How Will the FDA’s First Look at Poppers Affect Public Policy & Police Gay Sex?

Poppers are such an ubiquitous and indelible part of gay male culture, we often forget they are a drug. So much so that it was only this past June that the Food and Drug Administration got around to releasing the findings of their first study.

Chemically known as alkyl nitrites, they are also the subject of a new book  Deep Sniff by Adam Zmith.

The Chicago Reader: “After originating as a Victorian-era treatment for chest pain, poppers since at least the 1960s have been popular among gay men for the head rush that came with a huff of the vapors. In their early iteration, poppers were sold in small glass ampoules that made a popping noise when they were broken in order to release the vapors. (Hence the name “poppers.”)”

It’s finally here! My deep dive on poppers, the FDA’s recent warning, and policing queer sex: https://t.co/hIkwakNr2K

— Adam M. Rhodes (@byadamrhodes) January 5, 2022

Zmith writes, UK gay bars were raided repeatedly by police who were hunting poppers and using the arm of the law to stamp out queer sexuality in the mid-1980s. A stark symbol of the stigma gay men endured during the AIDS crisis, Zmith writes that some officers wore rubber gloves during the gay bar raids, apprently to protect themselves from the virus.

Both the UK and Australia have tried to ban poppers, and products containing alkyl nitrites are considered drugs in Canada and require a prescription.

The Stonewall Riots cemented the permanence and the resilience of the queer identity, and the rise of queer culture after that moment in turn increased the popularity of poppers. Over-the-top homoerotic ads selling poppers appeared in the decades following Stonewall, promising explosive orgasms, hard fucking, and beautiful, muscle-toned men. Poppers had attained their status as a gay sex staple.

But the hard-fought sexual freedom enjoyed in the 1970s was cut short by reports of a rare cancer soon seen among a small but growing number of gay men.

Years into the AIDS crisis, two gay activists in the U.S. published a book in the mid-1980s warning that poppers could cause or were at least a cofactor for AIDS, though their arguments were later entirely discredited. U.S. lawmakers banned butyl nitrate, a common substance in poppers, in 1988 and two years later banned the broad class of chemicals known as alkyl nitrites in the Crime Control Act of 1990, a bill sponsored by then-Senator Joe Biden. Prosecutors at one point also charged two men for selling poppers in 1996, though sentences were minor.