#its all but unheard of in that bar. its supposed to be a safe gay space

[malopeach]

sooo. i got roofied tonight 😐

i am safe! i was Immediately surrounded by my friends who also happened to be at the bar, all is well but damn. it might be a minute before im able to go back there, which is a shame because it was one of my favorite bars

[queernuck]

I am almost sorry, but you are likely to be around drug users at Pride if you spend a significant amount of time at various festivities, vigils, and events, even if you attend the most sexless, supposed-safe, sanitized ideations of whatever events are associated with pride. This is effectively a matter of how common drug use is, how many different sorts of drug use there are, and how ubiquitous drug use is within both gay communities and various communities that are in assembly and assemblage with it in one way or another.

What has frustrated me most, recently, in looking at how others view drug use, drinking, and sobriety in relation to Pride is that the understanding of our community’s ties to substance abuse are so poor, so awful, so normative. 

So many reinscriptions and repetitions of “advice” or directives given to us about how we must behave at Pride are ones that repeat largely hegemonic advice, advice that looks at public spaces in a way that fundamentally focuses on individual actions rather than structural inadequacies. Admonishments about smoking in public ignore larger issues of air quality, the structuring of capitalist work ethic such that one of the few ways to reliably get breaks on a reasonable schedule is get addicted to nicotine. Alcohol is among the few intoxicants that can be legally consumed in public openly, with marijuana in a kind of grey area in many places and illegal but tolerated, at least to a degree. Cocaine, as a substance that can be insufflated and one that goes well with alcohol, provides stimulation and confidence in a world where you are asked to keep drinking to stay at a bar, and a bar is likely one of the few social spaces you have, so that cocaine becomes a means of making the experience of going to the bar something memorable (in a literal sense, by keeping one from blacking out) as well as providing the energy necessary for going from a bar to an apartment, to a bedroom, to an encounter of a sexual character. The same is even more true of methamphetamine, or Tina, common in many gay communities and a favorite of many gay men, including in circles that by their nature are constructed around drug use.

Drugs and sex go together frequently, even with light usage of entirely acceptable drugs. Alcohol, either consumed or as an accessory to distract those who are satisfied with intoxication at a given moment, is present at most events where the audience is of legal age and the context is casual, or is well suited for such casual encounters. And, as discussed before, the use of cocaine surrounding sex is relatively well-documented as well, both inside and outside of gay communities. The use of poppers, a term for amyl nitrates, in sex is not uncommon, and certainly no longer restricted to gay communities. however, that it got its start, became popular in, gay circles is hardly disputed, mainly because even the amusingly droll wikipedia account of the history of the drug mentions the way in which it was taken on by a kind of avant-garde of straight culture (really, likely, just ones who had fucked a bisexual person and thought themselves subversive for it despite being far straighter than the highway line you walk down when checking if youre gonna catch your third DUI) as the muscle-relaxing effects of poppers are known both for increasing sexual pleasure, and for relaxing muscles in a fashion that allows for a greater ease of sexual acts. Or, if one is speaking without euphemism, after some drinks, some coke and some poppers an average vers or bottom is ready to bust themselves wide open.

These are examples of behaviors that involve drug use, but are not innately tied to it, are not by their nature activities that require drug use, merely ones that drug use can be found in assemblage with. However, “Party and Play” is a far different beast to discuss. The two parts of party and play are relatively easily explained: the “party” involves use of drugs, mainly meth but also integrating others such as MDMA, GHB, and other club drugs, while the “play” is various forms of sex, whether it be relatively tame or a highly fetishized process of exchange and resignification wherein traditional sexual acts are resignified through acts of drug use. PNP literally cannot exist without drug use. Drug use is integral to it as a space, as a fetish, and while it varies the drugs used fall largely within a very narrow list specifically because of how these drugs are consumed, the effects they have, and the sexualization thereof. One not-uncommon act in more hardcore PNP groups is injecting another partner with crystal meth, an exercise in trust, control, and a kind of intimate penetration far more transgressive than any other, a phallic presence signified by the needle rather than by a phallus or phallic object inserted into an orifice. It is the creation of a new orifice, a radical reshaping of the body through the singularity of the needle’s point, and the dangerousness of this, the risks associated with it, are part of what make it a meaningful fetish. As Žižek says of fistfucking, there is a way in which the phallus is, now, inadequately phallic to serve as a proper sexual instrument, a more extreme one must be found. 

