INTRO: KIDS OF THE LAST DAYS
From my early teenage years, I had difficulty relating to other people. I did not know how to enter ordinary social life. Meeting someone, making conversation, becoming friendly and gradually establishing familiarity did not come naturally to me. Sexuality did. Somehow, I knew how to make it work. It gave me a confidence I lacked elsewhere. Through it, I could approach people in a way that otherwise seemed impossible.
In searching for sex, I became part of a network of people. We were not friends in the conventional sense, although I felt a strong connection to them. We had remarkably similar temperaments. We were loners.
Some of our encounters involved more than two people. Substances were not essential, though they often somehow appeared, albeit not in very large quantities. These things all felt natural to us, even at a young age. We did not feel that we were doing anything particularly unusual. We had a desperate need to escape ordinary life.
We were not criminals or prostitutes. We were reasonably educated, curious and ambitious, though not in the conventional sense. In a way, we looked down on the culture of social mobility and the careful and strategic accumulation of status. We did not want to spend the present preparing to become respectable later. We wanted a life that felt immediate and particular. We lived as though things were coming to an end.
None of this meant that we necessarily wanted to die. We simply saw little reason to live in the way the world expected us to. Without having the language for it, we sensed a certain cultural and spiritual emptiness around us. Our sexuality gave that atmosphere a form.
It brought together people who had difficulty connecting with others in any other way. Our sexual world became our social world. We formed a circle of outsiders who recognized something in one another.
We understood our sexuality in the same way. It was part of our identity because we felt we needed it and organized parts of our lives around it. It was not the gay identity that most homosexuals now adopt almost automatically. We would never have said, “I’m gay,” because the label did not describe how we understood ourselves. Our sexuality was one element of a larger outsider identity formed by distance from ordinary life.
We did not necessarily regard men as romantic partners. Our relationships with men were primarily sexual, though they occasionally developed into something resembling a relationship. None of us imagined marrying one. Nor were we preoccupied with equal rights or adopting children. We were not the kind of guys who went to pride festivities, although we used the night after for sexual conquest.
Group sex had always formed part of our world. Back then, it did not have a highly organized character. It was also not compulsive. What later changed was its chemistry and duration. Cocaine and alcohol gave way to GHB and methamphetamine.
Such a gathering could now continue for days. What had once been an important part of the social world for many began to deteriorate into substance-sustained group sex. The night no longer ended. Some of the people inside it could no longer find their way out.
The phenomenon demanded an explanation. Why did homosexual men need such powerful drugs in order to have sex? The answer now most readily available is homophobia. Homophobia has traditionally been the answer to every problem in the gay world. Society has taught homosexual men to feel ashamed of their desires, and they have internalized that judgment. The drugs remove the resulting shame and inhibition.
They allow these men to live the promiscuous sexual lifestyle that they desire and deserve, yet cannot enjoy while sober. Chemically sustained group sex is therefore presented not primarily as the result of drugs, an uncontrolled sexual appetite or a culture that had become increasingly extreme. It is presented as a response to centuries of oppression.
The mechanism said to connect that history to present behavior is internalized homophobia: society’s hostility has been absorbed by the homosexual man and now prevents him from living his sexuality freely.
A concept developed in the field of psychology has become a means of enforcing orthodoxy. Internalized homophobia no longer merely describes the conflict of a homosexual person who rejects his sexuality and expresses that rejection in unhealthy and dangerous ways.
Stretched beyond its original meaning, it is now used to force a uniform gay identity onto all homosexuals and give their same-sex attraction a single shared meaning.
If a person resists that, his refusal is not treated as an alternative understanding of himself. It becomes evidence that he has not fully accepted his own sexuality as an identity.
One of the people who gave this explanation its vocabulary was David Stuart. He became one of the most influential interpreters of the new and ever-growing group sex culture and helped determine how the phenomenon was discussed by charities, sexual-health services and the media.
He spoke in the language of trauma and care. That language resonated. His authority rested partly on his proximity to the world he described, although the boundary between observer and participant was never clearly drawn. Yet he helped keep the concept of internalized homophobia alive, both as a rationalization for destructive behavior and as an instrument of conformity.
INSTRUMENT OF CONFORMITY
Internalized homophobia is real. I have known men who were attracted to other men and despised themselves for it. They pursued sex and treated the other person with contempt during the encounter or afterward. They divided their lives into sealed compartments and reacted with disgust to visible homosexuality.
The classic exhibit of homosexual self-rejection is the man who goes out of his way to prove that he is not sexually drawn to other men. He attacks other homosexuals with exceptional viciousness, using violence to punish in them what he cannot tolerate in himself.
The violence is directed not only at the victim. It is also intended to establish the attacker’s distance from him: no one could possibly mistake me for one of them. His homosexuality does not soften his hatred. It gives the hatred its particular intensity.
Homosexuality itself is not difficult to define. A homosexual man only experiences same-sex attraction and is not attracted to women. He may nevertheless reject this fact about himself. He presents himself as a heterosexual man, has sex with women and is revolted by it. This is internalized homophobia in its most literal form.
The concept rests on a questionable understanding of where this conflict comes from. Homophobia is understood to exist first in society, which then pushes its hostility into the person who experiences homosexual desire. He absorbs society’s judgment and directs it against himself. In this account, he has been corrupted by the world around him.
