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Deviants and dope: psychoactive drugs, the construction of sexual pathology, and gay culture in the United States, 1922-2000

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Deviants and dope: psychoactive drugs, the construction of sexual pathology, and gay culture in the United States, 1922-2000

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Content Deviants and Dope:
Psychoactive Drugs, the Construction of Sexual Pathology, and Gay Culture in the
United States, 1922-2000
by
John Stuart Miller
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(HISTORY)
August 2024
Copyright 2024 John Stuart Miller

Acknowledgments
Great credit for this dissertation goes to the faculty and graduate students of USC’s Van
Hunnick History Department. Above all, my profoundest gratitude is with Alice Echols, who has
helped me shape this project for the last few years, served as a formidable mentor and reader, and
been a wonderful conversationalist along the way. Alice’s work on disco, gay culture, and the
1960s were crucial in the conception of this work. On the landscape of American historians— a
place dusty at times—Alice is a unique and luminous treasure. Other faculty members in the
department owed thanks include Paul Lerner, Steve Ross, Aro Velmet, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal,
Peter Mancall, Bill Deverell, Phil Ethington, Richard Fox, and Maya Maskarinec. Paul pointed
the way through some of the psychiatric history required for my work, and comments by Steve,
Aro, and Nathan on related seminar papers covering the history of drugs were also deeply
insightful. Beyond the department, I extend my thanks to Terry David Church in the School of
Pharmacy and Joseph Boone in the English Department. Beyond USC, my thanks go to Regina
Kunzel at Yale, Gayle Rubin at the University of Michigan, and Jacob Green at UCLA.
Among the graduate students I especially thank Julia Brown-Bernstein, Stanley Fonseca,
Lydia Sigismondi, Joshua Poorman, Simon Judkins, Srijita Pal, Tahi Hicks, Abby Gibson,
Lauren Kelley, and Michael Diambri. I regret that Covid created such an awkward gap and
deprived us of much of our time together, but I thoroughly enjoyed our seminars and
extracurriculars and wish all the finest future endeavors. Stan and Michael, I’ll always remember
that rogue wave at Santa Monica beach.
Archivists and librarians at USC and in particular the ONE Archive, the San Francisco
Public Library, the GLBT Historical Society, Harvard, and UCLA made my research possible.
ii

Most vitally, Tim Wilson at the San Francisco Public Library pointed me to Eric Rofes’
enormous, unpublished collection of interviews with gay men about the 1970s, which would
form the core of chapter three. I hope this incredibly textured resource serves many future
projects.
Lydia Szamraj very kindly offered her time to explain her views and professional
experience of contemporary LGBT-tailored therapy and addiction treatment in Los Angeles.
A modified portion of chapters two and three of this dissertation appears in the May 2024
issue of the Journal of the History of Sexuality. My thanks go to the editors and anonymous
reviewers of the JHS.
Numerous organizations and donors made this work possible. I thank the USC Graduate
School, Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, all those affiliated with the
Harold Hastings McVicar Award and the Foulke and John R. Hubbard Fellowships, and
Elizabeth Van Hunnick for her generosity towards our department.
Kyle Kerley has enriched my life for over a decade now and eased many of the
downsides of graduate school. He can finally look forward to me having a “real job.”
Thanks finally go to the boys of West Hollywood.
iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………….…………… ii
Abstract …………………………………………………………….…………..……………..v
Introduction ..………………………………………………………………………………….1
Chapter 1: “Later He May Become a Drug Addict and a Chronic Homosexual”: Tracing
Tangled Pathologies in Midcentury Psychiatry, 1922-1965………………..…………………25
Don’t You Just Love the Theater? Assessing the Bacillus Homosexualis…………….………34
Treating or Redeeming the Intoxicated Sexual Deviant………………………….…….…..…53
Chapter 2: “All Possible Responses Simultaneously”: Anti-Gay Psychedelic Therapy and
the Acid Menace, 1955-1969……………………………..……..…….………………………68
Bridging Psychedelia & the History of Sexuality…………………….……………….………75
Psychedelic Paradigms……………………………………………….……………….….……79
Trip Away the Gay: LSD Psychiatry and Homosexuality………….………………….………82
Acid Babies, Acid Orgies, and Other Monsters……………………………………….………103
Chapter 3: Free Bodies, Free Minds: Using and Debating Drugs in the Years of Gay
Liberation, 1969-1981…………………….……………………….…..………………………114
Tripping Out of the Hospitals and Into the Streets…………………………………….………122
The Great 70s Drug Buffet…………………………………………………………….………128
Chapter 4: “Hellbent or Heavenly Scent?” AIDS and Recreational Drugs in San Francisco,
1981-1993………………………………………………………….……………..……………154
Hank Wilson’s War…………………………………………………………………….………163
Brownies for the “Kids”……………..………………………………..……………….………183
Chapter 5: Party and Play: Synthetic Drugs and the Second Coming of Speed,
1990s-2000s……………………………………………………………………………………195
Genealogy of Meth……………………………………..……………….….………….………198
Collective Euphorias or Vicious Circuits?……………………………….…………….………212
Methpocalypse……………………………….…………………………..…………….………220
A Place for Stigma?………………………..…………………………….…….……….………226
Conclusion: Harm and Pleasure in the New Drug Era ..…………………….…………………233
Bibliography…………………………………………………………..…………………..……237
iv

Abstract
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the development of modern
concepts of homosexuality and drug addiction, as well as the genesis of a gay subculture in the
United States which became concentrated in major cities and marked by the consumption of
recreational drugs over the following decades. Using a range of sources including medical and
psychiatric literature, interviews with drug users, activist texts, newspapers, gay periodicals,
memoirs, novels, and visual media, my dissertation charts the relationship between recreational
drug use and modern gay male culture. I argue that the relationship between psychoactive drugs
and sexuality has put a contest between pleasure and risk at the center of the previous century of
urban gay culture in the United States, profoundly shaping communities united by the pursuit of
sexual desire and freedom.
Largely overlooked by historians, the use of substances such as cannabis, psychedelics,
cocaine, quaaludes, opioids, poppers, amphetamines, and of course alcohol have had an intense
impact on modern gay life. Beginning with the perspective of midcentury psychiatrists, I first
explore the connections experts drew between substance addiction––however they defined
addiction––and the “addiction” of homosexuality among their incarcerated and clinical patients.
Some blamed these alleged pathologies on deep psychological disfunction that purportedly
created a lust for abnormal pleasures and “escape” from reality and the expectations of
conventional society. Before LSD became associated with the sexual promiscuity of the late
1960s counterculture, some psychiatrists used the potent psychedelic drug to crack open and
attempt to “correct” the psyches of their homosexual patients. During the post-Stonewall gay
‘golden age’ of the disco-fueled 1970s, recreational drug use reached new heights as many gay
v

men linked psychoactive experiences to the vibrant sexual culture forged in America’s
metropolises. Participants in this world found a variety of meanings in their drug use, and while
often acknowledging excesses, many celebrated the energy of a community that prioritized
hedonism. This culture was devastated and transformed by the AIDS epidemic beginning in the
early 1980s, and from the first reports many speculated about the relationship between the illness
and drug use. The response to AIDS generated one movement which sought to end the use of
poppers by gay men, and another which successfully pushed for the acceptance and limited
legalization of medical cannabis, the first major blow to America’s War on Drugs. Finally, the
rising popularity of methamphetamine and other synthetic drugs by the 1990s ushered in new
thrills and challenges debated and studied by gay writers and treatment professionals into the
twenty-first century.
Foregrounding timeless questions of pleasure, experience, community, and care, looking
at gay history with psychoactive goggles permits completely fresh interpretations of the highs
and lows of this contentious past.
vi

Introduction
“It does seem to me, though, that the machine called the ‘gay scene’––the bars, the
discos, the way-out sex––relies too much on drugs to keep it running. I wonder where we––and I
include myself––are heading if we have to enhance our amusements so much to experience those
magic moments,” stated Aldous, a drug user interviewed for a 1983 article in The Body Politic, a
gay Toronto periodical. For decades the confluence of psychoactive drugs, understandings of 1
sexuality, and gay male society have prompted contentious experiences and reactions on the part
of medical experts, state authorities, cultural producers, and drug users themselves.
Interpretations of drug use span arguments concerning etiology, criminal pathology, and
correlation, beliefs that drugs might occasion creativity, mysticism, or liberation in individuals’
sexual lives and identities, and paradigms of addiction and “escapism” that have informed
medical and popular discourse. While numerous commentators have long observed associations
between drugs and sexuality, the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries,
importantly, witnessed the emergence of modern concepts of both the drug addict, drug user, or
alcoholic, and the sexual deviant––in particular, the invert or homosexual. Subsequently, aberrant
sex and different forms of drug use increasingly became linked dimensions of human behavior of
concern to popular culture, the growing state, and emergent intellectual disciplines. Throughout
the twentieth century meanwhile, a growing selection of recreational drugs for illicit
consumption overlapped with the expansion of a pleasure-oriented gay scene headquartered
especially in the largest cities of America and the Western world.
John Allec, “Drugs: Changing Your Mind,” The Body Politic (November 1983), 35. 1
1

My dissertation examines the relationship between pathologized sexual subjects, an
emergent urban gay male culture, and psychoactive drugs, primarily in the United States since
the 1920s. The contested nature of this relationship attracted endless discussion across multiple
cultural and medical contexts, ranging from psychiatric studies to pulp literature, gay memoirs
and activist publications to addiction treatment texts. Do drugs numb the deviant’s suffering? Are
drugs the cause of his deviance? Do they offer an escape from psychological torment? Is the
deviant addicted to perverse acts, just as the drug user is enslaved to his or her chemical vice?
Does dependency on drugs drive users to prostitution? Do drugs trigger latent behavior in an
individual who might otherwise be a “healthy normal”? Can drugs prompt certain exotic or
extreme sexual acts? Do drugs erode the prerogatives of normative masculinity and femininity,
and exorcise religious morality? Could they indeed be a tool to seduce the young into a deviant
lifestyle, or a weapon of rape? Might certain drugs in the right hands rather help to cure and
normalize the sexually aberrant, as many psychiatrists believed of LSD before psychedelics
spread across the 1960s counterculture?
For users, are drugs agents of meaningful spiritual or sexual liberation? Do drugs enhance
sexual pleasure—and at what cost? Can they be a centerpiece of community or cultural
formation? Or do they pose a unique danger to those already imperiled by social stigma? With
the onset of the HIV/AIDS crisis, could certain drugs encourage practices likely to result in viral
contagion? Or could drugs such as cannabis instead represent a potent remedy for the epidemic’s
pain? Ultimately, do the features of this relationship depend upon the drug and context of use?
The new historians of drugs would remind us that these paramount questions of circumstance
and type further depend upon the moment in any specific drug’s cultural trajectory through any
2

given time and place. Certainly, the sensational, powerful, and controversial nature of drugs and 2
sexuality have given rise to boundless speculation about their linkages, infusing heated debates
from the fluorescent halls of psychiatric hospitals to the sparkling disco palaces of the 1970s.
Though unexplored by any dedicated historical analysis, psychoactive drugs have had a vigorous
and intimate influence on the development of gay culture––in the experiences and subjectivities
drugs induce, the expertise, stigma, state repression, and social views drugs and homosexuality
provoke, and the pleasures and dangers drugs constitute for gay men. Over the last century, urban
gay culture and patterns of recreational drug use have sustained a mutually-constitutive
relationship, one which has in part defined a sexual community bound by the pursuit of
collective pleasure while ensnared with contested vectors of risk.
There are a number of often related avenues in which the modern history of sexuality and
history of drugs consequentially intersect. It is possible to examine the experiential aspects of
drug use––once overlooked by historians––to illuminate the sexual lives, thoughts, and attitudes
of subjects and their observers. The work of sexologists and other experts since the late
nineteenth century, further, often compared or correlated those belonging to the emergent
categories of the addict and the sexual deviant. As well, the actual use of drugs such as cannabis,
psychedelics like LSD, cocaine, amphetamines, and poppers (amyl nitrate) in social, sexual,
spiritual, and recreational settings influenced the development of sexual cultures in the postwar
era in ways often little noticed by those on the outside.
Lucas Richert, Strange Trips: Science, Culture, and the Regulation of Drugs (Montreal: 2
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), 1-12.
3

Importantly, substance use shaped the perceptions and actions of participants in sexual
minority cultures, but drugs also played a role in activist debates about “respectability,” while
their illegality could serve as an excuse for police attention and repression. As scholars have
already established, the legal residue of prohibition served to restrict gay nightlife into the late
1960s, but at least as recently as the 1980s, raids on gay bars and bathhouses often included drug
possession charges. Meanwhile, activists and political commentators gay and straight alike 3
borrowed from the rhetoric of sexual self-determination––the right to one’s own body––to
advocate for the legalization of drugs and more honest and accessible education. By the 1970s, a
boisterous gay disco culture emerged in cities like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles,
and the counterculture’s predilection for sexual freedom and drug experimentation morphed into
near full-time pursuits for many gay men who migrated to the nation’s largest cities. The
treatment of substance use and abuse, additionally, has been a frequent occupation of LGBT
activists, organizations, and publications since at least the 1950s, and the appearance of HIV/
AIDS in the 1980s and boom in popularity of stronger methamphetamines by the 1990s
especially impacted a gay culture once accustomed to the halcyon exuberance of the 1970s.
Notes on Sex, Drugs, and History
This dissertation begins with the writings of influential sexologists and psychiatrists
operating in the mid-twentieth century, and then shifts towards the perspectives of gay drug
users, organizations, and cultural forms of later decades. But it is worthwhile to provide a
See this 1981 example from Canada, for instance, Mark Gollom, “Toronto bathhouse raids: 3
How the arrests galvanized the gay community,” CBC News, June 22, 2016.
4

cursory overview of a few relevant sources, beliefs, and events from the early modern and
modern eras that have shaped the deeper history of drug use and sexuality. This grounds my topic
within longer conversations that have fascinated drug users and those who study, police, or treat
them for centuries, but for the most part have escaped any comprehensive scholarly inquiry.
Through time and space, drug use and sexuality represent two of the most intense realms of
experience accessible to many people, so it is perhaps unsurprising that the two have frequently
crossed paths. “Drugs,” it must be noted, is a notoriously knotty term tied up in pliable notions of
the “medicinal” and “recreational” (which are not always mutually-exclusive), the actor
declaring such categories, the period in which such descriptions are made, and all consequent
cultural and legal ramifications. This confusion especially arises in relation to the impact of
drugs on sex and sexuality.
For millennia, the pharmacopeia of many traditional cultures incorporated drugs believed
to have aphrodisiac properties, fascinating many early modern European explorers, traders,
conquerors, and scientists by the sixteenth century. Coffee, opium, and cannabis (at times
referred to as bhang, hashish, or more familiarly marijuana, pot, or weed) were all identified as
having social as well as sexual qualities during this period, though sources varied on the precise
nature of this relationship, some crediting these drugs for increased virility and others for
impotency. King James I of England, in his 1604 Counterblaste to Tobacco, charged that over- 4
indulgence in the psychoactive commodity tobacco was thought to be “effeminate among the
Indians themselves,” and that “to take a custom in any thing that cannot bee left againe, is most
Benjamin Breen, The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (Philadelphia: 4
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 38, 160-5.
5

harmefull to the people of any land,” likening this new addiction to the sin of “mollicies”
(probably meaning masturbation or homosexuality in Scots English) which he thought was
widespread among the fallen Persians and Romans. During the second wave of European 5
imperialism in the nineteenth century, different colonial authorities tied drug use to violence, illhealth, the capacity for work, and sexual deviance, either in Europeans or colonial subjects,
depending upon circumstance. In the United States, meanwhile, the spread of cannabis and 6
opium by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was explicitly linked to insanity, racial
mixing, jazz, and the sexual threat some Asian, black, and Latino men appeared to pose to the
safety and virtue of white women. The late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which also 7
witnessed the emergence of modern sexology and a significant, visible, and urban sexual
minority culture, generated lasting interest in the relationship between intoxication and sexual
cultures among both experts and the general public.
King James was himself known for his male favorites such as George Villiers, the Duke of 5
Buckingham. It is debatable how we should read his use of the word “effeminacy” with this in
mind, and whether or not the Stuart court might have associated the King’s open bisexuality with
effeminacy. James I of England, A Counterblaste to Tobacco, 1604, 28-29, https://
en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Counter-Blaste_to_Tobacco.
French authorities linked hashish to sexual deviance in its North African colonies. David A. 6
Guba, Jr., The Taming of Cannabis: Drugs and Empire in Nineteenth Century France (Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020); In Indochina, the French depended upon opium
revenues, while also participating in international prohibition discussions in the early twentieth
century. Aro Velmet argues that this mandated the introduction of a racial distinction between
opium’s effects on Europeans versus Asians. Aro Velmet, “From Universal Relaxant to Oriental
Vice Race and French Perceptions of Opium Use in the Moment of Global Control,” in
Prohibitions and Psychoactive Substances in History, Culture and Theory, ed. Susannah Wilson
(New York: Routledge, 2019), 33-50.
David T. Courtwright, Dark Paradise: A History of Opium Addiction in America (Cambridge, 7
MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 64-77; Martin A. Lee, Smoke Signals: A Social History of
Marijuana—Medical, Recreational, and Scientific (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 41-43;
see also such lurid headlines as “MEXICAN FAMILY GO INSANE.; Five Said to Have Been
Stricken by Eating Marihuana,” The New York Times, July 6, 1927.
6

The Historiography of Sexuality & Drugs
The work of several historians and theorists of sexuality informs my research. Gayle
Rubin’s highly influential essay “Thinking Sex” charts the recent history of the repression of
“erotic deviants.” She posits a “Sex Hierarchy” of socially acceptable and unacceptable 8
behavior. While Rubin mentions recreational drugs elsewhere in passing, her schemata itself
begs the inclusion of an additional category: the erotic or sexual deviant drug user. This is a
designation made all the more dangerous in combination with any of Rubin’s other criteria for
the “Outer Limits” of behavior, such as homosexuality, public sex, or group sex. That drugs 9
often occupy a valued and intensifying purpose within sexual subcultures, while also increasing
the legal vulnerability of those subcultures, suggests that they are a necessary inclusion deserving
of greater attention. As Rubin explains in her “Afterword to Thinking Sex,” furthermore, the
overlapping nature of moral panics—whether those are related to controversial music, AIDS,
homosexuality, or I would add, drugs––creates a “mutually reinforcing,” “witchy brew,” a
powerful aromatic mixture with a strong cultural currency and political consequences. In her 10
Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the History of Sexuality,” in 8
Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2011), 152-153.
Viagra and alcohol sometimes pose rare exceptions to social sanctions against drug-and-sex 9
combinations. The legality and general social acceptance of medically-prescribed viagra is
clearly explained by its simple purpose, but also by the identity of its intended users, which was
made overt by the blue pill’s initially high, patent-protected cost and the accompanying massive
advertising blitz which almost exclusively featured affluent and elderly heterosexuals. The
history of alcohol is marked by frequent questioning of the legitimacy of drink in sexual life,
such as by the temperance movement of the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries and the
Me Too movement of the 2010s. For a dedicated treatment of alcohol, see Michele Elaine
Morales, “Persistent Pathologies: The Odd Coupling of Alcoholism and Homosexuality in the
Discourse of Twentieth Century Science” (Ph.D. diss, University of Michigan, American
Culture, 2006).
Rubin, “Afterward to “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the History of Sexuality,”” 10
in Deviations, 183.
7

essays, Rubin is a meticulous chronicler of moments of state or social repression related to sex
panics, and the confluence of recreational drugs and illicit sex might present many additional
entries, such as a 2020 Georgia police sting targeting cannabis users on the gay hookup app
Grindr.11
David Halperin’s project of broadening the frameworks and questions asked by historians
of sexuality is also useful in examining the relationship between mentally-powerful drugs and
sexual identity, even as his suggestions are pointed more at premodern scholars. Halperin
suggests that the desire of human subjects for human bodies depends upon “cultural codes” and
“social conventions,” which fluctuate through time and space, shaping constructions of sexual
systems, and, eventually, the very notion of a “sexuality.” There is, for Halperin, “no orgasm 12
without ideology;” expanding on the work of Michel Foucault, Halperin asserts that pleasure has
a politics. Particularly during the 1960s and 70s, many countercultural users of certain drugs,
especially psychedelics, understood their psychoactive experiences as “dissolving” of social
conventions. LSD annihilated the assumptions of earthly society, while sex and party drugs such
as quaaludes, PCP, cocaine, and poppers for some bested the limited disinhibitions granted by
alcohol alone—frequently also consumed alongside these other substances. My dissertation
sometimes inquires about the possible connections, grounded in certain cultural moments,
between the mental and physical experiences of taking drugs and the adoption of certain
sexualities and attitudes, as understood both by experts and drug users themselves. If users or
Patrick Saunders, “Nine men arrested in Grindr sex sting in North Georgia,” Project Q Atlanta, 11
April 10, 2020, https://www.projectq.us/nine-men-arrested-in-grindr-sex-sting-in-north-georgia/.
David Halperin, “Historicizing the Subject of Desire,” in How to do the History of 12
Homosexuality (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 102-103.
8

their observers believe drugs alter “cultural codes” and “social conventions,” then how do drugs
alter sexual systems?
Regina Kunzel, in Criminal Intimacy, argues that prisons, with their ascribed “situational
homosexuality,” represented a vast sphere of American life which appeared incredibly resistant
to the supposedly unstoppable trend towards the linear homosexual-heterosexual binary that took
hold by the mid-twentieth century. In expert texts and popular culture, prison was envisioned as 13
a space in which the “normal” could be more easily seduced into deviant practices, sometimes
justifying the containment of known perverts into special wards. It is my contention that the 14
physical and mental spaces of drug use have sometimes been constituted as another setting of
such sexual turmoil. Perhaps this is another “place” capable of overwhelming and confounding
orderly constructions of a fixed and normative human sexuality, prompting cultural alarms and
contributing to harsher regimes of sexual and psychoactive control. If many activists and
scholars have for strategic reasons neglected the “mad” or unwell among LGBT ranks over the
last few decades, as Kunzel suggests in the American Quarterly, then perhaps the drug-user has
similarly been neglected. It is not just punitive experts and the state that identify forms of 15
legitimate behavior and legal rights for the citizenry; activists and sympathetic scholars too play
a role in drawing categorical boundaries, with their inclusions and exclusions of worthy subjects.
Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American 13
Sexuality (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 2, 8.
Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy, 61. 14
Regina Kunzel, “Queer History, Mad History, and the Politics of Health,” American Quarterly, 15
Vol. 69, No. 2 (June 2017): 315-319; Kunzel elaborates upon these ideas in In the Shadow of
Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2024).
9

The influential scholarship of historians such as George Chauncey and Jennifer Terry,
foundational to gay and lesbian history, is indispensable to any examination of the interplay of
medical and social discourses and settings which created our modern sexual world. Terry 16
focuses especially on late nineteenth and twentieth century medical experts who occupied
themselves with debates concerning the role of the body or the development of a person’s
psychology in giving rise to homosexuality, thereby offering routes to sympathy or a possible
“cure.” Yet drugs and questions of psychoactivity, with the occasional exception of alcohol, 17
barely surface around the edges of Terry's An American Obsession and Chauncey's Gay New
York, never quite attracting much treatment from historians of sexuality at a time in which the
history of drugs remained an even more marginal field. New York nightlife, however, was
saturated with substance use, and that would only grow and diversify during the postwar era after
Chauncey’s timeframe. Some of the American doctors and psychiatrists referenced in Terry’s
book, further, also noted and theorized the drug use of their deviant subjects in their medical and
popular texts. As Terry and other scholars note, it was in part the captive population of
incarcerated research subjects that encouraged the association early sexologists formulated
between aberrant sexual activity and other types of crime. This was often elaborated through
theories of degeneration or civilizational decadence.
While I am most in debt to the incredibly innovative contemporary set of drug historians,
some aspects of my thought also borrow from or respond to the deeper historiography of drugs
Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern 16
Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999); George Chauncey, Gay New York:
Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic
Books, 1994).
Terry, An American Obsession, 41. 17
10

and alcohol. Historians such as Peter Mancall have long established the powerful and multivalent
role of alcohol in pivotal historical processes such as colonialism in North America, where
Mancall explores the relationship of alcohol to Native Americans, including their interpretations
of its intoxicating properties and attempts to manage problematic drinking. With some notable 18
exceptions, such as Alfred McCoy and David Musto, academic historians tended to leave drugs
other than alcohol to popular historians and other fields in the social sciences, which have
generally taken a solely criminological approach, until the 2000s. 19
Perhaps most of all, David T. Courtwright’s work was pivotal in establishing the vast
imperial, geopolitical, social, and economic dimensions of the history of drugs. The 20
commercial networks, slave economies, and imperial systems that emerged globally from the late
fifteenth to nineteenth centuries were largely based on and stimulated by psychoactive
commodities such as coffee, opium, tobacco, tea, and rum, and so the significance of drugs to
world history is undeniably enormous. Even as Courtwright demonstrated beyond any doubt the
value of studying drug history, however, he was largely dismissive of the idea that drug use
might have some generative role in human experience or culture beyond caricatures resembling
Peter Mancall, Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell 18
University Press, 1997).
As a graduate student, McCoy traversed war-torn Southeast Asia to prove the utility of drugs 19
during the Cold War, including the strategic role of heroin and cocaine for the CIA and its
regional anti-communist allies. Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the
Global Drug Trade (Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books, 2003) (originally published as The
Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York: Harper & Row, 1972)); David F. Musto, The
American Disease: Origins of Narcotics Control (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973).
Courtwright briefly surveys some of the previous literature in Forces of Habit. David T. 20
Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2001), 211-213; Courtwright, Dark Paradise. An earlier popular
history is Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and
Intoxicants, trans. David Jacobson (New York: Pantheon, 1993).
11

1990s PSA ads. In Forces of Habit, for example, Courtwright condemns experimenters with
drugs as “thrill-seeking sociopaths” in contrast to “those with strong superegos and religious
scruples,” who Courtwright believes are more likely to remain abstinent and pure. Spiritual users
of intoxicants, for Courtwright, are fooled by “chemical idols,” and hopelessly removed from
“true mystical experience.” Presumably this access to “truth” belongs to sober Mormons but 21
not to Amazonian practitioners of millennia-old plant shamanism.
Such stern judgments of drug users’ subjectivities only recycles centuries of shallow
prejudice, echoing the attitudes of anti-drug warriors from Hernan Cortes to Nancy Reagan. It
also results in myopic inquiry—it makes little sense for scholars to reject the worthiness or
importance of entire modes of human experience and culture that exist outside of sanctioned
mental states. Within the broader world of drug history, a new generation of historians casts
away some of the limitations of earlier work, taking a refreshing interest in drug users and
cultures beyond the lenses of addiction, politics, and law alone. Historian Benjamin Breen, for
example, reconstructs the beginnings of the early modern drug trade, and European attempts to
locate, ingest, and understand psychoactive drugs across empire, in a manner that does not
trivialize or denigrate the perspectives and productivity of users. While modern science claims 22
the high ground of objectivity by attempting to strike the greatest distance possible between
researchers and the phenomena they are studying, early modern scientists, doctors, and traders
frequently indulged in self-experimentation, at times even seeing such behavior as a mark of
Courtwright, Forces of Habit, 96, 169. 21
Breen devotes an entire chapter to the actual feeling of intoxication, as interpreted by the 22
seventeenth and eighteenth century mind, within Europe and its imperial realms. Breen, The Age
of Intoxication, 123-151.
12

authentic knowledge. Their interpretations of drug experiences, shaped by and shaping their own
cultural contexts, had pronounced effects on imperial structures, intellectual endeavor, and
scientific pursuits.
Analyses of drugs can thus take a variety of approaches, from geopolitics and studies of
organized crime to less-attended arenas, such as the actual altered states of users and the systems
of thought and drug cultures that emerge from these subjectivities. Questions about crime, law,
addiction, and state action, of course, will deservedly remain central to many works of drug
scholarship for years to come, and do arise in this dissertation. The work of many young drug
scholars is still well-grounded in this domain––in Taming Cannabis, for example, David A. Guba
Jr. demonstrates the utility of drug control in the exercise of colonial power and the centrality of
hashish in the construction of race and knowledge in nineteenth-century France’s Mediterranean
empire. Across periods, drug scholars consistently find drug control and moral panic associated 23
with impoverished, oppressed, or stigmatized populations, though very little has been written
about on this front with regard to sexual minorities.
Of great interest to modern Americanists, the War on Drugs, spearheaded by the US and
other governments and international organizations, has decimated communities often along race
and class lines in the US and abroad since 1973 (or earlier, depending on how we mark its
23 David A. Guba, Jr., The Taming of Cannabis: Drugs and Empire in Nineteenth Century France
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020). Other current scholars worth mentioning
here are Norman Ohler and Edward B. Westermann, who have explored the powerful impacts
and meanings of alcohol, amphetamines, and other drugs in the Blitzkrieg, Holocaust, and
unravelling of Nazi Germany. If drug control can be an agent of imperialism or conquest, then
the use of alcohol and drugs can also be utilized in war and to help commit atrocities. Norman
Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany (Boston, MA: HMH Books, 2018); Edward B.
Westermann, Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2021).
13

origins). This crusade has been waged by state agents and paramilitaries from rural Humboldt
County and South Central Los Angeles to the fumigated coca-growing highlands of Colombia.
Policies related to the War on Drugs helped to catalyze greater rates of incarceration in the US by
the late twentieth century, which many scholars have explored in depth. Looking to the final 24
decades of the twentieth century, historians such as Donna Murch, Emily Dufton, Lucas Richert,
and David Farber find particular insight in the motivations and culture of drug dealers and users
as well as the activist responses to drugs like cannabis and crack cocaine and the harsh state
response these substances variously incurred. While crack cocaine’s cultural reputation has 25
remained fixed in the ghetto and its attendant violent crime, perceptions of cannabis and its
management have been remarkably erratic across US history, as Dufton and Richert both
indicate. Cannabis shares this turbulent property with psychedelics.
Psychedelic drugs have received less scholarly treatment than “hard” drugs such as
cocaine and heroin, perhaps given their far smaller footprint on the global narcotics trade and
lack of geopolitical and economic heft, as well as the fact that they are rarely framed as
Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass 24
Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Heather Ann
Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in
Postwar American History,” The Journal of American History 97.3 (December 2010): 703-734;
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New
York: The New Press, 2010); James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in
Black America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017).
Donna Murch, “Crack in Los Angeles: Crisis, Militarization, and Black Response to the Late 25
Twentieth-Century War on Drugs,” The Journal of American History 102.1 (June 2015):
162-173; David Farber, Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Emily Dufton: Grass Roots: The Rise and
Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (New York: Basic Books, 2017); Richert, Strange Trips.
14

