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What are gay sex drugs? Are they dangerous?

Posted on by Vaseline

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You recognize it when you smell it. “Nail polish remover with a touch of permanent marker.” “Photochemicals.” “It’s hard to describe the smell, but I know I hate it.”

These Reddit users — from the “Ask Gay Men” subreddit — are talking about poppers, alkyl nitrite inhalants that many gay men snort from small bottles to feel euphoric on the dance floor and/or loosen up for anal sex. They may “hate” the smell, but that doesn’t stop them either.

“It’s just a momentary high, like it lasts a minute or two every time you sniff it,” says Adam Zmith, author of “Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures.”

Poppers as a gay sex drug dates back to the 1960s in the US. People joke that you can smell the poppers “through the screen” when you watch images on social media of gay men gyrating. For example, Troye Sivan’s song ‘Rush’ shares a name with a poppers brand.

But that euphoric, sexual feeling – which comes from sniffing chemical compounds called nitrites – isn’t always so euphoric or sexual. It can be unsafe if overused (although many users don’t realize that or don’t care about it – or both).

The FDA has warned against the use of poppers after an increase in reported deaths and hospitalizations after people inhaled or even (more dangerously) ingested them. Use can lead to severe headaches, a rise in body temperature, difficulty breathing, extreme drops in blood pressure and even brain death, according to the FDA. Reported exposure to alkyl nitrite more than doubled annually in the US between 2013 and 2022 (from 138 to 365), and the number of people requiring medical attention increased from 59 to 185. The use of poppers has increased in nightclubs in recent years and at festivals. It more than doubled between 2018 and early 2024.

Still, researchers say there’s a clear line as to why gay men are still sniffing poppers today — just as there’s reason for everyone to heed warnings about possible dangers.

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The history of poppers

Amyl nitrite was first synthesized more than 150 years ago. A French chemist sniffed the chemical and it made him blush, Zmith said. A few other chemists played with it and tested it over the next few decades, finding that it helps blood flow more easily through the body. Thomas Lauder Brunton, a doctor in Scotland, discovered that it could help patients with angina, or chest pain, and doctors in the US and Britain embraced it as a treatment.

How did it make its way into the gay community? “It’s hard to find traces in history often,” says Zmith, although sometime in the 1960s pharmacies and regulators in both Britain and the US noticed that healthy young men who did not suffer from angina kept asking for it. A drug that made it more comfortable to have anal sex would not remain hidden for long.

Michael Bronski, a Harvard University professor and author of “A Queer History of the United States for Young People,” discovered poppers from a sexual partner but doesn’t remember people talking about them much in bars. The small glass ampoules – which really ‘popped’ when opened – were ideal for quick connections. “There was no pop culture,” he says. “You could only get them by prescription, so you trusted that people who were doctors could write a prescription knowing they wouldn’t be used for a heart condition.”

However, it wasn’t that hard to figure out that people were recreationally snorting; restrictions followed.

“I don’t really know if homophobia played a role in that, or if sexphobia played a role in that, knowing that it was used for sex and that it was gay sex, but pharmacies and regulators certainly don’t want people to use drugs.” for things they were not made for,” says Zmith. Restrictions or not, it was too late. Gay men knew what they wanted, just like the manufacturers, who started making and selling it as a product outside the pharmacy and delivering it with muscular, macho, homoerotic images marketed to gay men.

“It seems to me that the marketing of poppers is really tied to the rise of male homosexuality as a visible cultural trend, but also as a marketable trend,” says Bronski.

Disco fever took over, as did the poppers; at the end of the evening at Studio 54 in New York, poppers bottles littered the floor. It was as common as cocaine.

But despite concerns about poppers, the AIDS crisis and the War on Drugs in the US, they were eventually banned for commercial purposes in the early 1990s. Although companies began to get around the ban by modifying chemical compounds, BuzzFeed News reported. It was sold as a tape cleaner, VHS cleaner, leather cleaner.

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Poppers in gay culture today

Now that the bright colors are reminiscent of disco, consumers buy it as a nail polish remover online or in sex shops. They retain a mythical quality from the past – of bathhouses, of long evenings of dancing, of new lovers. Of strange history.

Gay men are the most common users, followed by bisexual men, according to Joseph Palamar, an associate professor in the department of population health at New York University. But heterosexual men and women also experiment, probably because younger generations are more open-minded when it comes to sex.

But some are more susceptible to side effects than others: If you take blood pressure medication, or take Viagra that raises your blood pressure, inhaling it will confuse your body and lead to loss of consciousness. There is also evidence that heavy users can temporarily damage their vision. And they can go hand in hand with drug use by other parties.

So why do many risk it? “I wouldn’t argue for a ‘fairer’ representation of poppers, whatever that means,” Zmith wrote in his book. “Or even a more ‘positive’ view… If this book is a plea for anything, it is for pleasure – for the time and space to dream about it, plan for it, experience it.”