If society became more accepting, the conflict would disappear. Eventually, he would not even need to “come out of the closet,” because there would be nothing unusual to disclose. Yet this never happens. As homosexuality becomes more ordinary, the ritual of confession does not disappear. Nor has the concept of internalized homophobia lost its force. Instead, it has expanded.
Accepting one’s sexuality does not mean that one needs to reveal it. Over time, that distinction has disappeared. Internalized homophobia has become a judgment on whether a homosexual person is sufficiently open about his sexuality in public. Ultimately, it no longer means the inner rejection of one’s sexuality. It means refusing to turn homosexuality into a collective affiliation with a shared meaning: the gay identity.
The idea of homophobia lies at the core of the identity. Without it, there would be no gay identity in its modern form. Any collective identity leans on an adversary or an enemy. For the Gays, that enemy is the homophobe. He gives the identity its history, its struggle and its reason for existing.
People have developed ever more relaxed attitudes toward homosexuality. Yet many want to hold on to the collective identity built around it. It provides belonging and preserves the feeling of being different at a time when homosexuality itself has become ordinary.
It also provides moral authority. The history of persecution allows the homosexual to appear as the injured party and therefore as entitled to recognition. It sustains the activists, charities, therapists, media figures and professional gays whose position depends on homophobia remaining a serious problem.
It also protects the behavior associated with the identity from ordinary judgment. As open hostility declined, the meaning of homophobia therefore had to shift. It no longer meant only hatred, exclusion or opposition to equal rights. It came to include discomfort, criticism, indifference, privacy and the refusal to organize one’s life around the identity.
The homophobe remained necessary even when he became harder to find. Increasingly, he was found inside the homosexual himself.
Once society’s hostility is said to have taken root within the individual, the concept becomes almost impossible to argue with. A man who refuses the gay identity cannot simply disagree with it. His refusal is interpreted as a symptom. If he prefers to remain private, he is afraid. If he dislikes Pride, he is ashamed. If he criticizes gay culture, he is projecting his self-hatred onto others.
Even his insistence that he has accepted his sexuality can be treated as evidence that he does not understand the depth of his conflict. Every objection returns him to the diagnosis.
The expansion of the concept can be seen in the instruments designed to measure it. Some psychological questionnaires do not restrict internalized homophobia to shame, self-contempt or the rejection of homosexual desire.
The Short Internalized Homonegativity Scale asks the homosexual man to respond to statements such as “I feel comfortable in gay bars,” “Social situations with gay men make me feel uncomfortable” and “I feel comfortable discussing homosexuality in a public situation.” His willingness to enter gay social settings and be publicly associated with homosexuality becomes part of the measure of his psychological acceptance of himself.
The Nungesser Homosexual Attitudes Inventory makes the connection to the gay identity even more explicit. It includes the statements “It’s important to me to be part of the gay community” and “I find it important that I read gay books or newspaper.” A man’s relationship to a particular community, and even his interest in its literature, is thereby treated as evidence of his relationship to his own sexuality.
A private understanding of that sexuality becomes psychologically incomplete. The homosexual is not merely expected to accept his desire. He is expected to identify with other homosexuals and make that identification visible.
Here one can see how scientific research and psychological discourse have helped make the distinction between sexuality and a public identity disappear.
The same confusion runs through the academic models of homosexual identity formation. They present the homosexual as moving through a series of stages. He begins in confusion or denial, gradually accepts that he is gay, seeks contact with other gay people, enters the gay community and eventually integrates the identity into his public life. Distance from that community belongs to an earlier and less developed stage. Participation in it becomes evidence of psychological progress.
This creates an obvious problem. Before researchers can study a person’s relationship to the gay community, they must decide where that community is and who represents it. They frequently find their subjects through sexual-health clinics, gay and lesbian associations, bars, community organizations and activist networks.
The people encountered in these places are then used to construct a general model of homosexual development. A particular social world becomes the gay community, and movement toward that world becomes the expected development of the homosexual person.
The selection already contains the conclusion. Homosexuals who do not attend gay venues, approach sexual-health services or join gay organizations are less likely to appear in the research. Their absence can then be interpreted through the model itself. They remain private because they have not sufficiently accepted themselves. The research does not merely describe the gay identity. It helps produce it.
One of the most influential examples is Vivienne Cass’s model of homosexual identity formation. Cass divided the process into six stages: identity confusion, identity comparison, identity tolerance, identity acceptance, identity pride and identity synthesis.
The sequence describes more than a person gradually accepting his attraction to the same sex. Development also involves adopting the homosexual label, disclosing the identity, increasing contact with other homosexuals and becoming acculturated into their social world.
Cass tested her model by recruiting people through private social functions, a homosexual-rights march, a homosexual counseling service, newspaper advertisements, personal acquaintances and counseling referrals. These sources did not represent homosexuals as a whole. They made visible those who already had some connection to an organized homosexual world or to professionals concerned with homosexuality.
The model then gave that connection a psychological meaning. Distance from homosexual social life belonged to the earlier stages. Greater disclosure, group identification and participation belonged to the later ones. The homosexual who did not move toward the community could therefore appear not merely different, private or uninterested. He appeared developmentally unfinished.
Another body of research explains the destructive features of this social world through ostracism and minority stress. Homosexuals are rejected by their families, religious communities and society. They become isolated, seek refuge among other homosexuals and turn to alcohol, drugs and promiscuous sex.