addictive. This shortage has been eased in recent years, however, with a number of works 26
focusing especially on the first era of psychedelic research (1950s-mid-1960s) and to a lesser
extent, their wider cultural reception. These avenues of inquiry are linked: scholars including 27
Erika Dyck and Matthew Oram question whether the end of legal psychedelic therapy and
research by the late 1960s had more to do with the broader, media driven moral panic
surrounding the counterculture, or some failure to reach scientific standards of legitimate
evidence. Other scholars, such as Stephen Siff and Ido Hartogsohn, evaluate the moral panic of
the late 1960s, while also examining the interpretations of the psychedelic drug experience
according to users and non-users––the psychiatrist, the mystic, the journalist, and the hippy on
the street. David Farber, moreover, asks that scholars of the 1960s-70s counterculture better 28
Curiously, some large-scale LSD manufactures, such as Orange County’s hippie biker gang the 26
Brotherhood of Eternal Love, cared more about spreading around as much acid as possible than
profit margins, preferring the mantle of psychedelic evangelists to drug dealers. Nick Schou,
Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and
Acid to the World (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2010).
Erika Dyck, Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins 27
University Press, 2008); Mike Jay, Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019); Matthew Oram, The Trials of Psychedelic Therapy:
LSD Psychotherapy in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2018). Popular histories of
drugs useful for this project include Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The Complete
Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond (New York: Grove Press, 1985); Jay
Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and The American Dream (New York: Grove Press, 1987);
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, A Radical
History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution (New York: Bantam Books, 1993); Andy
Letcher, Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom (New York: Ecco Press, 2008).
Stephen Siff, Acid Hype: American News Media and the Psychedelic Experience (Champagne, 28
IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015); Ido Hartogsohn, American Trip: Set, Setting, and the
Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020).
15

reckon with acid––and by extension, other once drugs once neglected by historians––rather than
just seeing it as one more colorful but trivial artifact of the 1960s, like tie-dye shirts.29
While it is certainly true that the consumption habits and broader lives of drug users can
be strongly shaped by legal regimes, concepts of addiction, and networks of drug production and
supply, there remains considerable uncharted territory for scholars of drugs who also look
elsewhere. Whether conducted by down-and-out users on the streets, partiers getting buzzed for a
night out, or psychonauts engaging in experimentation on themselves or others, much drug use
takes place far beyond the purview of institutions and the state. In the longer term, users’
experiences with drugs do not just replicate patterns of crime and the formation of underground
economies, but can continue in the affective and mental spaces of human thought and
psychology. Following historian Sarah Shortall, I suggest that it is worthwhile to take the drug
experiences of users seriously, as these can shape understandings of the self and identity, as well
as the development of popular subcultures and aesthetic, social, spiritual, sexual, and intellectual
pursuits.30
In part due to the taboo of the subject, the historical scholarship on the history of drugs
that comments on sexuality is incredibly slim, and my dissertation attempts to substantively
combine these previously distinct bodies of work for the first time. Outside of history, cultural
studies theorist Kane Race and French studies scholar Oliver Davis have made some relevant
contributions in their fields which are very useful here. In Pleasure Consuming Medicine and
David Farber, “Review Essay: Acid matters: LSD and the counterculture,” The Sixties 10.2, 29
247-249 (May 2017).
Sarah Shortall, “Psychedelic Drugs and the Problem of Experience,” Past & Present 222.9 30
(2014).
16

several related articles, Race interrogates the place of medicinal (particularly AIDS) and
recreational drugs in the 1990s-2000s gay community, mainly in Australia, from a variety of
perspectives. Race’s work suggests that we ought to question the presumption that most or all
drug use must always be an indicator of some “deeper” trauma, particularly for sexual minorities,
while arguing for a more capacious space for valid forms of pleasure. While framing drug use, 31
the pursuit of bodily pleasure, and addiction as a response to or consequence of trauma can
sometimes be a useful approach for treatment therapists, this explanation is frequently
overgeneralized, and has its origins in the reeds of mid-twentieth century psychiatry, as I show in
chapter one. Carried somewhat further than he ventures, some of Race’s conclusions also prompt
a new understanding of the political mechanics behind the War on Drugs, neoliberalism, and
social conservatism in the late twentieth-century United States. Recreational drugs posed a 32
challenge for the Nixon-Reagan political coalition that celebrated an ethos of the deregulated
market and consumer choice but was nonetheless increasingly reliant upon religious
conservatives for electoral support. The solution to this contradiction was to selectively target
drugs associated with political and sexual dissidents as well as racial minorities, establishing a
token of concern for the debauched excesses of an otherwise “amoral” capitalism.
Oliver Davis, in a chapter from the collection After Foucault, identifies constructions of
“care and meaning-making” developed by Michel Foucault and his circle of gay friends as they
Kane Race, Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs (Durham & London: 31
Duke University Press, 2009), 168.
Race, Pleasure Consuming Medicine, 60. 32
17

engaged in drug use in Paris. In another essay in the collection Prohibitions and Psychoactive 33
Substances in History, Culture and Theory, Davis identifies the “coercive and pastoral”
assumptions underlying cultural depictions of chemsex, a practice among a subculture of gay
men in which crystal methamphetamine and GHB (gamma-hydroxybutyrate) are used to fuel
lengthy, usually group sexual encounters. Davis then casts doubt upon the usefulness of recent
British drug legislation in the policing of chemsex and the use of novel synthetic recreational
drugs, and its presumptions about the “self-securing neoliberal subject,” urging the consideration
of alternative, less-hierarchical methods of managing drug use and its possible consequences.34
While the chief task at hand is not to offer policy recommendations, in chapter five I suggest that
organic, multi-causal stigma has been effective in reducing the appeal and use of meth.
Still within the wider purview of my subject, historian Mara L. Keire and literary critic
Susan Zieger make notable contributions to the study of drugs and gender in the late nineteenth
century United States and Britain, prompting an approach to drugs which emphasizes other
forms of deviant gender or sexual expression, their control, and their portrayal. Keire shows how
the quintessential late nineteenth century addict became female (predating “heroin chic”) as
morphine was prescribed for the pain and discomfort of “female troubles,” and addiction
subsequently became associated with contemporary beliefs about feminine weakness. Women
were thought to be imperiled by the dangers and immorality of urban life, as many other
Oliver Davis, “Foucault and the Queer Pharmatopia,” in After Foucault: Culture, Theory, and 33
Criticism in the 21st Century, ed. Lisa Downing (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2018), 170-184.
Oliver Davis, “Prison Everywhere? The Imbrication of Coercive and Pastoral Governance in 34
the Regulation of “Chemsex” and New Psychoactive Substances,” in Prohibitions and
Psychoactive Substances in History, Culture and Theory, ed. Susannah Wilson (New York:
Routledge, 2019), 209-234.
18

historians have established. Female prostitutes were especially susceptible to one of city life’s
other evils, addiction, because of their need to tolerate the physical demands of their trade, and
because of the machinations of dreaded “white-slavers” lurking in alleys and Chinese opium
dens. Ziegler, meanwhile, points to a link forged between gender and addiction as Victorian 35
medical and literary texts rendered morphine injection by hypodermic needle, an innovation of
the time, as a penetrative, feminizing act. She further claims that addiction’s association with 36
the Victorian woman, and doctors’ belief that female addicts were not to be taken seriously,
compromised the credibility of all women. At times, this lent support to the political arguments
deployed to subvert feminist assertions of self-representation and demands for suffrage. The 37
nexus of drugs, gender, and sexuality, in other words, can have meaningful consequences in the
larger world, but I argue that it is as important to study the perspectives of experts as it is the
perspectives of users, whose subjectivities influence their own mental and cultural lives.
The “ambiguous experiential space” of drug users, as Shortall writes, is a worthy avenue
of scholarly inquiry, because it is also inseparable from the incredibly diverse and shifting
cultural meanings which drugs can be invested with by their users and those who observe, study,
treat, and discipline them. My dissertation, with its focus on gay men, will encompass sources 38
generated from all vantages on drug use, and their interplay. I am as interested in the meanings of
drug use for users themselves as I am in the theories conceived by experts and depictions of
Mara L. Keire, “The Gendering of Addiction in the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of 35
Social History Vol. 31, No. 4 (Summer, 1998): 809-822.
Susan Zieger, Inventing the Addict: Drugs, Race, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century British 36
and American Literature (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 127-154.
Zieger, Inventing the Addict, 148-154. 37
Shortall, “Psychedelic Drugs and the Problem of Experience,” 189. 38
19

drugs in popular culture––the relationships between elite and popular discourses, in other words.
The nature of expert versus user accounts of drug use and sexuality necessitates a
methodological dexterity highly conscious of context and open to speculative but reasoned
interpretation. Related and equally pertinent are the political, social, and medical debates that
emerged about the legitimacy of drugs, their benefits, their control, and their consequences.
Particularly during the twentieth century, with its explosion of sexual subcultures, access to
incredibly powerful substances, and copious cultural productions, psychoactive drugs have been
a conduit for shifting attitudes about sexuality. This is the case for no set more than urban gay
men, whose modern history has been marked and mirrored profoundly by the trajectory and
culture of both therapeutic and recreational drug use.
Looking at Gay History Through Psychoactive Goggles
The overall structure of this dissertation attempts to place psychoactive drugs throughout
a narrative of modern American gay history that has appeared from the last three decades of
historical scholarship. This narrative finds milestones relevant for this topic in such debates,
processes, and events as the midcentury psychiatric pathologization and treatment of
homosexuality; the emergence of a coherent, urban gay culture; the politicization, mobilization,
and social and artistic flourishing of this culture; the outbreak of the HIV/AIDS epidemic; and
finally the virtual restoration of this culture as the epidemic ebbed, alongside the recognition of
new and often related threats—most notably, the popularity of crystal methamphetamine,
probably the most controversial and written-about ‘gay drug’.
20

Chapter one explores the relationship between psychoactive substances such as heroin,
cocaine, and alcohol and sexual deviance as proposed by influential mid-twentieth century
psychiatrists Samuel Kahn, George Henry, and Sandor Rado. Basing their work on the study of
clinical patients as well as the incarcerated, they employed concepts such as addiction and
contagion to describe same-sex desire. Psychoactive substances themselves represented tools of
anesthesia, sublimation, or “escapism” for sexual deviants. Alternatively, substances could
become powerful stimulants for their depraved lusts and dramatic lives “on the stage.”
Ultimately, drug users and sexual deviants—and those who were both—were a problem made
worse by the indulgence and moral laxity enabled by urban modernity, and they required expert
study and intervention. Experts such as Kahn, Henry, and Rado participated in a larger process
which defined drug use and homosexuality as invalid sources of pleasure, and heterosexual
pleasure as serving the larger purpose of marital and national harmony.
Picking up from the psychiatric theories established by their colleagues and predecessors,
chapter two explores the application of LSD or “acid”—initially hypothesized as a mental
panacea––to “correct” homosexual men and women, ideally converting them into healthy
heterosexuals. A procedure likely executed upon hundreds or thousands of patients in the 1950s
and 1960s, a handful of published medical articles reveal the principles and procedures of what
we might now call psychedelic conversion therapy, as well as a spectrum of apparent clinical
results. This story suggests the extreme malleability of drugs along lines of the “medical” and the
“recreational,” as well as the rapid shifts in reputation drugs can experience in the eyes of
experts, the state, the general public, and narrower popular subcultures.
21

Strongly influenced by the 1960s counterculture that was so heavily invested in LSD, the
urban gay milieu of the 1970s adopted acid alongside a cornucopia of other drugs—cannabis,
poppers, cocaine, and quaaludes chief among them—during a decade highlighted by hedonism,
disco, and sexual liberation. Using sources such as memoirs and lengthy interviews conducted by
gay writer Eric Rofes, chapter three explores the place of drugs in the lives of gay men during
years often thought of as representing a renaissance of gay politics and culture between
Stonewall and AIDS. While many of these men indicated the centrality of collective sexual and
psychoactive pleasure in the building of community, these accounts also reveal the discernment,
unease, and understanding of risk many men practiced while partying in cities like New York,
Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
The nightmare of AIDS presented a challenge to the conventions around drugs and sex
many men had developed over the previous decade or two. In chapter four I follow two
contrasting responses to the new disease centered on San Francisco-based activists Hank Wilson,
Dennis Peron, and “Brownie” Mary Jane Rathbun. Wilson and his collaborators feared that
“poppers” or amyl nitrate, a chemical inhalant especially popular among gay men, might be a
cause or contributor to the disease, and spent years tracking and sometimes disputing medical
developments as they crusaded against the often quasi-legal drug. Peron and Brownie Mary,
alternatively, were central to the cannabis legalization movement, and while often in conflict
with the law they made great strides towards the acceptance of cannabis as a remedy for AIDS, a
badge of medical legitimacy foundational to the ongoing fight for legal recreational cannabis.
HIV/AIDS thus had a complicated impact on the relationship between gay culture and
drug use, and the epidemic continued to inflect debates about drugs after the development of
22

effective treatments, as chapter five tracks in regard to popular substances like crystal meth,
ketamine, ecstasy/MDMA, and GHB. I especially track the history of amphetamines in their
various forms from their first appearance in the United States and Europe in the 1930s to their
arrival in sexual and artistic milieus of the postwar era. The bulk of the chapter, however, is
devoted to the phenomenon of “Party and Play” or “chemsex,” the use of crystal
methamphetamine or other synthetic drugs during sexual encounters, often in groups organized
on the Internet, which has been prevalent since the 1990s. I also consider the relationship
between synthetic drugs and more recent features of the gay party landscape, such as the multiday circuit party, as well as discussions around addiction, partying, and drugs such as crystal
meth among gay writers and drug treatment professionals.
Scholars of sexuality are forever grappling with ahistorical usage and political trends, so
some final comments on terminology are necessary. I will primarily use the term “gay”
throughout this dissertation as I focus on same-sex desiring men, occasionally in comparison
with lesbians. During most of the period covered, the overwhelming majority of these men
would have been most comfortable with the word “gay,” though I use the standard medical term
“homosexual” when writing about psychiatric perspectives, especially in the first two chapters.
Despite the conventions prevalent in journalism (where it is now commonplace to read strange
descriptors like “LGBTQ man” or “LGBTQ woman”), organizations, and the academy, there is
an ever-increasing gulf between “gay” and “queer” socialization and culture, and has been for
some time. Many gay men and lesbians identify little with queer, while individuals who do
identify with queer tend to see themselves beyond the gender binary or even as asexual, which is
in turn anathema to most gay men and lesbians. I thus see it as appropriate to use “gay,”
23

“lesbian,” “bisexual,” “transgender,” etc. for specific contexts, and use “LGBTQ” only when
referring to organizations that themselves adopted the label. While I initially sought to
incorporate other such groups constituent in this umbrella term, I quickly realized that their
histories were far too distinct and deserving of their own focused treatments.
Drugs, of course, also present terminological challenges. Generally, I use the term
“drugs” in reference to psychoactive (mind-altering) natural or synthetic substances taken for
medical or recreational purposes (often overlapping with sexual or social purposes), and
occasionally, spiritual purposes. Some substances, such as LSD, have at different times been
recognized as having both medical and recreational qualities by experts and users alike, as
chapter two and three reveal. Many drugs are also part of larger categories, or have multiple
names, and I sometimes list other names or define differences within categories where relevant.
Finally, while alcohol is technically also a psychoactive drug, I refer to it separately throughout
due to its completely different legal and cultural history. In recreational settings, it is almost
always in the background and frequently taken alongside illegal drugs.
24

Chapter 1: “Later He May Become a Drug Addict and a Chronic Homosexual”:
Tracing Tangled Pathologies in Midcentury Psychiatry, 1922-1965
In his 1951 book The Homosexual in America, which portrayed homosexuals as a
minority subject to discrimination, Donald Webster Cory asked: “Why is homosexuality so
frequently associated in the public mind with intoxication?” This linkage emerged from 39
powerful and consequential sources, such as Federal Bureau of Narcotics commissioner Harry J.
Anslinger. In his 1953 denunciation of illegal drugs, The Traffic in Narcotics, Anslinger
presented some of the most frightening consequences of marijuana intoxication. Aggressive and
mentally unstable users would likely become violent, Anslinger charged, and an overall collapse
of “will power,” “restraints,” and “moral barricades” would inevitably lead to “debauchery and
sexuality.” Someone high on marijuana or other drugs may be conscious of their actions, but they
would nevertheless be unable to resist pursuing their strongest desires, however repressed these
might be while sober. In the paranoid, McCarthyite climate of the early 1950s, the precise 40
meaning of these words would have been clear for many readers: they signified the potential for
promiscuity or rape, certainly––especially the specter of rape committed by black or Asian men
in jazz clubs or opium dens, a fear that had already connected psychoactive drug use to sexual
deviance for decades. But Anslinger’s words would also have aroused anxieties around
homosexuality, a phenomenon more and more Americans were becoming fixated upon as lurid
stories of sex crimes filled newspapers and pulp novels, the sexology of Alfred Kinsey appeared
Donald Webster Cory (pseudonym of Edward Sagarin), The Homosexual in America: A 39
Subjective Approach (New York: Greenberg, 1951), 93.
Harry J. Anslinger and William F Tompkins, The Traffic in Narcotics (New York: Funk & 40
Wagnalls, Company, 1953), 21-22.
25

in monographs and magazines, and the voices of gay people such as Cory entered popular
discourse.
Few other officials or public figures were as influential as Anslinger in shaping American
and indeed global drug policy, despite his tendency to exaggerate wildly about the effects of
some drugs and clash with some other experts, such as the authors of the 1944 LaGuardia
Committee’s fairly relaxed report about marijuana use in New York City. But his comments 41
about marijuana and debauched sexuality were not simply pulled from an angry haze. Indeed, the
construction of the “addict” and the “sexual deviant”—two criminalized categories that attracted
significant analysis and scrutiny by the late nineteenth century––had much in common. Building
on the ideas of earlier experts and intellectuals in Europe, American researchers of sex and crime
in disciplines such as psychiatry debated the roles of heredity and the environment in generating
deviant behavior. Observing patterns of drug and alcohol use in the lives of their patients and
incarcerated subjects in clinics, hospitals, and prisons, some researchers sought to explain the
relationship between substance use and deviant sexual activity. This association could constitute
a “volitional etiology” in literary critic Benjamin Kahan’s words; that is, the will of the user
created the conditions in which substances contributed to deviant sexuality. But this “will” was
tainted. The process of substance addiction occurred somewhere between “choice and
compulsion.” The tug-of-war between choice and compulsion, of course, also correlated with 42
Mayor's Committee on Marihuana, by the New York Academy of Medicine, The LaGuardia 41
Committee Report: The Marihuana Problem in the City of New York (1944).
Benjamin Kahan, The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of 42
Sexuality (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2019), 102.
26

contemporaneous debates about the volitional, environmental, or psychogenic causes of
homosexuality.
In this chapter I chart some of the ways in which influential American psychiatrists and
other experts in the mid-twentieth century linked homosexuality and sexual deviance generally to
the use of drugs, including alcohol and tobacco. This process of knowledge production,
pathological descriptions and theorizations, and proposals for new treatments took place during a
key phase in the history of American psychiatry. The rise of Nazism and World War Two
catalyzed the flow of European psychoanalytic ideas as well as analysts themselves to the United
Kingdom and the United States, and some English-speaking psychiatrists had earlier trained with
the European leaders of their discipline, such as Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham. Between the
early and middle years of the twentieth century, these various developments materialized in
therapy for ‘shell shocked’ veterans, the popularization of psychoanalysis for the ailments of
middle class America, cultural representations of the esteemed, eccentric, and probably accented
therapist, and the further medicalization of proscribed social ailments such as addiction and
homosexuality. Many of these innovations were enabled by a more prosperous, educated 43
population, the strengthening of state, medical, and academic institutions, and greater confidence
in the potentials of science, medicine, and technology.
For early American psychiatry and the first influence of European theorists, see Elizabeth 43
Lunbeck, The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). For the later period, see several essays
describing the impact of a group of “brilliant refugee analysts” in John C Nemiah and Roy W.
Menninger, eds., American Psychiatry After World War II (1944-1994) (Washington, D.C.:
American Psychiatric Publishing, 2008), 73-202.
27

Influential psychoanalysts like Freud and Abraham occasionally drew connections
between “unconscious” homosexuality and alcoholism or drug addiction, but their successors in
places such as the United States had more to say. This chapter does not aim to be a complete
analysis of psychiatric interest in the convergence of drug use and homosexuality. Rather, I focus
most of all on the work of psychiatrist Samuel Kahn, who trained with Freud and perhaps wrote
more about the relationship between these social ills than any other expert of his day. His
research drew upon dozens of imprisoned homosexual “addicts” who were––apparently––
extremely forthcoming about their lives and feelings. Alongside Kahn, I also consider the ideas
of other mid-twentieth century psychiatrists such as Sandor Rado, a Hungarian-turned-American
psychoanalyst and key hinge figure between Freudian abstraction and modern concepts of
chemistry and biology, as well as George W. Henry, who was responsible for some of the most
influential research on homosexuality in the United States before Alfred Kinsey, and sought a
more compassionate stance than most of his colleagues. What follows may not be
comprehensive, but it is representative of broader currents of expert discourse during the mid28

twentieth century, a period in which analyzing and preventing sexual deviance was a principle
aim of the psychiatric discipline.44
I argue that the pathologization of the categories “homosexual” and drug user or “addict”
was for these influential theorists tangled, to borrow historian Kevin Mumford’s word, in ways
that could be deeply paradoxical, twisting vectors of cause and effect between these indecent and
evidently contagious conditions. Experts’ assessments of drug use sometimes lacked a genuine 45
consideration of health or harm for the individual, and frequently little heed was paid to the
recurrence or type of drug use. In Kahn’s study, for instance, some of the incarcerated
homosexual “addicts” seem merely to have been functional recreational drug users employed in
New York City’s theaters. There was thus more at play here. The study and stigmatization of
drug users or addicts, as well as sexual deviants or homosexuals, took place amidst a broader,
contested process which saw a clearer designation of valid and invalid sources of pleasure.
Under the guise of scientific objectivity, these classifications of pleasure invoked ephemeral
For Freud and Abraham, see Ralph M. Crowley, “Psychoanalytic Literature on Drug Addiction 44
and Alcoholism,” The Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. 26 (January 1939): 39-51. Other relevant
examples of the period’s psychiatric and related medical literature not discussed here, some of
which are limited to alcohol, include Solomon Machover et al., “Clinical and Objective Studies
of Personality Variables in Alcoholism: III. An Objective Study of Homosexuality in
Alcoholism,” The Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, Vol. 20 (September 1959): 528-542;
Robert M Riggall, “Homosexuality and Alcoholism,” The Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. 10
(January, 1923): 157-170; Edward Glover, “On the Aetiology of Drug-Addiction,” The
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, Vol. 13 (January 1932): 298-328. Abraham reviled the
thought of men showing physical affection while drunk, believing this was a mark of
unconscious pathology, see Irving Bieber, Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study (New York:
Basic Books, 1962), 256.
In his dissection of the controversy around the 1965 Moynihan Report, Mumford excavates the 45
potent specter of male homosexuality––made subtle in the report out of political necessity––in
anxieties surrounding the degradation of black masculinity. Kevin J. Mumford, “Untangling
Pathology: The Moynihan Report and Homosexual Damage, 1965-1975,” Journal of Policy
History, Vol. 24, No.1 (2012), 53-73.
29

notions of national and familial strength, judgments about employment, theories of the psyche
and social containment, worries about the corruption threatened by urban life, and deeply-rooted
traditional and medical concepts of morality. The “tangled” pathologization of substance
addiction and sexual deviance contributed to the depiction of homosexuals as contagious
seducers, disturbed hedonists, and slippery escapists fleeing from both reality and social
expectations.
Declarations made by experts and public officials about what represents legitimate
pleasure have long persisted in elite discourse, and have had broader implications for popular
culture and common paradigms of interpreting behavior. This shared heritage of pathology,
above all else, solidified the notion that illicit drug use and homosexuality were both rooted in
deep social or personal dysfunction, and could be tragically mutually-reinforcing. That is to say,
drug use might encourage homosexuality, while homosexuality might encourage drug use. As I
show in other chapters of this dissertation, the belief that substance use in gay people must
categorically derive from pathology, trauma, escapism, or some other negative aspect of the
psyche, can be mundane and restrictive. This attitude, indeed, can bolster repressive and
dangerous legal frameworks, imperil our ability to encourage healthier, informed, and voluntary
relationships with psychoactive substances, and detract from attempts to assist those who
encounter genuine substance-related problems.
As historian Jennifer Terry observes in An American Obsession, a central component of
the relationship between American society, expertise, and homosexuality has been the clash
between Puritanism––as that term is colloquially understood––and hedonism. Austerity, hard
work, and self-denial have been lauded, in other words, even as the pursuit of pleasure, usually
30

with a strong consumerist imperative, has helped facilitate the expansion of capitalism and urban
life. This contradiction has given rise to no shortage of tensions key to understanding attitudes 46
and policies towards gender, sexuality, and psychoactive substances. One motivation of the
temperance movement, for example, was the belief that alcohol suppressed the working class’s
ability to ascend economically or organize politically, while middle class reformers, experts, and
occasionally working class radicals argued that alcohol caused moral degeneration and poverty.
Meanwhile, early sexologists and other commentators in Europe and the United States, such as
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, echoed age-old apprehensions that alcohol’s special danger lay in its
ability to “increase libido” while weakening “moral resistance.” Drinkers pushed back with the 47
conviction that alcohol rewarded the day’s labors, and grounded a vital social space. Some
business interests believed that alcohol inhibited worker productivity, while others were heavily
invested in the sale of alcohol and the commercial spaces it permeated. 48
At the same time that the nationwide victory of American prohibitionists was for the
moment achieved in 1920, at least in law, researchers and reformers interested in human
sexuality were similarly engaged with questions of Puritanism and pleasure, self-discipline and
hedonism, that had captivated medical experts and an interested public for centuries. At least
since the early modern period, English commentators emphasized the importance of physical
pleasure during the act of sex for successful reproduction, while at the same time insisting upon
Terry, An American Obsession, 9-10. 46
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 1886 (New York: Special Books, Inc., 47
1965), 40.
Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 (New York: W. W. 48
Norton & Company, 1987), 62-63, 105-106, 223-234; Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What
We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), 60.
31

moderation. The political mandate and discourse surrounding the “pursuit of happiness” in the
independent United States animated those who urged the validity of pleasure, perhaps even in a
format separate from procreation. But by the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, popular 49
and medical Enlightenment and Victorian attitudes on either side of the Atlantic often began to
see sexual pleasure as questionable or non-existent in women, particularly those who were white
and upper or middle class. These most respectable women should be maternal, even as they were
simultaneously portrayed as overly-emotional and therefore irrational. For men, on the other
hand, sexual pleasure existed and could be responsibly sought, but it was also potentially bestial
and dangerous, and required taming by sensible mothers, dutiful wives, and the institutions of a
superior civilization. 50
By the 1920s, progressive sex researchers framed a normative and healthy sexuality as
the bulwark of a strong nation, while also acknowledging the value of sexual pleasure for both
genders, so long as it remained linked to reproduction and marital happiness, and therefore
“marital hygiene” and the integrity of the family. Pleasure was acceptable in men and women 51
both, but only if it was sanctioned by marriage and catalyzed reproduction that perpetuated ideal
hereditary features, which were now far more tangible and obtainable, eugenicists believed, than
was earlier possible. Medical experts thus formalized a process that would designate what 52
49 John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 5, 19, 40.
There were exceptions to this generalization, of course; some marital advice texts instructed 50
men on how to enliven the pleasure of their wives. D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters,
41, 71.
Terry, An American Obsession, 121. 51
Terry, An American Obsession, 217. 52
32

could be considered legitimate or illegitimate sources and objectives of pleasure, linking this
classification to the overall health of the public.
This public was imperiled by purportedly hereditary tendencies towards such maladies as
homosexuality, alcoholism, and drug addiction, which represented illegitimate pursuits of
pleasure. Opioids and cocaine were often accepted within the pharmacopeia of nineteenth 53
century America, and frequently leaked out of the hands of sober doctors without much
blowback before the introduction of state, national and international controls. But as
homosexuality garnered more official attention by the 1920s and 1930s, so too did these drugs in
recreational form. And so it is unsurprising that some psychiatrists and other experts took a
special interest in the use of pleasure-inducing substances, particularly by those whose sexual
proclivities deviated from the dictates of the heterosexual family. The legitimacy of bodily
pleasure depended upon its relationship with grander, ideological purposes, rather than being a
value in itself. For virtually all experts, bodily and erotic pleasure was one more abstraction in
need of “containment" through marriage well into the post-World War Two era, the domestic
ideal which could rather disappoint those who bought into it, as historian Elaine Tyler May
notes. Homosexuality as well as the use of many psychoactive substances outside of medicine 54
clearly fell outside of these bounds, even as the prohibition of alcohol was at an end and some
There appears, however, to have been some debate about the hereditary linkage of these traits; 53
in Sexual Inversion (1897) for instance, Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds indicate
that while many of the “inverts” whose families they studied also included alcoholics, it was
debatable whether they did more so than the population at large, see Havelock Ellis and John
Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion: A Critical Edition (New York Palgrave Macmillan,
2008), 182.
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: 54
Basic Books, 2017), 120-121.
33

researchers and medical practitioners shifted from religious and morally oriented worldviews
towards a more sympathetic understanding of drug users and sexual deviants as sick people who
needed help.
Don’t You Just Love the Theater? Assessing the Bacillus Homosexualis
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, prisons across the United States acted as
laboratories in which experts could construct and study criminal or deviant types, a phenomenon
which had earlier began in Europe in modernized, “complete and austere” or “total” institutions,
as Michel Foucault and sociologist Erving Goffman pointed out long ago. Elaborating on their 55
work, contemporary historians such as Regina Kunzel and Nancy Campbell convincingly argue
that penal institutions became central to debates about the origin and nature of homosexuality
and addiction. At some prisons, officials devised similar techniques to control both deviant 56
types, for their own good and to prevent contagion across the general incarcerated population. As
social diseases, homosexuality and drug addiction were pathologies that might spread through
social contact. Conveniently, containment further enabled easier study, permitting experts the
ability to monitor and treat concentrated populations. By the 1920s and 1930s, such concerns
justified the establishment of dedicated facilities, such as Lexington, Kentucky’s Narcotic Farm,
as well as special wards within larger institutions, such as the South Annex of the New York City
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 55
1995); Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Condition of the Social Situation of Mental
Patients and Other Inmates (New York: Anchor Books, 1961).
At the same time, as Kunzel argues, observations of same-sex behavior in prisons called into 56
question hardening mid-twentieth century views of the binary and stable nature of homosexuality
and heterosexuality. Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy, 5-6; Campbell, Discovering Addiction, 2.
34

