By N. Alexsander Sidirov
In this deeply personal prose reflection on drug abuse in the gay community, author N. Alexsander Sidirov reflects on his experiences in international gay party circuits and the experimentations of himself and his peers with party drugs, from GHB to worse.
“There’s a thin line between drug use and addiction, and in the queer community it’s not uncommon to spend your weekends dancing right on it.”
It’s a Sunday in Barcelona. It’s technically morning but it’s kind of a rollover from the night before. On a whim I decided to go to a circuit party (ironically, I hate circuit music) because there was a dark room, and my friend who had scoped the scene had told me a lot of hot guys would be there. By the time I arrived (much too late), everyone was highly inebriated and I was—minus a Red Bull and a viagra—rather sober.
Now, before I break down the didactics of this drug-filled orgy bonanza I should quickly turn back the clock three weeks to the last time I was at this exact party. I have a part-time job hosting at a gay bar; it was a chill way to pass the time and it offered consistent money, as writing for commercials, films etc., had slowed down, as well as offering other perks. One of the perks was the gay connections in the city, the other was that I had free entry pretty much everywhere. Now, the night in question was August 6th, the party was called Blackroom. It’s the last big party before everyone goes on two weeks of holiday and a couple had invited me after my shift to meet them there.
The couple consisted of a man in his fifties and a young twink (who looked rather raggedy for his age, but we’ll delve into the reasons for this later). I don’t remember their names, I’m bad with names. James and Alex, I think. For our purposes, James is the old grey-haired hound in his fifties and Alex is the younger ash-blonde Twink. James used to be a priest. Now he does drugs every weekend with his younger boyfriend, who is about to enter college. When they aren’t doing the drugs they spend their afternoons floating between sex clubs, dungeons, or visiting the bar where I work. They’re lovely… genuinely! Really really nice people. It was awkward sometimes to watch someone doing a line of ketamine off of a drink menu on the pedestrian-clad patio, but it was neither my life nor my ketamine.
So, I get to Blackroom for the first time, on August 6th, and I see them inside and they take me around. First, they show me the dancefloor, they introduce me to their friends. Then, they take off their underwear and shake their dicks a bit, encouraging me to do the same. I am wearing a jock that, in my opinion, is sexier than nudity, so I choose to keep it on. They then offer me GhB. Now I am not a virgin about these matters. I had lived in New York for many years and I had done many drugs, and so I oblige, I suppose out of courtesy to them and, of course, courtesy to the rites of hedonism.
What happens next is rather a tale as old as gay time: they give me too much. This is my own fault. Rule number one is you should always dose yourself. People may ask you, but no one is responsible for your safety besides you, and I had made a critical error. They had wanted me on their level so they gave me 2ml. Now there are a few important things to know about GhB:
One, it can and will kill you, especially if you mix it with alcohol; two, it’s very easy to overdose, or ‘G—out’, to use to correct term.
Ξ
According to Wikipedia, GhB is:
a naturally occurring neurotransmitter and a depressant drug. It is a precursor to GABA, glutamate, and glycine in certain brain areas. It acts on the GHB receptor and is a weak agonist at the GABAB receptor.
Now I don’t know what a GABAB receptor is, but what I do know is that GhB was originally used for narcolepsy. Now it’s used for sex parties, circuit parties, Fire Island, and Saturday nights.
At first, I am dancing. I am kissing a guy with a Mediterranean appearance, and then suddenly I’m shaking on a bar. My head is down, my eyes want to close, and I am utterly tremulous.
What they gave me, it turns out, wasn’t even GhB. It was GBL, a stronger and more potent version of the drug. The dose they give themselves is something they had built up over time, through extended use of the drug.
“You look bad” James says to me. “You need to go home…”
“No I’m okay…” I keep saying, but I’m repeating myself… “I’m okay…I’m okay…” it’s all I can manage to get out.
They drag me outside. The bouncers, James, and his boyfriend leave me on a park bench to either, I assume, sober up or die. I shouldn’t be so melodramatic though, another gay was carried out sixman-style, like they were performing a number from a Fosse film. His limp body dangled over each of their arms as they carried him out the hallway, I think they probably left him in an alley, as no cab would ever accept a corpse.
GhB has been the cause of a multitude of deaths in Fire Island, primarily drownings as people on the drug would pass out in the pool and everyone else on the same drugs would be too busy fucking, fighting or fan-clapping to notice. It’s a messy chemical, with a messy history.