The explanation moves in one direction. Society first injures the homosexual; the homosexual then carries that injury into the gay community, where it appears as dangerous or self-destructive behavior.
There is truth in parts of this account. Rejection can produce loneliness, and loneliness can make a person vulnerable to drugs. The account becomes questionable when it is made into a complete moral explanation. Gay culture itself disappears as an independent cause. The substances, the sexual appetite and the influence homosexuals exercise over one another become secondary.
Whatever happens inside the gay world is returned to the hostility outside it. The homosexual enters the explanation innocent and emerges damaged. Society has corrupted him, and even his worst behavior can be presented as evidence of what society has done to him.
By 2000, internalized homophobia had been connected with an extraordinary range of psychological and behavioral problems. Iain Williamson reviewed its alleged relationship to psychological distress, substance abuse, sexual behavior and HIV.
He nevertheless found the research equivocal and warned that the term was often used without sufficient consideration of its sociopolitical consequences. The uncertainty did little to restrict the concept. Internalized homophobia continued to function as the point at which social hostility was converted into an explanation of individual behavior.
It is nevertheless highly questionable whether homosexuality was the cause of these problems in the first place. The fact that a person is homosexual and suffers from depression, addiction or sexual compulsion does not establish a causal relationship between the two. He may have these problems for many of the same reasons as anyone else. Even where homophobia forms part of his experience, it does not follow that it explains everything he subsequently does.
The transformation was now complete. What had begun as a description of a person rejecting his sexuality had become a judgment on his relationship to the gay identity. He was no longer required merely to accept his attraction to the same sex. He was expected to adopt the collective meaning attached to it.
His refusal could then be interpreted as evidence of an unresolved conflict within himself. More importantly, the concept placed his behavior within a moral narrative. The homosexual remained the injured party, while society supplied the cause. A self-appointed expert called David Stuart carried this expanded understanding of internalized homophobia into the emerging world of drug-induced group sex.
THE EXPERT AS PARTICIPANT
In 2022, only months after his premature death, the gay magazine Attitude posthumously honored David Stuart at its Pride Awards and celebrated him in a tribute video. The accompanying article placed his “hedonistic period firmly in the past” and described him as having become sober before becoming one of the world’s most prominent authorities on addiction in the gay community.
“I would go and stay on his sofa while parties would rage around us,” one contributor remembers, “and I always just felt safe in his company.” Stuart “had many different lives” and was said to have been “quite open about his journey.” He had run an agency for sex workers in London. After closing it, he became “the most glamorous cocaine dealer in London.”
Stuart knew the world of commercial sex from within. As he later said in an interview, he had himself worked as a prostitute at the age of eighteen. To the community of gay male prostitutes, he was “a complete legend.” He had managed not to let his personal history “obstruct him” and had gone on “to run clinics and change the world.”
The tribute also preserves Stuart’s own sense of mission: “We have to be great. We cannot be average. The community needs us to be…” The commemoration concludes by drawing a peculiar moral lesson from his life: “He’s a real example of why people shouldn’t be judged for the decisions that they make.”
By the time of his death, Stuart had become much more than a sympathetic figure helping people with addiction. He had named a new phenomenon and become its most influential interpreter. He used the term chemsex to describe sexual encounters sustained by a particular group of drugs, principally mephedrone, methamphetamine and GHB or GBL.
Chemsex is the promiscuous lifestyle perfected and taken to new extremes. For many homosexual men, that is precisely its attraction. They already seek frequent and varied sexual encounters. Drug-fueled sex parties offer both convenience and intensity: the drugs make it easier to enter that world, remain inside it and push the experience further.
The drugs can be taken repeatedly and in combination. Encounters involving several men can continue through the night and into the following day, sometimes lasting an entire weekend or even longer.
What distinguishes the phenomenon from earlier forms of drug-induced group sex is therefore not only its chemistry, but also its high degree of organization, extended duration, and compulsive character. The aspect of organization is often overlooked: it transformed what had previously been occasional and improvised encounters into a repeatable social practice with its own networks, suppliers and expectations.
The risks include overdose, unconsciousness, sexually transmitted infections, psychosis, and dependence. What begins as an attempt to intensify pleasure can become a cycle from which some participants are no longer able to escape. For many, it becomes a way of life.
Another distinguishing feature is the highly ritualized nature of these gatherings. The drugs, for instance, must be taken repeatedly at particular intervals. Participants keep track of the passing time, prepare the next dose, and remain awake long after their bodies would otherwise have brought the encounter to an end.
Yet these prolonged encounters do not necessarily involve continuous sexual activity; remarkably little sex may actually take place. Much of the time is spent talking endlessly about sex and personal preferences, almost like teenagers, while participants compulsively search dating apps for new men. As some leave, lose interest, or become incapable of continuing, replacements have to be found. The search for the next person becomes as important as the encounter itself.
The behavior is difficult to understand because its purpose is never entirely clear, often not even to the people engaged in it. Its apparent aim is sex, but the pursuit increasingly replaces the act itself. The gatherings rarely provide any lasting satisfaction.
Still, the participants return and repeat the same rituals. It is not simply about pleasure. It is a strange and compulsive form of social life whose meaning remains obscure even to many of the people inside it.
This was the behavior David Stuart set out to explain.
In 2010, while still working at a drug service in central London, Stuart went to the nearby sexual-health clinic at 56 Dean Street. In his recollection, he asked whether they were seeing more of what he called chemsex. Their response was: “What’s chemsex?” Stuart had brought them a problem of which they were not yet aware.