Jail on Blackwell’s Island (later known as Welfare Island and then Roosevelt Island) in the East
River. Prisoners incarcerated in these spaces became the raw material which experts exploited to
generate some of the early research on homosexuality as well as addiction.
George Chauncey and Kunzel show how the American prison system presented an
opportunity for the study of gay and lesbian subcultures and “subtypes” in the general prison
population as well as in wards reserved specifically for the most flagrantly effeminate of sexual
deviants. Among men, the chief subtypes were the dominant, usually older “wolf” and the
subordinate, usually younger “punk,” which also existed in all male-settings such as the navy as
well as more disreputable settings, such as hobo camps. Either of these types could be spared
segregation in the "pansy ward” if deemed suitably masculine. Similar types were to be found
among women: the older, more manly “butch,” and the younger, more stereotypically womanly
“femme.” The wolf and butch were portrayed as both predator and protector, while the punk and
femme were usually weak and passive but could also learn to manipulate the stronger sexual
desire of the wolf or butch. The youth of the punk and transactional nature of the relationship 57
could, in the wolf’s mind, reassure a sense of normal manhood, for only a true “queer” or
“pansy” would present as effeminate or seek out a partner of similar age and status. The notion
of the “wolf,” on the other hand, also suggested that there were “true” homosexuals responsible
for converting the innocent to a convenient homosexuality in an all-male environment. These
subtypes influenced theorizing about the relationship between drug use and homosexuality in
institutional and urban cultures increasingly legible to experts and law enforcement. For just as
the wolf might bestow affection and treats such as candy and money upon the punk in a highly
Chauncey, Gay New York, 88-95; Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy, 64-67, 134-135. 57
35

limited environment such as a prison, so he might also offer cigarettes, alcohol, or illegal
drugs––gifts as well as catalysts of seduction. Cunning experts, too, offered cigarettes to
cooperative prisoners.
Samuel Kahn, a student of Freud, was one such expert charged with studying contained
populations of homosexual prisoners, many of whom he considered drug addicted, in the South
Annex of the New York City Jail on Blackwell’s Island. In the South Annex, homosexual
prisoners were separated from other prisoners and given distinct tasks, such as laundry, and
placed in segregated farm labor gangs. Among them, Kahn identified many “types,” such as the 58
punk or “punkie,” the “bulldiker,” “papas,” and “mamas,” many of which were already familiar
to other experts. But studying and treating these inmates in isolation as prison physician from 59
1922-1926, Kahn also offered some of this early period's most substantial expert analysis of the
relationship between homosexuality and drug use, and published his observations and
conclusions in his 1937 book Mentality and Homosexuality. This volume was an attempt to 60
determine the causes and nature of homosexuality, its diagnosis and treatments, and its
relationship to other forms of criminal behavior, particularly drug use. Kahn studied 500
subjects, 75 of them in depth, portraying himself as a sympathetic but no less judgmental agent
of science and the state whose job it was to address a problem that jeopardized the “morals of the
young.” Likely alluding to psychiatric concepts linking narcissism to homosexuality, which
Samuel Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality (Boston, MA: Meador Publishing Company, 58
1937), 23-24.
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 123-124. 59
“Dr. Samuel Kahn Dies; Psychiatrist and Writer," The New York Times, December 28, 1981, 60
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/12/28/obituaries/dr-samuel-kahn-dies-psychiatrist-andwriter.html.
36

Kahn referenced in agreement, he further justified his research with the claim that his subjects
enjoyed being studied. He nonetheless stated that most of his subjects were quite uninterested 61
in his “help” with their pathologized condition; the “narcissists” simply liked talking about
themselves.62
While Kahn was clearly motivated enough to take detailed notes about his homosexual
subjects in the 1920s, it is perhaps unsurprising that he did not publish Mentality and
Homosexuality until more than a decade after his posting at the jail. The Depression years of the
1930s saw attitudes towards homosexual subcultures in places such as New York harden. Indeed,
the author of Mentality and Homosexuality’s forward, Dr. V.C. Branham, noted that the “bacillus
homosexualis” was rapidly spreading in the all-male petri dishes of barracks, work camps, and
prisons, which all grew during these years, and he believed that the public had strong grounds to
connect recent murders to "perverted states of mind.” Branham did not specify which murders 63
he was referring to, but he may have been thinking of Chicago’s infamous 1924 Nathan Leopold
and Richard Loeb child murder case, or the 1933 murders of two men in New York and New
Orleans by Kenneth Neu. In the body of the text, Kahn himself dissented from the suggestion 64
that violence and homosexuality were related, stating that homosexuals only had a tendency
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 14-15, 18-19. 61
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 25. 62
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 5. 63
At this time the murders of gay men were typically credited to the criminal pathology of 64
homosexuality, with little regard for proportionately greater violence among heterosexuals or the
claimed objectives or sexuality of the alleged killer. For examples of how such crimes were
covered, see “LOEB 'MASTER MIND' OF FRANKS SLAYING, ALIENISTS REPORT,” The
New York Times, July 28, 1924; see also James Polchin, Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of
True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2019).
37

towards crimes of petty theft and drug use. But as Kahn detailed in later pages, the contagion of 65
the bacillus homosexualis nonetheless corrupted and festered in the cities where more salacious
crimes took place. The violent criminal underworld could easily be conflated with gay nightlife,
and these did overlap especially as the mafia began to run many gay bars. Ironically, the end of
Prohibition enabled surveillance and police repression at newly licensed and bureaucratized bars
and clubs in New York where “pansy acts” and homosexual socialization had previously thrived
in an often coded but fairly open and accessible gay world. In states such as New York, postProhibition liquor regulators barred licensed establishments from serving homosexuals alcohol.66
For experts such as Kahn, the homosexual menace was connected to drug addiction, a
matter also increasingly scrutinized in the years following the passage of the 1914 Harrison
Narcotics Tax Act and other federal legislation, the establishment of state laws and narcotics
control agencies, and the expansion of medical expertise and the state inaugurated with the New
Deal era of the 1930s. The notion that homosexuality was an addiction was already well 67
established; the phrasing “addicted to the practice of sodomy,” for instance, was found in the
legal codes of states such as Washington and Oregon. The nature of “addiction,” as this 68
dissertation discusses in this chapter and elsewhere, is itself quite a sticky question, as is what
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 102. 65
Chauncey, Gay New York, 331-354. 66
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 15. Domestic drug control emerged in part from 67
international agreements made at the 1909 International Opium Commission in Shanghai, a
legacy and atonement of the Opium Wars, as historian P. E. Caquet argues. Opioids set the tone,
in other words, for the future of control for all drugs. See P. E. Caquet, Opium’s Orphans: The
200-Year History of the War on Drugs (London: Reaktion Books, 2022).
Session Laws, 1921, Chapter 53, Washington State Legislature, http://leg.wa.gov/ 68
CodeReviser/documents/sessionlaw/1921c53.pdf; Peter Boag, Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing
and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2003), 210.
38

should be considered “drug abuse.” Kahn did not question the “addicted” condition of prisoners
—their homosexuality was a behavioral addiction, and any illicit drug use verified through police
allegations or legal proceedings might be represented as proof of a substance “addiction.”
Kahn used the category “addict” for substance users regardless of whether their use was
in reality constant or occasional, solitary or social, or of heroin, opium, morphine, cocaine, or
cannabis, the most common street drugs of the time. When discussing psychoactive substances 69
themselves, Kahn always specified when referring to alcohol and tobacco, but otherwise only
occasionally differentiated between specific substances, instead using catch-all terms like “drug”
and “narcotic.” When he did specify, heroin was most often the drug in question, which became 70
very little used by both gay men and lesbians in subsequent decades, as I will explain in chapter
three. Heroin’s apparent popularity in New York’s homosexual circles during the 1920s can be
credited to cultural factors and the non-existence or short supply of drugs which only became
popular later on, but also to the fact that the city’s drug market was being flooded with Turkish
heroin by the infamous Sicilian mafia don Charles “Lucky” Luciano and his associates and
competitors, who also owned many illegal gay bars. As more dedicated police tactics intended 71
to root out sexual deviants were less common in the 1920s, many of the homosexual prisoners of
Kahn’s study were thus originally jailed for using heroin and other drugs. That they had already
Control of cannabis was patchy in the United States before the Uniform State Narcotic Drug 69
Act of 1934, which also increased restrictions on other drugs, and the Marihuana Tax Act of
1937. Ryan Grim, This is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America
(Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2009), 44-47.
Such overly-general terminology can still be typical in colloquial speech surrounding illegal 70
substances today. The term “dope,” for example, usually refers to heroin or cannabis––radically
different substances.
Grim, This Is Your Country on Drugs, 176. 71
39

been brought into the legal system for this reason probably meant that they would be more
willing to speak about such a taboo subject with an authority figure who pledged his noble
intentions.
Earlier sexologists, such as Magnus Hirschfeld and Iwan Bloch, contemplated the
connection between deviant sexuality, alcohol, and other drugs, noting the confusing relationship
between cause and effect, libido and impotence. Hirschfeld wrote that some homosexual men
could have sex with women, and that some heterosexual men could have sex with men, while
intoxicated. He also suggested that the sexual orientation of some individuals might fluctuate
depending on their mental state and drug use. One of his patients, a manic-depressive high
school teacher, felt homosexual while depressive, but heterosexual while manic and on
morphine. Bloch, on the other hand, referenced cases he knew of in which otherwise “normal” 72
men became sodomites while under the influence. He also cited an alleged correlation between
opium and homosexual prostitution in Qing China, and the “wanton sexual images” that filled
the imagination of the hasheesh smoker. 73
With his large, captive body of patients that became the subjects of Mentality and
Homosexuality, Kahn offered more substantive descriptions and explanations of the relationship
between drug use and sexual deviance before providing a number of case studies where he
detailed his patient’s lives, vices, and beliefs about themselves. Like many psychiatrists of the
time, Kahn accepted the belief that sexuality could be explicit or repressed, and that one’s sexual
Magnus Hirschfeld, The Homosexuality of Men and Women (1914), trans. Michael A. 72
Lombardi-Nash (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 233, 258.
Iwan Bloch, Anthropological Studies in the Strange Sexual Practices of All Races in All Ages 73
(1933) (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010), 137-138.
40

nature evolved across a lifetime, particularly in the first two critical decades. Introduced by
Sigmund Freud in the 1900s and 1910s, the stage theory of psychosexual development carried
with it the potential for disruption or regression, which some experts saw as potential triggers for
homosexuality, other sexual abnormalities, and emotional instability generally. 74
Freud had a complicated and at times uncertain understanding of homosexuality, caught
between contemporaneous debates about its origins in endocrine and other biological
deficiencies or psychogenic missteps. His publications about sexuality discussed theories
concerning infantile psychology, narcissism and sexual object choice, the Oedipus complex, the
ego and id, and aggression. While he disavowed legal or cultural oppression of homosexuals, 75
even proposing that everyone had some level of “latent” homosexuality, certainly many of
Freud’s ideas were foundational to the medical pathologization of homosexuality as well as the
“blame the mother” dictum of midcentury psychiatry and self-help. Other sexologists and
psychiatrists loosely interpreted and modified the broader principles of his work for application
in their own practice and writing, and Freud’s murky silhouette stretched far into twentieth
century expertise and popular wisdom. Perhaps more than any of Freud’s other ideas about
sexuality, some loose incarnation of his stage theory of development remained fixed in the work
of his colleagues, appearing in a rather simple format in Kahn’s Mentality and Homosexuality (it
was another sense of the word “stage” that chiefly interested Kahn), and another version
Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works 74
(London, UK: Penguin Books, 1991).
For Freud’s various theories of homosexuality, see Sara Flanders et al., "On the subject of 75
homosexuality: What Freud Said,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis Vol. 97, No. 3
(January 2021): 933-950. Freud believed drug use was a substitute for masturbation, itself
conceived of as an addiction that had been targeted by social reformers and medical experts for
decades. Campbell, Discovering Addiction, 21.
41

somewhat more elaborated in the more cerebral writings of Hungarian-American psychiatrist
Sandor Rado.
Theorists such as Rado and American psychiatrist George W. Henry, developed their own
concepts about sexuality, drug use, and alcoholism. Rado put the relationship between selfcontrol, drug use, and homosexuality in psychoanalytic and pathological terms, speculating about
technological cures for what he considered to be a morbid hedonistic impulse arising in part from
frozen sexual stage development. Henry, meanwhile, contended that alcoholism could emerge
from the interior conflict and “escapism” he thought homosexuals were prone to, but he also
called for social compromise on the issue. Such reform would better accommodate the
psychology of “sex variants” and not seek to “cure” them, which Henry believed to be
impossible anyway, unlike many of his contemporaries. A social compromise that introduced 76
greater tolerance of homosexuality would perhaps diminish the interior conflict and ease the
burden of substance abuse.
A noted and controversial psychiatrist and like Kahn, another student (and later dissident)
of Freud, Rado had a marked interest in drawing connections between recreational psychoactive
substances and sexual pleasure beginning early in his career. While Kahn’s beliefs about drug 77
use and homosexuality were primarily based on tangible observations and his interviews with
Henry Minton, Departing from Deviance: A History of Homosexual Rights and Emancipatory 76
Science in America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 111
Rado particularly broke from Freud’s mystical, romantic, and mythological tendencies, 77
favoring a psychoanalysis in greater harmony with the latest in biochemistry and neuroscience.
He also adopted a harsher view of homosexuality than anything Freud ever espoused, believing
that it, like drug addiction, could be cured by following the latest precepts of hard science. For an
explanation of Rado’s contentiousness within the psychoanalytical and broader psychiatric
communities, see Paul Roazen and Bluma Swerdloff, Heresy: Sandor Rado and the
Psychoanalytic Movement (Jason Aronson Inc.: Northvale, New Jersey & London, 1995).
42

inmates, with psychiatric concepts mostly floating around in the background, Rado’s thoughts on
the matter were solely psychoanalytic and more abstract. In 1924 Rado published “The Psychic
Effects of Intoxicants: An Attempt to Evolve a Psycho-Analytical Theory of Morbid Cravings” in
the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. This paper recognized the unpredictability and
diversity of responses to drugs among different individuals, but in general terms argued that the
pleasurable effects of some intoxicants on humans represented another type of orgasm, and thus
psychoactive orgasm, sexual orgasm, and the unconscious could be understood together. Unlike 78
his fellow psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, Rado believed that orgasm, sexual or not, could be
dangerous. The experience of “pharmacogenic orgasm,” that is the pleasure derived from 79
morphine, heroin, and other drugs, introduced a rival to “natural modes of sexual gratification,”
meaning that drug use could disrupt normative sexual development, desire, and behavior. The
“phantasies” of the drug stupor would unleash previously hidden sexual urges, a condition of
psychic neoteny which destabilized the “primacy” of the fully-mature genital stage, potentially
resurrecting previous stages of sexual development. The disruption of the unconscious created 80
by “pharmacogenic orgasm” could thus invite forms of perversion, including homosexuality,
which entailed its own form of illegitimate orgasm. Drugs, in other words, could make you gay. 81
Sandor Rado, “The Psychic Effects of Intoxicants: An Attempt to Evolve a Psycho-Analytical 78
Theory of Morbid Cravings,” The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis Vol. 7 (January
1926): 396-413.
Wilhelm Reich, Genitality in the Theory of Neurosis (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 79
1981); for more on Reich, including his influence on the Sexual Revolution, a term he coined, in
the United States and Europe, see David Allyn, Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An
Unfettered History (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2000), 4, 45; Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of
the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (New York: Vintage, 2005), 220-224.
Rado, “The Psychic Effects of Intoxicants,” 403. 80
Rado, “The Psychic Effects of Intoxicants,” 405. 81
43

Kahn also believed that his homosexual patients suffered from stalling or immaturity in
their psychosexual development, and the accompanying emotional chaos could be responsible
for their alcoholism or addiction to drugs, whether they realized the core, psychosexual nature of
their problems or not. Pointing to multiple sources for his subjects’ homosexuality, Kahn leaned
heavily towards environmental and psychogenic causes, such as trauma, “excessive stimulation,”
“abnormal experiences or family members,” an oedipus or electra complex, odd dress or hobbies,
a tendency to “fall in love” with everyone or no one, many siblings, or “harshness,” perhaps
experienced in a punitive boarding school or through parental beatings. A homosexual son may
have been in love with his mother, or “excessively attached” to his father or brother. Other 82
theorists would argue that a boy was homosexual because he was surrounded by sisters during
childhood. Lesbians, on the other hand, were likely to have dead, alcoholic, or drug-addicted
parents. The sweep of explanations psychiatrists such as Kahn devised to explain sexual 83
diversity was such that few individuals could not locate some trace of their supposed psyche or
upbringing.84
Kahn additionally suggested that homosexuality might emerge directly from “alcoholism
and other addictions,” so causality could flow in either direction between substances and the
sexual self. Sexual deviants, moreover, were frequently the children of alcoholics and drug 85
addicts, a belief consistent with contemporary eugenic notions of the heredity of criminal and
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 19-21, 39. 82
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 68. 83
Psychiatrists’ obsessive search for the cause of homosexuality seems absurd and fraudulent in 84
light of the revelation that same-sex activity exists across virtually all social animals. Shall we
search for an oedipus complex in dolphins or overbearing mothers among emus?
See also n. 13 of this chapter. Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 20-21. 85
44

degenerate traits. Parsing out the precise connection between his subjects’ sexuality, 86
substances, and other matters required lengthy interviews in a room accessorized with papers and
pictures of evocative people, items, and printed words, including “murder” and “fag,” but also
“whiskey, alcohol, morphine,” and “heroin.” Kahn did not clarify whether or not this
methodology existed from day one; we can probably assume at least that he entered his role as
prison physician already believing that homosexuality was inherently linked to other forms of
criminality, including the use of illicit drugs. If he perhaps started with conventional tools such
as Rorschach tests, he graduated to more specific tactics determined by his interests.
During therapy and interview sessions, Kahn and his assistants played good cop/bad cop,
at times professing their friendly intentions, accusing the prisoner of being a “degenerate,” or
ironically, offering cigarettes or other gifts as rewards for full cooperation. These manipulative 87
tactics perhaps suggest that Kahn’s subjects were not always as eager for his attention as he
earlier claimed, or at least that he believed fuller and more accurate information about their sex
lives and drug use would only be acquired through a dynamic and elaborate approach. Notably,
he even suggested that the aphrodisiac powers of smoking cigarettes might bolster “oral
eroticism.” His gifts of cigarettes may therefore have been intended to make his interview 88
subjects slightly aroused and therefore more outspoken about their sex lives, drug consumption,
and other intimate matters—this was theory applied. Some of these prisoners, of course,
probably had access to stronger stuff than Kahn was able to offer inside of the prison. When New
York police raided the notoriously corrupt prison in 1934, eight years after Kahn’s tenure, heroin
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 39. 86
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 28-31. 87
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 55. 88
45

and other narcotics were found among the inmates, though in the South Annex equally depraved
paraphernalia––makeup, perfume, and wigs––were discovered in the possession of men by the
police. Whatever the case, Kahn’s bribes and cunning yielded a number of case histories and 89
commentaries which he argued revealed patterns important to understanding, and perhaps
containing and treating, homosexuality and addiction.
It is important to note that Kahn frequently switched between the alleged words of his
subjects, whether paraphrased or directly quoted, and his own analysis. It is impossible to
establish the authenticity of the inmates’ voices or to fully measure the impact and partiality of
Kahn’s questioning on the case histories he recorded. There were no doubt contexts and
observations which Kahn omitted, like any researcher would. As Chauncey has established, at
least a few gay New Yorkers were aware of European sexological debates in the early twentieth
century, and those who followed international literary and political controversies were likely
aware of scandals in which homosexuality was discussed relatively openly, such as the Oscar
Wilde trial and the Eulenburg affair. Many furthermore rejected prevailing medical, legal, and
religious hostility. If the men who populated the streets of gay New York thought of categories
and explanations at all, a homosexual-heterosexual binary was not necessarily the dominant
framework, except among some middle class professionals, until the middle of the twentieth
century. Terry, moreover, suggests that some of psychiatrist George Henry’s research subjects 90
in the 1935-1941 Sex Variants study exerted their own will and understanding in their apparent
challenges to the investigation’s proceedings and assumptions about homosexuality’s
“Welfare Island Raid Bares Gangster Rule Over Prison; Weapons, Narcotics Found,” The New 89
York Times, January 25, 1934.
Chauncey, Gay New York, 5-6, 12-16, 107, 144. 90
46

pathological status. A few savvy prisoners interviewed by Kahn on Blackwell’s Island may well 91
have been familiar enough with contemporary psychiatric principles to tell the doctor what he
wanted to hear to support his ideas, possibly granting them rewards or preferential treatment.
Among his most central findings, Kahn argued that homosexuality and addiction were
linked because it was frequently other homosexuals who first introduced his patients to drugs,
and this typically took place in distinctly urban spaces in which gay newcomers to the city found
camaraderie. Again and again, Kahn described “the stage” as one of these spaces, and he spoke
of his patients’ “life on the stage,” phrasing which referred to the participation of some
homosexuals in various forms of entertainment, such as drag performances, plays, and pansy
acts. “Life on the stage,” to Kahn, no doubt underlined the dramatic and “emotionally unstable”
nature of his subjects’ lives, and he believed the pressure of the spotlight was one factor which
motivated their drug use. Kahn imagined not only that “most homosexuals are drug addicts,” but
that most “become addicted while on the stage.” His observations, no doubt, appeared to 92
confirm age-old connotations between the acting profession, abnormal sexuality, and excessive
substance use which had flourished from the amphitheaters and brothels of Ancient Rome to the
moral crisis that engulfed pre-code Hollywood just a few years before Mentality and
Homosexuality’s publication. For some of his imprisoned subjects, of course, being the 93
Terry, An American Obsession, 262. 91
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 52, 130. 92
Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 153, 93
194; after the Hays Code had been introduced but before its rigorous enforcement, gay film
historian Vito Russo states that subtle homosexual insinuations were rampant, see his The
Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 31-32, 40.
47

“patient” or even “addict” may have just been other “acts” necessary to get by in socially and
economically hostile conditions.
Some years before Alfred Kinsey’s revelation that perhaps 13% of American men
engaged in completely or mostly same-sex relations throughout their lifetimes, and newspaper
reports that warned about the presence of hundreds of thousands of gay men and lesbians in large
cities, Kahn believed it plausible that most of New York’s homosexuals were drug-addled actors,
dancers, and drag queens. Perhaps it seemed unlikely to Kahn that homosexuals might be found 94
in society’s more respectable echelons; flamboyant Broadway performers, on the other hand,
were highly visible. The idea that addiction was the norm among New York’s homosexuals, male
and female, was apparently encouraged by some of his patients. One young man who had his
first homosexual experience with a priest became a hustler, working alongside an addicted
woman who catered to other women at a New York “call house.” Observing his female
colleague, the hustler came to believe that the majority of “women perverts or Bull Dikers are
drug addicts or drunks,” but curiously did not indicate the same about his own male customers. 95
Generally, matters of gender distinction only occasionally appear in Kahn’s text,
particularly with regard to “masculine” and “feminine” types of homosexual men and women.
Kinsey and his team were mostly uninterested in drugs and alcohol, in keeping with their 94
emphasis on measuring rather than explaining sexual behavior. They were cognizant, however,
of the possible influence of intoxication on their interviewees. Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B.
Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia and London:
W. B. Saunders and Company, 1948), 665; for one of the earliest significant instances of media
coverage of New York’s large gay subculture, in which antigay psychoanalyst Irving Bieber
suggested that homosexuals, like members of Alcoholic Anonymous, recognize their identities as
a disease, see Robert C. Doty, “Growth of Overt Homosexuality In City Provokes Wide
Concern,” The New York Times, December 17, 1963.
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 43. 95
48

He also made few references to matters of racial distinction, and none with regard to drug use.
While many American carceral facilities were segregated in the 1920s, the City Jail’s South
Annex housed some black prisoners. Kahn noted a type known as “chocolate lovers,” who are
white men attracted to black men. He also wrote that homosexuality tends more often to be
acquired in the “colored race,” and congenital among whites. While Kahn noted that a few of 96
his patients were “colored,” he did not repeat worries connecting black men intoxicated by drugs
(especially cocaine) to sexual violence targeting white women, a fear which by the time of
writing had already circulated in the United States for decades.97
The bulk of the case studies Kahn reported followed fairly predictable narratives of
young, naive men and women leaving broken homes or odd familial situations only to “drift"
around and become addicted to drugs upon encountering the corrupt homosexual underground
and Broadway theaters. One young woman began with opium while slumming in New York's
Chinatown at the age of 17, claiming that she did it because she had “no will power” and was
“easily led on.” She later moved on to cocaine. Kahn found that "the stage” was just as 98
powerful a motivator of drug use as the lack of discipline and morality supposedly inherent to
homosexuals, given the unique pressures involved which might be assuaged by alcohol, cocaine,
or opioids. One man began his drug habit by snorting heroin at a theatrical boarding house, 99
while yet another man who was abnormally attached to his mother before embracing his
homosexuality ran away from home, “took to the stage as an impersonator,” and there found
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 123, 128, 134. 96
Martin Booth, Cannabis: A History (New York: Picador, 2003), 160-162. 97
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 202. 98
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 130. 99
49

drugs. “Fairies,” who are plentiful in the theater, “will jab morphine free into those who do not
use it,” one inmate warned. 100
Just as Anslinger several years later warned that marijuana could cause sexual
debauchery, Kahn also believed that many homosexuals utilized illicit drugs to channel and
enhance their sexual capacities, and quoted some patients’ specific use of cocaine to “excite
passion” or ease prostitution. The highs and lows of drug use might also destabilize sexual 101
desire, or lead to a situation-dependent bisexuality. Kahn quoted one woman who felt same-sex
desire most under the influence of cocaine. In correspondence with another medical expert
included in an appendix to Mentality and Homosexuality, Kahn also explained that an addict in
drug treatment seemed to experience new homosexual inclinations that were otherwise
atypical. As if to reinforce the necessity of segregating homosexuals in designated spaces such 102
as the City Jail’s South Annex, homosexuality and drug use were both consistently portrayed as
matters of social contagion and the dangerous results of an uninhibited urban culture.
Kahn considered most homosexuals to be addicts, at one point even questioning the
“genuine” homosexuality of one patient because he did not use drugs. But he elsewhere 103
maintained that there was a hierarchy of homosexual “types,” and not all were doomed to
descend to addiction, prostitution, “active perversion,” and criminality. New environments, sex
education, psychoanalysis, mental reeducation, and even sedative drugs (prescribed by a
responsible professional, of course) could all assist in prevention or resemble a cure. Kahn 104
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 46, 127. 100
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 130-131, 202, 227. 101
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 228, 242-243. 102
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 226. 103
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 70-72, 84-87. 104
50

proposed that homosexuals might also try to "stay out of trouble” and “disguise” themselves by
avoiding New York’s storied cabarets and theaters, and instead enter respectable middle class
professions where it was easier to remain sober and closeted, such as business or the clergy.105
Though even with “ecclesiastics,” he teasingly added, “there are questions.” Twentieth century 106
experts such as Kahn and Rado strongly epitomized a prominent stream of deep hostility or
unease towards bodily pleasures within the Western intellectual tradition. This sentiment has
only occasionally been disrupted and often at great reputational cost, as psychoanalyst Wilhelm
Reich, who suggested that only healthy orgasm could truly allay neurosis, learned. Such 107
antipathy to most forms of pleasure persisted in the modern secular academy, but can probably
be traced back to the apparent austerity of life in the seminary and monastery where the Western
scholarly enterprise dwelled for centuries and vows of celibacy reigned. Though as Henry VIII
and his chief minister Thomas Cromwell recognized when they introduced the first civil antisodomy legislation in 1533 amidst the English Reformation, the purported morality and chastity
of the ecclesiastics was in fact frequently violated.108
Kahn firmly established his view that the etiology and evolution of homosexuality and
substance addiction were inextricably tied, at least among the inmates he questioned at New
York’s City Jail. Like many psychiatrists, his conclusions were plagued by a biased sample.
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 57. 105
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 59. 106
Reich’s problems within his profession and with the law also had to do with some even less 107
orthodox ideas considered fraudulent by the Food and Drug Administration. Reich, Genitality in
the Theory of Neurosis; Allyn, Make Love, Not War, 45.
Louis Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University 108
Press, 2003), 363; for sexual pleasure and Medieval Catholic theology, see Bertrand Russell, A
History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1945), 359-360.
51

