,
he actually says that most instances of chemsex are one-on-one,
contrary to that media portrayal.
I think that shows, again,
how the homophobia and the prohibitionism
and the drug phobia, if you want to call it,
are intimately linked and both propagated by the media.
And we’re seeing I think it’s two gay people,
two gay men a month dying in London
of accidental overdoses.
So developing a reliance on GHB is one thing that’s commonly seen.
You know, use it in the first instance
to heighten that sexual pleasure,
but then actually sex without it then becomes unfulfilling,
and you seek to have that hit again and again.
One of the other risks is that it leads to
engaging in riskier sexual practices.
You’re less likely to use protection when you’re high.
It’s an increased risk of STD transmission,
and obviously HIV is a part of that.
I think we also have to be careful about the way we talk about chemsex,
in that there is a tendency, especially in the media,
to just slip straight into moral panic.
And I don’t think that’s particularly helpful either, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
And of course, the media is going to take every opportunity
to jump at whipping up moral hysteria
to harvest rage clicks or sell papers or do whatever they need to do.
Both queer people
and people who use drugs historically and today
have been and continue to be
prevented from accessing crucial harm reduction information
or psychological support information they might need
because of the shame and stigma that they feel internally.
So that internalized homophobia, for example,
that they have been made to feel from without.
Right now, chemsex might actually be getting redefined
by the wider queer community.
The way in which chemsex, since its original conception
about men having sex with men on gay dating apps,
the way that that has changed now,
and so I know there’s a lot of other queer people
who engage in chemsex for other reasons.
So for example,
trans and non-binary people using chemsex
to break down those barriers
about maybe their dysphoria about their body,
maybe their lack of sexual confidence due to various issues around gender.
People using these drugs are enabled for the first time
to have fulfilling, positive sexual experiences
with themselves and others
and with their bodies and in their bodies
thanks to using these drugs.
Do you think there are differences
in the way that different parts of the LGBT+ world are using drugs?
No doubt that different queer groups
use different drugs in different ways,
in different settings, at different times.
But unfortunately, due to the nature of the research
that’s out there at the moment, the limited nature of it,
and the way that it homogenizes LGBTQ+ people into one group,
when actually, more so than almost any other group,
I feel like queer people are an extremely heterogeneous
group of people,
unfortunately we don’t have
a scientific, proper breakdown of that.
Queer women in South America
or gender non-conforming people in Europe
or Black gay men in America,
I’m sure that those groups all engage in drug taking
in a slightly different way, sure.
OK. And I do think we need to look at trauma and marginalization
and how these can play a role in some queer drug use.
Could you speak to that a little bit?
Queer people by definition are on the outskirts of society.
They differ from the norms.
And trauma, unfortunately,
and stigmatization, discrimination is almost a defining part of that.
Queer people, especially gay and trans people of color,
way more likely to be suffering from a series of personal circumstances
that are then also correlated with high levels of drug use.
So we’re talking poverty,
we're talking homelessness, childhood trauma,
mental health issues,
domestic, physical, and verbal abuse.
All of these things are over-indexed in the LGBTQ+ community,
and all of these things ultimately lead to
a higher likelihood of using drugs.
And I’d like to talk about one quite specifically queer drug,
which is poppers.
Can you just explain what poppers are
and the role they play in LGBTQ+ life?
So poppers, amyl nitrates, alkyl nitrates,
I think it differs according to where you are on the globe, actually.
And what they are, basically, is they are a relaxing drug.
They’re used, I guess, mainly by men who have sex with men.
But increasingly, as younger generations
become queerer than before
and queerer in a different number of ways,
they’re increasingly used by other populations.
But historically speaking, [poppers] have mainly been used by
receptive anal sex partners,
men who have sex with men,
to sort of ease that experience.
So if you have a sniff of poppers, it induces smooth muscle relaxation,
it dilates the blood vessels,
it leads to a small head rush,
and that allows for easier, basically, receptive anal sex.