He returned after a bank-holiday weekend and asked the nurses to question their patients differently. Instead of asking only about illicit or injected drugs, they were to ask: “Do you use party drugs for sex sometimes?” Thirty-three men had arrived that day seeking medication after a possible exposure to HIV. According to Stuart, “every single one had come from a chemsex situation.” The clinic now understood that the phenomenon was much larger than it had assumed. “That’s how we identified this chemsex phenomenon,” he later explained.
Stuart subsequently left the drug service and went to work at 56 Dean Street “to address it there.” He had identified the problem, taught the clinic how to recognize it and then entered the institution that would become closely associated with his authority.
In another interview, Stuart located the beginning of his interest much earlier and inside his own experience. “It was about 2001 when I was doing a lot of chems myself,” he said. At the same time, “I was identifying something” that did not resemble any pattern of drug use he had previously encountered. The participant and the person defining the phenomenon were therefore the same man.
Stuart later said that he had enjoyed most of his years of drug use. “The reason I stopped doing drugs,” he explained, “is not because I identified as an addict or it became really problematic for me.” He quit after realizing that some of the people around him could not manage the life as successfully as he believed he could. “Some of the people I was playing with couldn’t. I was damaging them,” he admitted. “As resilient as I might be, others weren’t.”
His involvement extended beyond his own drug use. “I’ve given drugs to people who perhaps should never have been introduced to them,” he said. He had been “an HIV-positive infectious man having sex on drugs with lots of people” and acknowledged “the unkindness” he had done to others. He did not know what all the consequences had been.
He also brought other men into this world, inviting them to sexual gatherings involving drugs and introducing them to substances of a different order, including methamphetamine. He understood the attraction of the experience and knew how to make it accessible to others.
Stuart was describing conduct that amounted to grooming and had become embedded in this part of gay culture: experienced participants drawing other men into the scene and introducing them to increasingly powerful drugs.
Stuart was arrested and sentenced for drug dealing. Afterward, he found work in a service dealing primarily with heroin use. It was there, he said, that he acquired an understanding of “the human work required around drug use and the complexity of it.”
He was candid about his lack of formal qualifications. When the hosts of one interview addressed him as a doctor, he immediately corrected them: “I’m not a doctor, firstly.” Elsewhere, he described himself as “vastly underqualified.” Yet the mistake was understandable, since he regularly presented himself—and was presented by others—as an expert.
In many interviews, he gives the impression that he had withdrawn from sexual life altogether. Yet he did not present this withdrawal as permanent. “I don’t enjoy sex at the moment,” he said in one interview, adding that he believed he would enjoy it again “with the right person” who could help him overcome some of his issues and process “the role sex has played in my life and the damage it’s done to me and the unkindness I’ve done to others.”
He never renounced the sexual world he once inhabited; instead, he claimed that the trauma associated with it had made him temporarily unable to enjoy sex.
In later videos on YouTube, he appeared to me to be under the influence of methamphetamine. His claim to have stopped and Attitude’s presentation of his involvement in the drug culture as firmly in the past did not correspond to what I saw or to the impression Stuart himself gave.
From what I witnessed over many years, exaggeration, distortion and embellishment were common in the part of the gay world I knew. There was a persistent disdain for the truth: when it proved inconvenient, it was twisted rather than left unspoken. Even admiration was manufactured, with flattery and praise bestowed where none was deserved.
Stuart’s account of HIV is another illustration of this. HIV was essential to his effort to distinguish chemsex from ordinary addiction. Yet he was untruthful about the ways in which it was contracted within that world. Many men knowingly ran the risk; some even appeared willing to acquire the infection.
Stuart instead presented HIV principally through stigma, shame and historical trauma. That helped allow chemsex to become a specifically homosexual health problem requiring its own explanation and form of treatment.
The practical consequence was institutional. Support was moved away from conventional addiction services and into sexual-health clinics and charities run by the Gays. Chemsex would no longer be treated primarily as addiction. It would be interpreted by professionals and organizations already committed to a particular understanding of gay sexual life.
Behind Stuart’s language of care was a claim to control: the Gays wanted influence over both the treatment and the addicts themselves. People like Stuart, and the gay world that celebrated them, had much to conceal. Above all, the behavior had to be shielded from ordinary judgment. Homophobia provided that protection.
THE RIGHT TO PROMISCUITY
The sexual behavior demanded more than treatment. It demanded an explanation that could account for its excesses without condemning those involved. The familiar language of addiction was insufficient: it could describe dependence, compulsion, and harm, but it could not give the behavior a larger social meaning. The new explanation served not only to absolve its participants but, more importantly, to sanitize the practice itself.
David Stuart supplied that framework. He did not deny the overdoses, infections, psychosis, or damage done to others. He placed them within a different account of what homosexual men wanted and needed, what prevented them from obtaining it, and why drugs had become necessary. His interpretation reinforced existing assumptions about sobriety, inhibition and promiscuity within the gay world.
In order to preserve the sexual ideal behind the behavior, judgment had to be redirected. It fell not on the way of life itself, but on those who could not keep up with it.
In countless videos and interviews available on YouTube, one can witness how Stuart understood the phenomenon. Internalized homophobia is his master explanation, and it works on more than one level. In his account, a homosexual man may accept that he feels attracted to other men and still remain uncomfortable with what happens between them.
