As the tourniquet came off and the meth rushed through my body, a small part of my brain remained sane. “You’re about to do something really stupid,” I remember thinking. “Don’t have unprotected sex with this stranger.”
It was good advice, but far too late. Already, the meth had removed every inhibition and taken complete control over my decision-making. In an instant, I was flooded with an urgent need, an insatiable hunger for sex. And not just sex, but animal copulation. I could take anything, I would do anything, I could go forever; I wanted nothing more than endless, unstoppable intercourse for the rest of my earthly life. Damn the risk.
This was my first real introduction to the darkness of chemsex, though I had dabbled before. It’s hard not to encounter the drugs if you’re pursuing anonymous, impersonal sex through Grindr. I enjoyed the feeling they gave me, of course, but there was a deeper, more psychological appeal.
I’ve never been able to do loving, mutual, affectionate sex; for me, sex is about being used. I had my first sexual experience when I was very young, far too young: groomed and abused by the headmaster at my prep school. This experience almost certainly shaped my adult sexuality. I’ve always wanted to be abused by men, ideally older men. The only problem was my lack of attraction to them.
What I liked about chems was how they made sex so much easier. A drop of G or a puff of T meant it didn’t matter how ugly the guy was, how seedy the situation: it made me horny, made me enjoy the dehumanising sex I craved.
I soon found that if I went looking for chems, I’d be sure to find the degradation I desired — and much more. Group sex, anything-goes sex, sex with completely disinhibited, shameless men bent on acting out their sickest fantasies. A particular low point involved a guy who wanted to pretend he was a teacher and I, his underage pupil. I’ve heard and seen some pretty weird, really abhorrent stuff in these sessions, but this was a cut above. Even though I was blitzed on crystal meth, I still found the suggestion utterly repellent. But I didn’t want to disappoint. “Fuck it,” I thought, “just go with the flow”… and promptly re-enacted my childhood rape for his pleasure.
At least I can say my addiction never plumbed such depths again. But in every anonymous encounter, at every “party”, I saw something just as bad: a tragic atmosphere of loneliness and emptiness. The sex, needless to say, is completely transactional; it’s just people taking it in turns to use each other’s body. In hours- or days-long orgies, people come and they go. Sometimes, they don’t even bother introducing themselves. It’s in, onto the conveyor belt until they’ve had enough, and out. Between bouts of passionless thrusting, we would lie on the bed smoking cigarettes and scrolling through Grindr looking for the next fix, sexual and chemical.
Oh, and the porn. Always the porn. With people so drugged up and shagged out, they need visual stimulation to keep them aroused. That and Viagra. Typically, some dead-eyed stranger would be fucking me, but he’d be looking at the bedroom TV screen, watching two other strangers fuck in HD.
But what did I expect? An emotional connection? Affection, intimacy? I knew what I was getting into. I wanted orgasmic oblivion, with a side order of objectification. I got exactly what I was looking for. Except, perhaps, for one thing.
In my teens and early twenties, I used self-injury as a coping mechanism. Around that time, I remember reading an article about “bugchasers” — people who purposely try to get infected with HIV. I remember being baffled by it at the time. Now I think I understand. Throughout my chemsex Odyssey, I didn’t have a conscious desire to become HIV+ but there was a strong element of fatalism to my behaviour. After all, you don’t do chemsex if you’ve got a lot to live for…or at least, you don’t have a lot to live for once you get into chemsex. In a weird way, putting myself at such enormous risk felt like a form of control over my destiny.
I wasn’t the only person chasing infection: one guy had a special toothbrush he inserted into himself to scratch his insides, to make himself bleed and help any virus get into his system. Chemsex is full of horrifically comic moments like these.
In the end, I was lucky: I only picked up a couple of doses of low-level VD. I also caught the crabs a few times, often enough that I usually had some Permethrin lying in the bathroom cabinet from the time before. I was responsible enough to get tested often. But I found I could wait for the tests with a surprising degree of equanimity; indeed, my worst fear was that a positive result would restrict my future pool of chemsex partners. Somehow, to my mild surprise, the HIV tests kept coming back negative. What a contrast to the first time I got fucked without a condom! I remember living in a state of pure terror for the eight weeks it took for the incubation period to pass and the test results to arrive.
Throughout my seedy ‘adventures’ there was only one drug I never took, and it is (in my opinion) the worst one of all: PrEP. I know this is going to make a lot of gay men angry, but to my mind PrEP is what makes this all possible. PrEP supports the myth that anonymous, multi-partnered, drug-fuelled, bareback sex is consequence-free. But that’s a lie. Every time you do chemsex you run the gauntlet of ‘old school’ STIs. Everyone knows antibiotics are becoming less and less effective against new strains of gonorrhea, syphilis, and chlamydia. Almost everyone in the chemsex scene is on PrEP, but no one seems to care about other infections — which is odd, given that HIV is now a fully manageable condition, while super-strength STIs are increasingly resistant to treatment.
Infection isn’t the only risk. I won’t get into the health problems of taking Class A drugs; these should be obvious. I’ll only remark that immediately after the guy gave me my first-ever shot of meth, he left me alone while he busied himself in the bathroom for 15 minutes. It took him that long to find a vein.
I’m much more interested in the spiritual death that chemsex represents. Chemsex is not the opposite of making love; it is the murder of love. It treats people as meat puppets, fleshy sleeves into which we masturbate. It teaches that we are disposable, that our value is nothing more than how we look, how long we last, and how much tina we bring to the encounter.
How did I get out? Simple: by finding love. I met someone I love with all my heart and with whom — for the first time in my life — I can make love with, as an equal. It’s really as simple as that. Now that I have something to live for, the thought of going back to chemsex fills me with horror.
I’ll always be an addict, though. There will always be the muscle memory: of the most mind-blowing physical pleasure; of delicious, delirious, intoxicating risk; of utter abandonment and the fulfilment of my darkest desires. But if you ever see me on the chemsex scene again, it’s because I’ve made a conscious decision to kill myself: first in spirit, and then — eventually, who cares when — to extinguish life itself.