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Chemsex

The Inside Story of London's Chemsex

Scene
Christine Schierano has been documenting the world of drug-fuelled
sex parties for the past six years.

By Max Daly

12 June 2017, 11:28am

ALL IMAGES VIA THE VICE DOCUMENTARY 'CHEMSEX'

T he dark side of London's chemsex scene crept into public view during
the trials last year of Stephen Port, who killed and raped four young
men in east London, and Stefano Brizzi, who partially ate and dissolved in
acid a police officer in the south of the city.

Both murderers used their knowledge of chemsex – male sex parties, often
organised on dating apps, which are fuelled by mephedrone, G and crystal
meth – as a pretext and a smokescreen for their gruesome killings. The
more chemsex came up in these court cases, the more this niche
subculture, in the eyes of the public, came to represent a macabre, depraved
underworld.
But what do we really know about this hidden world that inspires such grim
fascination? Beyond the extreme cases of Port and Brizzi, there is no
denying it's a risky thing to do, because it can entail drug injecting,
overdosing, unprotected sex and the potential for addiction. In London
there has been a rise in HIV infections and mephedrone and GHB/GBL
overdoses linked to chemsex. It is a landscape peopled by "crystal
methodists", BBC economists, radio producers and former rugby stars, not
just those on the fringes of society.

Since VICE first brought the scene to national attention in 2013, it has been
the subject of some good journalistic investigation, most notably in VICE's
Chemsex documentary and in articles by specialist LGBT journalists such as
this. Yet, apart from a 2015 study revealing that drug services are ill-
equipped to deal with chemsex casualties, in depth academic research into
this modern day spin-off of the old drugs-sex nexus has been thin on the
ground. Until now.

Christine Schierano, a criminologist at Liverpool John Moores University,

has been observing London's evolving chemsex scene since 2011, looking at
the health consequences and the way drugs are supplied. Against a
backdrop of drug use and sex, some of it in the open and some behind
closed doors, she has met and interviewed a stream of dealers and guests at
parties over the past six years. She was submerged at points: during one
year she spent roughly a third of her waking hours at parties connected to
the chemsex scene.

Schierano's research – part of which was published in an academic journal

in December by the European Society for Social Drugs Research – is the
only long-term ethnographical look at the world of chemsex. It provides
unprecedented insight into how the scene has changed, what drives it and
who is attracted to it. Ultimately, it is a window into what Schierano calls "a
life within a life", a buzzing, fraternal underground zone that was part
created as a response to living in one of the loneliest cities in the world.

WATCH: Sexual Healing – Inside the World of Medically Assisted Sex

S chierano happened upon the chemsex scene by chance in 2011. A 22-

year-old Italian alone in London, she was having fun, dancing and
drinking in Vauxhall's iconic gay bars and clubs. She started hanging out
with a group of gay men who were into clubbing, drugs and sexual
adventure. They took her into their circle, calling her a "straight girl with a
gay man's brain".

As the UK's fledgling chemsex scene – a similar one had been around in Los
Angeles and San Francisco for the last decade – began to expand, it was
these men who invited Schierano to document their lives. By chance, her
new friends were key players in the development of London's chemsex
culture, as its focus moved from clubs to flamboyant private parties. With
the blessing of one new acquaintance, a "young, charismatic and beautiful"
dealer from South America called Leon, she took a front row seat while
London became the chemsex capital of the world.

"Chemsex is mainly people chilling out, some having sex, some taking drugs,
listening to music and laughing," says Schierano. "It's like any party, but with
an accent on drugs and people having sex with strangers in the corner of
the room." At these parties, Schierano bumped into office workers, barmen,
fashion stylists, dancers, bankers, university lecturers and people from all
over the world.

One of the regulars on the chemsex circuit was a secondary school teacher,
who would often buy drugs all through the weekend to please his boyfriend.
It was tough for him, says Schierano. "You could see his boyfriend was way
more into it than him, and he was the one who had to sober up and go to
teach on a Monday. Everyone was trying to persuade him to phone in sick,
but he always went because he said he had a duty to the kids. Eventually he
was arrested in a police raid and lost his job."

What first struck Schierano about the chemsex scene was the pivotal role
played by the dealers, who had begun hosting parties in their own homes.
Most of the 23 chemsex dealers she studied in depth were foreigners staying
and working in London, from places such as South America, Italy and
eastern Europe. There were only two British dealers.