“It’s strange how, when the world hates the sex you’re having, how you can internalize that,” he said, “and it can ruin your experience of gay sex.” For Stuart, the difficulty was not confined to concealing one’s sexuality or rejecting the gay identity. It remained present during the sexual act itself.
Stuart gave this shame several sources. He spoke of religion, the hostility of heteronormative society and “the role of HIV and AIDS in the last thirty years in our lives.” Homosexual men had grown up surrounded by “so many straight people thinking gay sex is disgusting” and had internalized that disgust.
Stuart claimed a personal proximity to the AIDS crisis. He remembered the newspaper headlines of the 1980s about “promiscuous disgusting gay men having filthy sex spreading disease.” He supported that claim by saying that he had been diagnosed with HIV “decades ago, before the medicines were invented” and by invoking “AIDS victim, deathbed stuff,” although he did not make clear whether he was describing his own experience or somebody else’s.
The experience, he recalled, had continued for years and had been “very traumatizing.” In telling his story this way, Stuart presented his sexuality and later drug use as having been shaped directly by the epidemic. The chronology, however, is less straightforward than this account suggests: the substances associated with chemsex became widespread much later.
Stuart explained the delay by linking several developments. The trauma of AIDS had remained embedded in gay culture; then “technology came along.” Dating websites and hookup apps changed how homosexual men found one another, while methamphetamine, mephedrone, and GHB became readily available. Gay men had emerged from “thirty-plus years of an AIDS epidemic and HIV defining a lot of the sex we have.” The new drugs entered a sexual world that, in his account, had already been severely damaged.
Stuart made the connection directly: “If that population struggling to enjoy gay sex was suddenly exposed to drugs that served that purpose,” he said, “well, they would take them up in very large numbers. And they have. And it’s called chemsex.” The drugs allow the homosexual man to overcome the inhibition that society has placed inside him.
I witnessed this process over many years. GHB and methamphetamine did not simply become available to homosexual men from outside. They introduced one another to the drugs and helped spread their use through sexual networks.
When I first encountered methamphetamine, it was extremely expensive and confined to a much narrower world. I associated it mainly with men involved in fisting and with people connected to serious criminal circles. Over time, it passed into a much wider group of users.
The David Stuarts of this world want us to believe that the “chems” magically fell out of the sky and found a traumatized population waiting to use them. Over the years, I saw gay men play an important role in circulating these drugs, first among themselves and later beyond their own world.
The podcast Voices in the Dark provided the only interview I could find in which Stuart’s explanation was seriously challenged. One of its hosts questioned whether the history of trauma could explain his own experience. Born in 1985, he acknowledged that the AIDS crisis continued to have “cultural resonances” for him. “But it wasn’t my history, not my personal experience,” he said.
The interviewer suggested that what participants might bring into drug-induced group sex was something more ordinary: “not having great self-worth, not feeling very sexy” and wanting to be more disinhibited. “I don’t know how much I really have internalized homophobia,” he continued. It might instead be “a more generic self-worth concern and fear of rejection.” The phenomenon of chemsex, he concluded, was “not solely about gayness.”
Stuart evaded the charge that he reduced gay men to their identity and viewed everything through the lens of homophobia. “Nothing is black and white and exact,” he said, suggesting that even a younger man’s fear of encountering an HIV-positive person on Grindr might mean that “maybe you have inherited some trauma.”
He acknowledged that there were “as many reasons for using drugs as there are fingerprints on the planet,” but said that he narrowed them down “for the sake of academia.” The explanation expanded whenever it was challenged.
Stuart was remarkably blunt about what the drugs provided. “A lot of us use drugs and it’s just a great disinhibition that feels good,” he said. He described wanting to “put my legs in the air” during sex, but finding the perceived feminine role “really, really hard.” “I actually needed drugs to actually enjoy it,” he admitted.
He later spoke of homosexual men struggling to achieve “the disinhibition that we deserve to feel when we’re having sex.” The drugs did more than increase pleasure. “I feel sexy and I’m in this sex environment and I feel entitled to be here,” he said. “That’s what chems give us, more than great sex.”
Stuart understood the resistance to criticizing the chemsex practice as a legacy of gay activism. He expressed its defensive logic in explicitly political terms: “We fought for this gay sexual liberation. Don’t say there’s anything wrong with it. Don’t you dare.” The freedom to have promiscuous sex had become something that must be defended, even when the way that freedom was being exercised had become destructive.
In some interviews, Stuart implied personal closeness to the activists who defended gay sexual freedom during and after the AIDS crisis. Yet in another he admitted: “Not so much me because I was just getting high at the time.”
Stuart did not consider the practice itself inherently destructive. “A lot of people are using chems in safe and brilliant ways and in caring ways,” he said, while others were using them in “acting-out ways” and “self-harming ways.” He made the same distinction when describing his own experience: “Some of the people I was playing with couldn’t. As resilient as I might be, others weren’t.”
The failure belongs not to the sexual ideal, but to those who cannot sustain it. The combination of excessive drug use and a promiscuous lifestyle is no longer incidental; it is presented as a central expression of gay identity and liberation.
Within this reasoning, those who cannot keep up can be treated as internally homophobic: they have failed to embrace the identity fully, including its ideal of sexual freedom and the place of drugs within it.