Obviously he would be far more likely to find people “with problems” among homosexuals and
drug users in the prison system, even as many commentators would today recognize that these
people should be seen as the victims of an oppressive state. Another important conclusion can
indeed be drawn from Kahn’s analysis which other scholars might pursue further in court and
police records or municipal government proceedings. At least in 1920s New York, drug use or
possession were very common justifications for the police harassment of homosexuals,
particularly those involved in the entertainment industry. In one case Kahn explained of one of
the inmates: “the boy is a pervert sexually, but was arrested for drug addiction,” and this was the
case for the majority of his patients. Scholars have frequently recognized the long-standing 109
tactic of punishing undesirables by targeting drug offenses with regard to racial minorities and
radicals, such as antiwar activists, but this analysis can probably be extended to some sexual
minorities.110
Before the introduction of more explicit ploys, such as entrapment in public parks and
washrooms, gay men and other sexual minorities may have more frequently been swept into the
prison system and branded as sexual deviants initially because of drug law enforcement. This 111
could have functioned as a direct pretext for police who wished to single out homosexuals
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 111, 129-130. 109
For two examples see, Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the 110
Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012); Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman has
admitted that a key motivation of his administration’s major escalation of the War on Drugs
beginning in the late 1960s was to criminalize and disrupt the black community and antiwar
hippies. Dan Baum, “Legalize It All: How to Win the War on Drugs,” Harper’s Magazine, April
2016, https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/.
For especially sinister methods of entrapment in 1940s-1950s Los Angeles, see Lillian 111
Faderman and Stuart Timmons, Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and
Lipstick Lesbians (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 75-82.
52

engaged in nightlife and on “the stage,” who were no doubt more likely to be substance users.
But it probably also reflected the increased attention gay nightlife received overall, and the more
public nature of gay male sexual activity which often took place outdoors, rather than in limited
domestic spaces overseen by prying neighbors, landlords, and the heterosexual family. As vice 112
squad tactics intended to enforce sexual and gender norms widened over subsequent decades,
gay men especially continued to be frequently punished for drug crimes. In a study conducted by
sociologist Wayne Wooden and therapist Jay Parker in the early 1980s, 15% of homosexual male
prisoners said they had been arrested for drug crimes, compared to 6% of the general male
prisoner population. These numbers are comparable to drug crime disparities based on race. 113
Understanding some of the ideological and medical frameworks devised to explain drug use and
homosexuality might inspire another inquiry that remains focused on the history of the criminal
justice system—a topic for the most part beyond my scope, though well-deserving of a dedicated
study.
Treating or Redeeming the Intoxicated Sexual Deviant
According to Kahn, should homosexuals not attain “control” and “sublimation,” that is
closeting through correct social, career, psychological, or spiritual achievement, then chaos and
disrepute will likely emerge in other facets of their lives: namely, an addiction to substances.114
This clashes with, but does not necessarily preclude, another long-held theory of substance abuse
Chauncey, Gay New York, 179-205. 112
Wayne S. Wooden and Jay Parker, Men Behind Bars: Sexual Exploitation In Prison (Boston, 113
MA: Da Capo Press, 1984), 123.
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 71-72. 114
53

and homosexually, sometimes held both by those hostile and sympathetic to homosexuals: the
belief that the repression of the closet leads to substance abuse and even violence. An 115
extremely influential rationale and archetype of the sexual deviant substance abuser indeed
saturates much of Kahn’s writing: the homosexual addict as “escapist,” which later experts, like
George Henry, elaborated upon. Reflecting on the drug and alcohol use of his patients, Kahn 116
considered that substance use and “homosexuality are all elements of sexual escapes.” At times
he revealed an incredibly generous definition of problematic substance use; even patients’
admissions of having “been drunk” was enough to support diagnoses of a pathological condition
they were either trying to escape from or escape to.117
Samuel Kahn believed his drug using, homosexual patients had little capacity for selfcontrol, and their pursuit of “passion” made them vulnerable to the most sinister vices that urban
life offered in plenty: drugs and illicit sex. Just as twentieth century governments were 118
beginning to see strict drug control as a vital function of a modern state, experts like Kahn were
seeing mastery of the self and the conquest of the will over base instincts as the cornerstones of a
sound mind and a healthy society. While clearly informed by psychiatric thought and other
bodies of expertise, Kahn posed many of his conclusions as mere elaborations of some of his
confined patients’ own descriptions and explanations, which were in turn influenced by popular
For a midcentury review of proposed links between repressed homosexuality and alcoholism, 115
see John V. Quaranta, “Alcoholism: A Study of Emotional Maturity and Homosexuality as
Related Factors in Compulsive Drinking,” MA Diss., (Fordham University, 1947).
For a couple of specific examples from Kahn, one man expressed his attempts to have sex 116
with women with the help of alcohol, while another forgot “all of his troubles” when a
homosexual actress introduced him to heroin. Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 41, 54.
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 54. 117
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 43-44. 118
54

legal and medical discourse and filtered through Kahn’s pen. At the same time, any appraisal of
an experts’ work with subjects under duress must of course be approached with some skepticism.
For Kahn at least, the practice of homosexuality was essentially a behavioral addiction that
existed alongside illicit substance use, when addiction was understood as a pathological rejection
of self-restraint in favor of self-indulgence. His patients’ rejection of the white collar in favor of
the theatrical costume and “life on the stage” further affirmed their inability to control
themselves.
Some patients, as reported by Kahn, seemed proud of their drug use, or self-identified as
addicts. It is here that readers can grasp some impression of the patients’ own voices and
attempts to sway the process of knowledge-making, treatment, or their own incarceration, even
as this survives only as filtered by Kahn. One woman explained that her life’s primary ambition
was to have “plenty of whiskey and drugs,” but simultaneously to be “normal,” while another
subject specifically admitted his “addiction,” but was uninterested in ending it. Two patients 119
went so far as to offer the doctor several explanations for “drug addiction in homosexuals,”
which they believed derived from pleasure and a “satisfied feeling,” forgetting “their troubles,”
“bewildered passions,” “good company,” the ability to make them “gay and womanish,” “give
them courage,” and “remove self-control.” But it is difficult to know precisely what others 120
who used the word “addiction,” or were branded as addicts, understood by “addiction,” or
whether or not they believed a confession of addiction would improve their circumstances.
Perhaps some prisoners sensed that the emerging paradigm of addiction as a medical disease
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 103, 110. 119
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 125, 128. 120
55

might shift their institutional treatment from the disciplinary to the therapeutic and perhaps
lenient. Across the history of drugs, medical, legal, and popular sources alike frequently speak of
any type of illegal drug usage as a definitive indicator of abuse and addiction, without taking into
account a fuller portrait of frequency, tangible impact, or dependency.
Others patients, however, did wish to tackle what they themselves believed to be a
problematic relationship with substances, and they may well have been capable of separating this
effort from their homosexuality. One such woman, calling herself a “bulldiker,” appeared to pass
judgement about the widespread addiction among others of her type, but of her own sexuality she
said, “it is natural for me” and “I am sure I cannot be cured.” Notably, she or another patient (in
some of the text it is unclear when someone else is speaking) added that it was unwise to mix
drugs––probably referring in this case to opioids––with alcohol, because it will make one
“deathly sick,” and Kahn indicated that such precautions were commonplace. This represented 121
one of the few instances of physiological difference recognized among the various recreational
substances Kahn’s patients were using. As is so often the case in popular and even expert rhetoric
to this day, “drugs,” “narcotics,” or “dope” were very frequently referred to by Kahn as an
undifferentiated mass, their most important unifying attribute being their danger and legal status.
This patient, while still simply referring to “drugs,” demonstrated to Kahn that users could
themselves be protective of their own health by recognizing hazardous combinations, and were
not always utterly reckless.
Sandor Rado was likewise uninterested in differentiating drug usage and type, though we
can probably assume that opioids were foremost in his mind. Building on his earlier ideas and
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 126, 131. 121
56

years of clinical observations, Rado later suggested a clearer framework linking the concepts and
origins of substance addiction and homosexuality, along with potential treatments, in his 1957
paper “Narcotic Bondage: A General Theory of the Dependence on Narcotic Drugs,” which was
presented at that year’s annual meeting of the American Psychopathological Association in New
York City. In place of the term “addiction," Rado’s preference for “narcotic bondage” as a 122
descriptor for substance dependency firstly evoked a state of slavery to drugs, an image which
captivated experts and filled popular imagery related to drug use since at least the nineteenth
century. Rado argued that a common feature of all life, from protozoa to humans, is “hedonic
control,” that is the capacity to manage the sources, meanings, and consequences of pain and
pleasure. For humans, hedonic control is central to psychological development as well as
behavioral necessities such as eating and reproduction. Intoxication and narcotic bondage are
inherently “pathological” because they “corrupt” an individual’s hedonic control, annihilating a
more “enlightened” ability to avoid “super-pleasures” in pursuit of responsible and delayed
gratification. The sexual or drug hedonist refuses to accept the limits on pleasure which 123
biology and culture instruct.
Finding support for his hypothesis in contemporaneous scientific discoveries related to
the brain’s pleasure centers, Rado asserted that someone with a corrupted hedonic control would
find a new sexual outlet at a “site contrary to nature,” hardly disguised terminology for
homosexuality and other sexual pathologies. Narcotics were thus a “threat to the future of our
Sandor Rado, “Narcotic Bondage: A General Theory of the Dependence on Narcotic Drugs,” 122
in Psychoanalysis of Behavior: Collected Papers, Volume Two: 1956-1961 (New York: Grune &
Stratton, 1962), 21-29.
Rado, “Narcotic Bondage,” 24-25. 123
57

species,” as they would detract from the natural reproductive instinct. For Rado there was no
innate bisexuality, as Freud had believed, but rather a default though corruptible
heterosexuality. Rado proposed that a solution to this corruptibility, at least with regard to 124
intoxicants, might be some technological intervention upon the brain which would “immunize”
humanity from the pleasures of narcotics, thereby also improving the psyches and sexual
dispositions of the population. A hypothetical surgical procedure, something like a lobotomy, 125
perhaps, could destroy the hold of psychoactive substances forever, representing an apotheosis in
the long war against illegitimate chemical pleasure as well as its insidious sexual cousin. Many
psychiatrists likewise operating within a context of postwar technological and scientific
confidence actually did apply novel technological techniques in efforts to “cure” the behavioral
addiction of homosexuality, as chapter two will explain. Many later anti-homosexual
psychiatrists, moreover, studied under Rado at Columbia or were otherwise influenced by his
work. But constrained as they were by the dominant ideology of their time, other experts 126
would come to see their research and therapeutic efforts as a means to meet and assist those
considered socially deviant without forcing a “cure.”
George W. Henry held numerous posts at hospitals, universities, and clinics across his
career, and authored a number of books, but is best remembered for heading the 1935-1941 Sex
Variants study in New York City, the first major sexological inquest dedicated to examining
homosexuals in the United States. In the lengthy volume that grew from that study, Henry and 127
Kunzel, In the Shadow of Diagnosis, 25-26. 124
Rado, “Narcotic Bondage,” 27-28. 125
Kunzel, In the Shadow of Diagnosis, 26. 126
George W. Henry, Psychiatrist, 74; Director of Brooklea Farm Sanitarium in Greenwich,” The 127
New York Times, May 24, 1964.
58

his colleagues explained the “clinical, psychological and sociological aspects” of their subjects’
lives. They believed that this was a public good and a solid basis from which to derive
generalizations about “sex variants” which would then assist other experts and legal authorities
in approaching sexual deviance as a medical issue, rather than a criminal matter. Henry had a 128
more sympathetic view of homosexuals than experts like Kahn and Rado; he for instance stated
that the homosexual would not benefit from “segregation,” meaning imprisonment or
hospitalization in dedicated facilities. The greatest “benefit” possible through applied expertise
would nonetheless be an adjusted heterosexual life, though this attitude would shift in time, and
he came to believe that his eponymous foundation’s mission was to help the sex variant within a
hostile social context. Occasionally taking note of his subjects’ histories with substances, to 129
Henry the existence of alcoholism, drug addiction, and homosexuality in the same family
probably hinted at contemporary theories of hereditary degeneracy, which were mapped in the
volume’s genealogical charts. That Henry's subjects had somewhat more to say about alcohol 130
than illegal drugs, especially compared to Kahn’s incarcerated patients, perhaps indicates their
hesitance to discuss illegal activity beyond the sexual matters at hand. Henry tackled the question
of homosexuality and alcoholism more substantively over two decades later in another book
published posthumously, Society and the Sex Variant.
George W. Henry, Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns (New York: Paul B. Hoeber, 128
Inc., Medical Book Department of Harper & Brothers, 1941), v; for a lengthy analysis of the Sex
Variants study and an explanation of its context within the emerging field of progressive
sexology, see Terry, An American Obsession, 178-267.
Henry, Sex Variants, 1028. 129
Henry, Sex Variants, 16. 130
59

By the mid-1960s, Henry had spent the remainder of his career digesting the Sex Variant
study's findings, and he had also worked with hundreds of more patients. Public awareness of
homosexuality and the urban culture that surrounded it had also increased substantially,
especially following the homosocial immersions many experienced during World War Two and
the publication of the Kinsey Reports. More literary and pulp novels also featured homosexual
themes, and 1950 saw the founding of the first lasting homophile rights organization, the
Mattachine Society, in Los Angeles. By the 1960s newspaper reports and television specials
often contained descriptions of gay milieus as well as interviews with homophile activists,
psychiatrists, clergy, and other commentators. A few of these, such as a 1964 Life magazine 131
piece, occasionally approximated subtlety, at least in comparison to the standard tone of similar
material a decade earlier, which typically denounced homosexuality as an unqualified “moral
menace to our youth." 132
Society and the Sex Variant, which was published in 1965 as an inexpensive paperback,
was Henry’s attempt to package his career’s findings on homosexuality for a broader, non-expert
For some widely-circulating literary, television, and newspaper examples, see Gore Vidal’s 131
novel The City and the Pillar (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1948)—notably, Vidal’s main
character, Jim, tries to drink enough to have sex with a woman in order to satisfy the
expectations of his straight male friend; see television special “The Rejected” (KQED San
Francisco, September 11, 1961), Youtube, https://youtu.be/DG_-MlM4Cb8, accessed April 19,
2022; see articles Robert C. Doty, “Growth of Overt Homosexuality In City Provokes Wide
Concern,” The New York Times, December 17, 1963; Paul Welch, “Homosexuality in America,”
Life, June 26, 1964.
Ralph H. Major, Jr., “Moral Menace to Our Youth,” Coronet, September, 1950; while some 132
articles or television specials intended for adults might have introduced the mildest amount of
nuance by the 1960s, in places such as schools the message that homosexuality represented a dire
threat generally remained the same, see “Boys Beware,” Sid David Productions, 1961, Youtube,
https://youtu.be/YeUu-1VheEU, accessed October 4, 2022; there was also variation in tone along
regional divides, see the notorious pamphlet created by the Florida Legislature as late as 1964,
Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida, https://archive.org/details/ReportJan1964.
60

audience, possibly influencing these debates which had only become more relevant since the
1930s. “Sexual adjustment,” Henry explained in the book’s introduction, was central to all
aspects of human life, from courtship to suicide, and so little else could be as important. But 133
Henry seemed less convinced, by the 1960s, that “adjustment” could only mean the adoption of
monogamous heterosexuality. He no longer believed psychosexuality could be “radically
altered,” and called for social compromise while disavowing any desire to force a culturallydetermined, “arbitrary pattern” of life. Indeed, Society and the Sex Variant’s frequent historical 134
references indicated that Henry had spent a great deal of time learning about the sexual cultures
of other times and places, perhaps in keeping with an increasingly relativist and conciliatory
view of sexuality and family life some prominent authorities, such as cultural anthropologist
Margaret Mead and pediatrician Benjamin Spock, were then beginning to promote.
Henry’s chapter on alcoholism in Society and the Sex Variant was one of the first entries
in a new literature which attempted to explain and perhaps remedy problematic substance use in
homosexuals without condemning homosexuality to legal sanction. That is, Henry did believe
homosexuals generally needed help, but as noted above he did not think this should mean legal
punishment or forcible heterosexuality. As this dissertation will discuss later, in future decades
this recovery literature became the province of LGBT people themselves, particularly as activist
organizations became institutions and turned towards substance abuse treatment. This genre
nonetheless maintained much of the residue of the reformed but still slanted mindset of
authorities like Henry. While accepting complexity in the conditions of alcoholism among sex
George W. Henry, Society and the Sex Variant (New York: Collier Books, 1965), 12. 133
Henry, Society and the Sex Variant, 15. 134
61

variants, Henry began with the premise that the inherently defective nature of a “masculinefeminine conflict” within the psyche frequently drives individuals to “escape” through alcohol.
Unsurprisingly, those Henry believed were most susceptible to dangerous amounts of drinking
were “effeminate, passive men” and “masculine, aggressive women,” in other words, those sex
variants whose deviance would generally have been considered most disturbing. Though more 135
kindly towards his sexually diverse subjects than many other psychiatrists of the period, Henry
argued that the core disfunction of homosexuality was also a prime stimulus of alcoholism.
While “sex variants” in Henry’s work most frequently referred to homosexuals, who were
also sometimes referenced with categorical specificity, others with non-normative sexualities
were at times lumped into the “variant” grouping. Some sex variants may be driven by alcohol to
pedophilia, peeping, or exposure. Others felt that alcohol was a central factor in their social 136
and romantic lives. Henry sketched out the motivations, feelings, and consequences of alcohol
consumption among a number of such patients with some detail. One woman, Mildred, denied
that alcohol had anything to do with sex for her at all, and that it was rather a stimulating social
activity she felt proud of, while a man, José, claimed that alcohol drives his sexual cycle between
desiring men, feeling hungover and guilty, and switching to women, before seeking men
again. For his entire life Saul’s sexual experiences were limited to men, but he was shocked to 137
find out that he had proposed to a woman while black-out drunk. Larry believed that he could
dissolve his homosexual urges only by getting drunk, while Kathleen found that she could not go
all the way with another woman until they finally got drunk together. Marvel enjoyed sex with
Henry, Society and the Sex Variant, 110. 135
Henry, Society and the Sex Variant, 101-103. 136
Henry, Society and the Sex Variant, 102-103. 137
62

men and women both as she spent two years with a group of copious drinkers, confused the
whole time, she claimed, about which gender she would “find love” with. The role of alcohol 138
and alcoholism in the intimate life of the sex variant could indeed be confusing, manifold, and
contradictory. But throughout, “escape” was usually Henry’s guiding paradigm in his short case
studies and summary analysis of alcoholism and the sex variant.
When discussing sexuality and substance use, the escape concept referred and still refers
to several specific possibilities, many of them opposed. Among them is the subject who is trying
to escape from homosexual feelings and perhaps force heterosexual acts, one who is trying to
escape from the pressures of the dominant heterosexual society to enable indulgence in
homosexual activity, one who is escaping from feelings of guilt, perhaps inculcated by a Catholic
or other religious upbringing, or one who simply finds escape in a destructive psychoactive
oblivion that occludes reality entirely. Escape is perhaps not a useless or completely groundless
psychological category, and escapism frequently emerges as an explanation from the reflections
of subjects themselves. No doubt originating in cultural associations between intoxicants and
delusion, hallucination, and feeling in another place or mindset, it is important to note that the 139
concept of escape crystallized in the medical theory of authorities such as Kahn and Henry in
consequential and persistent ways. If intoxicated homosexuals were escaping from their troubled,
Henry, Society and the Sex Variant, 104, 107-108. 138
139 Particularly outside of the West, some traditions hold that certain psychoactive experiences––
though generally not alcohol intoxication––can in fact represent deeper thrusts into reality or
ordinarily invisible aspects of reality, rather than true “escapes” from reality. Some schools of
modern neuroscience and philosophy of mind, meanwhile, hold that reality is a convenient
hallucination created by neurotransmitters and the brain, and that it is debatable whether “base
reality,” a state of sobriety, always represents “the truth” more than a state altered by whatever
natural or synthetic substances, even if sobriety is practical for survival.
63

sober minds, they were also trying to escape from prescribed gender roles and the purported
expectations of nature, culture, or God. The very concepts of escape, addiction, and the
legitimacy of pleasure are the shared roots that tangle and overlap the homosexual and the drug
user as deviant types.
Certainly the work of some medical experts, in which intoxicants and the concept of
addiction were welded to deviant sexuality, can help us to answer Donald Webster Cory’s
question at the beginning of this chapter, and so do the partial visibility of the gay bar and the
increasing prevalence of risqué themes in cultural representations, as Cory himself indicated.140
While psychiatrists such as Kahn, Rado, and Henry were chiefly concerned with alcohol, opiates,
and cocaine, these beliefs were easily projected onto the latest drug to attract moral outrage, as
Harry Anslinger’s sentiments demonstrate about “debauchery, sexuality,” and marijuana. More 141
directly, in 1957 criminologist Arthur Guy Mathews warned that marijuana was effectively a
gateway drug to homosexuality and even murder, especially for teenagers, in Is Homosexuality a
Menace? Homosexuals, he claimed, were frequently addicted to marijuana and other drugs
because they “lose all sensory stimulations or excitations from normal expressions of sex.”142
Mathews’ concerns were closely related to fears about youth degeneration and “juvenile
delinquency,” which he frequently referenced. Perhaps Mathews was also aware of the budding
urban beatnik scene, which celebrated sexual and drug experimentation. As the next chapter will
Cory, The Homosexual in America, 93. 140
Anslinger, The Traffic in Narcotics, 21-22. 141
Mathews also recounted a story in which a daughter turned to marijuana and homosexuality 142
because her “mother was downstairs getting plastered with one of her favorite Hollywood stars.”
Arthur Guy Mathews, Is Homosexuality a Menace? (New York: Robert M. McBride Company,
1957), 121-126.
64

show, the popularization of psychedelic drugs and emergence of the youth counterculture further
complicated the relationship between psychoactive substances, homosexuality, and expertise.
Although the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its
diagnostic manual, DSM-III, in 1973-1974, a strong anti-homosexual faction remained within
the medical discipline. Homosexuality’s portrayal as an addiction continued to surface among
some authorities. One of the leading voices of the late twentieth century anti-gay therapy
movement, psychiatrist Charles Socarides, denounced “sex for its own sake” and drug use in the
gay community, frequently comparing homosexuals to drug addicts and alcoholics. Such a 143
persistent attitude was not an outlier. The influence of this rhetoric has extended beyond medical
and popular discourse, even surfacing in consequential legal proceedings, such as Bowers v.
Hardwick (1986), in which the US Supreme Court upheld Georgia’s sodomy laws. At a more 144
parochial level, a doctor in Barrie, Ontario, Peter Sullivan, maintained the same belief in a
professional journal in 1984, advising that homosexuality might be treated in a “manner similar
to that used for chemical addiction,” which to him seemed particularly necessary given the
revelations of promiscuity disclosed by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Another doctor, employed at
the Winnipeg, Manitoba Gay Community Health Clinic, pushed back, calling Sullivan’s views
Charles Socarides, Homosexuality: A Freedom Too Far (Phoenix, AZ: Adam Margrave 143
Books, 1995), 19, 21, 24, 68-69, 102, 120, 125, 149, 196; Socarides traced the origins of
homosexuality mainly to parenting issues during infancy. When his own son, Richard Socarides,
came out as gay as an adult, Charles reputedly threatened to commit suicide, see Cured, directed
by Bennett Singer and Patrick Sammon (Singer & Deschamps Productions, Story Center Films,
2020).
Elizabeth J. Levy, Animus in the Closet: Outing the Addiction Parallels in Anti-Gay Legal 144
Rhetoric,” UC Irvine Legal Review, Vol. 151 (2013), 158.
65

bigoted and out of date, attesting to the multiplicity of sexual lifestyles among gay men, and
charging that many of their problems emerged from the “corrosive effects of homophobia.”145
The observations, psychiatric conjectures, and psychoanalytic theories of experts such as
Kahn, Rado, and Henry circulated across their disciplines and beyond, informing understandings
of substance addiction and homosexuality. At the same time, the mid-twentieth century saw the
dawning heyday of medical anti-gay therapy––what we might now call gay conversion
therapy––which for most experts represented the applied science of “curing” homosexuality. If
substance addiction might be treated or even cured, so too might deviant sexual addictions. In
chapter two, I turn to a singularly ironic developments in the history of psychiatry, drugs, and
homosexuality: first, the early use of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in anti-gay therapy in the
1950s and 1960s and second, the transformation of LSD into a menace threatening normative
conceptions of gender and sexuality during the moral panic that assailed the late-1960s
counterculture. Chapter three subsequently begins with an exploration of LSD’s use as a tool of
inspiration and a party drug by gay liberationists, before I expand to examine the practices and
paradigms surrounding the use of other recreational drugs which captivated gay culture during
the rapturous 1970s and beyond.
In charting the history of a single drug, LSD, I illustrate the dynamism that can propel
elite and popular attitudes towards psychoactive substances, particularly when these overlap with
contentious questions of sexuality. The story of LSD showcases one of many convergences
between the history of drugs and the history of sexuality which this dissertation illuminates.
Peter Sullivan, “Homosexuality: An Addiction?” Canadian Medical Association Journal, 145
Vol. 130 (February 1984): 338; J.R.M. Smith, “Response: Homosexuality: An Addiction?”
Canadian Medical Association Journal, Vol. 132 (April 1985): 737-738.
66