They started selling for two reasons: profit and popularity. They wanted to
make money, often to afford their own drugs. They also wanted to be
popular, and the more popular they were, the easier it was to sell drugs.
"The combination of profit-making, popularity – the sense of being needed,
or even of being loved – and related opportunities for sexual encounters
made escalating from social supplier to dealer attractive," says Schierano.
Leon, for example, found being needed "exciting". He loved the idea of
having people looking at him and wanting him.

Not only do the dealers provide the venue, but they deliver the triad of
powerful drugs that are the lifeblood of the chemsex scene – because it's
the chems that drive the sex, not the other way round, says Schierano.
Mephedrone, which had broken onto the UK drug scene only a few years
before chemsex took off, is the super cheap stamina aid. GHB and GBL,
passed down to the gay clubbing scene from the bodybuilding scene, gets
people horny. Crystal meth, a drug virtually unused in Britain apart from on
London's gay clubbing scene, provides both staying power and sexual desire.

There is a blizzard of these drugs on the chemsex scene. Most are sold face-
to-face at clubs and parties, but nearly all dealers now sell via dating apps,
too. Over a long weekend during a big party, she found, a dealer will shift up
to a kilo of mephedrone. Most order 200 grams at a time from their
suppliers – Turkish and Asian outfits in north and west London who import
it from India or via the dark web – in case someone finds their stash while
they're blitzed out on G.

On top of the mephedrone, dealers get through around a litre of GBL,

equivalent to around 600 doses. Most buy this online from websites such as
GBL.com in five litre containers at a fraction of the price they sell it for.
Tellingly, although GBL provides dealers with the biggest profit margins –
they can make £700 selling a litre that cost them £40 – most end up giving it
away. In fact, the chemsex dealers Schierano came across weren't exactly
cutthroat mercenaries.

"Prices were cheaper depending on how much of a close friend the buyer
was with the seller and whether they had sex with the dealer – and cheaper
again for those who were seen to be particularly good at sex," she says. "For
example, one dealer earned £2,300 over four days, but ended up with £1,000
because he got G euphoria and ended up paying for huge cab journeys for
everyone to get home."

C hemsex dealers are certainly drug dealers, selling up to 100 quarter-

gram bags of crystal meth at £60 a pop over a big party weekend. But
they are dealers unlike any others, as Schierano reported, because they are
"firmly embedded in the drug using culture rather than parasitical to it".

In the first years of London's chemsex scene – and increasingly less in 2017
– dealer-hosts saw themselves as having the role of agony aunts. Parties are
not just venues where people gather to take drugs and have sex; they are
ports of companionship, where you can find a shoulder to cry on – and it's
the host-dealer job to provide that.

Leon's parties quickly gained a loyal following: reliable drugs and never-
ending sex under an umbrella of protectiveness. "Many of the dealers on this
London scene didn't just come and go, they were part of it. They acted as
counsellors, as a social service and saw their job as making people feel good,"
says Schierano.

However, the life of the chemsex dealer is an intense, crowded existence.

Many dealers find themselves caught up in a maelstrom of parties and drug
selling, and it's hard to step out. According to Schierano, dealers
purposefully take mini-ODs of G at their own chemsex parties to ensure
they got some rest. "I've seen some dealers deliberately take a little more
than their usual amount of G and overdosing, to get away from the stress,
because they are too tired and need to sleep," she says.

"Imagine watching a nice movie at home with your boyfriend, then loads of
people come round to take drugs and have sex. You take drugs, you sell
drugs and people are making a mess. You try to go to the toilet and people
are having sex in it. You go to your room and there are people there, too. It
can be stressful. Some dealers don't mind because they know that as long as
the party is going on in their flat they can be selling all the drugs."

But many can't take it. Most chemsex drug dealers have careers as short-
lived as an amphetamine-pumped racing greyhound. On average, says
Schierano, chemsex dealers last two years in the business before burning
out. Some dealers realise the only way they can stop the flood of parties at
their home is to move house. But one party in the new place and it starts
again.

Britney, a 25-year-old male drug seller from south London, told Schierano it
wasn't possible to sleep or have a normal meal with his boyfriend because
there was always someone in the living room. He said he had moved house a
few times to try to avoid unwanted attention from previous customers.
When asked why he let people in to his home all the time, he told her: "If you
stop organising sex parties, you don't sell much."

Other chemsex dealers have had to move out of the country because it gets
so bad. Of the 23 dealers she observed over six years, only three of them are
still in London. Leon, for example, seeing his relationship was near breaking
point because his home had turned into a non-stop club night, ended up
moving to northern Europe to get some peace and quiet. Others have gone
to sell in more chilled out chemsex scenes abroad in Spain and the Canaries.
But as soon as one dealer departs, another steps up.