*cut forward three weeks*
I am at the same party, this time I’m sober. I see a tiny Venezuelan I had fucked at a previous chill, and he gives me a bit of Molly. I guess this is probably about five minutes into the event. I’m not exactly yearning for drugs this time, as the park bench episode, while not a formative memory, certainly served as a lesson in self-reliance. What I guess I learned from that experience is the following: unless someone is a real friend of yours, or possesses an immutable moral compass, expect that no one is going to stop their pleasure-seeking nor their drug-fueled nights of pandaemonia to make sure you are okay—spaces where substances and hedonism thrive are the same spaces oft-filled with apathy.
I find my friend right as the lights turn on. It is at this same moment that I encounter a couple whom I had met some eight months before: Charlie and Santiago, British and Spanish respectively. I had met them at a chill in their apartment (chills are to the Spanish what an afters is to the New Yorker). What one could expect at a chill depended on the people who came.
We’re sitting in Charlie’s apartment and begin doing lines of Mephedrone, a stimulant that burns badly when you snort it, but keeps you wide awake. There are about ten people in the apartment and only about seven are hot. The other three are insufferable. One is a rando from Slovenia who kept repeating about how crazy it was that he was here, how he just left his hotel and ended up at this apartment because they invited him (the they in question was a Venezuelan who had brought with him a group of six hodgepodge gays).
More hot men are en route, but Charlie wanted me to get the Slovenian to leave. I try to talk to him but he keeps repeating his story and making strange hip gyrations while twirling with a glass of red wine. I would say he didn’t belong here, but it was difficult to imagine exactly where he belonged—his image was at the very least idiosyncratic. After several failed attempts, I relent and hang in the kitchen as they chop up more powders.
Charlie then says, “Orgies are so interesting to me…”
“Why?” I ask.
“Because you never know what will happen…who looks hot in pictures but is strange in person, who will take too much GhB, fall into a K-hole, who has a big cock…it’s all a dice roll…”
“You know they say every orgy has its witness…” Charlie’s roommate suddenly exclaims.
“What does that mean, do you suppose?”
“That we all lose sometimes…”
I go into the back room to fuck Charlie’s roommate, we do a dose of G before he rips off my jock to ride me. (1.5ml well-measured.)
Ξ
Okay, turn the clock back again—a month—it’s July—the week of Pride in Barcelona. New York has come to visit me.
I am sitting at a dinner where a friend, Keenan and I are about to eat some Paella.
It’s become evident in our reconnection that Keenan has a drug addiction and, considering we weren’t best friends, I wasn’t really sure if I was the right person to tell him. In the bathroom he asks me if I have any ketamine. I only have some Tussy, a pink powder mix of cocaine, ketamine, and mdma. He obliges. An ex-lover had handed it to me at a party and later forgot to retrieve it from my satchel. He does a bump, I don’t. Then at the dinner table, while the ferris wheel of the circus turns in the background behind us, and the ocean laps at the shore, Keenan pulls out a dropper and puts some G into his orange Fanta.
“You know what time it is? Seven-thirty?” I ask.
“No…G-o’clock.” He downs the beverage.
We sit and talk for about fifteen minutes, about music, we both made music, we talk about New York, how things have changed, how the production value of events had increased, but so had the price of blueberries—there was the feeling that no matter where I was in the world New York would send me one of its agents to let me know—that it was still there, and I could always come back—the passing thought makes me shudder.
While my gaze averts towards the sky, to catch a glimpse of the omnipresent celestia, Keenan passes out. Slumped over in his chair, his head bobbing slightly to the left, cheek pressed against the glass of the divider with the street. I slap his cheek a couple times to wake him up. I look around, the people around us are staring, worried, a bit confused. The waiter brings us the Paella and asks if everything is fine and I say we’ve been traveling—for the next hour I’m on vigilant watch, observing him as he eats a bite and then fades in and out of consciousness. This was the New York I know.
And it was the New York I knew. The first time I had ever encountered GHB was when I was 21 years old in the city. I was quite docile, thin, a model, a twink. I was also homeless and living in a shelter. I met a DOM who was quite hot and would tie me up, spank me, lightly torture me I guess. He was intense but pretty nice and introduced me to the liquid. I didn’t use it, but I watched him use it. At that time, his Grindr profile had said Tina in it, which I thought, like a naive imbecile, meant Xtina, as in Christina Aguilera. I would of course find out the truth.