While gradually shifting my perspective from that of experts and their quoted patients in chapters
one and two to the voices of ordinary gay people as well as gay writers and activists in chapter
three, I demonstrate how disputes about sexual and psychoactive pleasures and experiences
materialized among those who actually participated in them. In a growing sexual culture that
valued openness, pleasure, and alternative lifestyles, new and contentious calculations regarding
freedom and risk would become just as significant as efforts to combat the prejudices of the
prevailing heterosexual society.
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Chapter 2: All Possible Responses Simultaneously: Anti-Gay Psychedelic Therapy
and the Acid Menace, 1955-1969
In 1959, eight years before tripping hippies mingled at San Francisco’s 1967 Human Bein, LSD was already circulating in Hollywood. During the months surrounding the release of
Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller North by Northwest (1959), actor Cary Grant disclosed his therapeutic
use of LSD to tabloid reporters, remarking that “young women have never before been so
attracted to me.” The synthetic psychedelic drug was not yet a national menace, instead 146
enjoying strong support from the media and medical establishment. Grant claimed that thanks to
LSD and the Los Angeles psychiatrists who supplied him, he could “give a woman love for the
first time in my life because I can understand her.” The Hollywood Golden Age star had 147
several troubled marriages, and a daughter, but like many other male stars of the era, rumors of
Grant’s homosexuality nonetheless circulated, especially centering upon a possible relationship
with fellow actor Randolph Scott. Noted Los Angeles sexual hedonist Scotty Bowers later
claimed to have had numerous liaisons with Scott and Grant in Malibu and West Hollywood’s
Chateau Marmont. Whatever the truth of Grant’s sexual inclinations or behavior, he was very 148
outspoken about the personal benefits of LSD, connecting it to the maintenance of the firm but
Joe Hyams, “What Psychiatry Has Done for Cary Grant,” New York Herald Tribune, April 20, 146
1959; Laura Berquist, “The Curious Story behind the New Cary Grant,” Look, September 1,
1959.
John Kobler, “The Dangerous Magic of LSD,” Saturday Evening Post, November 2, 1963, 147
https://allaboutheaven.org/observations/the-alleged-addiction-of-dr-arthur-l-chandler-toritalin-025823/221.
Scotty Bowers, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the 148
Stars (New York: Grove Press, 2012), 75-77; Scott Eyman, Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021), 433.
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attentive heterosexual libido expected to radiate from a leading man of the silver screen, and
therefore from the ideal American man.
Lysergic acid diethylamide-25, commonly known as LSD, or more colloquially as “acid,”
was first synthesized by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1938. The mind-altering substance
was widely distributed by the Sandoz corporation, Hofmann’s employer, to medical professionals
in many Western countries beginning in 1947. LSD was subsequently utilized in a variety of 149
psychiatric and experimental contexts, particularly at universities, hospitals, independent clinics,
and military and CIA facilities. Other psychoactive agents, such as thorazine, were also being 150
used for the first time by psychiatrists during a period that was marked by great confidence in the
possibilities of postwar science. LSD offered therapists the ability to combine neurochemistry
and talk therapy, which were often considered to be competing branches of knowledge and
practice for the mind sciences. As historians of psychiatry such as Jonathan Michel Metzl 151
show, the distinction between “talk therapy” and “drug therapy” was not at all cut and dry;
British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond and British writer Aldous Huxley coined the term 149
“psychedelic” in their correspondence in 1956. While Osmond and Huxley were chiefly
concerned with LSD, the word “psychedelic” came to refer to multiple natural and synthetic
mind-altering substances. Erika Dyck, Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 1-2. See also Huxley’s essays on his early
experimentation with other psychedelics, Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven
and Hell (New York: HarperCollins, 2004). The early sexologist Havelock Ellis was one of the
first Western intellectuals to describe his experiences with the psychedelic mescaline. Mike Jay,
Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2019), 91-98. See also Albert Hofmann, LSD, My Problem Child: Reflections on Sacred Drugs,
Mysticism and Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 6-24.
Worried about Soviet advances, the CIA funded much of the early research on LSD and other 150
psychedelic drugs, making these venues difficult to distinguish. Ido Hartogsohn, American Trip:
Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 2020), 55-57.
151 Matthew Oram, The Trials of Psychedelic Therapy: LSD Psychotherapy in America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2018), 94.
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Freudian psychoanalytic concepts, in fact, informed the treatment methods some drug-happy
therapists conceived for their patients.152
Despite the vast antiquity of some other psychedelic substances, such as psilocybin
mushrooms, mescaline found in the peyote cactus, or the Amazonian ayahuasca vine brew, LSD
became popularly known as the archetypal psychedelic. The notoriety of LSD was contingent 153
upon the attention it received from medical experts and governments, but most of all as a result
of LSD’s widespread manufacture and use among members of the 1960s-1970s counterculture,
and media portrayals of that era. In the US, medical and recreational prohibition of LSD began at
the state level in the late 1960s, and was affirmed through the federal Controlled Substances Act
of 1971, which declared that common psychedelic drugs––alongside more prevalent street drugs,
such as cannabis and heroin––had no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.154
LSD took similar legal and cultural trajectories in some other Western countries, such as the UK
and Canada.
From 1947 to the late 1960s, before LSD’s prohibition, expert study of psychedelic drugs
yielded a rich research literature, much of it boasting of the drugs’ transformative properties.
Therapists treated thousands of intellectuals, artists, celebrities, prisoners, and ordinary
Jonathan Michel Metzl, Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder 152
Drugs (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
For deep histories of the use of psychedelic substances, see Terence McKenna, Food of the 153
Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and
Human Evolution (New York: Bantam Books, 1993); Paul Devereux, The Long Trip: A
Prehistory of Psychedelia (New York: Penguin Arkana, 1997); Christopher Partridge, High
Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World (Oxford
University press, 2018).
“The Controlled Substances Act,” Drug Enforcement Agency, https://www.dea.gov/ 154
controlled-substances-act.
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Americans for problems such as schizophrenia, alcoholism, end-of-life anxiety, and depression.
But beginning in the mid-1960s, LSD escaped institutions, clinics, and laboratories, becoming
associated with the rising youth counterculture through the antics and media spectacles of writer
Ken Kesey and psychologist Timothy Leary. Towards the late 60s, LSD was increasingly
produced by rogue chemists with a variety of intentions and commitments to chemical purity,
and cultural depictions of acid’s impacts became far more nefarious. The countercultural scene
was increasingly inhabited by lost young people damaged by drug use and life on the streets,
contributing to an overarching narrative explaining that LSD and its evangelists were largely
responsible. Many of those who took acid in uncontrolled settings from the mid to late 1960s
were unprepared for such extreme experiences, and this phenomenon imperiled American
morality and demolished the efforts of responsible experts to foster a novel pharmaceutical tool.
Certain aspects of this narrative, however, must be complicated and revisited. While the
majority of experiments with LSD during the first wave of research was conducted on patients
with conditions which remain under the purview of contemporary therapeutic and
pharmacological practice, such as schizophrenia and depression, LSD was also sometimes used
in conjunction with psychotherapy to “treat” homosexuality. Alongside other sexual disorders,
homosexuality was then deemed a pathological neurosis requiring repression or major
adjustment, at clinics and universities in the United States and across the Western world. Many 155
psychiatrists and psychologists during this first era of psychedelic research believed that LSD
Benjamin Karpman, a prominent American psychiatrist, noted in 1951 that some of his 155
colleagues considered any expression of homosexuality to be “criminal psychopathy.” Others
thought it a neurotic condition, Karpman wrote, if occurring consensually and in private,
meaning it was a mental disorder though not “criminal.” Benjamin Karpman, “The Sexual
Psychopath,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 42 Iss. 2 (July-August 1951), 186.
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and similar substances were powerful methods for the enforcement of normative sexual desires
and acts. Some of these efforts would now be called gay conversion therapy, a wide range of
physically or mentally invasive techniques intended to permanently change a patient’s
sexuality. The methods discussed in this chapter were premised on the notion that sexuality is 156
mutable, and that it was the duty of medical professionals to assist pathologized subjects who
might otherwise face social, familial, psychological, or legal consequences for living as gay men
or lesbians. Many patients thus participated in this research perhaps “voluntarily,” but certainly
out of desperation.
Patients’ therapists, adapting ideas about sexuality, psychiatry, and psychology articulated
earlier by thinkers such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, believed the memory recall and ego
dissolution said to be enabled by LSD provided an opportunity to reconfigure fundamental
aspects of the mind and sexual desire. In this chapter I trace the development of “conversion
therapy” with LSD according to contemporary understandings of homosexuality and psychiatry,
as well as psychotherapeutic, mystical, and creative paradigms which dominated early
psychedelic research. Each of these paradigms reveals the motives and explanations psychiatrists
deployed in approaching homosexuality with what was seen as a groundbreaking and versatile
new drug capable of enforcing sexual norms. A chief aim of the growing establishment of
psychiatrists and other experts was concerned with better shaping individuals into productive
constituents of the “breadwinner liberalism” vision of postwar society, as historian Robert O.
Chris Babits, “Conversion Therapy,” in David A. Leeming, Encyclopedia of Psychology and 156
Religion (Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer, 2018); For an account of the use of LSD to combat
“frigidity” in heterosexual women, see Constance A. Newland, My Self and I: The Intimate and
Completely Frank Record of One Woman’s Courageous Experiment with Psychiatry’s Newest
Drug (New York: Coward-McCann, 1962).
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Self terms this blend of technocracy, the welfare state, corporate-state harmony, and the maleheaded nuclear family. Seeing great potential in technologies such as novel psychoactive 157
drugs, early psychedelic therapists argued that acid’s “boundary dissolving” action upon the
psyche granted their own corrective interventions. A self-indulgent homosexual might even be
made a “breadwinning” father. Yet in its later, countercultural incarnation, LSD was hailed as an
agent of insurrection and youth revolt, and by its opponents as a threat to normative conceptions
of gender, behavior, and sexuality. As psychedelics like LSD filtered through the counterculture,
they were often used by socially and politically active gays and lesbians with a spectrum of
results—some affirmative of their identities and lives.
As many peace activists, hippies, mystics, and sexual nonconformists of different stripes
began to use LSD recreationally and spiritually in the mid- to late-1960s, some might have
questioned whether the drug promised to cure the individual, cure society, or destroy both.158
While the underground press of the counterculture extolled LSD’s contrarian power, mainstream
portrayals of the psychic “dissolution” of LSD were no longer framed as a method of combatting
social illness. Instead, film and print media represented the drug as the scourge of Cold War
domestic orthodoxy and the health of the gender and sexual order. Cultural and scientific
anxieties centered especially on the possibility that LSD damaged reproductive health through
chromosomes and fetal development, the potential for LSD to facilitate promiscuity or rape, and
the risk LSD posed to healthy American manhood and womanhood generally. From the late
Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s 157
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 17-45.
Lucas Richert, Break On Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture 158
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), 120-121.
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1950s to the 1970s, the purpose and meaning of LSD, in the eyes of users, experts, and the
broader public, was contested and chaotic, and in no domain more so than its ramifications for
understandings of gender, reproduction, and sexual expression.
As I show towards the end of this chapter, stigma towards gays and lesbians remained
fairly consistent through both the psychiatric and early countercultural eras of psychedelic use.
For many heterosexual members of the 1960s counterculture, LSD was a source of revolutionary
inspiration and personal transformation, yet its use did not necessarily dispel all prejudice. But
far away from the confines of both institutional structures and straight countercultural gurus and
activists, gay men and lesbians found new ways to make sense of themselves and engage in
spiritual, recreational, and social practices through their use of LSD, leading to new insights,
laughs, consequences, and pleasures. What was conceived of as a tool to encourage conformity
and normalcy in the 1950s became a weapon for self-expression and self-determined joy in the
wildly different context of the late 1960s and 1970s, when America produced an unparalleled
subculture of pleasure oriented, illicit drug consumption. While LGBT historians have 159
generally neglected the place of medical and especially recreational intoxicants, substances like
As historian David Herzberg reminds us, later decades also saw the formation of licit cultures 159
of self expression or self-actualization through the use of regulated drugs or “happy pills”
promoted by huge corporate advertising campaigns. This was, in effect, another successor of
Timothy Leary. Similarly, amyl nitrite or “poppers,” a quasi-legal inhalant drug used by many
gay men, were advertised heavily through macho, self-improving imagery by the 1970s. See
David Herzberg, Happy Pills in America: From Miltown to Prozac (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2010), 1-2; Herzberg more recently argues that many of the crises surrounding
specific drugs in the United States have originated in the medical marketplace. Generally
speaking, LSD has never been considered illegal, but certainly the moral panic surrounding it
had its origins in a ‘white market’ of medical therapy. See David Herzberg, White Market Drugs:
Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2020).
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LSD in fact offer a vivid window for viewing changing social attitudes, and helped lay the
groundwork for the post-Stonewall “golden age” of gay culture. This story, I suggest, also
indicates the primacy of deep interpersonal relations, individual subjectivities, and popular
culture in determining the route of psychedelic experiences, a dynamic that highly
bureaucratized and professionalized structures of medical psychedelic therapy will struggle to
replicate in our own era, even as these enlightened edifices seek to rein in the accidents and
abuses of the past.
Bridging Psychedelia & the History of Sexuality
Connecting the history of sexuality to the ‘long’ psychedelic era of the 1950s-1970s
offers a new opportunity for historians and other scholars to understand a period marked by
rapidly shifting social values and understandings of human psychology and sexuality in popular
media as well as among experts and ordinary people. The decades preceding the introduction of
LSD saw the formation of modern concepts of sexuality and “sexual deviance.” Beginning in the
late-nineteenth century, the early German sexologists, British intellectuals, and Viennese
psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud published a variety of influential studies which demarcated sexual
orthodoxy, variety, criminality, and etiology, occasionally with some measured sympathy for
homosexuals or “urnings,” as German sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs called male-attracted
males. American sexological writers of the period exercised less subtlety, roundly condemning 160
Freud, On Sexuality; Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (New York: 160
Vintage, 2014); Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion: A Critical
Edition, ed. Ivan Crozier (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008).
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non-monogamous and non-reproductive sexual activity, from masturbation to sodomy. By the 161
early twentieth century, some progressive American sex researchers and psychiatrists saw
homosexuality as an unfortunate but somewhat tolerable facet of human sexual expression, while
other authorities advocated the use of state force and expertise to identify, exclude, contain, and
prosecute homosexuals and other sex deviants. Homosexuality was frequently conflated with 162
crime generally, including violent acts of pedophilia which had captivated and horrified the
nation. 163
The scientific community and public alike were equally stunned by the release of the
Kinsey reports on male and female sexuality in 1948 and 1953, and the sheer variety of sexual
activity Kinsey revealed, along with his proposal that human sexuality lay on a spectrum
between total homosexuality and total heterosexuality. These revelations came about amidst 164
the cultural flux energized by World War Two and the early Cold War, with attendant fears about
the cohesion of the nuclear family, gender roles at home and the workplace, and the need to
detect political and sexual subversives. As lesbians and gay men became more visible they 165
experienced broad attacks and the repression of an urban social world, and a dedication to the
Benjamin Kahan, “The unexpected American origins of sexology and sexual science: 161
Elizabeth Osgood Goodrich Willard, Orson Squire Fowler, and the scientification of sex,”
History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2021), 71-88.
Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern 162
Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 120-158; Margot Canaday, The Straight
State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2011).
Terry, An American Obsession, 268-296. 163
Alfred C. Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia, PA: Saunders, 1953); 164
Alfred C. Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, (Philadelphia, PA: Saunders, 1948).
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: 165
Basic Books, 1988).
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counsel of the “shrink,” but also nascent political formation. Indeed, both the first era of 166
clinical psychedelic research, and the psychedelic counterculture, coincided with the birth and
growth of the first major gay rights organizations, such as the “homophile” Mattachine Society
(1950) and Daughters of Bilitis (1955), or the “liberation” organizations founded after the 1969
Stonewall Inn riots. An important goal of some of these organizations was the declassification of
homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder. With the assistance of medical experts such as Evelyn
Hooker and Richard Green, activists led by Frank Kameny and others eventually pushed the
American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from their Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1974. This objective was achieved with some thorny
consequences. As scholars such as Regina Kunzel and Abram J. Lewis have pointed out, this has
led to a tendency against the study of the “patient,” the “sick,” or the “mad” in queer history, to
which I might add the “high” and “intoxicated.” LSD seeped into psychiatric practice and 167
saturated the youth counterculture during these explosive years of gay and lesbian life, politics,
and culture, yet their convergence has never been explored with much breadth.
Three classic works on gay American history that cover this period are George Chauncey, Gay 166
New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New
York: Basic Books, 1995); John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of
a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1983); and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of
Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York, Routledge, 1993). For an
autobiographical account of gay author Edmund White’s relationship with therapy, beginning in
the mid-1950s, see Edmund White, My Lives: A Memoir (New York: Harper, 2006), 1-29.
All this in contrast to an activist imperative stressing the “health” of LGBT life. Regina 167
Kunzel “Queer History, Mad History, and the Politics of Health,” American Quarterly, Vol. 69,
No. 2 (June 2017): 315-319; Abram J. Lewis, ““We Are Certain of Our Own Insanity”:
Antipsychiatry and the Gay Liberation Movement, 1968–1980,” Journal of the History of
Sexuality, Vol. 25, No. 1 (January 2016): 83-84.
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Histories of LSD often tangentially mention fears about the drug’s possible impact on
reproduction and heterosexual promiscuity, but rarely mention its relationship with sexual
minorities. The historical convergence of psychedelia and LGBT life has thus received virtually
no scholarly attention. Scholars of psychedelics have nonetheless made strides useful to this 168
history in recent years; most prominently, Erika Dyck, Matthew Oram, Stephen Siff, and Ido
Hartogsohn have explored LSD in the clinic and the media, as well as the intellectual debates
surrounding its use. Taking various cues from this recent scholarship, I use medical literature, 169
the news media, film, autobiographical accounts, and other elite and popular sources to chart an
alternate history of LSD. The questions of sexuality and gender that rattled America from the
1950s-1970s, indeed, represented the most dramatic stage for shifting cultural interpretations of
LSD. For psychiatrists and other experts, acid was a tool used in attempts to enforce normative
desire and behavior from the 1950s to mid-1960s, but the drug became a popular menace thought
to jeopardize manhood, womanhood, and reproductive health in the late 1960s, before finding its
place into the toy chest of the ecstatic urban landscape of gay liberation by the 1970s. Excavating
the largely unknown practice of LSD conversion therapy, and the relationship of psychedelics to
LGBT people more broadly, is further significant for those interested in the new era of
For a notable exception discussed below, see Andrea Ens’s focused study, ““Wish I Would be 168
Normal”: LSD and Homosexuality at Hollywood Hospital, 1955-1973,” (MA thesis, University
of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, 2018).
Erika Dyck, Psychedelic Psychiatry; Oram, The Trials of Psychedelic Therapy; Stephen Siff, 169
Acid Hype: American News Media and the Psychedelic Experience (Champagne, IL: University
of Illinois Press, 2015); Hartogsohn, American Trip. For older popular histories of LSD, see Jay
Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and The American Dream (New York: Grove Press, 1987);
Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the
Sixties, and Beyond (New York: Grove Press, 1985).
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psychedelic research currently underway in psychiatry and psychology, which will be briefly
discussed in the conclusion.
Psychedelic Paradigms
Before delving into the details of the research produced by the use of LSD to treat
homosexuality, it is useful to briefly conceptualize some of the major theoretical paradigms
introduced during LSD’s early years. These ideas determined the methods and interpretations
psychiatrists employed in these reports and others, and they continue to influence the use and
meaning of LSD for users in all contexts decades later. Understanding some of these
paradigms––the psychotherapeutic, the mystical, and the creative in particular––can serve as a
foundation for grasping LSD’s claimed utility, both for psychiatrists who treated homosexuality
and those interested in other conditions.
From the 1950s-1960s Los Angeles, with its large population and many practicing
therapists and research facilities, was one major locus of LSD experimentation and clinical use.
Three prominent LSD psychiatrists in Los Angeles were among the first to introduce three
critical paradigms in their publications and practice. The work of Sidney Cohen and Betty Eisner
was frequently cited by later LSD researchers who applied their theories to patient sexuality and
other matters. Cohen, based at UCLA and the nearby Veterans Administration Hospital, urged a
strictly scientific approach in which the LSD experience was initially understood as
“psychotomimetic,” that is, that it simulated schizophrenia and other psychoses, which might
help doctors understand and treat the real conditions. Cohen also became a pioneer of LSD’s use
79

in psychotherapy. Therapists like Cohen came to believe that LSD could facilitate more wide- 170
ranging talk therapy than could sobriety, augmenting the ability of patients to recall memories
and describe their thoughts, lives, and desires, while better exposing their psyches to the doctors’
interventions. Many subsequent therapists, believing that recovering and adjusting early
memories and the inner psyche were the keys to curing homosexuality, utilized this
psychotherapeutic paradigm.
Sidney Cohen’s colleague, Betty Eisner, agreed with Cohen’s psychotherapeutic
approach, but she also entertained more numinous explanations of LSD’s effects which Cohen
respected for a time, but grew uncomfortable with. Alongside British writer Aldous Huxley, who
associated with the Los Angeles LSD psychiatrists of the time, Eisner suggested that LSD
allowed users to “glimpse the unity of the cosmos,” and even recall past lives in the ancient
world. While a spiritual component has long trailed psychedelic use in various cultures, Eisner 171
and Huxley were among the first to affirm this dimension within the context of 1950s-1960s
science and psychiatry. As the studies below will reveal, some therapists argued that LSD
mysticism could activate “natural” heterosexual inclinations they believed to be inherent to all
Echoing Cohen’s eventual judgement, psychiatrist Steven J. Novak condemns psychedelics 170
outright by citing two suicides of patients with pre-existing mental health concerns in 1952 and
1953, and the suicide of a CIA operative who was given LSD without his knowledge in 1953.
Some have since argued, however, that this later incident was in fact a murder, and that the
operative was pushed out the window. Many CIA agents at the time, furthermore, regularly
dosed each other with LSD. Novak completely dismisses those who claim to have had positive
and meaningful experiences with LSD, saying they had been “preconditioned,” and that therefore
their opinions “were worthless”––certainly a leap in logic. Steven J. Novak, “LSD before Leary:
Sidney Cohen's Critique of 1950s Psychedelic Drug Research,” Isis, Vol. 88, No. 1 (Mar., 1997),
99-101, 105, 110.
Betty Eisner, “Remembrances of LSD Therapy Past” (unpublished manuscript, 2002), 5, 171
http://www.maps.org/images/pdf/books/remembrances.pdf; Oram, The Trials of Psychedelic
Therapy, 43; Novak, “LSD before Leary,” 100.
80

humans, if sometimes obscured. In this sense, there was some overlap between the principles of
some religiously-oriented LSD therapists, and the beliefs held by practitioners of more wellknown and widespread versions of gay conversion therapy conduced by Christian organizations.
Finally, psychiatrist Oscar Janiger, based at UC Irvine and with a private clinic in Los
Angeles, stressed the profound and novel creativity he believed was generated by LSD, and often
had patients paint before and during their LSD trips. He administered LSD to perhaps 900 people
in Southern California, including Cary Grant, who later went on to work with Beverly Hills
psychiatrists Arthur L. Chandler and Mortimer A. Hartman. The creative paradigm surfaced 172
less in LSD conversion therapy than the psychotherapeutic and mystical approaches, but at least
one therapist discussed last in this chapter believed that LSD could spur novel ways for a man to
view a woman, permitting the arousal of his homosexually-inclined patient. Psychiatrists and
other therapeutic users of LSD working in the United States and other Western countries
generally adhered to various combinations of the psychotherapeutic, mystical, and creative
paradigms. These approaches to psychedelics were further adopted by many members of the
1960s counterculture and the underground psychedelic community that continues today.
Coincidentally, Janiger was a cousin of gay Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, though Ginsberg had 172
his first psychedelic experiences with indigenous people in Peru in 1960 and Timothy Leary at
Harvard in 1961. Allen Ginsberg, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, ed. Bill Morgan (Cambridge,
MA: Da Capo Press, 2008), 228-229, 235-237. For Janiger, see Rick Doblin, Jerome E. Beck,
Kate Chapman and Maureen Alioto, “Dr. Oscar Janiger's Pioneering LSD Research: A Forty Year
Follow-up,” Bulletin of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), Vol. 9
Num. 1 (Spring 1999), 7-21, http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v09n1/09107jan.html. For
Chandler and Hartman, see Kobler, “The Dangerous Magic of LSD.”
81

Trip Away the Gay: LSD Psychiatry and Homosexuality
The Sandoz corporation exported LSD from Switzerland to professionals on both sides of
the Iron Curtain, where it found a wide variety of experimental applications. Below I have 173
compiled an overview of therapeutic practice regarding LSD and homosexuality conducted in the
United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States from the 1950s to early 1970s using a series of
medical studies and reports. In these three countries experts were in frequent conversation and
acted according to similar and evolving ideological and methodological principles. From its
inception, LSD research was transnational, and researchers in the English-speaking world were
at great liberty to pursue the most recent publications of their fellow researchers on either side of
the Atlantic, which for some also included studies published in German and Italian. This flow
was reflected in their research citations as well as the international nature of psychiatric
conferences related to LSD during this era. Some patients may even have crossed borders for
treatment; British Columbia’s Hollywood Hospital, featured below, was known––somewhat
confusingly––to host Americans flying in from Hollywood, California.174
Researchers were, of course, bound by their own national professional associations and
regulatory systems, which in the English-speaking world worked more or less in-sync in
Research concerning LSD and homosexuality took place outside of the English-speaking 173
world, see passing references in Sarah Marks, "From experimental psychosis to resolving
traumatic pasts: Psychedelic Research in Communist Czechoslovakia, 1954-1974,” Cahiers du
monde russe, Vol. 56, Iss. 1 (2015); Per Haave and Willy Pedersen, “The Promise and Demise of
LSD Psychotherapy in Norway,” Social History of Medicine, Vol. 34, Iss. 2 (May 2021):
399-416; and an especially egregious case of extremely strong doses of LSD (up to 800
micrograms) forcibly administered to two adolescent male homosexuals in Alsace, France, Zoë
Dubus, “Utiliser les psychédéliques pour « guérir » des adolescents homosexuels ? Essai de
thérapie de conversion, France, 1960,” Annales Médico-psychologiques, revue psychiatrique
Vol. 178, Iss. 6 (June 2020), 650-656.
Ens, ““Wish I Would be Normal”,” 27. 174
82

cracking down on LSD both recreationally and in medical practice. The later portion of this
chapter considers the role of gender and sexuality in the backlash against the recreational use of
LSD in the American counterculture, as well as the migration of LSD to urban gay party cultures
during the post-Stonewall era. It is not my intention to demonstrate that these sexual dissidents
were consciously reappropriating what had been a psychiatric tool by embracing recreational
LSD in places such as gay clubs. To the best of my knowledge very few if any gay recreational
drug users were aware of the history of LSD use in anti-gay therapy, but virtually all were aware
of the thorny relationship between psychiatry and homosexuality which had been shaping their
personal lives as well as law and popular attitudes for decades.
Working during the earliest years of psychedelic research, psychiatrist Harold Abramson
followed a psychotherapeutic model of LSD. Based at Columbia University’s College of
Physicians and Surgeons, Abramson published one of the first studies into LSD and sexuality in
the Journal of Psychology in 1955. This work was based on an extended session with an 175
unnamed woman experiencing a variety of anxieties. Most of her symptoms were successfully
treated earlier, but what remained was her prominent fear of her possible homosexuality.
Abramson's patient, thirty minutes following the consumption of a light-to-moderate LSD dose
of 40 micrograms, felt more capable of speaking about her sexuality, and Abramson’s report
centered on a transcript of her four-hour long talk-therapy session. She described a satisfying
relationship with her husband, but linked her masturbation when he was absent to the possibility
that she could be a lesbian, even though Abramson, in previous sessions, had assured her that she
Harold A. Abramson, “Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD-25): III. As an Adjunct to 175
Psychotherapy with Elimination of Fear of Homosexuality,” The Journal of Psychology, Vol. 39,
Iss. 1 (1955), 127-155.
83

“had enough feminine characteristics not to be considered a lesbian.” The patient went on to 176
convey her belief that her desire to masturbate would cease during a committed relationship with
a man, but that this had not occurred, and that now she could only reach orgasm using the “same
practice lesbians use.” She further expressed her fascination with a chapter speculating about 177
the origins of lesbianism in the mother-daughter relationship, which she had just read in French
feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949).
The extended interview transcript in this study is fairly unique, and Abramson included
inserts marking the time and likely stage of the LSD effect. According to Abramson, the drug’s
peak occurred between two and three hours following ingestion. As forty-five minutes elapsed,
the patient remarked about her “strange” feelings, while seeming to drift from thoughts of herself
projected onto de Beauvoir’s analysis of lesbianism to especially vivid recollections of her
childhood and sexual awakening, her adult sexual history with her husband, and an incident with
the neighbors that led to her need for assured privacy in order to achieve sexual satisfaction. In
the report, Abramson noted unusual openness in his patient. The patient evidently conflated 178
masturbation and occasional dissatisfaction with her sex life with potential homosexuality. For
her, this was a frightening possibility. Abramson’s report noted that under the influence of LSD,
she was not only more willing to speak about these matters with him, but she also found that her
memories assembled more clearly, fulfilling, in Abramson’s mind, psychotherapy’s objective of
remedying patients through the reconfiguration of memories thought to shape personality. The
patient overlaid these memories onto the mother-daughter dynamic as explained by de Beauvoir,
Abramson, 130-131. 176
Abramson, 132. 177
Abramson, 136. 178
84

and Abramson connected her childhood experiences with bathing and contact with her mother to
the creation of a resolvable “symbolic homosexuality.” The notion that homosexuality derived 179
from a problematic relationship with parents was especially popular in the early to mid-twentieth
century, and was heavily influenced by Freudian theories about stages of sexual development. 180
In his final analysis, Abramson suggested that the mass collection of sexual data, in the
style of Alfred Kinsey, was insufficient, and that this case demonstrated the necessity of applying
Freud’s ideas to individuals should any “understanding of the role of sexual behavior in our
culture” be ascertained. The role of LSD, he argued, was to “produce a disturbance of the 181
personality structure,” elicit the unconscious, and induce a temporary state comparable to
schizophrenia, as prominent psychedelic psychiatrist Sidney Cohen advocated. Abramson
ventured that his patient’s fear of homosexuality was dissolved as LSD granted “egoreconstruction,” a process in which dissecting and rebuilding the psyche through enhanced
memory could return the patient to a healthier mental state, one where masturbation and
homosexuality were decoupled. 182
Given the nature of Abramson’s research, it is fair to speculate about the ethical
considerations of his methods, and what else the patient’s “openness” could have meant. There is
little we can know about what went on in his office outside of his own record, but during the first
era of psychedelic research there were probably instances of what we would now consider
physical or verbal sexual abuse beyond the idea that sexual orientation should be corrected,
Abramson, 152. 179
Freud, On Sexuality. 180
Abramson, “LSD. As an Adjunct to Psychotherapy with Elimination of Fear of 181
Homosexuality,” 153.
Abramson, 140-141, 153-154. 182
85

which later studies explicitly championed, and many would now find troubling. The history of
psychiatry is rife with instances of questionable behavior or outright sexual abuse, and the
contemporary revival of psychedelic science and therapy has itself been the subject of such
allegations. As Kunzel notes in In the Shadow of Diagnosis, the “encounter” of psychiatrist 183
and patient is marked by a “radical asymmetry,” and this both limits and informs our possible
interpretations of psychiatric texts.184
What we can know for certain, however, is that Abramson’s article revealed the anxiety
and confusion at a time when discussions of sexuality, even in private between a therapist and
patient, remained taboo. Other psychiatrists applied LSD more directly to patients with
diagnosed or self-reported pedophilia, transvestitism, transsexuality, or homosexuality, which
were then typically lumped together as pathologies or “sexual perversions.” While often 185
combined into this single category, these conditions were not necessarily seen as equivalent
violations of law or culture. But for gay men and women, the strong stigma against
homosexuality motivated some to seek treatment voluntarily, often without any legal or penal
requirement that they do so. In December 1957, one such man, “Harold” from Wisconsin, wrote
to ONE Magazine, a gay rights publication first published in 1953, looking for a solution. Rather
Psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan, for instance, used “physical affection” among patients and 183
clinical staff in his therapy, which was concerning for some of his colleagues, see Naoko Wake,
Private Practices: Harry Stack Sullivan, the Science of Homosexuality, and American Liberalism
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 80-81; for contemporary sexual assault in
psychedelic therapy, which does otherwise promise respite from traumatic experiences, see
Olivia Goldhill, “Psychedelic therapy has a sexual abuse problem,” Quartz, March 3, 2020,
https://qz.com/1809184/psychedelic-therapy-has-a-sexual-abuse-problem-3.
Kunzel, In the Shadow of Diagnosis, 8. 184
J. R. Ball and Jean J. Armstrong, “The Use of L.S.D. 25 (D-Lysergic Acid Diethylamide) in 185
the Treatment of the Sexual Perversions,” Canadian Psychiatric Journal Vol. 5, No. 4 (August,
1961): 231.
86

than finding political inspiration in the magazine, he asked “if there is a “drug” that will control
or dull my homosexual desires,” and he wrote that he believed a tranquilizer had temporarily
reduced his “homosexual desires and drives.” He proceeded to express his loneliness, said that 186
he had unrequited feelings for his psychiatrist, and also wondered if drinking might be the
answer to his pain. Harold’s story was not at all unique, especially for gay people outside of the
handful of major cities with easily accessible gay subcultures. From the 1950s onwards, the gay
media frequently referenced psychiatric ideas and “conversion” techniques, though LSD therapy
for homosexuality appears never to have attracted significant attention, perhaps indicating its
limited use. Gay activist Jim Kepner, writing as a columnist for ONE Magazine in February
1956, mentioned that a New Orleans police official had invoked the need for medical assistance
in controlling homosexuality. LSD, the official marveled, was “reported to effectively relieve
latent homosexual frustrations,” a notion Kepner thought was reminiscent of George Orwell’s
1984.187
Some––probably most––gay people who sought or were compelled to seek professional
“help” obtained conventional forms of psychotherapy alone. But the technology of the era also
offered alleged solutions that could be used alongside, and various methods were legitimated by
the views of prominent psychoanalysts and psychiatrists such as Edmund Bergler, Irving Bieber,
and Sandor Rado. Psychotherapy with LSD became one such tool and was relatively limited in
scope. Somewhat more common technological treatments included hormonal interventions,
Craig Loftin, ed., Letters to ONE: Gay and Lesbian Voices from the 1950s and 1960s 186
(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), 89-90.
Jim Kepner, “ONE Magazine, February 1956 “tangents, news & views: Getting the 187
Treatment” in Rough News –– Daring Views: 1950s’ Pioneer Gay Press Journalism (New York:
Routledge, 1997), 108.
87

aversion therapy using nausea-inducing drugs and electric shocks, chemical castration, and
lobotomies, and some of these methods were in practice by the 1930s. Aversion therapy 188
followed the precepts of behaviorism, a school of psychological thought championed by
psychologist B.F. Skinner and others that emphasized environmental factors in explaining
behavior in humans and other animals, reducing the importance of inherent factors such as
heredity.
Practitioners of aversion therapy believed humans could and should be conditioned to act
in a corrected way through a positive or negative stimulus. Various aversion therapies saw
homosexual patients appropriately punished or rewarded while viewing sometimes erotic images
of men or women. Sometimes this punishment amounted to a painful electric shock administered
to various parts of the body. During some studies conducted in the 1960s, apomorphine, a nausea
and erection-inducing drug, was administered to homosexual patients who were exposed to
erotic imagery or instructed to recount their sexual fantasies, with the intended outcome that
feelings of nausea would become linked to homosexual desire and physical arousal. In a 1970 189
case, noted psychiatrist Robert Galbraith Heath of Tulane University attempted to cure a young
Terry, An American Obsession, 162, 294-295, 308-314, 326, 365-366; in the late 1940s, New 188
York State mental hygiene commissioner Paul H. Hoch experimented on at least one male patient
with mescaline in conjunction with lobotomy, believing this dual use of psychoactive and
surgical treatment might treat homosexuality and other aberrant sexual behavior, see Benjamin
Breen, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic
Science (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2024), 94.
In the study conducted by Dr. Basil James, alcohol was consumed alongside the apomorphine, 189
because it enhanced the nausea and was “part of the behavior pattern associated with his
homosexual activity.” Basil James, “Case Of Homosexuality Treated By Aversion Therapy,” The
British Medical Journal Vol. 2, No. 5280 (March 17, 1962): 768-770; N. McConaghy,
“Subjective and Penile Plethysmograph Responses Following Aversion-Relief and Apomorphine
Aversion Therapy for Homosexual Impulses,” The British Journal of Psychiatry Vol. 115, Iss.
523 (June 1969): 723-730.
88

gay man known as Patient B-19 by conducting deep brain stimulation. This involved the
activation of implanted electrodes in Patient B-19’s brain’s pleasure centers while he viewed
heterosexual pornography and had sex with a hired female sex worker––wires attached. To 190
Heath, this represented a success, though there is no evidence that this experiment was conducted
again or by anyone else. Beyond medical and psychiatric contexts, religious institutions
including gay conversion sites regularly used psychological manipulation, martial punishment,
and terror of hellfire, a practice that still occurs in much of the Western world.
Taking LSD is less physically invasive than deep brain stimulation, but for patients it
could be equally as mentally intense. As Abramson was compiling his early research on LSD’s
implications for psychotherapy and homosexuality in 1955, many subjects were given the new
drug at other hospitals and clinics across the United States and elsewhere, where a wide variety
of new applications were attempted. In Canada, therapists at Hollywood Hospital in New
Westminster, British Columbia treated a variety of conditions with LSD, especially addiction.
Their methods were fairly typical. Patients first wrote autobiographical statements and took pretreatment interviews and tests to assess viability, and this was followed by one or several
sessions in which patients ingested LSD in a relaxing room and underwent psychoanalysis with a
male and female therapist according to the problems they were experiencing. As historian 191
Andrea Ens has uncovered through rare access to medical files including patient-authored
In this case, Patient B-19 was under legal pressure––when he was treated by Heath, he had 190
just been arrested for possession of marijuana, and avoided being charged by spending time at
Charity Hospital in New Orleans under Heath’s care. Lone Frank, The Pleasure Shock: The Rise
of Deep Brain Stimulation and Its Forgotten Inventor (New York: Penguin, 2018), 3-4, 124.
The standard use of a male and female therapist in each session reflected the heterosexual 191
underpinnings of psychiatric theory. Ens, ““Wish I Would be Normal”,” 36-38.
89

reports, at least twelve men also sought and paid for treatment of their homosexuality at
Hollywood Hospital from 1955-1973. Ens suggests that these men sought to alleviate their 192
same-sex desire at a clinic known for addiction due to the less stigmatized status of addiction,
compared to homosexuality, in contemporary Canadian society. It is also possible that their 193
choice to seek therapy at Hollywood Hospital was influenced by psychiatric arguing that both
homosexuality and drug addiction originated from the same error in the self’s search for
pleasure. 194
Many of the men who sought treatment at Hollywood Hospital were frustrated with
dating women, or were concerned about whether or not they could have “normal” lives in which
they could love their current or future wives and children. The patients’ expressed desires to live
“normally” were laden with the prevailing psychiatric rhetoric of the time. In particular, some
associated “maturity” with life at the head of a heterosexual nuclear family, or traced their
sexuality to weak fathers and overbearing mothers. While some men sought a form of
heterosexual transition, others were just interested in clarity, and believed LSD might reveal
some truth about themselves which an ordinary state of consciousness could not. For one 195
patient, pseudonymously named Andrew Sandford, this truth was that he and homosexuality
were both “evil”––a conclusion he reached despite a nurse at the hospital telling him
otherwise. 196
Ens states that two same-sex desiring women were treated with LSD at Hollywood Hospital, 192
but not for reasons related to their sexuality. Ens, 15-17.
Ens, 28-29. 193
Nancy Campbell, Discovering Addiction: The Science and Politics of Substance Abuse 194
Research (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2007), 23-25.
Ens, ““Wish I Would be Normal”,” 58-63, 79. 195
Ens, 68, 72. 196
90