Behind the therapeutic language of the David Stuarts of this world lies the logic of the bully. Internalized homophobia allows them to explain every outcome: why a man enters the practice, why he collapses inside it, and why he refuses or disapproves of it.
The concept does not merely interpret his behavior; it stigmatizes as deficient anyone who cannot live by, or will not approve of, the sanctioned gay identity and its promiscuous ideal. It becomes a tool of ostracism, allowing them to dismiss dissenters as ashamed, damaged, or self-hating.
THE CHICKEN GAME
Drug-sustained group sex is a social phenomenon created and sustained within the gay world itself. Homosexual men introduce one another to drugs and parties, normalize increasingly extreme behavior, and establish the standards by which participation is judged. To understand the practice, one must look not at what society is said to have done to homosexual men, but at what homosexual men do to one another.
The organized gay community has been remarkably successful at marketing and public relations. It has carefully crafted an image around slogans such as “love is love,” presenting gay life as a matter of affection, empathy and sexual freedom. Gay men have acquired a good reputation. The ever-growing attendance at Pride festivals is a testament to the success of that image.
Yet the gay world is first and foremost a manosphere. Like other male subcultures, it is populated by men who often resemble caricatures of masculinity, and parts of it remain deeply connected to worlds organized around drugs, prostitution and human trafficking. People who inhabit those worlds continue to inform and influence gay culture. The chemsex phenomenon has to be understood within this context.
The ways homosexual men recruit, influence and judge one another provide the basis for an understanding very different from David Stuart’s misleading defense of the gay sexual ideal.
In recent years, a number of academic papers have presented a more honest assessment of what drives these gatherings. Rather than returning everything to homophobia, shame, and rejection by society, they examine the social pressures, norms, and hierarchies created within the gay world itself.
In 2016, Alysha-Karima Ahmed and her colleagues published the study Social Norms Related to Combining Drugs and Sex (“Chemsex”) among Gay Men in South London. It was based on interviews with thirty participants and two focus groups.
Most of the men believed that the practice had become inescapable. Some estimated that eighty or ninety percent of gay men in London regularly used drugs. The available survey evidence did not support anything approaching those numbers.
Their exaggeration was nevertheless important. A person’s immediate surroundings determine what appears normal to him. Men who found their partners through the same apps and moved through the same sexual networks repeatedly encountered others who used the same substances.
The practice appeared to be everywhere because they were living inside the part of the gay world in which it was concentrated. What was fashionable began to appear unavoidable.
The world they described was concentrated, but it was not imaginary. In the 2014 Chemsex Study, Adam Bourne and his colleagues reported that crystal methamphetamine use had risen. They also found a strong association between its use and private sex parties.
The figures do not establish that the number of parties had itself increased. They do, however, show how closely the spread of methamphetamine and these gatherings were connected.
The rise was not uninterrupted. In Changes in Chemsex and Sexual Behaviour over Time, among a Cohort of MSM in London and Brighton: Findings from the AURAH2 Study, Janey Sewell and her colleagues found declining chemsex participation between 2015 and 2018. Methamphetamine use also declined, although not significantly. The practice therefore spread rapidly during particular periods rather than increasing steadily everywhere.
Men did not necessarily enter this world by themselves. Research repeatedly describes drugs being offered by sexual partners, friends and more experienced participants. Sometimes their use had not even been discussed before the encounter.
The boundary between invitation, initiation, peer pressure and grooming is a large gray area. Research describes a progression from voluntary initiation to peer pressure and coercion. Some cases may resemble grooming, particularly when a more experienced participant supplies the drugs, establishes the conditions of participation, withholds information or gradually draws another man into behavior he had previously refused.
The attraction cannot be reduced to pressure alone. In Motivations and Values Associated with Combining Sex and Illicit Drugs (“Chemsex”) among Gay Men in South London: Findings from a Qualitative Study, Peter Weatherburn and his colleagues found that men pursued greater libido, confidence, disinhibition and stamina, but also pleasure, intimacy and sexual adventure. These attractions help explain why a man may enter willingly. The practice offers qualities he already values and wants intensified.
Once inside, the pressure takes another form. Participation brings access to men, parties and social networks, but most importantly confers status. The person willing to take more drugs, remain awake longer and accept more extreme encounters appears experienced, fearless and sexually accomplished. The people around him provide both the example and the pressure to follow it.
The same pressure applied to sex without condoms. “If you want to be involved in that scene, then that is the way you feel you have to go,” one participant explained. Each man may have a boundary he does not intend to cross, but he is surrounded by others who have already crossed it. What begins as peer pressure gradually becomes a test of belonging.
The 2014 Chemsex Study describes this hierarchy clearly. The man who avoids methamphetamine can compare himself favorably with the man who uses it. The man who smokes it can distinguish himself from the man who injects it. The man who injects can still reassure himself that, unlike somebody else, he does not share needles. There is always someone further down.
The practice resembles a game of chicken, especially where the use of methamphetamine is concerned. No one wants to be the first to withdraw. The person who hesitates risks appearing inhibited or incapable of keeping up. In the end, the person who admits that he can no longer continue has not exposed the absurdity of the game. He has merely lost it.
The point is not simply to take the drug, but to show that one can take it without losing control. The man who stops first cannot keep up; the man who goes too far becomes the cautionary example against which the others reassure themselves. The contest therefore pushes the boundary forward while allowing almost every participant to deny that he is the one in danger.