The third time I visited him would be the last. He seemed different, more tired, more paranoid. Since the beginning he always had a rule for when we fucked: we have to fuck louder than the neighbors. He insisted it was a contest he had with them, and being a people-pleaser I always tried. As we got ready to fuck that night and I was beginning to take off my clothes, he said—“Wow they’re so loud today”—and, as I lifted my ear to listen, all I heard were birds across the street. Maybe nightingales, maybe crows, but not people.
“I don’t hear anything…” I said.
“They’re so loud!”… Crickets.
I noticed a rig ontop of his refrigerator. I asked him what he smoked with it; to which he quite readily replied—“Meth. Why?”
We didn’t fuck that night. Instead, I cried while he told me about how he hadn’t slept in a week; how his mom called him in tears all the time, afraid he was going to die; and how he used cocaine to cook crack in his living room. Before all this, he had been a banker.
I remember wondering why being gay was so dark. For years after that, I attributed it to New York City, felt that it was the city’s fault things reached their hellacious apex, a place with no guard rails, a capital that seemed determined to watch you perish.
Five years on, my perspective has changed a bit. I have met meth users in Arizona; New Mexico, Florida, Los Angeles. I have met them by accident in Mexico City, Madrid, Cancun, Barcelona, Prague, and Berlin.
It is not the city, it is the drug. I remember when my ex-boyfriend called me once, because he had ‘accidentally’ done meth. He didn’t like it, but he described the beginning as being incredibly euphoric, the sex being the best he had ever had, and the comedown being so monstrous, so phantasmagoric, and so nightmarish that he would never do it again.
Maybee this is obvious, but meth is an amphetamine. One of my best friends who had gone years with undiagnosed ADHD used meth to survive in the city. He would focus; he would finish, he would use the time not sleeping to ride and deliver meals for Uber Eats. In the beginning, it worked so unbelievably well for him that it was hard to imagine life without it. But in the end, he moved to Pennsylvania and relapsed, three times, maybe four. We don’t speak that much these days…
In the beginning. Those are the words aren’t they…in the beginning: doom, collapse, addiction; their primary means of narrative introduction is alway those three words—in the beginning. I suppose it makes sense, every spiral staircase has a first step.
Ξ
After Paella, Keenan asks me to contact every dealer I know in the city to see if we can get four grams of Ketamine delivered.
“We’ll pay cash”
“What else would you pay…” I say rolling my eyes.
Wanting to be a good guide for my friends from NY to the city of Barcelona, I oblige, but realistically, Monday after 11pm is neither the best day nor the best time to locate a dealer.
Ultimately a good friend of mine who owns a gallery in Eixample has a contact who answers. We meet him at a mutually beneficial coordinate and receive the Ketamine. He has a ketamine addiction too, Anna had told me. He also had a pitbull named Princess whom I was very fond of.
Once we have the drugs, we catch a cab to their hotel right outside the city, where I meet Keenan’s friends for a third time. A couple who always seemed to be fighting, primarily over who was using whose drugs, but sometimes about who was getting bred before the other approved. They were both Geminis—and I thought they were nice, even if the constructs of their relationship I wasn’t entirely envious of.
I would hang out with them while they did line after line, key bump after key bump of ketamine on a Monday, cartoons playing in the background; I would catch a bus home at 2am, and arrive at my apartment at 3:30am.
The next day Keenan would text me asking for more ketamine; and the day following, tell me that he pissed blood.
Ξ
It’s not the city, it’s the drug. The drugs that I myself had used and now on a multitude of occasions, witnessed others using were strange in their adjacency. GhB was as a high—fun, loose, kind of like being drunk—but as an overdose it was vomiting, passing out, eyes rolling back, strange behavior, tweaking, or in some cases death.
An Australian man I met and dated while I was eighteen and studying Shakespeare in London told me that his best friend had died from GhB. That was 2015, he was the one who gave it to him. That to me, seems the most striking fact, that what he remembered about his friend and his friend’s death was the role he played, even if it was just a pair of hands passing the bag or bottle.
Drugs offer connection, they can remove inhibitions, what makes gay people gay people, our silliness, our desire to dance, our love of sex, our love of love, of affection, of expression, pre-disposes us to the use of drugs. So much of queer life was night life, it was the place where queer and gay people were the safest to express themselves, and yet, it was the same place where substances were so rife one can scarcely walk past a bathroom stall without hearing the fretted sound of sniffs or requests to pass the bag.
Just as there is always one witness at the orgy, there is always an addict for a substance. When we decide to spin the wheel of hedonism and pleasure-seeking, to live out those freedoms that so many of us queer folks feel robbed of in youth, well, unfortunately sometimes we lose.
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