Even as the hospital staff had mixed opinions about the matter, the setting of the hospital
could not obscure prevailing social attitudes, which had led the men there in the first place, from
surfacing during the psychedelic experience. The record of most patients’ lives after the therapy
is patchy, but in his post-treatment report, Sandford claimed that his final experience with LSD
revealed to him that he was not homosexual after all, though it is unclear if he believed this
change had occurred recently, or indeed there was any “change” at all. In a paper presented at 197
Amityville, New York’s 1965 “International Conference on the Use of LSD in Psychotherapy
and Alcoholism,” the medical director of Hollywood Hospital, J. Ross MacLean, indicated that
Sandford’s case was fairly exceptional; only a few patients reached “satisfactory heterosexual
adjustment” through psychotherapy with LSD. Rather, many others found that they gained
“insight, acceptance of role” and “reduction of guilt,” suggesting that at least some patients of
Hollywood Hospital were navigated towards a more affirming view of their sexuality through
LSD therapy, with or without the prodding of attendant therapists. Unlike many of the other 198
patients discussed in this chapter, the men at Hollywood Hospital were not participating in
therapy clearly mandated to “cure” their homosexuality, likely resulting in a greater openness to
a variety of directions and results on the part of patients, MacLean, and his colleagues.
Psychiatric practice with LSD likely peaked in the early 1960s, with several researchers
publishing studies involving homosexuality—like at Hollywood Hospital, primarily that of men.
UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute estimates that about 700 000 Americans have received
Ens, 79-80. 197
Harold Abramson, ed., The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy and Alcoholism (Indianapolis, IN: 198
The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1967), 415.
91

some form of gay conversion therapy since the late nineteenth century. Only a small minority 199
of these people, perhaps in the hundreds or low thousands, were given LSD to treat their
homosexuality from the 1950s-1970s. Because the vast majority of these patients were not the
subject of published research, it is impossible to obtain precise numbers. But judging from Cary
Grant’s treatment regimen, which may only be traced in the tabloid and popular press of the day,
there were no doubt many individuals––celebrity or not––treated for some failure to exercise
correct heterosexual energies, regardless of whether or not their pre-treatment homosexuality,
frigidity, or other impairment was made explicit or not. It is important to note that homosexuals
were by no means the chief target of psychedelic researchers; rather, medical experts aimed at
the entire grab-bag of psychiatric conditions as they were identified at the time.
Tracking published medical research on sexuality and LSD, in which therapists and their
patients sometimes claimed some level of success, permits a view of evolving medical dialogues
surrounding both psychedelic drugs, homosexuality, and related conditions during this era. J. R.
Ball and Jean J. Armstrong, psychiatrists working at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle,
England, viewed LSD similarly to Abramson and Cohen according to their Canadian Psychiatric
Journal article. Like Abramson, they lauded LSD for its ability to aid “recall of previous events”
and boost the “appearance of unconscious material” as an “adjunct to therapy.” The ten 200
patients they reported on in 1961 included “one transsexualist, one transvestist, five male
homosexuals, one female homosexual,” and two others were not specified in this list, other than
that they were male. These men were the subjects of the paper’s more detailed case studies.
Christy Mallory, Taylor N.T. Brown and Kerith J. Conron, “Conversion Therapy and LGBT 199
Youth,” The Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, January 2018.
Ball and Armstrong, “The Use of L.S.D. 25 in the Treatment of the Sexual Perversions,” 231. 200
92

The researchers probably singled them out as much for their apparent, partially successful
treatment as for their complicated and fluid sexual histories, which included homosexual and
heterosexual acts, exhibitionism, groping, pedophilia, and a sexual advance on one of the
researchers during a session. While claims of “successful” treatment here should always be read
with skepticism, it is plausible that the apparently shifting sexual practices of these men across
their past lives made them more convincing “successes” after treatment. The researchers, on the
other hand, claimed that success required “above average intelligence” and the authentic desire
of the patient to be “rid of perversion.” The two case study men met these qualifications, while 201
none of the other eight, the researchers said, were interested in significant change, finding their
sexual or gender expression “satisfying and fulfilling.” In Ball and Armstrong’s only specific
comment regarding either of the trans patients, they noted that the “transsexualist” was of above
average intelligence, but this was not enough to enable any “improvement” in their “sexual
perversion.” While this study was unique in specifically referring to a trans category, as I have
noted above it is possible that other transgender people were placed in the category
“homosexual” at a time when these identities were far more blurred for most experts as well as in
popular discourse, and just several years after the media sensation surrounding Christine
Jorgensen.202
All ten of Ball and Armstrong’s patients were separately given a large dose of 200
micrograms of LSD in a comfortable setting with calming music. The two case studies 203
Ball and Armstrong, 232-234. 201
See throughout Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the 202
United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
Ball and Armstrong, 231, 233. 203
93

describe a sense of unity, spiritual feelings, “new dimensions,” and connections to “God”
acquired by both patients, which afterwards manifested in better lives. One of the “successful”
patients “began to indulge in ordinary heterosexual activity for the first time in his life.” Other 204
patients said they had changed due to the therapy, but Ball and Armstrong found that this was
often not demonstrated afterward in any lasting way. Lacking the extended interview and
analysis of Abramson, Ball and Armstrong did not clearly explain the mechanics whereby LSD
was used for sexual modification, but they summarized by calling it an “extra-weapon,”
“occasionally extremely effective,” in treating sexual pathologies. They further appear to have 205
encouraged the mystical view of LSD associated with Los Angeles psychiatrist Betty Eisner,
linking an experience of the divine to the reconfiguration of sexual normalcy, and hinting at the
presence of religious systems of morality behind medical and scientific imperatives to cure the
aberrant.
Another LSD study, conducted by psychiatrist Bertrand Tenenbaum in an austere group
context, occurred at California’s Atascadero State Hospital in 1960, and was published the
following year in Diseases of the Nervous System. Unsurprisingly, given the correctional setting,
Tenenbaum adhered strictly to a psychotherapeutic frame. Located about fifteen miles north of
San Luis Obispo, Atascadero State Hospital was described in 1960 by its superintendent,
Reginald Rood, as an alternative to prison for the “sexual psychopath.” According to Rood, 206
under the authority of California law this category included those who suffer from “abnormal
Ball and Armstrong, 233. 204
Ball and Armstrong, 234. 205
Reginald S. Rood, “California’s Program for the Sexual Psychopath,” Cleveland State Law 206
Review, 1960.
94

sexual desire of a kind and degree to constitute him a menace to others,” typically excluding “the
ordinary homosexual.” Nonetheless, some gay activists later called Atascadero “Dachau for
Queers,”evidently unaware that the original Dachau itself housed plenty of “queers.” They
pointed to lobotomies, chemical treatments, and experimental conversion techniques performed
on sexual minorities at Atascadero as “torture.” This discrepancy concerning Atascadero’s 207
mandate and the status of its inmates likely derived from the entrapment of gay men and
unevenly applied laws and penalties regarding age of consent, public sex, and other stipulations,
which might have condemned gay men and women to sexual psychopathy and imprisonment for
non-violent behavior between consenting adults. Atascadero, furthermore, likely housed inmates
confined there by hostile families, and following referrals made by medical professionals
elsewhere.
Precisely how the “two rapists, four male pedophiles, two incestuous female pedophiles,
and two exhibitionists” treated with LSD at Atascadero in 1960 might be categorized by later
standards of pathology and sexuality is thus difficult to determine. Tenenbaum identified two in
the group as “homosexuals,” presumably in addition to one of the other classifications. This 208
group of inmates was “selected for treatment” under the auspices Tenenbaum, who in a patient
newsletter no doubt closely scrutinized by officials was described as taking a “light-hearted and
Matthew Barry, “The Torture Of Homosexuals - 1950s to 1980s,” 2011. 207
Bertrand Tenenbaum, M.D., “Group Therapy with LSD-25 (A Preliminary Report),” Diseases 208
of the Nervous System, Vol. 22, No. 8 (August 1961): 2.
95

intellectual approach.” The patient newsletter further praised Doctor Tenenbaum for his 209
devotion to solving problems that removed inmates from their families, offered blessings to
Tenenbaum and the staff, and thanked the ten LSD subjects from “ward 16.” Tenenbaum 210
reported that his use of a group setting was borrowed from indigenous peoples of the US
Southwest and Mexico, who traditionally hold ceremonies in which they consume psychedelic
peyote cacti and psilocybin mushrooms. As Philip Deloria charts, the hippies frequently 211
adopted lose interpretations of indigenous imagery and concepts in their style and folk
philosophy, and it might be added that psychedelic therapists and other experts occasionally
functioned as middle men in this cultural process.212
This group setting was not at all the norm in LSD therapy, but Tenenbaum cited a Dutch
therapist who had found that a social setting could influence “the course of treatment.” The ten
patients, from ages 20-57, had a range of other issues, including alcoholism and “various
character disorders,” and had improved little during their time at Atascadero. Tenenbaum
administered first light and then progressively higher doses of LSD (ranging between 50-300
micrograms, and depending on individual response) to the group several times over six months,
but not so high as to “disrupt ego function” excessively. Tenenbaum attempted to confront the 213
In his report, Tenenbaum notes that patients were “selected,” but the Atascadero newsletter 209
implies that participation was voluntary. Writing in this newsletter was probably an important
opportunity for inmates to prove their mental health, and should be read as such. Tenenbaum,
“Group Therapy with LSD-25,” 1; Robert C Hoskins, Associate Editor, “LSD-25,” E.S.P.
Newsletter, Vol. 4, No. 22 (June 2, 1960): 2, ONE Archive Subject Files Collection
Coll2012.001, Atascadero State Hospital--Pilot Project 1900-2012, ONE Archive, University of
Southern California.
210 Hoskins,“LSD-25.”
Tenenbaum, “Group Therapy with LSD-25,” 1. 211
Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 154-180. 212
Tenenbaum, 1-2, 4. 213
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subjects with memories or aspects of their personalities that they had typically “evaded or
rationalized,” just as their experiences peaked. He found that their reactions were far less
defensive than usual, and claimed success in adjusting unwanted behavior in nine of the ten
patients. He did not pursue a broader objective of “complete personality realignment,” instead 214
wishing to focus on reducing only the undesirable aspects. Like Abramson, Tenenbaum followed
the Freudian model, locating sexual disorder in a troubled parental relationship. His two
homosexual patients, “K.L.H., age 33” and “S.F., age 47” evidently “relinquished (their)
symptom(s)” once they addressed the trauma and abnormal dynamics of their childhoods. As in
Abramson’s technique, Tenenbaum believed that the memories retrieved by LSD could be
addressed to modify deviant sexual drives. Alongside its memory function, Tenenbaum argued,
LSD dissolves ego, granting a fuller and more productive introspection of the unconscious. The
group setting, Tenenbaum stressed, fostered more authentic and empathetic understanding among
the inmates “as individuals.” Therapy with the assistance of LSD, he concluded, was eased, 215
“enhanced and accelerated.”216
Anna Joyce Martin was an especially prolific psychoanalyst, and wrote two studies
concerning her use of LSD in treating gay men in 1962 and 1967 in which she advocated a
Tenenbaum, 2. 214
Tenenbaum, 2-3. 215
Tenenbaum, 4. 216
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modified version of psychotherapy. Her first study centered on the treatment of twelve gay 217
men at London’s Marlborough Day Hospital, where a total of “one hundred chronic neurotic
patients” were given LSD for a variety of reasons. Martin claimed that the patients had been 218
carefully selected according to Marlborough Day Hospital’s standards, which required a lack of
earlier “psychotic episode(s),” a “high intelligence,” and a “strong desire to get well.” These
standards also excluded gay men who were “accepting” of their sexuality, “without any desire to
change.” The level of coercion applied to this group, then, amounted to the prevailing 219
prejudice of British society in the early 1960s. Every man was given 4-14 doses of LSD in
amounts beginning at 50 micrograms and then increasing by 20 micrograms each time depending
on effectiveness. Uniquely, Martin utilized a Freudian psychoanalytic phenomenon referred to 220
as “transference,” in which problematic emotions from patients’ childhoods were recalled––with
the assistance of LSD, in this case––but then energetically redirected towards Martin in the role
of therapist. This use of transference was based on the presumption that homosexuality derived
from some combination of a troubled family life and a premature termination of Freudian sexual
development. Carefully adjusting the dosage, Martin did not seek to induce “disintegration of the
The second study, dated to 1967, is an elaboration of the “Detailed Account” provided in the 217
first. This longer version appears to have remained an unpublished manuscript––perhaps because
Martin died in 1969. A. Joyce Martin, “The Treatment of Twelve Male Homosexuals with
'L.S.D.' (followed by a Detailed Account of One of them who was a Psychopathic Personality),”
Acta Psychotherapeutica et Psychosomatica, 10 (1962): 394-402; A. Joyce Martin, “A Case of
Homosexuality and Character Disorder in a Man of 37 Treated by L.S.D. and Resolved Within
Four Months,” 1967, Albert Hofmann Foundation, http://www.hofmann.org/papers/
martin_3.html.
Martin, “The Treatment of Twelve Male Homosexuals with ‘L.S.D.’,” 395. 218
Martin, 396. 219
Martin, 396, 400. 220
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ego” or feelings of “unreality.” She saw the positive action of LSD in augmenting memory 221
recall and the power of transference, “freeing the ego” without melting it. Tenenbaum and 222
Martin both maintained that LSD vastly accelerated psychoanalytic work that would otherwise
take years.
Martin’s conclusion lauded seven newly “heterosexually oriented” subjects after “three to
six years,” and varied results for the rest, including commitment to homosexual monogamy in
one case, and the substitution of painting and politics instead of homosexuality for two others.223
Martin went into greater detail about one especially troubled man from the group, a misfit with
homosexual inclinations, but an earlier history of sexual aggression towards girls and incestuous
feelings towards his mother while he was a child. The man had recently been fired for his
homosexuality. After eight LSD sessions, in which he relived past memories and expressed his
emotions through transference, he was able to “stabilize and integrate.” Checking in on the man
several years later, Martin wrote that he married a woman and that “they would both like to have
a child very much, and are taking advice about this from University College Hospital,
London.”224
In 1967, authors Peter Stafford and Bonnie Golightly, in LSD - The Problem-Solving
Psychedelic, stated that some gay alcoholics found that LSD helped to remedy their addiction,
while leading them to live more heterosexual lives. Stafford and Golightly repeated many of 225
Martin, 396. 221
Martin, 401. 222
Martin, 396-397. 223
A. Joyce Martin, “A Case of Homosexuality and Character Disorder in a Man of 37 Treated 224
by L.S.D.”
Peter G. Stafford and Bonnie H. Golightly, LSD — The Problem-Solving Psychedelic (1967), 225
50-51.
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the beliefs common in the psychiatric community: that homosexuality derived from “early
traumas” and “morbid dependency on parents,” and that LSD was a powerful agent for
enhancing psychotherapy. But they also noted that LSD caused some people to accept their
“homosexuality without shame,” and that “continuance of homosexuality after LSD is not
necessarily a treatment failure…It may represent the establishment of a positive nature of the
self.” To Stafford and Golightly, homosexuality nonetheless remained a “perversion,” but that
“acceptance” would even be mentioned here could be read as an indication of some changing
attitudes by the late 1960s, and even the influence of homophile activists who had become
outspoken years before the gay liberation movement.226
A final, highly eccentric study was published by Richard Alpert in the Psychedelic
Review in 1969, though the events it describes could have taken place several years earlier.227
Alpert was Timothy Leary’s collaborator at Harvard, and followed his own trajectory to become
a New Age guru known as Ram Dass in the decades after both left academia. While Alpert 228
stated that he “leaned towards a Freudian model of the early development of sexual identity,” his
work departed from the more standard psychoanalytical approach favored by psychiatrists such
as Abramson, Cohen, and others. Unconstrained by the rigid standards of his earlier profession,
Alpert’s study blended the mystical and creative approaches to LSD promoted by Los Angeles
For more on these early years of the gay rights movement, and popular media depictions, see 226
Martin Meeker, Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community,
1940s-1970s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
Alpert published a shorter version of this piece, with the more spiritual content removed for a 227
secular audience, in The Journal of Sex Research in 1969. Richard Alpert, “LSD and Sexuality:
Review of a case of homosexuality treated therapeutically with LSD and description of a malefemale psychedelic session program,” Psychedelic Review No. 10 (1969): 21-24; Richard Alpert,
“Drugs and sexual behavior,” The Journal of Sex Research, Vol. 5, Iss. 1 (1969): 50–56.
Alpert, 21. 228
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psychiatrists Eisner and Oscar Janiger in the 1950s. Alpert argued that a subject dosed with LSD,
when given a “stimulus,” did not experience his or her typical “cognitive…associations.” Rather,
the subject encountered “all possible responses simultaneously––providing an experiential
richness, freshness, and inter-relatedness which then, theoretically, allows for the possibility of
the emergence of new external behavioral responses.” LSD created a fuller breadth of novel
experience, and a man influenced with LSD and looking at a woman “sees her in literally
hundreds of other ways,” he sees the “archetypes” of woman––“the harlot, the virgin, the
seductress, the juvenile, the matron, the mother, and so on.” These newly-perceived archetypes,
Alpert imagined, awakened a natural heterosexuality in his patient, who could for the first time
apprehend the sexual appeal of women. Alpert’s concept of human sexuality framed the unity of
male and female archetypes as a force central to the universe, and he included a Medieval Indian
illustration of the “Union” of an anthropomorphic “Fire and Water” in his report to illustrate this
spiritual concept.229
Alpert demonstrated his theory of LSD with a 38 year old “bisexual” man with an
extensive history of thousands of homosexual encounters, and three with women. The treatment
took place over four sessions of strong LSD use. During the first two sessions, in which the man
was given 200 micrograms (the amounts for the other sessions were not specified, but they were
probably at least this strong), Alpert and the subject constructed what Leary popularized as “set
and setting”––that is, the mindset and environmental conditions of the psychedelic experience.
This involved a review of Taoist literature, conversation, “soft music,” and the choice of
Renaissance portraits of women painted by Leonardo da Vinci, Rafael, and Titian, alongside
Alpert, 23. 229
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photographs of women known to the subject. Alpert’s work showcased the eclectic cultural 230
and spiritual tastes of the counterculture, and he repeatedly referenced “Eastern practices”
without much elaboration. His notion of the “archetype” probably derived from the ideas of 231
psychiatrist Carl Jung. As David Kaiser, W. Patrick McCray, and others chart in Groovy 232
Science, a characteristic feature of the counterculture was the fusion of eclectic traditional
spiritual and stylistic concepts, decentralized and accessible scientific pursuits, and cutting edge
or fringe technological visions, and Alpert’s research incapsulated this blending. During the 233
second session, Alpert’s patient studied the chosen images, as the “guide”––presumably Alpert––
quietly asked “What are the characteristics of that woman?” “What is woman?” The patient,
meanwhile, reported a “sexual attraction,” purportedly seeing the women as never before, on
LSD.
During the third and fourth sessions, a real woman joined the session, who knew the
patient and “would like to have a relationship with him.” The patient remained impotent
throughout the initial “Tantric session,” where the woman simply held him. They achieved
successful and “profound” “sexual union” in the fourth and final session. As with the 234
Alpert, 22. 230
The article noted that Alpert “is now in India on a “journey to the East””––a trope of the 231
counterculture era. Alpert, 21-23.
Jung believed that all humans unconsciously grasp universal ideal forms in the Platonic sense, 232
which find expression in formats such as myth, dreams, and spirituality. These archetypes can be
personalities, events, or patterns. See for instance, Carl G. Jung et al., Man and his Symbols
(New York: Doubleday, 1964), 18-103. Notably, Jung was not a fan of LSD, despite the
enthusiastic adoption of his ideas by later psychedelic thinkers such as Terence McKenna. See
Richert, Break On Through, 6.
David Kaiser, W. Patrick McCray, eds., Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and 233
American Counterculture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 1-12.
Alpert, “LSD and Sexuality,” 22-23. 234
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Abramson study above, for many readers, especially of a later era, this process would warrant
some red flags, especially given the involvement of sexual acts and an intoxicant during therapy.
But Alpert would probably respond that everything that occurred was consensual and effective.
He wrote that the patient, a year after the LSD sessions, had been living with a woman for eight
months, with only two homosexual encounters to test if “the changes were real.” Before 235
turning to the next portion of the article, in which Alpert explained how heterosexual couples
might obtain “full body orgasms” using LSD, he wrote of his patient’s future sexual life, “I can’t
tell you what will happen a half year from now. He may be back out on the streets; I certainly
don’t guarantee a thing.” “Out on the streets” was likely meant as a euphemism for seeking 236
anonymous gay encounters. If the patient was not Alpert himself, he probably at least thought of
his own bisexual record while describing these results. Whatever the case, Alpert’s work was a 237
link between earlier, clinical LSD conversion therapy, and attitudes towards LSD and
homosexuality within the counterculture that Alpert and Leary so influenced.
Acid Babies, Acid Orgies, and Other Monsters
By 1962, regulatory shifts far preceding the counterculture’s heyday had already begun to
restrict the ability of psychiatrists and researchers to legally use LSD, and experts became more
conflicted about the one-time wonder drug. Outside the psychiatric practice of the 1950s and 238
Alpert, 23. 235
Alpert, 23. 236
Alpert was fairly open about his relationships with men. See Mark Thompson, “Ram Dass: A 237
Life Beyond Labels,” GayToday, September 2, 1997, http://gaytoday.badpuppy.com/garchive/
people/090297pe.htm.
Hartogsohn, American Trip, 171-173. 238
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early 1960s, and in the critical spotlight of politicians, public figures, and the national media,
LSD’s perceived relationship to normative behavior morphed into something quite different. The
recreational drug use common across the 1960s counterculture became tied to fears about sexual
deviance, reproduction, communism, masculinity, and a sense of emasculation incurred by
failures in Vietnam. In 1971, Richard Nixon summarized this unease. Recorded on a White
House tape, the president grumbled, “Believe me, it is true, the thing about the drug [marijuana],
once people cross that line from [unintelligible] straight society to the drug society, it’s a very
great possibility they are going to go further. You see, homosexuality, dope, immorality in
general. These are the enemies of a strong society. That’s why the communists and left-wingers
are pushing the stuff, they are trying to destroy us.” During the preceding years, “dope” and 239
especially LSD became linked to a wide variety of threats, many of which involved permanent
mental damage or physical accidents, such as the notorious tripping “window jumpers” whom
everyone at the time seemed to know an anecdote about. Just as frightening, a series of 240
scientific studies and cultural representations attracting popular attention revolved around the
impact of LSD on human reproduction and the imperiled status of men and women.
Quoted from “Nixon Tapes Show Roots of Marijuana Prohibition: Misinformation, Culture 239
Wars and Prejudice,” CSDP Research Report, March 2002.
Two doctors at the University of North Carolina reported a 1967 incident in which a student 240
known to associate with a group of sexually-ambiguous friends, though not “overtly
homosexual” himself, purportedly committed suicide by jumping out of a window. Martin H.
Keeler, M.D. and Clifford B. Reifler, M.D., “Suicide During an LSD Reaction,” American
Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 123, No. 7 (January 1967): 884-885, Box 22, Folder 2, 1845, Sidney
Cohen Papers, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
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A 1967 Lancet article authored by Swiss pediatrician Hans Zellweger and two other
researchers suggested that LSD might be responsible for a leg deformity in a baby girl. This 241
and similar articles generated public attention, especially as they were published while some
hippie mothers were openly celebrating the consumption of LSD during pregnancy, as more
scientists were beginning to seriously study and debate the impact of alcohol on fetal
development, and as the fetal deformities caused by the anti-nausea drug thalidomide in the early
1960s remained fresh in the public mind. Doctors in cities such as Washington, D.C. reported 242
to journalists that they had begun to find fetal deformities in the aborted fetuses of women who
had used LSD. Especially for those critical of the counterculture’s celebration of uncontrolled 243
drug use, the conclusion was clear: reckless acid users might not just be damaging their minds,
but damaging the future “leaders of our society,” in the words of a doctor at D.C.’s Children’s
Hospital.244
Other scientists proposed that the mark of LSD might also appear in chromosomes
themselves, the basic unit of genetic inheritance. In 1967, geneticist Maimon Cohen studied LSD
users from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, finding that their chromosomes appeared to be more
fragile than normal. Cohen published in science journals and presented at medical conferences,
Hans Zellweger et al., “Is Lysergic-Acid Diethylamide a Teratogen?” The Lancet, Vol. 290, 241
Iss. 7525 (November 1967): 1066-1068.
E. M. Armstrong, “Diagnosing moral disorder: the discovery and evolution of fetal alcohol 242
syndrome,” Social Science & Medicine Vol. 47, No. 12 (December 1998): 2025-2042; Siff, Acid
Hype, 156.
Victor Cohn, LSD Babies Defective, Medical Study Shows: LSD Babies Abnormal, Study 243
Finds,” The Washington Post, Times Herald, November 23, 1968.
Enrico Davoli et al., Clinical Proceedings, Children’s Hospital of the District of Columbia: 244
Symposium: LSD and Drug Abuse, p. 151, Box 21, Folder 11, 1845 Sidney Cohen Papers,
Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
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participating in a growing discussion. Other researchers, such as psychopharmacologist 245
Samuel Irwin and geneticist Jose Egozcue, also claimed to find chromosome abnormalities in six
of the eight LSD users they studied—the six who ingested the most. Experiments were 246
conducted on mice, and more studies made similar claims and counter-claims about
chromosomes or fetuses, though popular magazines and newspapers reporting upon these new
finds tended to be more conclusive about damage than the scientists themselves, as is typical in
popular science reporting. If psychiatrists were earlier interested in putting homosexuals on 247
the correct path towards heterosexual marital bliss and fertility, it was a horrible irony that acid––
so recently a miraculous therapeutic drug––might actually be mutilating human reproduction at
the cellular level.
In Acid Hype, Stephen Siff argues that LSD in the late 1960s provoked a moral panic, a
mass reaction to a perceived social problem quite out of proportion to its genuine impact. While
there were real injurious or deadly accidents that occurred while individuals were on LSD, some
of these stories were hoaxes, exaggerated, or omitted vital contextual information about those
involved. Even less evidence was ever verified about the alleged damage LSD inflicted upon
human reproduction, including developing fetuses and chromosomes, and articles in the medical
press pushed back on earlier claims. The sporadic damage caused or exacerbated by street- 248
Maimon Cohen, “Cytogenetic Effects of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD-25),” paper 245
delivered at the Illinois State Medical Society’s “National Symposium on Psychedelic Drugs and
Marijuana,” Chicago, April 10, 1968, Box 21, Folder 11, 1845 Sidney Cohen Papers, Charles E.
Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
Samuel Irwin and Jose Egozcue, “Chromosomal Abnormalities in Leukocytes from LSD-25 246
Users,” Science Vol. 157, No. 3786 (July 1967): 313-314.
Siff, Acid Hype, 156. 247
Siff, 151, 156-158. 248
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level LSD use attracted a media frenzy rarely leveled at other, vastly more lethal social
behaviors, such as mass dependency on the private automobile, bombings of civilian targets in
the Third World, or of course America’s legal recreational drugs, alcohol and tobacco. Scientists’
concern about LSD safety was certainly reasonable; LSD was still a new drug, and it was being
consumed by millions of people outside the clinical gaze by the late 1960s, often in impure
batches concocted by renegade chemists in garages rather than in reputable laboratories. But the
media hysteria this scientific agitation contributed to also may have triggered many “bad trips”
experienced by LSD users inundated with negative and sensational imagery—some of which did
have temporary or permanent psychological consequences. To make this relationship more
concrete, we might imagine a young person watching a frightening depiction of a psychedelic
experience on television, perhaps one in which there was a horrifying injury or suicide, and then
proceeding to fixate upon such a traumatic event during their first real-life acid trip.
If some doctors expressed concern about LSD and children as the “future leaders of our
society,” some of these would be military leaders expected to exude masculine strength. The war
in Vietnam rapidly escalated beginning in 1965 amidst the larger struggle against the Soviet
Union and communist China. Carey Grant and his therapists thought that LSD enhanced the
star’s expression of manhood in the 1950s, but by the mid-1960s the association of LSD with the
antiwar movement and drugs in general with martial weakness and masculine frailty represented
a very different rendering of LSD for officials and the public. The relationship of LSD to the
antiwar movement has been debated since the 1960s. While many individuals no doubt shifted
their political and social views because of an inspirational experience with LSD, some critics
have suggested that LSD also undermined the 1960s social movements because it catalyzed the
107