Not all PNP is this extreme, even though injected use of methamphetamine is not unheard of in gay circles. For some, shooting crystal is more or less as acceptable as any other drug-related behavior, specifically due to the influence of PNP culture and the prevalence of meth more generally in gay spaces. In fact, in many places it is predominantly tied to the gay community, as a kind of currency within it due specifically to PNP’s popularity leading to a wider popularity of the drug in relation to other club drugs. If you’re in Nevada and looking for meth, you probably don’t have to go too far. In some parts of Southern California, it is only the second most common substance because you can buy weed easier than a pack of cigarettes. There are towns in Arizona that all but throw it at you, and at one point Missouri was the meth capital of the world. Meth is one of America’s favorite drugs, but if you’re in New York, it can be hard to come by. Nearby cities like Patterson and Newark on out to Kensington in Philly are dope havens, and if you go far enough uptown or downtown in New York you’ll find the same. And don’t get anyone wrong, dope is great. But dope dick won’t exactly satisfy most. And that’s where Tina comes to town in her Swarovski crystal dress: in NYC, meth is relatively rare outside of gay clubs, gay parties, and most meth users are involved in PNP scenes or at most a step removed from them, drug users who acknowledge the kinship between the two and may rely on it in order to get their own supply, sustain their own dealings, so on. And while meth is more acceptable to inject in certain circles than heroin is to use at all, by any route of administration, that there would eventually be some crossover is hardly surprising.

The popularity of heroin among gay users is less tied to sex and largely tied to the same factors that make alcohol, cocaine, and other drugs popular: lives of depression, rejection, isolation. This is even more true for trans people, given our experience in relation to embodiment as a concept, a process, a continual test of being and becoming. As an experience, heroin and other opiates are some of the drugs most similar in effect and affect to the sadomasochistic restructuring of the body, two of the approaches toward the Body without Organs (as laid out by Deleuze and Guattari) and two means of attaining a restructuring of the body that passes through an embryonic stage rather than requiring the traumatic breaking and restructuring of the body occur in a body that will fracture as a result, the embryonic body able to sustain such change due to its lack of definition. For trans women, heroin may not make us women, but the pain of becoming one is certainly helped by it. Heroin, when mixed with alcohol, benzodiazepines, cocaine, or meth (or really anything else) provides a unique, more euphoric experience, one where anxiety melts away and euphoria comes easily. Dope itself is often not sexualized, as lazing around and listening to music is usually more appealing on it than the effort needed to have sex. Rather than a strictly sexual component, the kinship between sex work and drug use, the way in which the two are commonly found near one another, with one inviting and invoking the other such that involvement in one is often tied with involvement in another. Whether to come down from an upper (smoking heroin to come down from MDMA was and remains a common Irish raver practice) or to add an analgesic to the pain of exploitation, its involvement in gay lives is hardly surprising, even if not as emblematic of glitz and glamour as cocaine, MDMA, and even meth.

To refer back to previous mentions of MDMA, while certainly not associated strictly with gay lives, the queerness of MDMA is hard to dispute, given the artistry with which MDMA pills are often crafted and the scenes in which they are distributed. Raves and gay fashion have frequently intersected, the music that forms the basis for most raves owes its origins in one way or another to gay (and black gay communities, specifically) innovation. The faggishness of rave culture, the effete style of PLUR dress codes, and the way that this is all sublimated back into heterosexuality gives all at once an overwhelmingly “queer” vibe to certain spaces and a sort of drought of any genuine queer identity, gay affinity, trans transgression, merely an apparition of it, a simulacra of rave culture. however, MDMA still can be found at gay clubs, raves, and so on, especially given the way that the Netherlands has begun exporting phenomenal pills in bulk quantities. Madonna dominating the dance floor is an issue of Voguing being in vogue, but the roots of house music, ballroom culture, the influence of both on popular culture and musical development cannot be ignored, and that so much of it rings with the metallic taste of MDMA is also undeniable.

Gay communities have a lot of drugs, are a frequently intoxicated sort of space, one in which intoxication as a means of restructuring transgression and reclaiming certain means of relation, resignifying them, is part of the experience, of what makes a community possible. To say there is no problem with this is to make a statement too far, but to say the opposite, to say that intoxication is a moral failure, is itself a statement that goes against both purposes of community and the reason that intoxication became so involved in them in the first place.