Since 2014, Schierano has noticed a change in the scene. As parties

proliferated and more people were attracted to the chemsex flame, the
original communal trust vibe diminished. Theft of drugs and cash from
jackets and wallets became more common, although chemsexers did adapt.
People started keeping their socks on while having sex – the classic German
porn star look – or buying weird ankle bracelets because they needed to
stuff their money and drugs somewhere while naked.

"It got cynical," says Schierano. "People came to parties when they knew
everyone was wasted to steal what they could. So some people put money in
their socks. But people got wind of it and took it out of their socks when
they were asleep or during sex. So then people started to buy wrist and
ankle bracelets with storage pouches for money and drugs."

As she has moved across the expanding party scene, Schierano's spotted
that parties often consist of "high school cliques": the popular people, the
wannabes, the bullies and the outsiders. "You have people laughing behind
people's back at their Grindr profile, about how no one wants to have sex
with them," she says. "Quite often at parties there are people rejected from
the central core."

One of these men on the south London circuit suffered terrible abuse. A
young eastern European office worker in his twenties, he spent his evenings
and weekends moving from one party to another, chasing the crystal meth
because he had become addicted to the drug. "He had no friends, no one
wanted him around unless it was using him for sex or as someone to buy all
the drugs. When they had used him, they would kick him out," says
Schierano. At one party, she was told, he was unconscious after taking too
many drugs and was raped, then woken up and forced to watch a video of
his own rape.

A darker side of chemsex certainly exists, she says. It appears to involve

victims and perpetrators of violence and rape who have been doubly
rejected: first by the mainstream and then by the gay scene. "They have
struggled to come out, but then the gay community doesn't want them
either. They are rejected on Grindr and become outsiders. Sometimes they
will turn to anyone, even the real creeps, to feel wanted."
O f those Schierano has followed on London's chemsex scene, 80
percent have contracted HIV because of sharing needles and
unprotected sex. She says the intensity of the scene means that people end
up forgetting to take their anti-HIV medication. Even though people have
become more careful of OD'ing on G – for example, putting dye in it so they
don't confuse it with a glass of water – three friends have died of drug
overdoses. She has also witnessed the chemsex community suffering from
mild psychosis and paranoia, circulation and breathing problems.
David Stuart, the world's leading expert on chemsex, from the Soho-based
sexual health charity 56 Dean St, tells me around 3,000 gay men accessing
56 Dean Street each month are using chemsex drugs, 70 percent of whom
are unable or unwilling to have sober sex. It is not a phenomenon that is
going away anytime soon.

In fact, the London scene is branching out. It's become fashionable for UK-
based chemsex dealers to expand their sales abroad. According to
Schierano, they are selling drugs at exclusive chemsex parties at Gay Pride
events in Gran Canaria, other parts of Spain and on the gay party scene in
French ski resorts. Because it is a clear liquid, G is easy to smuggle and is
sometimes disguised as nail polish. Schierano says some of the planes flying
out to these events are packed with men high on chemsex drugs.

She says that, to a small extent, the London scene has been copied in
Brighton, Glasgow and most notably Manchester, where a younger crowd is
now going to chemsex-lite parties, swapping crystal meth for ecstasy.

I ask her what the common thread is among those who take part in
chemsex.

"It's people looking for something, looking for love maybe. Foreigners come
to London with this ideal. They will sleep with lots of men, live to the max,
take lots of drugs and enjoy the freedom of being gay in London. Parties are
important because often the only person they speak to in the week is
someone on a Sainsbury's checkout. Even though it's very multicultural and
full of people, London is the loneliest city in world. The chemsex scene is
the product of this." As one dealer, Jay, told her: "People are looking for
affection and trying to fill up the empty space they have inside."

But while the chemsex scene can provide an oasis of sex, highs and
companionship for lonely men in the capital, like a dizzying fairground ride,
at some point people have to get off and end up back where they started.

"Chemsex is not a happy ending for most people," says Schierano. "It does
more damage than good. They do not end up loved, there are no hopes
achieved. Yes, it's a life experience, but in the end you leave the same as you
arrived. Chemsex is just another life in your own life. Time stands still. Then
it is back to reality."

@Narcomania

If you want to contact Christine about her ongoing research into chemsex
email her on C.Schierano@2016.ljmu.ac.uk.

Chemsex support is available in most sexual health clinics. 56 Dean Street

offers one-to-one chemsex support; visit chemsexsupport.com. Antidote
(London Friend) offers drug and alcohol support for the LGBT community. Call
0207 833 1674.