A more recent study describes the same structure as a “sliding, dynamic hierarchy” running from “flourishing” to “flailing.” Participants establish themselves as responsible chemsex users by placing others further down. Harm therefore does not discredit the practice; it discredits the man who can no longer sustain it.
In this way, the group creates the pressure and denies responsibility for its consequences. It rewards the willingness to go further, then treats the man who breaks down as someone who failed to control himself. What began as a social test of belonging is rewritten as an individual failure.
Methamphetamine does not merely remove sexual inhibitions. It can remove other restraints as well. I saw people turn ugly under its influence. Sometimes the change was immediate. In other cases, it happened gradually as repeated use made cruelty, manipulation and the exercise of power appear increasingly normal.
Some people were visibly overcome by the drugs. Others appeared able to handle them because the damage showed itself mainly in the way they treated those around them.
Their cruelty was not evidence that they had mastered the drugs. They were no more in control than the men who visibly fell apart. They had merely directed the damage outward. By making other people carry its consequences, they could continue to present themselves as resilient.
The resemblance to Stuart’s own account is striking. He described himself as “resilient.” Some of the people around him, he said, couldn’t manage the same life. By his own account, he introduced men to drugs, supplied them and damaged them, yet his survival became evidence of a strength that they lacked. The apparent winner of the game was then permitted to explain what had happened to its losers.
The research suggests an explanation very different from David Stuart’s, and it accords with my own observations. The homosexual man may use substances, not because heterosexual society has prevented him from accepting gay sex, but because the gay world around him has made extreme behavior a condition of belonging and a source of status. His reluctance does not necessarily come from homophobia. It may simply reflect his recognition of the danger.
The pressure comes from within. A man is expected to prove that he is adventurous, uninhibited and capable of keeping up. The drugs allow him to perform those qualities until the performance becomes impossible to maintain. When he finally loses control, the people still playing can look at him and congratulate themselves. They have not yet reached his point. They are still “flourishing.”
The game of chicken, however, is not a complete explanation. It explains how homosexual men push one another further, but not why the practice holds such attraction or why they remain inside it.
One answer is that the gatherings offer a social life. In The Rise of Chemsex: Queering Collective Intimacy in Neoliberal London, Jamie Hakim interprets chemsex as a search for collective intimacy in a culture increasingly organized around competitive individualism. Drawing on interviews with fifteen homosexual and bisexual men, he argues that the gatherings provide an intense form of togetherness within an increasingly atomized culture.
To understand that, one must ask what this world provides and what may be missing from the lives of the men drawn to it.
THE EMPTY LIFE
The intense form of togetherness Hakim describes was already familiar to me long before things got out of hand. In the beginning, I always attended these gatherings with one of two friends I knew and trusted. Nothing bad ever happened with either of them by my side.
The encounters were respectful and never felt crazy or out of control. I did not regard what we were doing as anything out of the ordinary. It felt natural to me. At the time, it was one of my preferred ways of having sex.
In those early years, the gatherings did not depend so much on GHB or methamphetamine. Some substances appeared, but they were not essential. The encounters ended within a reasonable time; people went home and ordinary life resumed.
Over time, I gradually entered another circle. The gatherings looked superficially similar, but their character was different. The substances became more important, the encounters lasted longer and the boundaries were less clear. I had not abandoned one way of life and consciously chosen another. I had moved into a more extreme version of something that was already familiar to me.
Before that, I had preferred going to bathhouses for sex. I never used substances there. Over time, however, the bathhouses became less crowded, and all eventually closed. The sexual world I had known was disappearing. Eventually, these group gatherings seemed to be the only option left.
Much later, I began attending these gatherings without a friend at my side. That was when they started to become dangerous. Before then, I had been protected without fully realizing it. The presence of someone I knew and trusted had placed a limit around the encounter. Without that protection, I was more exposed to the people already there and to the conditions they established.
Although many of my friends and I did not identify as gay, we had ended up in the same extreme settings. We moved through a gay world to which we did not really belong. There were plenty of malicious people in it. Some bullied and harassed me or tried to set me up for trouble. Without a trusted person beside me, I was much less able to recognize what was happening or protect myself from it.
That vulnerability helps explain how these encounters became unsafe, but not what continued to draw me to them. By then, I had become much better at approaching people, establishing familiarity and participating in ordinary social life. Yet I still sought out those gatherings.
Still, establishing ordinary friendships with people outside the gay world brought another difficulty. I often felt that I was losing myself in them and allowing other people to exercise too much influence over me. Closeness felt like a loss of control.
Even when I regularly spent time in the company of many people, I could experience an intense loneliness and despair. Being surrounded by others did not necessarily make me feel connected to them.
Through other personal problems, I eventually lost contact with all the friends I had previously made. I became isolated and was left dependent on the people in my immediate surroundings who were deeply unsympathetic to me.
After that, I did not seek out these gatherings. In moments of despair, however, I would return to them, even though doing so had already got me into a great deal of trouble.
One of the last gatherings I attended was organized by a man I genuinely liked. He was squatting in an elementary-school building from the 1980s. For two days, we stood around in our underwear while new people came and went. Substances were constantly being taken, but nothing happened sexually. In fact, almost nothing happened at all. The host was usually somewhere in another room. As so often with him, the building began to flood while he was taking a shower.
