In dominating early nightlife scenes, LGBTQ+ people were among the first to adopt ‘club drugs’ like MDMA and novel psychoactive substances like poppers into their nightlife practices. Fiona Measham, Director of The Loop and Chair in Criminology at the University of Liverpool, refers to gay club-goers as “‘early adopters’ of drug trends” LGBT people, particularly gay men and trans women, pioneered what we have come to understand as nightlife in cities like New York and London during the social and political turbulence of the 1970s and ‘80s. As a key site of recreational drug use, it follows that gay nightlife and party drugs walk hand in hand. Stereotypically a community that parties both hard and frequently, most ‘queer spaces’ open after the sun sets. While recent pushes for sober queer spaces (largely in response to high rates of alcoholism and problematic drug use among LGBT individuals) have initiated a critical questioning of why the queer experience continues to be intrinsically linked to substance use, in the face of widespread bar and club closures due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the importance of the existence of the gay bar as a pivotal site of connection, pleasure, and community for queer people has been reinforced. Often the first time one can be truly and unashamedly queer in a space dominated by their peers, without the crushing oppressive pressures of a heteronormative society that exists outside the world of the gay bar. For freshly ‘out’ queer people, visiting a gay club acts as a rite of passage.
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It is no coincidence that the Stonewall Riots, a series of protests by gay and trans people in 1969 widely credited as the watershed moment in the fight for gay rights, began at a gay bar, The Stonewall Inn, in response to a homophobic police raid of the tavern.Īs acceptance grew and regimes of the prohibition of queer identities dismantled, the historical centring of LGBTQ+ communities on activities involving drinking and drug use lingered.
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Gatherings were liberating and hedonistic, an escape from the life of secrecy led by gay and gender non-conforming people. Codewords and word of mouth protected individuals that frequented early gay spaces (most commonly bars, clubs, and locations where alcohol was served) and the ‘queer gathering’ became a defiant “rejection of queer isolation”. The historic criminalisation of gay spaces and behaviour demanded that LGBTQ+ people met in secret, underground locations. The ‘gay bar’- the only venue that dares to spin Kylie Minogue and Doja Cat back-to-back, and the symbolic site of queer liberation, has significance both directly to LGBTQ+ people and as a tangible, visible, physical acknowledgment of the queer community in a heteronormative society. Nowhere is this more evident than in queer nightlife. To view queer drug consumption solely as a coping mechanism for dealing with social and health problems, resulting from individual and structural conditions that LGBTQ+ people operate in, is to overlook the myriad ways in which substance use, most notably alcohol but also other drugs such as empathogens and stimulants, intersects with identity, sociability, sexual relations, place, space, and community formation for queer people – particularly young people. This is problematic and leads to the reproduction of often harmful stereotypes that further serve to stigmatise members of the LGBTQ+ community. Popular representations of queer drug use are dominated by oscillation between either trauma responses or debaucherous hedonism, rarely acknowledging the nuance that lies between the two. Why is drug use higher amongst LGBTQ+ people? It is important to note that LGBTQ+ people are not one homogeneous group, but most published studies fail to distinguish between various sub-groups.
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This pattern is found even when controlling for gender and age distribution. Studies have shown that LGBT adults were significantly more likely to have taken illicit drugs in the last year than heterosexual adults, particularly amongst younger people, with one in eight LGBT people aged 18-24 (13%) taking drugs at least once a month.
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Drug use plays an outsized, if not wholly unsurprising part in the experience of the LGBTQ+ community today, for good and bad. The queer community and illicit drug users are inextricably linked: Both are subjected to similar politicisation of private practices, both are disproportionately aggravated by social harms, and are both fighting stigma and shame for the assurance of rights that should be fundamental.