More on VICE:

The Story of Mephedrone, the Party Drug That Boomed and Went Bust

The Life and Crimes of 'Cannibal Cop Killer' Stefano Brizzi

An Illustrated A to Z of Chemsex

TAGGED: DRUGS, SEX, HIV, FEATURES, LGBT, MEPHEDRONE, GHB

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Chemsex Week

How Gay Clubs Changed the Way We Take

Drugs
Many of the world's most popular drugs took off in gay clubs, but it
looks like the days of gay men being "early adopters" of new
psychoactive substances are numbered.

By Max Daly

30 November 2015, 7:00am

A WRAP OF MDMA (PHOTO BY MICHAEL SEGALOV, FROM "I WALKED AROUND BESTIVAL ASKING TO TEST PEOPLE'S DRUGS")

Gay drug users have long been seen as "early adopters" of new club drugs.
The powders, pills and bottled liquids sniffed and swallowed in the cubicles
of gay clubs today will be the substances passed around the straight clubs of
tomorrow – or so the thinking goes.

In reality, as we enter what could be described as a new, post-clubbing era,

the days of drug trends trickling down from cutting edge dance floors – gay
or straight – to the wider population appear to be numbered.
In June of 2013, VICE published a report on the phenomenon that would
later become known as "chemsex" – groups of gay men injecting crystal
meth and mephedrone at private orgies arranged on dating apps. Since
then, there have been academic studies on the subject, new clinics set up to
deal with the fallout and public health warnings. A VICE documentary film,
Chemsex, is released in cinemas in the UK on Friday.

One thing worth noting about Britain's chemsex scene two years down the
line is that, fortunately, it's remained a minority sport. It's true these
extreme sex parties are now bigger in Manchester than they were in 2013,
but as yet chemsex has not rippled out to the wider gay, drug-using
community. What's more, there are scant reports of this practice spreading
to straight drug users.

That last point is reflective of a broader change in how gay club culture
relates to the world outside of it. Neither mephedrone nor GHB – two of the
most popular substances on the gay clubbing scene – have become
particularly fashionable among mainstream clubbers, who have fallen back
in love with MDMA. Crystal meth, a drug with a high prevalence in many
parts of the world, remains largely confined to the gay community in the
UK. And poppers and viagra, the other mainstays of gay club nights, aren't
exactly all the rage at Ministry or the Warehouse Project.

Yet, there was a time when gay drug users – particularly those on the club
scene – set the pace. Don't tell the pilled-up shuffler mouthing off about
"gay lads being alright, as long as they don't do nowt in front of me", but he
owes nightlife as he knows it to a dance revolution invented by gay black
men in America. It was in venues such as the Warehouse in Chicago and the
Paradise Garage in New York in the late-1970s and early-1980s where the
cocktail of MDMA-enhanced house and garage music was first brewed. Until
then, the use of ecstasy – synthesised by Alexander Shulgin in his backyard
lab in California in the late-1970s – had been largely restricted to small
cliques of new-agers and psychologists' patients.

These clubs were intense places, sanctuaries where the oppressed could
dance, get high and forget about their worries for 24 hours. They attracted
British pop stars such as Marc Almond, Mark Moore, Steve Strange, George
Michael and Boy George, who all spread the love back home. Almond took
ecstasy for the first time in New York in the early-80s and loved it; the result
was Soft Cell's debut album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, said to be the first
British ecstasy record.

Eventually, the drug trickled down to the clubs and football terraces of
England, as well as the sandy beaches of Ibiza, and – surfing on a wave of
acid house – became fully democratised during the second Summer of Love
in 1988. "The biggest gift gays gave to club culture was house and garage 30
years ago, from the black gay clubs in America," says legendary club
promoter Patrick Lilley, who ran LGBTQ activist organisation Queer Nation.

Gay clubbers were early adopters of ketamine in the late-1990s, when it was
commonly used as a partner to cocaine under the name "CK1", after the
Calvin Klein perfume. As the drug filtered into the mainstream it was
snorted by straight clubbers to bring them down from the high of MDMA or
ecstasy. By 2012, after being virtually unheard of in the UK before the turn of
the millennium, ketamine had become more popular than cocaine and a
rival to ecstasy on the student and festival scenes.