On Monday morning, we stood outside half-naked and smoked cigarettes while people brought their children to school. I remember how surreal that felt. I should have been able to look at the scene more clearly and think: this is insanity. It was the last of his parties I attended. I never returned to any such party.
Many years later, I came across a man my age. He told me that he had attended such gatherings alone all his life and said that he must have had an angel on his shoulder. He was well aware of the dangers.
The problem was not simply that I lacked company. I had not been able to build a life with enough meaning to sustain me. The friends who had once protected me were no longer there. Nothing had taken their place. I had no stable social world capable of recognizing when I was in danger or helping me keep my distance from that world.
The problem was not mine alone. Many of the men I encountered were educated and came from well-to-do backgrounds. They had homes, work, money and the freedom to organize their lives as they pleased. They were not necessarily isolated in any visible sense. Some knew a great many people. Yet their lives could still lack durable attachments, obligations and a convincing reason to return home.
The parties supplied something that was missing elsewhere. They brought people together, gave them an event around which to organize themselves and created an immediate sense of purpose. Nobody had to ask why he was there. The sex provided the reason; the drugs prolonged it. What could not be built gradually in ordinary life appeared all at once inside the gathering.
Yet togetherness is not the same as attachment, and intensity is not the same as meaning. The gathering could make loneliness disappear for a night or several days without changing the life to which a person eventually had to return. It offered a temporary social world, but it did not necessarily provide the relationships capable of protecting him once the gathering ended.
We felt alienated, but not because we were homosexual. Our homosexuality gave the alienation a form, a language and a social world in which it could be lived out. It allowed people who had difficulty finding a place in ordinary life to recognize one another and make something pleasurable out of their distance from it.
Is that not precisely what being gay is supposed to mean? Our alienation could be reinterpreted as the effect of growing up homosexual in a heterosexual world. If we rejected that explanation, the rejection itself could be taken as evidence that we had internalized society’s judgment.
The gay identity offers a ready solution. It tells the homosexual that his estrangement is not merely personal and does not arise from a wider difficulty finding meaning in life. It is the shared experience of an oppressed group. The identity gives that experience a history, an enemy and a community in which it can be lived out.
That explanation can be comforting because it turns something shapeless into a recognizable story. Loneliness becomes exclusion; estrangement becomes oppression; the inability to build a life becomes the consequence of having been denied the freedom to live openly. The person is no longer simply lost. He has been injured, and the identity tells him who injured him.
For me and my friends, homosexuality belonged to a larger outsider identity. It did not explain the whole of our alienation or give us a singular experience shared with every other homosexual man. We felt different for reasons that we could not have explained at the time.
Our homosexuality sometimes seemed almost like a reward for that difference. It gave us access to a social and sexual world that felt immediate, unusual and suited to our nature. We did not identify as gay or fully embrace the sexual mores of the gay world as an ideal.
Many of us nevertheless ended up doing these extreme things. The absence of shame and inner rejection did not protect us.
Our homosexuality had been inextricably linked to promiscuity from the beginning. Most of our sexual encounters with one another took place in group settings; we rarely had sex as a pair.
Group sex was therefore not a later practice that could easily be separated from the rest of our sexual lives. That helps explain why we could not simply let go of it, even after it had become harmful.
It represented more than a way of having sex. It was bound up with how we connected with people, escaped ordinary life and experienced ourselves as different. Giving it up meant losing one of the few worlds that had felt naturally available to us.
Companionship was only part of the attraction. Many people who become hooked on methamphetamine develop a fatalistic attitude toward life. The attitude is simple: Today I am alive. Tomorrow I may be dead.
They know what they have got themselves into: not only the power of the drug, but also the danger of the world surrounding them. That danger is not merely a price they accept. It becomes part of the attraction.
Playing with fire becomes a way of escaping emptiness. They may not want to die, but they begin to live as though the future no longer makes a claim on them.
Living promiscuously is not easy. It can remain pleasurable only with people one can trust and in places that feel safe. If a man needs GHB or methamphetamine to enjoy it, the drugs have not liberated his sexuality. They allow him to continue a way of life that no longer works for him sober. At that point, they are no longer serving pleasure. They are preserving the identity built around it.
For many people, the lifestyle eventually stops being fun. By then, it has become the defining part of what being gay means to them. The sexual ideal offers no natural ending. A man is expected to remain sexually available, adventurous and uninhibited for the rest of his life.
Leaving it behind can therefore feel like a retreat into shame or an admission that he has grown old. Many continue long after they have outgrown it and get into serious trouble. What first appeared as liberation becomes a corset and finally a prison.
In this limited sense, professional gays such as David Stuart are right. The identity they defend is a very particular one: it places sex and substances at the center of life. It does not fit every homosexual man, although many adopt it willingly and others accept it because no alternative is treated as legitimate. The man who cannot live that way, or no longer wishes to, finds that he can no longer identify as gay—or perhaps that he never truly did.
The David Stuarts of this world do not merely claim to speak for the entire collective. They are placed in positions of authority and are taken seriously as interpreters of homosexual life.
Their particular sexual ideal thereby acquires institutional authority and becomes what every homosexual is expected to accept. Yet rejecting that way of life is not rejecting homosexuality. A man may accept his sexuality without giving his allegiance to that culture or adopting it as his identity.
Internalized homophobia closes off that distinction by turning his refusal into evidence of a defect within him. It is one of the principal means by which the gay identity is enforced.