(My latest novel is about several predominantly straight characters who for different reasons have all grown up believing they're not good enough and have gone on to try to punish themselves with either drink, drugs, dangerous sex or abusive relationships.) But I'm particularly interested in the shared experiences that can drive gay men to self-destruct through practices such as chemsex. Of course, there can be all kinds of reasons why people, both gay and straight, try to destroy themselves – and this is something I like to explore in my fiction. Yet while the behaviour the film documents may seem repulsive to many, I found myself moved to tears by the men interviewed and the experiences that had driven them to chemsex. The film's portrayal of the chemsex phenomenon will no doubt shock straight viewers who've been seduced by the vision of a newly emancipated community of proud and happy gay men that many of us have been so willing to project. After it, he adds, sober sex is just dull: “If I have to spend the rest of my life sober,” he says in the film, “you might as well take me to the euthanasia clinic.” One interviewee says that having sex on G is “like a firework display going off in your soul”.
While upsetting to watch, the film does manage to explain the appeal of chemsex. Exploring the UK chemsex scene, with unrestricted access to several parties, it offers interviews with current and former participants. Scenes such as this are documented in the film Chemsex, which premiered at the London Film Festival this weekend (it will get a wider release in December). By the time I left, at 4am, I felt very sad but also slightly hopeless. Except that what I saw wasn't remotely sexy as the men became more and more high, some of them began thrashing around, twitching and gurning, unable to maintain an erection without taking Viagra, and appeared to be possessed and desperate. They stressed that it wasn't a chemsex party but a “chill-out”, so the objective of the event was to take drugs, with sex an expected by-product rather than its primary focus. They all sat around the living room in their underwear, chatting and listening to music, breaking away to take drugs in the kitchen when alarms on their phones reminded them to top up their dose of G – and occasionally retiring to the bedrooms to have sex.
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My friends took me to a party hosted by a professional fiftysomething at his flat in north London and attended by around 20 guests. The following weekend I decided to witness chemsex culture for myself. Nevertheless, I started to become seriously worried when one of them told me that at a recent party he had misjudged his dose of G, “gone under” and had come round three hours later to discover someone was having unprotected sex with him. When I expressed my concerns, they insisted they were just having fun and I was accused of morally judging them. A while ago I noticed that after attending parties they were often too exhausted to go to work on Monday and spent most of the following week plagued by depression, anxiety and paranoia. They're in their late twenties and early thirties and both have successful media careers. I've never been attracted to chemsex, but a couple of my friends are. Although most deaths related to G are recorded as heart failure or some other form of bodily malfunction, over the past five years a handful of deaths have been attributed to G, such as those of three men in London's Pleasuredrome sauna in 2012. In rehab, we had to deconstruct our sexual identities and even wrote down drug-free sexual fantasies as an exercise for recovery.Perhaps more worryingly, men who misjudge their dose of G or mix it with alcohol run the risk of going into a coma or even dying. Indeed, when I finally made it to the Van Ness Recovery House in Hollywood, I found many other LGBTQ addicts just like me, addicted not just to meth and other party drugs, such as GHB, but also to the sexual behavior attached to it. "These are the experiences I have referred to as 'the perfect storm' for gay men," he said.
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Sloane said chemsex decreases sexual inhibitions, making gay men feel sexually empowered and sexually free - in some cases for the first time in their lives.
"I've often had clients tell me that when they experienced sex on meth, GHB or both for the first time that all the negative voices in their heads about shame, not being good enough, not fitting in and other traumas disappeared, albeit temporarily." "Every gay man that I've worked with in therapy that has used meth, GHB or both has reported that they were first introduced to using in the context of sex," Craig Sloane, a New York City-based psychotherapist who has treated gay men in his practice for 18 years, told me last year.