And it wasn't just drugs and music where gay clubs innovated. The concept
of the after-hours club – an inevitable result of the passion for drug-taking
and excess that has characterised gay club culture – was pioneered by the
iconic gay night Trade at Turnmills in London.
A NIGHT AT TRADE (PHOTO COURTESY OF TRADE)

So why have gay clubbers historically been seen as the early adopters of
new psychoactive substances? Partly, it's because they're more prolific drug
takers than straight clubbers. According to the British Crime Survey, gay
people – and gay men, particularly – are three times more likely to take
drugs than straight people. They take them more frequently and from a
wider menu of substances, and are also bigger drinkers.

The normal clubbing experience is intensified in gay clubs because of what

American therapist Alan Downs calls "velvet rage" – many of those on the
dance floor will have escaped to city bars and clubs after suffering years of
repression and bigotry. The music and the drugs offer a release and a place
of sanctuary almost unimaginable to most clubbers just trying to shake off
the working week.

"Gay people are more prolific and adventurous drug takers," says Professor
Fiona Measham, who has spent two decades interviewing people in gay
clubs in London and Manchester. "There is a work hard, play hard attitude, a
willingness to experiment with different drugs and an openness about that."

There is a strong common bond between people who may have had similar
experiences growing up – i.e. coming out and being discriminated against –
and the unity around drug taking and dancing in clubs is amplified by these
collective emotions. Measham points out that academics have compared the
unifying intensity, hedonism and liberation in gay clubs to the spirituality
and escapism of historical "dances of death", rituals used to cope with pain
and plague in the medieval era.

The more shit people go through, the more willing they are to take risks and
do impulsive things, which in the context of the gay club scene means
experimenting with drugs and sex. Gay clubs offer a more important role for
their guests than their straight equivalents, because the stakes are higher.

"Gay men, historically, have had their lives, recreation and sex associated
with risk and danger and disentitlement," says David Stuart, head of
substance use at 56 Dean Street, a charity helping gay drug users in
London's Soho. "Communities do inherit historical and communal trauma, a
kind of mass post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The most common
symptom of PTSD is experiencing a constant sense of danger and risk."

It's this context in which chemsex grew, being not only a representation of
the dark side of this hedonism, but an indicator that gay club culture is
dying a death.

"There is spin we are all party animals having a fantastic time, but my
experience is many of us are repressed, stressed and self-medicating with
drugs," says Matthew Todd, editor of Attitude magazine. "In my twenties,
going to [London venues] Fridge and Astoria seemed more happy. Now, it's
more intense, harder and more sexual."

The number of nightclubs in the UK has halved in a decade, a trend that

started with gay venues. The roll call of iconic but now dead gay bars and
clubs is a long one, and it's not just a result of gentrification and stricter
licensing; attendances are also down. Why bother going to your local club if
you can meet people, buy drugs and arrange a weekend-long orgy using an
app on your phone? As David Stuart says: "The shameless queuing in
nightclubs for drugs has become the shameless sharing of them online."

If a new drug – an updated ecstasy, say, or the next ketamine – were to

appear tomorrow, would we see it first on the gay clubbing scene? "Five
years ago I would say yes, but now it's far less likely," says Professor
Measham. "Because of the internet, people don't need to hear about drugs
from trendsetters who are part of some fashion and music zeitgeist. Today,
a new drug is more likely to rise up from a lab in Amsterdam with some
clever internet branding than [from] some uber-subculture scene."

In his 1997 book, Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House,
Matthew Collin observed how through the 1970s, 80s and 90s "black and gay
clubs consistently served as breeding grounds for new developments in
popular culture, laboratories where music, drugs and sex are interbred to
create stylistic innovations that slowly filter through to straight, white
society".
Now, it seems, those days are well and truly over.

@Narcomania

CHEMSEX is released in the UK on Friday the 4th of December. To see a full

list of cinemas showing the film, click here.

CHEMSEX will be released on DVD and On-Demand in the UK on the 11th of

January.

To read the rest of the articles from our Chemsex Week – a series exploring the
people, issues and stories in and around the world of chemsex – click here.

More on VICE:

A History of GHB, the Club Drug at the Centre of London's Serial Killer Case

Inside the Lives of the British Heroin Addicts Who Steal from Supermarkets to
Fund Their Use

A Refresher Course On the Ups and Downs of Taking LSD

TAGGED: DRUGS, MDMA, CRYSTAL METH, THE LOOP, KETAMINE, MEPHEDRONE, GHB, CHEMSEX, STUFF, MAX DALY,
NARCOMANIA, GAY CLUBS, 56 DEAN STREET, EARLY ADOPTERS,
ALTERED STATE: THE STORY OF ECSTASY CULTURE AND ACID HOUSE, INNOVATORS

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