I mean, I find it a very pleasurable sensation.
What we have actually seen recently is a real assault on poppers
in countries across the world.
So in Canada, in Australia, and in the UK,
we’ve seen moves to outlaw their sale and their use.
And it’s based on very little real-world evidence of their harms.
I think, once again, it’s just another example
of how queer people and people who use drugs
are just victims of prevailing social norms.
And I’d also like to look back in history
to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s
and how that moment kind of brought LGBT+ people
and drug users together in quite profound ways.
I think the HIV/AIDS epidemic—
which I think it’s important to know is still going on
with millions of people in Sub-Saharan Africa
dying from AIDS—
absolutely, in the 80s,
that was the story that brought those two communities together.
You know, especially men having sex with men,
gay, bisexual men were at the forefront of that
in the early 80s in the UK and in the US.
And then it sort of spread to
communities that were using needles to inject drugs.
And we saw that LGBTQ+ people
were at the forefront of HIV/AIDS activism in the 1980s.
So I think that speaks to what we were getting at earlier
about queer people being at the vanguard
of so many social justice movements,
whether that be the HIV/AIDS epidemic,
whether that be anti-apartheid movements,
peace movements,
women's rights movements.
And that actually leads you on to the next question.
What do you think the emerging drug legalization movement
can learn from the massive achievements
of the gay rights movement
and the broader queer activist movements?
I think there's a lot to be learned from the gay rights movement
and the long and hard-fought struggle that LGBTQ+ people have fought
and continue to fight in the West and across the world.
So for example, we’ve seen that, in the UK,
it’s been, in policy terms, a lengthy process
from the decriminalization of homosexuality in the late 1960s
to the introduction of civil partnerships
in the early 2000s,
and then finally same-sex marriage being introduced in 2013.
We should be looking just to achieve what we can, where we can.
If that means embracing decriminalization
before we get to conversations about full legalization,
then let’s do that.
I think one of the other things that we can learn
is the need, really, for a political champion of the cause.
I think if we’re going to see serious reform of drug policies,
we need to have a politician who is willing to stake political
and social capital on the issue.
So in political science literature,
I believe it’s called a “policy entrepreneur.”
You know, we have pioneering politicians
coming out in favor of LGBTQ+ rights across the world.
And we need to see the same in terms of drug policy.
So are all drugs queer?
I think, by definition, it would be impossible for all drugs to be queer.
A lot of drugs are sort of quite straight histories.
When you’re looking at alcohol, caffeine, tobacco, even cannabis,
I don’t think these are drugs
that are tied up in queer liberation movements.
But with certain drugs,
when you look at poppers,
when you look at club drugs like MDMA, ketamine,
these drugs that were first used in the late 20th century
in nightlife spaces dominated by Black and LGBTQ+ people
in San Francisco, in Detroit, in New York, in London,
I think a lot of these drugs, their histories are queer histories.
But there's also the sense of queer as a verb, right?
Like the verb “to queer” something— queering the academy, queering media.
I can kind of propose an idea of drugs as queering consciousness.
Now, that’s a radical question. That’s good. That’s very good.
I think, absolutely, the use of drugs
is a queer act in a society that’s committed to prohibitionism.
So in the same way that people who have non-normative genders
or sexual identities are breaking down those barriers
and those norms of gender and sexuality,
people who use drugs are ultimately breaking down a societal norm
and exploring and transgressing boundaries in that same way.
And I think, especially in the case of LGBTQ+ people
whose identities aren’t legally recognized,
there is a commonality there in terms of living a life
outside of the acceptable legal parameters of society.
So if you are an LGBTQ+ person
that’s been a victim of arbitrary criminalization,
you’ve felt the sharp end of just how arbitrary
our laws on so many things are,
that you have that in common
with somebody who has used a drug such as cannabis,
where the most dangerous thing about cannabis is being caught with it,
in that sense, I think there is a lot in common.