splintering of political objectives and removed people from affairs of any mainstream
substance. Regardless, it was readily perceptible that many leading figures in the hippie and 249
antiwar movements, such as Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and Timothy Leary,
celebrated LSD use, and LSD and cannabis were both prevalent at countercultural and antiwar
events and protests, such as those held by the Vietnam Day Committee and other
organizations. In a kind of psychedelic joke at one such protest in 1967, poets Ginsberg and 250
Ed Sanders, occultist filmmaker Kenneth Anger, and others tried to “levitate” the Pentagon
through Tibetan chanting, while Hoffman reportedly wielded an LSD-filled water-gun. Free 251
love, the Pentagon’s besieged generals might have mumbled, won’t contain communism.
Cannabis and opioids, meanwhile, loomed as the greatest threats to soldiers in Southeast
Asia itself, a fact that troubled commanders who felt powerless given the drugs’ ubiquity and
connections to CIA-sponsored anti-communist paramilitaries. Relatively little LSD appears to 252
have made its way to Saigon, though particularly during the drug’s legality in the United States,
it would not have been difficult for troops to smuggle it across the Pacific. Clinton Sanders, a
sociologist who studied drug use in the military in the early 1970s, suggested that hallucinogenic
drugs were in little demand because they simply did not suit a tense and paranoid theater of war.
Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams, 284-285. 249
Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power 250
(New York: Picador, 2012), 320-321.
Johnny Black, “What happened the day The Fugs attempted to levitate the Pentagon,” Louder, 251
December 13, 2016, https://www.loudersound.com/features/what-happened-the-day-the-fugsattempted-to-levitate-the-pentagon; Hartogsohn, American Trip, 185.
Martin Booth, Cannabis: A History (New York: Picador, 2003), 271-272; Lee Robins et al, 252
“Drug Use by U.S. Army Enlisted Men in Vietnam: A Follow-up on Their Return Home,”
American Journal of Epidemiology Vol. 99, No. 4 (April 1974): 235-249; Alfred McCoy, The
Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill
Books, 2003).
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According to Sanders, the troops used cannabis and heroin as “coping” tools, rather than because
of the pursuit of “reckless hedonism” or due to “character disorders”––the usual motivators of
drug use, in many of his fellow experts’ opinions. Cannabis highs, of course, are for some 253
users more a cause of paranoia than a coping method. But it was easy for the government and
many mainstream Americans to link recreational drug use to the degradation of the masculine
prowess needed to wage an ill-conceived war.
Back in the United States, film, pulp literature, pornographic magazines, and tabloids
detailed lurid stories about LSD’s weird sexual powers. Paperback narrative tell-alls with titles
such as Marsha Alexander’s The Sexual Paradise of LSD (1967) and Christopher Laine’s
Psychedelic Sex (1969) appeared on store shelves, often purporting to present moral lessons
while in fact intending to arouse readers and entice curiosity. These books depicted the
consumption of marijuana, LSD, and other drugs as the first steps towards group sex,
homosexuality, or prostitution. What might at first appear to be a mystic revelation or
hallucinogenic induction into the “in crowd” was in fact a slip towards utter depravity. Hippie
exploitation films including Riot on Sunset Strip (1967) and Psych-Out (1968) contained scenes
in which sublime landscapes transformed seamlessly into naked flesh during lovemaking on
LSD, but they also portrayed women on LSD who fall prey to gang rape, or become trapped
between lanes of traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge. Gossip papers also linked the rich and
famous to LSD-mishaps off-screen. At an unspecified date in the early 1970s, one tabloid
reported that blond Hollywood hunk Tab Hunter was institutionalized after taking LSD and
Clinton R. Sanders, “Doper’s Wonderland: Functional Drug Use by Military Personnel in 253
Vietnam,” Journal of Drug Issues, Vol. 3 (Winter 1973): 65-78.
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freaking out, thinking “he’d turned into a woman,” an allegation the actor––whose
homosexuality was long rumored before he confirmed it––thought laughable.254
To some extent, depictions from popular culture did have some grounding in reality, as
surely some of the sporadic police reports that linked LSD to home break-ins, suicides, indecent
exposure, and attempted rapes from the mid to late 1960s were true. The widely-covered 255
August 1969 murders of seven people at the Tate and LaBianca homes in Los Angeles by the
acid-using Manson Family drove the message home more frighteningly than any book, film, or
earlier police report. LSD did not just destabilize normative conceptions of sexuality, manhood,
and womanhood. In the aftermath of the killings, the media reported that Charles Manson
purportedly used acid as a “catalyst” for the creation of a deranged new familial form in which a
psychotic patriarch collected and controlled lost women. Tex Watson, a prominent Manson 256
follower, wrote in his autobiography that a dose of the famous acid variety “Orange Sunshine”
induced his epiphany that Manson “was right” about his visions of inevitable race war and
catastrophe, and the bloodshed needed to accelerate the coming of this future. 257
Hunter and Muller do not specify the precise publication or date. Tab Hunter and Eddie 254
Muller, Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin
Books, 2005), 294-295.
See for example, Peter J. Pitchess, Sheriff, “Case #6 2/21/1966,” LSD Case Summaries, Los 255
Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, p. 4, Box 22, Folder 2, 1845 Sidney Cohen Papers,
Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
Dave Smith, “The Manson Family: Through A Glass Darkly,” Los Angeles Times, June 20, 256
1971; Tim O’Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (New
York: Back Bay Books, 2019), 39, 308.
Charles “Tex” Watson and Chaplin Ray Hoekstra, Cease To Exist: The Firsthand Account of 257
the Journey to Becoming a Killer for Charles Manson (formerly published in 1978 as Will You
Die For Me?) (Santa Monica, CA: 12AX7, 2019), 127-129; for Orange Sunshine and the
Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the “hippie gang” responsible for its distribution, see Nicholas
Schou, Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love,
and Acid to the World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010).
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Such violent episodes were not the norm in these unconventional ‘familial’ groupings, let
alone the larger psychedelic counterculture. Some other cult figures of the time, such as James
Edward Baker or “Father Yod,” distanced themselves from violent pasts upon discovering
mysticism, vegetarianism, and LSD. The violent crime that plagued hippie enclaves such as 258
Haight-Ashbury in the late 1960s and early 1970s no doubt had more to do with the growing
presence of harder, more profitable and addictive drugs such as heroin and methamphetamine
and the groups who trafficked them, such as the Hell’s Angels, who were already present in
countercultural milieus by Ken Kesey’s La Honda, California parties in 1965. Some members 259
of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a Maui and Laguna Beach-based smuggling ring, traced the
loose organization’s loss of idealism, infighting, and downfall at the hands of local police and
federal authorities to their transition from using and smuggling Afghani hashish and “Orange
Sunshine” acid to Peruvian cocaine. Notably, the multi-agency anti-Brotherhood task force 260
discussed sex rituals, homosexuality, and wife-swapping within the hippie gang before their
sweeping assault on most of its now cocaine-hungry members in 1972. Drawing clear divisions
between soft and hard drugs could at the same time be an easy way for ‘true believers’ to
disavow the sometimes negative consequences of hallucinogenic drug use. But it is
incontrovertible that the social harm of drugs like psilocybin and LSD, or cannabis, has never
The Source Family, directed by Jodi Wille and Maria Demopoulos (Drag City, 2012). 258
Alice Echols, “Hope and Hype in Sixties Haight-Ashbury,” in Shaky Ground: The Sixties and 259
its Aftershocks (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 42-43; see also the infamous LSD
rape scene at one of Kesey’s parties, Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York:
Farrar Straus Giroux, 1968), 176.
Schou does not seem to have pursued the subject of homosexuality further while interviewing 260
surviving group members, though in his account heterosexual jealousy certainly clashed with
those living some version of free love. See Schou, Orange Sunshine, 255, 261-263.
111

been proportionate to the anti-drug response of the state or cultural conservatives, which has
faded only in the twenty-first century. Psychedelics were at times used for exploitative or
dangerous purposes, but what mattered most of all was the growing perception by the late 1960s
that the sexual and psychedelic revolutions, and the dark side of the hippie counterculture, were
all closely intertwined.
Some experts who had presided over clinical research with LSD reacted with shock at
reports of its use beyond their purview, especially in sexual contexts. Psychiatrist Thomas M.
Ling was a colleague of A. Joyce Martin at London’s Marlborough Day Hospital, and was no
doubt aware of her work with homosexual men. As early as 1965, Ling heard about the apparent
“abuse” of LSD in the United States, and expressed his displeasure in a paper given at that year’s
“International Conference on the Use of LSD in Psychotherapy and Alcoholism.” According to
the American press, Ling stated, individuals acting outside of “psychiatric supervision” had
discovered the “erotic stimulant” properties of LSD, and had engaged in “dangerous,
irresponsible” “mixed orgies,” an outrageous act proving their status as “unstable, or else prepsychotic.” In this instance, Ling saw the distinction between LSD as a medical or a 261
recreational drug as hinging upon whether it was used by experts as a tool of sexual
normalization, or by ordinary people as a source of pleasure beyond the confines of sober
heterosexual monogamy. In both settings––Marlborough hospital and the “orgies” featured in
Ling's press reports––the ultimate goal of LSD was to facilitate or enhance sex. But the types of
sex differed markedly, varying between heterosexuality or homosexuality, monogamous couples
Ling did not specify the precise reports he had in mind. Abramson, ed., The Use of LSD in 261
Psychotherapy and Alcoholism, 131-132.
112

or groups. Many experts and the officials they informed branded both “deviant sex” and the
“nonmedical use of drugs” as unacceptable because they believed the pursuit of pleasure, baring
some higher goal, lacked any intrinsic legitimacy. LSD’s association with deviant sex, and the
threat either might pose to reproduction, healthy manhood, and feminine integrity, were critical
features of the larger turn against the drug by authorities and the general public.
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Chapter 3: Free Bodies, Free Minds: Using and Debating Drugs in the Years of
Gay Liberation, 1969-1981
Leaders of America’s “establishment,” such as President Nixon, associated the
recreational drugs of the 1960s with youthful rebellion and looser sexual mores. Yet as I have
shown, LSD, the chief countercultural sacrament, originated in a psychiatric discipline that
sought to enforce normative sexual behavior which seemed to be unravelling in the 1960s. But
the “1960s” movement, if it may be spoken of in broad terms at all, was not uniformly liberating.
Rather, sexual minorities struggled to find a place within a counterculture that celebrated
heterosexual free love, but tended to remain conservative about homosexuality. Foremost among
Nixon’s enemies, and ever the smooth-talking showman, Timothy Leary declared LSD a
heterosexual aphrodisiac in a 1966 Playboy interview reprinted as “She Comes in Colors” in his
1968 book, The Politics of Ecstasy. The middle years of Leary’s life are important if we are to
understand the trends shaping the cultural vectors between the 1960s and 1970s. Leary
frequently affiliated with those who genuinely believed in large-scale political revolution, such
as the Weather Underground, who engineered his prison escape, and the international section of
the Black Panther Party in Algiers under Eldridge Cleaver, with whom he clashed.
Simultaneously, Leary was the psychedelic movement’s loudest champion for the exploration of
the self and the rediscovery of “fun.” This tension similarly played out among sexual
liberationists––those politically engaged as well as those just there for the ride––across the gay
1970s.
A few months before Leary’s appearance alongside Allen Ginsberg at San Francisco’s
hippie Human Be-In, which anticipated the 1967 Summer of Love, homosexuality drew
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contempt from the counterculture icon. LSD, Leary boasted, “is a cure for homosexuality,” “a
freaky…symbolic screw-up.” Leary was no doubt thinking of his friend and colleague Alpert’s 262
work, and was probably aware of other research into LSD as a gay “cure.” He also claimed that
Ginsberg, who strongly tended towards adolescent and grown men throughout his life and had a
long-term male partner in Peter Orlovsky, had “turned on to women…during an LSD session.” A
number of months before Ginsberg met Leary at Harvard in November 1960, he had gone
through psychedelic experiences with yagé (ayahuasca, a psychedelic vine concoction) while
visiting the Peruvian Amazon which illuminated his guilt-ridden struggles with his sexuality. In
visions which included images of skulls, the universe, serpents, Peter, and women he knew,
Ginsberg associated homosexuality with the inability to reproduce and therefore the true death of
himself and his lineage, the best possibility of life after death. He resolved to understand 263
women better. For Leary and many hippies on communes and on the streets, the Aquarian Age
would be populated by Arcadian, long-haired heterosexual couples, and even Ginsberg the
infamous boy-lover might bend back to the straight road with the right drugs and bear children.
Realistically speaking, the Weathermen and the Panthers would never realize their fantasies of
overthrowing the American government, so might as well reverse course and go back-to-theland, drop acid, and reproduce in nature’s bounty.
“Playboy Interview: Timothy Leary, a Candid Conversation with the Controversial Ex- 262
Harvard Professor, Prime Partisan and Prophet of LSD,” Playboy, September, 1966; Timothy
Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1968), 118-159.
Bill Morgan, ed., The Letters of Allen Ginsberg (Boston, MA: Da Capo Press, 2008), 263
230-233; Michael Schumacher, Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 328-329.
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But this sentiment quickly lost much of its energy, and just as the revolution died before it
was born, so too did the majority of rural communal efforts. As religious studies scholar Erik
Davis puts it in High Weirdness, the “centrifugal drift of identity” spun out from the nova of the
“counterculture’s millennialist dreams,” which spread “heretical mores through the culture at
large.” One such heresy, recreational LSD, became just as prevalent in the exploding urban 264
gay subculture of the late 1960s and 1970s as it was in other corners of the counterculture, which
were not always so distinct. Indeed, Roy Aarons, a gay New York man, remembers much sexual
“experimentation” among the runaway male youths who flocked to the city’s drug and hippie
scenes in the late 1960s. According to historian Martin Duberman, the Stonewall Inn itself was 265
“known as a good place to buy acid” at the time of the 1969 riots which––according to gay
mythology––marked the moment in which militant gay liberation was birthed from earlier
homophile activism and assertive, erotically charged nightlife. The straight “hipsters” and 266
homosexuals of America’s metropolitan underground had both occupied the same spaces and
often imbibed the same drugs during the years before gay liberation and before the hippies, as
literary critic Guy Davidson points out. By the late 1960s, was there anyone “who didn’t take 267
Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies 264
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019), 39.
Charles Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America (New 265
York: Grove Press, 1997), 145.
Martin Duberman, Stonewall: The Definitive Story of the LGBTQ Rights Uprising that 266
Change America (New York: Penguin Random House, 2019), 230.
Guy Davidson, “Hipsters and Homosexuals: Chandler Brossard’s Who Walk in Darkness and 267
the Midcentury Gay Underground,” Post45, June 2, 2022.
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drugs except Nixon & Kissinger?” Alan Helms asked in his memoir of glamorous transatlantic
gay life, Young Man from the Provinces.268
While psychiatrists debated paradigms of drug addiction as well as various medical
interventions in curing addictions of all kinds at academic conferences, the subcultures of the
urban underground functioned as a laboratory which synthesized its own shifting paradigms of
drug use. For the Beat bohemians, the use of drugs such as speed, cannabis, and mescaline
spurred authenticity, spontaneity, and creativity, while for the hippies, LSD was the ultimate
source of consciousness-expansion, spiritual growth, and occasionally revolution ‘for the hell of
it.’ Gay liberationists of the 1970s borrowed from these paradigms, as well as from the hippie
and bohemian concept of free love. For much of the metropolitan gay male population of the
1970s, drugs such as cannabis, LSD, quaaludes (a party-friendly sedative), cocaine, poppers
(amyl nitrite or related inhaled chemical compounds), and of course alcohol were catalysts for an
unencumbered sexual hedonism. In this world, pleasure-seeking and its accompanying social,
economic, and artistic spaces would represent the basis of a new kind of intentional community
that was oriented around maximizing the experiential intensity of the healthy, youthful, and
usually male individual, which could simultaneously become communitarian along the lines of
sexual identity. Such terrain was distant from late 1960s political revolution, yet maintained
underlying currents of activism and social concern around the panoramic summits and foggy
depths of plentiful drugs and sex. This occasional paradise, furthermore, was centered not in the
Alan Helms, Young Man From the Provinces: A Gay Life Before Stonewall (Winchester, MA: 268
Faber & Faber, 1995), 130.
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groovy rural Arcadia of hippie destiny, but instead back in the city, around Castro Street, along
Manhattan’s Hudson River shores, and around the Hollywood Hills.
The dominance of drugs in 1970s urban gay life certainly had detractors, and they would
become more vocal by the 1980s and 1990s. But for many participants embracing an intensely
sensory life oriented around bodily pleasure and altered states surely felt like true freedom,
particularly compared to the suicidal boredom and isolation of their previous lives in small towns
and suburbs. In the “solitude” of the closet or partial closet, or in the reduced visibility of earlier
decades, alcoholism and drug use might have seemed rather sad, as is the case among the pitiful,
hardly convivial characters of Matt Crowley’s 1968 Off-Broadway play The Boys in the Band,
who crawl out of their separate corners for a birthday party gone awry. But in the burgeoning
“collective” of an underground no longer so subterranean by the 1970s, drug use appeared to
hold greater value as a shared recreational activity.269
In the 1960s and especially the 1970s, cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San
Francisco were sexual playgrounds crowded with gay bathhouses, disco clubs, bars, and private
homes that frequently hosted after-hours parties and orgies, even as periodic police crackdowns
Davidson considers the closet and the postwar urban underground as secret spaces, but the 269
former is solitary while the latter is a collective. By the 1970s, the urban gay milieu certainly
remained alternative, but it was becoming less and less “underground,” except perhaps for the
most extreme leather dens and S&M dungeons. Davidson, “Hipsters and Homosexuals.”
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and homophobic street attacks committed by discontented youth persisted. Semi-fictional 270
novelistic depictions of urban gay life in the 1970s, such as Andrew Holleran’s Dancer From the
Dance, John Rechy’s The Sexual Outlaw, and Larry Kramer’s Faggots, were likewise peppered
with vivid but sometimes critical references to drug use, as are documentary presentations of
these years, such as Gay Sex in the 70s and Continental. The arrival of HIV/AIDS in New 271
York in 1981, and its subsequent devastation of gay communities across the United States and
beyond, has badly scarred memories of the preceding decade’s social and sexual liberties. But
this need not necessarily diminish our appreciation of the unparalleled sense of euphoria felt by
some individuals during this period, and the fact that much of this emotional, experiential, and
pleasurable zenith was grounded in promiscuous sex, psychoactive drug use, and the mental
states these activities created separately and in tandem. By the late 1970s, this social scene and
its accompanying chic styles (and drugs) even began to attract many heterosexual emulators,
who knowingly or not mixed with gays at high-status venues such as Steve Rubell’s Studio 54 in
New York City, and opened Travoltaesque polyester discos in suburbs and small towns
nationwide.272
For the relationship between gay culture, nightlife, and disco, see Alice Echols, Hot Stuff: 270
Disco and the Remaking of American Culture (New York: WW Norton, 2010), 39-70, 121-158;
for a powerful but brief account of the threat posed by the police and violent criminals alike in
Los Angeles, see John Rechy, The Sexual Outlaw (New York: Dell Publishing, 1977), 98-103;
historian Marc Stein notes that as early as 1958-1959, fears about drugs and homosexuality
together propelled an anti-coffeeshop push by police and concerned residents in Philadelphia,
Marc Stein, City Of Sisterly And Brotherly Loves: Lesbian And Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972
(Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2004), 156-173.
Andrew Holleran, Dancer From the Dance (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1978); Larry 271
Kramer’s Faggots (New York: Random House, 1978); Rechy, The Sexual Outlaw; Gay Sex in the
70s, directed by Joseph Lovett (Lovett Productions, 2005); Continental, directed by Malcolm
Ingram (Blowhard Films, 2013).
Echols, Hot Stuff, 122, 195-198. 272
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Over the following pages, I first present detailed sketches of the LSD experience for
several individuals notable in the gay milieus of the 1970s. Quite unlike the psychiatric patients
of the previous chapter, these LSD users found that tripping could in some large or small way
benefit, or at least impact, their alternative political, social, or intellectual lives, and primarily on
their own terms and outside of institutional care. I next zoom out to describe wider trends and
themes in the use of LSD and several other common drugs using autobiographical texts, survey
data, and most of all, interviews conducted of those who lived through the “long gay 70s.” These
were the years roughly from the 1969 Stonewall Riots and the founding of the gay liberation
organizations to the prevalence of HIV/AIDS, which began in 1981 or a year or two later,
depending on the community.
While the survey data, compiled by activists Karla Jay and Allen Young, covered both
lesbians and gay men, the much lengthier interviews conducted by educator Eric Rofes were
only of gay men, and star in this chapter. A fuller range of drugs played a more significant role in
gay male culture than in lesbian culture, though alcohol and cannabis certainly permeated both,
and so this chapter looks primarily at men. It can be tempting to make an essentialist case about
the pursuit of pleasure through substances to explain this gender discrepancy, a contrast which is
surpassed by the comparative rarity of extreme promiscuity among lesbians. Certainly though,
there are other factors at play, such as that gay men had more disposable income to spend on
recreational pursuits (one of Jay and Young’s women specifically commented on her lack of
funds), and the majority of gay venues, which implicitly or explicitly encouraged drug use, were
dominated by men. In Jay and Young’s study, which only covered drug use in relation to sex,
more lesbians than gay men reported having “never used” almost every category of drug during
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sex, especially poppers, and they chose to publish more negative report excerpts for women than
for men. Jay and Young’s women by no means abstained, however, and some especially
expressed fondness for the sensory experience of using marijuana or psychedelics during
intimacy. But beyond their numbers, Jay and Young published only a small handful of 273
respondents’ explanations. I therefore privilege Rofes’ interviews over the survey data most of all
because they are far more qualitatively sophisticated, and it is my intention to sketch out the
complex place of drugs in the lives of specific individuals rather than getting too bogged down in
obsessions over patchy numerical data. Beyond just describing the types of drugs used (and those
consciously avoided), the Rofes interviews reveal common explanations and shifting paradigms
of drug use, reasons why some people largely abstained from drugs, anecdotes which give
texture to our impression of the time, and retrospectives on drug use from a later date.
Finally, I conclude with a brief note concerning the legitimacy of drug use according to a
few writers and activists of the era, which varied between outright condemnation, informed
moderation, or a libertarian approach which––like sexual freedom––hinged upon autonomy over
one’s body. Along the way, I contextualize all of this gay psychoactive geography within the
larger changes simultaneously occurring in America’s relationship to drugs-–as always, an
impulsive pendulum. If some of the following pages seem chaotic at times, shifting rapidly
between different individuals, drugs, and sources, then I would argue that this is appropriate in a
chapter which seeks to capture some essence of frenzied and hedonistic times. Picture a
Karla Jay and Allen Young, The Gay Report: Lesbians and Gay Men Speak Out About Sexual 273
Experiences and Lifestyles (New York: Summit Books, 1979), 431-434, 496-499. For
contemporary data on gender and drug use, see “Sex and Gender Differences in Substance Use,”
National Institute on Drug Abuse, https://nida.nih.gov/publications/research-reports/substanceuse-in-women/sex-gender-differences-in-substance-use, accessed September 23, 2022.
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somewhat droopy but orgasmic face, a serotonin-flooded brain, multicolored spotlights, and
barely-coordinated fingers trying to find their way through a fanny-pack stuffed with different
vials, pills, blotter-papers, and powder-filled little baggies.
Tripping Out of the Hospitals and Into the Streets
The experiences of five individuals with LSD––lesbian feminist activist Martha Shelley,
gay activists Lige Clarke and Jack Nichols, gay writer Edmund White, and French philosopher
Michel Foucault––demonstrate some of the meanings gays and lesbians discovered in LSD
during these years. While the psychiatrists who administered LSD to their patients in the
previous chapter borrowed from a limited set of disciplinary principles, sharing their insights and
findings with colleagues at conferences and in medical journals, LSD freed from the clinic could
have as many meanings as it did users, who were nonetheless strongly impacted by the
surrounding cultural environment, with its miss-mash of medical, countercultural, and artistic
ideas about psychedelic drug use.
Martha Shelley worked with the homophile organization the Daughters of Bilitis, which
advocated for civil rights, offered a forum where lesbians could meet and socialize, and
published literature of interest to lesbians such as the magazine The Ladder, beginning in 1967.
Shelley later became involved with more radical groups such as the Gay Liberation Front and the
Lavender Menace. She was introduced to LSD through one celebrated acid “ritual” of the era:
viewing Stanley Kubrick’s revolutionary 1968 sci-fi film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, “a real blast
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of an experience,” in Shelley’s words. Like many of Kubrick’s other films, 2001 contains what 274
some would interpret as homosexual undertones, in this case between the male-voiced HAL
computer and astronaut Dave. Shelley’s first time was facilitated by fellow Columbia student and
gay activist Bob Martin, and much to the consternation of their gay and lesbian comrades, the
two were sexually involved despite their political activities and avowed sexual inclinations.275
LSD bent Shelley’s feelings about reality and the sexual binary. While many of the men of the
Beat Generation earlier reveled in drug experimentation and bisexuality, many women immersed
in the drug scene and counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s such as Shelley, Janis
Joplin, and Timothy Leary’s partner Joanna Harcourt-Smith could also swing in both
directions. 276
For Shelley, the psychedelic experience also appeared to validate some of the notions of
Eastern spirituality floating around student and counterculture circles at the time, and remained
inspirational for her as she took part in more radical political activities in the aftermath of the
Stonewall riots. In one instance, she credited her drug use for emboldening her to lead a very
loud and very public demonstration in Washington Square Park in July 1969. Just how did 277
“Making Gay History: The Podcast, Martha Shelley,” Shelley interviewed by Eric Marcus 274
October 24, 1989, podcast with recording posted February 21, 2019, https://
makinggayhistory.com/podcast/martha-shelley/.
Martha Shelley, “From the Bars to Barnard to Stonewall, Part II,” Ebisu Publications, August 275
1, 2020, https://ebisupublications.com/from-the-bars-to-barnard-to-stonewall-part-ii/.
Joplin, it should be clarified, was not a fan of psychedelics, generally preferring alcohol and a 276
few other drugs, see Alice Echols, Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin
(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999), 44-45, 252-253; Joanna Harcourt Smith, Tripping
the Bardo with Timothy Leary: My Psychedelic Love Story (North Charleston, South Carolina:
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013), 234.
Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights 277
Movement in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 28-29.
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Shelley connect this experience with her political activities? Perhaps if the nature of reality could
be rendered so shockingly arbitrary, or the savannah-to-the-stars human destiny as presented in
2001 could seem so cosmically psychedelic, then why bother with the slow lectures and staid
demonstrations of the pre-liberation homophiles?
Gay activist Lige Clarke and his partner Jack Nichols met in the Washington, D.C. area,
where they first helped found the local Mattachine Society chapter in the early 1960s. Clarke 278
and Nichols became involved in New York’s gay community in 1969, editing Gay magazine and
joining more radical organizations. During this period Clarke saw his use of marijuana and LSD
as central features of his life which brought him pleasure and spiritual fulfillment, particularly in
sex and his appreciation of opera. He also believed that LSD granted a release from political
“dogma,” but some fellow activists in the “movement” sought a more sanitized image. On the
surface, Clarke and Nichols might have seemed like the ideal, masculine, and believably
monogamous role models for public consumption, and they were “considered” by unnamed
organization leaders as candidates for speaking tours. But their known drug use disqualified 279
them, and Clarke ridiculed the suggestion that they surrender such a cherished pastime. Gay and
lesbian political organizations were quite divided on drugs in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Many members frequently bought or used drugs at meetings, or showed up high, identifying the
right to drug use as a political cause. But some groups, such as the lesbian separatist Furies
Collective and the Gay Activists Alliance, discouraged or banned drug use, including of
David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in 278
the Federal Government (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 184-185.
Jack Nichols, Elijah (unpublished manuscript), Jack Nichols Papers, 1962-1994, New York 279
Public Library, 203-205.
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marijuana, seeing it as disruptive of their activities, a vulnerability the police could exploit, or
just as a bad look. In the case of Clarke and Nichols, the idea of tainting respectable political 280
objectives with drugs that had so recently been the center of a moral panic was quite unpalatable.
More involved in literary and social circles than direct activism, celebrated gay author
Edmund White recounted some of his experiences with LSD and other drugs in his 1960s-1970s
memoir City Boy, though alcohol was generally his preference. White wrote that LSD was an
“occasional part of our lives in the 1970s”––“our” presumably meaning other gay, literary, and
artistic men in New York. Unlike more casual users, dropping acid was a fairly infrequent,
possibly “dangerous,” and very sacred event for White. The twenty or so times he used LSD
were “life-changing," though he reminisced about some of the levity it brought his circle. At a 281
gathering at the gay resort of Fire Island, White’s host invited too many men to his home, and so
put LSD into their drinks to make their sleeping quarters appear less obviously improvised and
shambolic. A few carpets and blankets, perhaps, became the Bedouin tent of a desert sultan.
During the same Fire Island hang-out the group visited a nearby home where a gigantic dog
named “Baby” appeared both ridiculous and terrifying to White, with its owner wielding his pet’s
“pterodactyl”-like paws. As depicted in Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, Fire Island’s
gay scene was powered by a vast assortment of drugs, and would remain so to the present. One
longtime resident interviewed by anthropologist Esther Newton credited the potent mixture of
Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, 46, 76, 104. 280
Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ‘70s (New York: 281
Bloomsbury USA, 2009), 136-137.
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clones, disco, and drugs for the decline of drag performances on Fire Island by the 1970s. This 282
loss, evidently, was not universally mourned.283
Despite being less comfortable than White and most denizens of Fire Island with such
identities as “gay” or “gay liberationist,” believing these notions of identity to be limiting or
linked to disciplinary power schemes, Michel Foucault reveled in drugs as well as male “bodies
and pleasures” during his visits and academic appointments in the United States. The philosopher
was known to frequent Bay Area gay bars during his appointment at Berkeley. Most famously, in
1975 Foucault tried LSD for the first time in California’s Death Valley at the behest of a young
Claremont College professor, Simeon Wade, an episode recently exposed in greater detail by
literary scholar Heather Dundas, who brought Wade’s account to publication. This psychedelic
excursion, accompanied by canyon vistas and the sounds of Stockhausen, led Foucault to fall in
love with California and its range of “variety and lifestyles.” It also inspired him to entirely
revise the History of Sexuality, from the second volume onwards, with an underlying praise for
Esther Newton, Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America’s First Gay and Lesbian 282
Town (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 245.
It was perhaps no coincidence that drag performance experienced a major resurgence under 283
RuPaul in the 2010s, years marked by mainstream acceptance. Drag, journalist Patrick Moore
notes, is an emasculated and thus more palatable version of gay culture, and is increasingly of
greater interest to heterosexual women. Patrick Moore, Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the
Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2004), 119-120.
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an “aesthetics of existence” in place of the “ruinous codes of the Disciplined Society” that had
irredeemably afflicted the Old World and apparently left California unblemished.284
One of Foucault’s later trips on LSD points to another side of the psychedelic experience
for those troubled by the “set and setting” of changing political and cultural winds. While some
scholars have recently identified an early sympathy with neoliberalism in Foucault’s historical
dissection of state institutions and the bodies of knowledge they depend upon, he certainly felt no
admiration for one of neoliberalism’s greatest avatars, Ronald Reagan. Quite the opposite, in 285
fact––Edmund White recollected that Reagan’s 1980 landslide victory threw Foucault into a
nightmarish acid trip at a most unfortunate place, New York’s Man’s Country bathhouse, where
the naked philosopher forgot his English and fixated on the “fascism” he believed Reagan’s
victory represented. White’s friends Michael Denneny and Mark Blasius, both also involved in
New York’s academic and literary gay milieu, fetched Foucault from the baths and brought him
back to his apartment near New York University, where tranquilizers eased his return to
sobriety. However Foucault might have felt about Reagan’s assault on unions and the welfare 286
state, it appears that the 1980s alliance between Evangelical Christian conservatives and
Volume IV, only recently published in incomplete form, covers shifts in sexual ethics as 284
Christianity became dominant during the waning years of the Western Roman Empire and after
its collapse. We will never know the full scope of Foucault’s envisioned seven volumes. Simeon
Wade and Heather Dundas, Foucault in California: [A True Story––Wherein the Great French
Philosopher Drops Acid in the Valley of Death] (Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 2019), 9, 68; Michel
Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume IV: Confessions of the Flesh (New York: Pantheon
Books, 2021).
285 See for example, Daniel Zamora and Michael C. Behrent, eds., Foucault and Neoliberalism
(Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2015).
Edmund White, My Lives: An Autobiography (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 197-198; for 286
a sense of the scene, see a late-1970s Man’s Country advertisement on Youtube, https://youtu.be/
Er1Ri3qKavw, posted November 23 2016, accessed January 6 2022.
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corporate interests terrified a man who found his personal praxis in the sexual playground of
1970s America, with all of its psychoactive toys.
Sitting hands-in-knees on the bathhouse floor, Foucault could not have predicted his
death at the hands of a virus that would decimate the gay community, though his psychedelic
senses were accurate in detecting political trouble ahead as it took years for the world’s most
powerful government to acknowledge the epidemic’s gravity and need for dedicated financial
and medical resources. Chapter 4 will detail the confusion surrounding the suggestion that
different recreational drugs were a possible remedy or cause of HIV/AIDS. Grappling with this
debate, however, first requires a more extensive portrait of drug use beyond just LSD, and an
exploration of the ways in which psychoactive drugs, the gay community, and a vibrant
consumer subculture came to be linked to an extent perhaps unlike any precedent.
The Great 70s Drug Buffet
“I had a dream that I was at the 1808 Market Street sex club trying to get a cup of coffee
from the vending machine,” wrote San Francisco author Mark Abramson in an August 4, 1979
diary entry. “Instead of the usual buttons to push for cream or sugar or decaf, the buttons were
for acid or Valium or Quaaludes.” Abramson’s diary detailed his arrival in San Francisco from 287
rural Minnesota in July 1975, his loves, friendships, the features of the Castro, Land’s End beach,
and other gay hangouts around the city, his considerable but rarely debilitating alcohol and drug
consumption, and his almost unbelievable volume of sexual activity. Abramson’s drug use was
Mark Abramson, Sex, Drugs & Disco: San Francisco Diaries From the Pre-AIDS Era (San 287
Francisco: Minnesota Boy Press, 2015), 226.
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merely casual by the intense standards of some of his friends and acquaintances, and to some
extent it was also conscientious and intentional; he believed that speed was good for housework,
cannabis appropriate for studying, and cocaine ideal for parties and sex. Acid was wonderful
during outdoor excursions with treasured friends, or for celebrating, as he joined parties thrilled
by the defeat of the 1978 Briggs Initiative, which would have required the firing of gay and
lesbian teachers in California. 288
Abramson nonetheless used many of these and other substances in wholly different
contexts. Amyl nitrate (poppers) is “unhealthy,” Abramson admitted, but great for sex and
dancing. “All other drugs are unnecessary,” he added. Abramson was distinguishing his own 289
concept of what counted as a “hard drug,” one better avoided, like heroin, and a “soft drug,” one
worth doing, especially for some ideal purpose. Historically, the state has also attempted to
create legal distinctions in classifying fully legal, strictly controlled, and completely prohibited
psychoactive substances, and as I and plenty of others have argued, this has had at least as much
to do with evolving cultural biases as with objective assessments of genuine harm. The police
and courts, the media, parental discipline, and educational programming in schools and religious
organizations have all been responsible for disseminating approximations of this official
classification. But a different sort of categorization also exists as a kind of folk knowledge
among drug users spread and modified through word of mouth, direct experience, and advice
proffered in alternative publications. Certainly since the 1970s, this has often been the case
within the gay community.
Abramson, Sex, Drugs & Disco, 128, 155. 288
Abramson, Sex, Drugs & Disco, 128. 289
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Abramson first expressed some reservations about excessive drug use while in a
relationship with a man named Armando. The two consumed the same types of drugs––“grass,
Quaaludes, acid, and cocaine, not to mention alcohol”––but Abramson compared Armando’s
“every day,” copious drug use to eating candy, an image which would later return to him in the
drug vending machine dream. When Abramson pushed back against the extent of Armando’s
drug consumption some time later, Armando defended himself by appealing to his identification
as “part of the drug culture,” almost as though he felt that that superseded his membership in the
gay male world that both of them were so immersed in. Abramson’s own use of drugs did have 290
its downsides; he frequently referenced hangovers of all types, unsurprisingly, but he also
occasionally suffered from brief but disturbing sensations and hallucinations. Once stuck in a
long line while tripping on acid at Disneyland, Abramson imagined Auschwitz as one of the
rides. A similar psychedelic-induced vision of the Holocaust terrified Alan Helms. While at a 291
Jefferson Airplane concert on mescaline sometime in the early 1970s, Helms was “convinced”
that the venue’s exits led to homicidal Nazis, and that the lineups of concert attendees were
naively walking to their abattoirs. Having escaped the theatre, Manhattan became an “abandoned
concentration camp” on the cab ride home. Abramson and Helms were surely not the only 292
trippers haunted by historical events, not to mention the more recent horrors in Vietnam. While
the realization of addiction or personal disfunction are often thought of as the means by which
drug users truly reflect upon their activities, observations of others or memorable but isolated
hallucinogenic incidents can also inform altered approaches to drug use.
Abramson, Sex, Drugs & Disco, 114, 140. 290
Abramson, Sex, Drugs & Disco, 120. 291
Helms, Young Man From the Provinces, 136. 292
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Gay psychologist Charles Silverstein and Edmund White’s 1977 The Joy of Gay Sex
included one early attempt to present part-folk, part-expert opinions of drug use for a gay
readership. While none of the men from the Rofes interviews I discuss below specifically 293
referred to Silverstein and White’s book with regard to their drug use, The Joy of Gay Sex was
undoubtably influential, circulating widely and later being updated for two new editions in 1993
and 2006. The 1977 edition included entries about “Booze,” which speaks more specifically of
alcoholism, “downs” (here meaning barbiturates and quaaludes), hallucinogens, marijuana,
poppers, and “ups” (here meaning amphetamines and probably cocaine). Silverstein and White
pointed to the difference inherent to gay men’s experience of drugs and alcohol. Bars are more
central to dating and sociability than for straights, and so can be a pathway to alcoholism, for
which the answer is attendance of gay Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, they instruct. The 294
book very strongly warns against using quaaludes, noting that even one may do harm, and that
they are addictive and potentially deadly in combination with alcohol. In one of his memoirs,
White wrote about his own sexual and social use of quaaludes, which sometimes led to sloppy
mishaps, such as dragging a table setting across a restaurant. We should not expect a memoir 295
to carry the same grave tone as an instructional guide.
Regarding LSD, White and Silverstein admit its pleasures while indicating the variability
of user response, as well as its frequent use by men at discos and the baths. Revelations had on
In the book’s acknowledgements, the authors thank two presumably gay or sympathetic 293
medical doctors, as well as the Institute for Gay Identity, a New York counseling clinic. Charles
Silverstein and Edmund White, The Joy of Gay Sex: An Intimate Guide for Gay Men to the
Pleasures of a Gay Lifestyle (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1977), 5.
Silverstein and White, The Joy of Gay Sex (1977), 46-47. 294
Silverstein and White, The Joy of Gay Sex (1977), 85; White, City Boy, 137. 295
131

