Let’s Talk About Gay Sex and Drugs: New Beginnings

New Beginnings 

New Year’s Eve, Piccadilly Circus, 6am. London and its sirens whirl around you, your brain’s full of champagne, and you’ve just found out the kind and gentle guy you’ve been dating isn’t quite the man you thought he was.

So you stagger on to the free tube, perhaps emotionally wounded, and take the Bakerloo line to Elephant & Castle where you know a huge gay after-hours party has just opened. You’ve been handed a one-way ticket to consume whatever you can lay your hands on, which hopefully will include loads of smiling strangers’ gym-toned bodies.

Only, as you’re walking out the station, suddenly this voice says in your head: “Is this really the way you want to begin 2016? Ending up three days later in the corner of a scarily minimalist flat in Stockwell with some G’d-up random who you’ve declared your new BFF, looking like the below?”

So instead, I went home and slept. The consequences of which meant spending most of New Year’s Day like this:

But still, it felt better than if I’d tried to smother those hurt feelings with anything else but ice cream and a ‘Dominos Big Night In’ meal deal for one.

I’m reading Unspeakable Things by Laurie Penny right now; a book about modern feminism. In it, she writes of the “lost boys” and that “talking about trauma is a queer activity in every sense, particularly for men, when it is forbidden unless you’re in a war movie”; how most men are not allowed to want “to be taken care of, to cry in public, to cry in private, to be fucked, to play with makeup… To have their vulnerabilities acknowledged.”

Penny is writing mostly about heterosexual men, but we’re not given a get-out-of-masculinity-jail-free card simply by being gay. We’re still brought up in this system, and shaped from our earliest ages with these notions: “Big boys don’t cry.” To process emotional hurt in our current culture, perhaps most men will choose the rabbit hole rather than the mirror. Often you hear the story from guys on the gay chillout scene that they “just split up with their boyfriend a year ago…”

But that’s anecdotal – where are the statistics? As many voices shrieked during the Chemsex film’s release, to claim that there might be underlying reasons to some drug use is to create a “moral panic”, not understanding that gay boys just wanna have fun, and even being an “alarmist nun”:

I’m not trying to piss on anybody’s hard-won fun, nor to moralise on habits in my habit. Yet if drugs, alcohol and sex are one path for dealing with difficult emotions – the best friend dropping round with a bottle of gin and a gram declaring “let’s get wasted and forget about that prick” – then maybe it makes sense to open up another road at the cross-section. Because the gin and the gram won’t make you forget, they’ll just numb for a time.

This is part of the reason we run Let’s Talk About Gay Sex & Drugs; to give people an outlet to share their feelings with others. But it’s also a place of performance, and a celebration of community. Our theme for January is ‘beginnings’ and everyone is welcome, whether seeking to begin something new by speaking, or simply to hear other voices.

‘Let’s Talk About Gay Sex & Drugs – Beginnings‘ is at Ku Klub, 30 Lisle Street, WC2H 7BA on Thursday 7th January. Doors 6.30pm, and free entry. 

Our featured speakers and performers for the January event include: 

Travis Alabanza

A Barbican Young Poet, Travis is making waves on the London spoken word scene and queer POC politics.

Rubyyy Jones