LSD, however, are the questionable product of a “chemically screwed-up brain”––this is not
quite the spiritual idealism of 1960s “better living through chemistry” psychedelia. They
nonetheless offered some suggestions which might later have been referred to as harm reduction
strategies: “trip with someone you know, trust and like and who’s experienced,” hold on to a
mild tranquilizer just in case, avoid driving, and avoid uncomfortable settings. But this did 296
“not constitute a recommendation.” They were writing for a mainstream publisher, after all, and
while LSD remained popular among gay men, the acid panic of the late 1960s was still fresh in
many ‘unexpanded’ minds. White and Silverstein had fewer reservations about marijuana in
keeping with relaxed attitudes both among gay men and in the late 1970s, increasingly other
Americans. They acknowledged its widely reported aphrodisiacal properties, a trait cautiously 297
accepted in the pages of the New York Times only in 2022.298
Amyl nitrite or “poppers” were the only drug as popular as marijuana among gay men, at
least in the 1970s, as most of this chapter’s source material makes abundantly clear. Prescribed as
inhalants for medical conditions such as angina since the nineteenth century, the FDA granted the
sale of poppers without prescription in 1960, before reversing course in 1968 after it became
known that they were widely used recreationally, which to the government and most experts
White and Silverstein, The Joy of Gay Sex (1977), 121. 296
In the United States, public support for legalizing marijuana increased from 12% to 30% from 297
1969 to 1979, before plunging by half through the 1980s and then rebounding to the present
height of almost 70%. Katherine Schaeffer, “6 facts about Americans and marijuana,” Pew
Research, April 26, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/26/facts-aboutmarijuana/, accessed August 24, 2022.
White and Silverstein, The Joy of Gay Sex (1977), 147; in another decade, for such a headline 298
to appear in the paper of record might have been construed as an April Fool’s Day joke, Christina
Caron, “Cannabis for Better Sex? Here’s What the Science Says.,” New York Times, April 1,
2022.
132

indicated abuse. By the 1970s, however, poppers were synonymous with gay party culture, 299
and regulations were avoided through the sale of analogous butyl nitrites and their marketing as
“room odorizers." Lance Loud, star of the 1970s reality television show An American Family,
found that the thought of poppers and their characteristic smell evoked a Proustian sensory feast,
calling them “so wantonly chemical,” a scent not a few men translated as brain damage.300
Virtually all of the men interviewed by Eric Rofes who divulged their drug consumption used or
at least tried both marijuana and poppers, the later inhaled for a few intense moments of orgasm
enhancement as well as disinhibition and the relaxation of several muscles, which could be
helpful during sex or dancing. One of the few survey subjects quoted by Jay and Young evoked
tactile exhilaration and psychedelic imagery in describing his first orgasm on poppers in a
bathhouse. 301
Silverstein and White credited the specific origins of the use of poppers during sex to the
sadomasochism scene, and by the 1970s their scent flourished under disco balls as much as in
bedrooms, or in living rooms as “campy old movies” played on the television. They could 302
provoke eroticism and get “things happening” during an incipient orgy situation, White and
Silverstein suggested, or just make Joan Crawford that much funnier. The substance’s flammable
and caustic nature should be respected around fire and skin, the authors instructed, but they are
not particularly discouraging about use otherwise. While debates about the safety of poppers
Nathan Fain, “How Dangerous Are Poppers,” Stallion, June 1982, Fain 82, Carton 9, HW 299
Papers.
Martin Torgoff, Can’t Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stone Age, 1945-2000 (New 300
York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 301.
Jay and Young, The Gay Report, 499. 301
White and Silverstein, The Joy of Gay Sex (1977), 176. 302
133

erupted especially with the emergence of HIV/AIDS, opinions already varied years earlier––
some of Rofes’ interview subjects thought inhaling poppers was actively “healthy,” while others
believed the opposite.
In their final drug-related entry, White and Silverstein briefly described the dangers that
can emerge from amphetamine use, such as lost sleep and nutritional deficiency as well as
addiction. The medically prescribed or illicit use of amphetamines or “speed” ebed and flowed
across American society for much of the postwar era, being linked to groups as diverse as
commandos in Vietnam, depressed suburban housewives, and Andy Warhol’s clique of
Manhattan Pop artists. White and Silverstein pointed to amphetamine’s weird and variable
relationship to sex: it can just as easily induce sex mania as it can lead someone to experience
erectile dysfunction, put on his clothes, and obsessively “read the Yellow Pages.” As will be 303
explained in chapter 5, gay drug culture shifted by the 1990s, and many gay activists and medical
experts spoke of an “epidemic” of dangerous and addictive sex on crystal methamphetamine,
amphetamine’s stronger chemical cousin.
Simply speaking of their own experiences rather than offering lifestyle tips, many of the
men from Eric Rofes’ study nonetheless claimed a high degree of discretion concerning their
drug use, and explained their views of addiction, shifting paradigms of what drug use meant, and
the relationship of substances to their inner and outer lives. Most of them were not especially
noteworthy in academia, activism, the arts, or other domains, but were rather ordinary
participants in gay urban nightlife or other avenues of sexual culture. Over one hundred men
were interviewed by Eric Rofes, who was a Californian author and educator, from 1997 until his
White and Silverstein, The Joy of Gay Sex (1977), 221. 303
134

death in 2006. Of these men, about forty left no restrictions on the use of their names or subject
matter, and with a couple of anonymous exceptions, only their files are referred to in this
chapter. Importantly, they were speaking from the point of view of a much later date, when 304
they possessed a fuller perspective on the full effects of drugs in their lives, and attitudes towards
drugs had changed in all kinds of ways. Rofes recognized the “1970s” as a distinct era of gay
life, though he chose to date the beginning of this era to 1972, when gay neighborhoods,
businesses, and organizations were well established. By this year gay liberationists had
succeeded in some cultural and legislative objectives in certain cities. He closes the era with the
dominant impact of HIV/AIDS in virtually every gay network by 1983 or 1984. Rofes collected
these interviews after the deadliest phase of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States, and it
would be fair to speculate that the hardest drug users had been more likely to become infected.
The lengthy interviews (often 50-80 transcribed pages) on a variety of topics related to the mens’
lives were intended to be the source material for a comprehensive nonfiction book on the period
which Rofes died before he could write, and they were also meant to be available for other
scholars. The interviews had a standard set of questions, and he asked every man about his drug
use, which often came up quite unprompted.
Many of the men credited their use of drugs to two related, ambient factors: growing up
“children of the sixties,” as Chuck Barricman put it, and the ubiquitous drug use in gay nightlife
during the 1970s of their young adulthood, which itself partly grew out of the previous decade’s
“Interview List/Key,” Eric Rofes 70’s Gay Oral History Project, Exhibit II: Individual 304
Interview Transcripts, GLC 60, Series 11, Eric E. Rofes Papers, James C. Hormel LGBTQIA
Center, San Francisco Public Library (hereafter abbreviated as ER Project, page numbers at end
of ER Project citations refer to separate interviews, and if absent were unavailable).
135

counterculture. Likely because Rofes spent some time living and teaching at Humboldt State 305
University in northern California, meeting men with connections to the area, some of his subjects
were also exposed to the drug culture and nascent marijuana industry seeded by hippies, draft
dodgers, and Vietnam veterans in the region. Indeed, David Ethan Alessi indicated that he first
used marijuana in Vietnam, and later sold marijuana and a variety of other drugs including acid,
magic mushrooms, the unpredictable stimulant-psychedelic angel dust (phencyclidine or PCP),
and the quasi-psychedelic stimulant MDA (methylenedioxyamphetamine, later superseded by its
softer chemical cousin MDMA) as a hippie in northern California. There he experienced 306
various hallucinogenic effects, such as visions of Saturn and Pluto, as well as “impressions of
heaven” and images of intertwined, naked bodies. Angel dust became too intense, however, and
led him to reduce his intake of some substances, but he did credit these years with helping him to
“open up” and embrace a very different life than he had earlier in the army and a strict New
Jersey family.307
Alessi lost his hippie style and transformed into a gay “clone,” remaining a marijuana
user, upon moving to San Francisco in 1973. As sociologist Mark P. Levine charts, the “clone” 308
style embodied the idealized, mature urban gay man of the 70s. The clone partied hard at discos,
went to the gym, and was more groomed and clean-cut than his hippie and early gay liberationist
forbearers, usually with the exception of a stubborn mustache. Importantly, the clone also had 309
“Interview with Chuck Barricman, 1999,” ER Project, 37. 305
“Interview with David Ethan Alessi, 1999,” ER Project, 37-39. 306
“Interview with David Ethan Alessi, 1999,” ER Project, 39, 44. 307
“Interview with David Ethan Alessi, 1999,” ER Project, 38, 43. 308
Mark P. Levine, Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the Homosexual Clone (New York: NYU 309
Press, 1998), 3-9.
136

much greater purchasing power, often had a steady income and professional employment, and
lived in a still-affordable metropolitan housing market, albeit one with high rates of violent
crime. Clones participated fully in the subcultural lifestyle consumerism of the 1970s which,
according to sociologist Sam Binkley, was marketed as a pathway to find one’s true, freer “self,”
a mandate very much in sync with the gay liberationist conviction that one must “come out.”310
The renegade chemists, marijuana growers, international narcotics syndicates, generous
physicians, and street dealers responsible for most of the drugs gay men consumed in the 70s, of
course, tended not to engage in conventional marketing. Users instead spread the word 311
amongst themselves as drugs and sources became central components of conversation. But 312
some companies, as we will see in the next chapter, did take full advantage of the clone and
similar lifestyles as well as ever-buffer presentations of masculine sexuality to legally sell
poppers.
For many gay men in the 70s who might have been identified as “clones,” the purchase
and use of drugs such as LSD was not necessarily about witnessing cosmic vistas or seeking
harmony with nature, as it had been for many hippies. In Jose Hernandez’s words, “one didn’t go
to a club unless one was drugged up,” and a striking feature of many testimonials about drug use
in the 70s was just how many men frequently dropped acid or did large doses of other intense
Sam Binkley, Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s (Durham, NC: Duke 310
University Press, 2007), 3-10.
Arnie Smith sourced his quaaludes from a Venice Beach doctor happy to pantomime a fake 311
blood pressure reading to justify his prescription. “Interview with Arnie Smith, 2003,” ER
Project, 29.
Levine, Gay Macho, 71-72. 312
137

psychedelic drugs to dance at discos or have sex at bathhouses. The consumption of drugs and 313
the consumption of nightlife bolstered by new sound technology, disco beats, and relaxed moral
policing were intimately linked. Sometimes this all went badly wrong, and Michel Foucault was
surely not the only man to have a bad trip and meltdown at a bathhouse. But for the most part,
acid flowed as generously as any other drug. In his memoir, Alan Helms wrote of dancing on
mescaline and acid as the “most successful therapy” he had discovered. Men interviewed in 314
the documentary Gay Sex in the 70s recount taking acid alongside other drugs before seeking
sexual encounters at bathhouses, while at the Continental, one such New York bathhouse, acid
even found its way into vending machines and decorative fish tanks. Mark Abramson reported 315
an acid punch concoction in a phallic vessel pouring into a bowl at a Folsom street sex club on
New Year’s Eve sometime in the late 1970s. On acid Philip Gefter saw the Anvil, a New York 316
gay bar, as a psychedelic incarnation of “Weimar culture,” an image recently popularized by the
1972 film Cabaret. Gregory Ford, one of Rofes’ interview subjects, also recalled drinking 317
punch laced with acid at a black gay bar called the Clubhouse in Washington, D.C.. 318
“Interview with Jose Hernandez, 1999,” ER Project, pre-interview questionnaire (no page 313
number).
Helms, Young Man From the Provinces, 141. 314
Gay Sex in the 70s; Sam Davies, “Sex, disco and fish on acid: how Continental Baths became 315
the world's most influential gay club,” The Guardian, April 27, 2018, https://
www.theguardian.com/music/2018/apr/27/sex-disco-and-fish-on-acid-how-continental-bathsbecame-the-worlds-most-influential-gay-club.
Abramson, Sex, Drugs & Disco, 141. 316
Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis, 244. 317
“Interview with Gregory Ford, 2000,” ER Project, 25. 318
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Researchers at the time found that LSD, along with marijuana and poppers, were the most
commonly used drugs for sexual enhancement among a sample of Bay Area gay men. While 319
24.5% of Jay and Young’s male respondents claimed lifetime use of psychedelics during sex,
around half of Rofes’ men reported sometimes or often using acid or other psychedelics at
discos, clubs, or bathhouses. They found that the lights, music, and energy at discos 320
complimented acid very well, much like the hippies who frequented psychedelic rock concerts in
the 1960s or the “Dead Heads” who followed the Grateful Dead and its associated drug
distribution network. Nicky Siano, a DJ at Studio 54, considered the differences between 321
drugs like LSD and later, ecstasy, as well as the body’s physiological responses, when designing
sound and lighting systems. This was no different than his hippie forbearers. But the 322
The researchers divided the “sensuous hippies” of this study, for them a catch-all term, by 319
sexuality and gender, George R. Gay, John A. Newmeyer, Michael Perry, Gregory Johnson &
Mark Kurland, “Love and Haight: The Sensuous Hippie Revisited, Drug/Sex Practices in San
Francisco, 1980-81,” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 14 (1982): 114.
More of Jay and Young’s survey subjects reported negative views, and less use, of all drug 320
categories compared to Rofes’ subjects. In part, this is because their survey asked about drug use
only in relation to sex. The difference can also be explained by the fact that respondents were
drawn from across the United States and Canada, including from areas distant from the
metropolitan party scenes, whereas most of Rofes’ men had significant experiences in cities such
as San Francisco and a few even reported spending lengthy periods of time in many party
destinations across North America and Europe. Respondents to mail-in surveys are also probably
less likely to have personalities disposed towards drug use, and fewer would probably feel
comfortable sending such information through the mail, as opposed to speaking about it
truthfully and in-person to an interviewer with whom trust could be established. Jay and Young,
The Gay Report, 497.
See also “Interview with Roger Peña, 1999,” ER Project, 22; “Interview with Walter Reuben, 321
1999,” ER Project, 15; for the Grateful Dead and acid’s post-60s life in the mostly-heterosexual
counterculture, see Jesse Jarnow, Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America (Boston, MA: De
Capo Press, 2016).
“Interview: New York City Legend Nicky Siano Describes The Downfall of Modern DJs, 322
Clubs & Producers,” Magnetic Magazine, August 23, 2017, https://www.magneticmag.com/
2017/08/interview-new-york-city-legend-nicky-siano-describes-the-downfall-of-modern-djsclubs-producers/, accessed September 27, 2022.
139

underlying mindsets or paradigms of psychoactive experience and interpretation between hippie
psychedelia and the gay 1970s nonetheless differed.
The peak experience of being on acid at a gay disco or bathhouse was not necessarily any
less meaningful than tripping at Woodstock or a rural commune, even if the former aspired more
to naked sensual hedonism and the celebration of a specific sexual identity, in contrast to the
hippie marriage of sensuality and idealism that typically carried a spiritual, universalist, or quasipolitical aura. This shift in drug use paradigms and accompanying behavior had some gay 323
critics. Jonathan Klein was a moderate drug and alcohol user during the late 1960s and 1970s,
and “came from an idealistic perspective that drugs were for consciousness raising, not for
getting fucked up.” He told Rofes that his naiveté about addiction was influenced by his 1960s
idealism, and he only gradually came to realize how many people were overdoing it, and getting
too “fucked up” many times too often. While LSD, extremely rarely recognized as addictive 324
though sometimes psychologically distressing, remained on the scene for years to come, by the
late 1970s clubs like Studio 54 were at least as known for cocaine and quaaludes, which were
both linked to more significant health problems, and LSD consumption across the United States
diminished somewhat by the end of the decade.325
The few men who had an abstinent or minimal approach to drug use credited factors such
as childhood incidents or their family background. Gideon Ferebee was raised by a black mother
Many of Rofes’ interview subjects identified as pagan or Buddhist, but only rarely spoke 323
about their spiritual beliefs in relation to their drug use.
“Interview with Jonathan Klein, 1999,” ER Project, 24-28. 324
Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis, 256; of all common street drugs LSD is one of the most 325
vulnerable to supply issues, given its complicated and usually centralized production process;
Grim, This Is Your Country on Drugs, 1-16.
140

with a Depression mindset which he absorbed, and found that he mostly stayed frugal and sober
aside from marijuana occasionally shared by friends and some cocaine in the 1980s. In general 326
a lack of financial resources has never stopped the rich, poor, and middle class from imbibing all
sorts of substances in quantities large and small, if sometimes modified for smaller budgets, but
the few men from Rofes’ interviews who mostly stayed sober felt that they had to explain
themselves in some way. For Lee Gilbert, it was a sickly physical constitution that kept him from
drinking or getting high. Lance Loud also felt that many popular gay club drugs made him 327
sick, but did them anyway out of the desire to be “part of something.” 328
Many men cited frightening anecdotes or memories that curbed, moderated, or
completely prevented their use of drugs. A friend of Sammy Zoeller’s died snorting angel dust
which he believed was cocaine at San Francisco’s Balcony bar. Zoeller, however, personally felt
comfortable with non-synthetic drugs such as marijuana and magic mushrooms, which he
located in pastures, essentially the only way to obtain them before the publication of at-home
mushroom growing guides by the mid-1970s. A car accident, meanwhile, frightened Keith 329
Wendt from continuing a speed habit, and a horrifying introspective experience with marijuana
“Interview with Gideon Ferebee, 1999,” ER Project, pre-interview questionnaire (no page 326
number).
“Interview with Lee Gilbert, 1999,” ER Project, 29. 327
Torgoff, Can’t Find My Way Home, 302. 328
“Interview with Sammy Zoeller, 1999,” ER Project, 22-27; Lance Loud referenced the death 329
of David Lochary, star of some John Waters films, on angel dust, Torgoff, Can’t Find My Way
Home, 302; for mushrooms, see Terence and Dennis McKenna’s influential and pseudonymously
published volume which is largely responsible for the popularization of psychedelic fungus, O. T.
Oss and O. N. Oeric, Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide: A Handbook for Psilocybin
Enthusiasts (Berkeley, CA: And/Or Press, 1976).
141

prevented Dan Weiss from pursuing any further experimentation. Tommy Avicolli Mecca for 330
the most part loved marijuana, which was very common among his fellow activists, but stayed
away from acid, because a tripping friend once stripped naked in a Philadelphia park, had a
complete breakdown, and was committed to a psychiatric hospital. Robert Paterson 331
remembered a kid who died from sniffing gasoline when he was a child, as well as his coroner
father’s warnings, and so he used little other than poppers. Chuck Barricman knew one man 332
who died from an angel dust overdose, and another who became a “brain fried street person,” but
survived, after the same incident. Curiously, none of the men interviewed by Rofes who 333
abstained or minimized their drug use credited legal prohibitions, fear of the police, or drug
testing for employment, though this practice only started becoming common in the United States
at the end of the period covered by the interviews. However much homosexuals might have 334
been targeted by the police on pretexts of illegal drug possession (and some common drugs, such
as poppers and quaaludes, were legal or legal with a prescription), the threat of enforcement
seems to have done little to alter behavior.
Also notable was the fact that almost none of the men disclosed any use of heroin or
other opioids, perhaps in part because it was the most universally stigmatized street drug when
Rofes conducted the interviews, but also because it simply was not a common gay drug by the
1970s. Allen Young and Karla Jay's survey and other researchers found that few gay men or
“Interview with Keith Wendt, 1997,” ER Project, 36; “Interview with Dan Weiss, 1999,” ER 330
Project, 35.
“Interview with Tommi Avicolli Mecca, 1999,” ER Project, 24-25. 331
“Interview with Robert Paterson, 1997,” ER Project, 28. 332
“Interview with Chuck Barricman, 1999,” ER Project, 37. 333
334 Ryan Grim, This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America
(New York: Wiley, 2010), 121.
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lesbians used heroin. Some men specifically designated a red line at heroin, or were “scared to 335
death of needles,” the most common means of administering heroin. Peter Groubeet recalled 336
witnessing heroin “junkies” in New York City when he was growing up, and this memory
remained a powerful antidote. Only one man, Steve Edgerton, reported using MDA mixed 337
with heroin every few months for intensity, which he claims was then the norm––both drugs,
indeed, had been blamed in part for the decline of hippiedom in San Francisco. Many of the 338
homosexuals in the New York City Jail from Samuel Kahn’s 1937 study covered in chapter one
were initially arrested for using heroin, which then dominated more of the drug market. Beat
writer William Burroughs recounted the many hustlers, “queers,” and “junkies” of mid-twentieth
century New York in his early work, but the popularity of heroin seems to have declined
significantly in the gay population during later decades. One important exception to this trend 339
against heroin use may have been found in smaller avant-garde subcultures in places like New
York’s East Village during the late 1970s and 1980s, which produced artists such as David
96.5% of women and 97% of men reported never using heroin during sex, Jay and Young, 335
The Gay Report, 431, 497; heroin was also one of the least popular drugs among gay men as well
as lesbians in the smaller sample of George R. Gay et al., “Love and Haight,” 114.
“Interview with Darrell Johnson” (interview date not available), ER Project, 26; other gay 336
men, such as Alan Helms and some of his friends, had no issue with intravenous injections of
drugs such as methamphetamine, though heroin remained rare in his circles. Helms, Young Man
from the Provinces, 132, 134.
“Interview with Peter Groubeet, 1999,” ER Project, 33. 337
Edgerton reported that he “liked reality” too much to become addicted. “Interview with Steve 338
Edgerton, 2001,” ER Project, 65; Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury: A History (New York:
Wenner, 2005), 219, 288.
Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality, 111, 129-130; William Burroughs, Junkie: Confessions 339
of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (New York: Ace Books, 1953).
143

Wojnarowicz, who highlighted themes related to homosexuality, heroin (among other drugs), and
HIV/AIDS in his visual and literary work.340
There are almost always multiple reasons for shifts in drug popularity, but the exuberance
and highly social or sexual nature in which most gay drug use took place in the 1970s––disco
nightclubs, bedrooms, and boisterous parties––did not exactly lend itself to zonked-out, impotent
opioid highs. Heroin belonged to lonelier times. If Groubeet remembered sad “junkies” from his
childhood, everyone also knew of the more recent heroin overdoses that had taken the likes of
Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison. We can only speculate about why heroin became known more as
a “straight” drug, though this reputation could be tricky. A 1970 pornographic pulp tell-all, James
J. Proferes’ Boys, Drugs, and Sex, bragged to a mostly gay readership about the often ‘straight’
hustlers who used heroin and other drugs and sought money for their habit through sex with
other men. Some readers no doubt found the publication’s images of intravenous drug use by 341
young, naked men to be arousing, a striking echo of eroticized Victorian addicts, and
foreshadowing 1990s stylizations of “heroin chic.” According to Levine, most 1970s clones 342
eschewed the “heavier” stuff of sadomasochism, which he notes could include piercing of the
nipples or genitals with needles, an act which may have been evocative of intravenous drug use.
Moore, Beyond Shame, 101-103. 340
James J. Proferes, Boys, Drugs, and Sex (Washington, D.C.: Guild Press Ltd., 1970), 20-21, 341
Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection, Houghton Library/Center for the History of Medicine,
Countway Library, Harvard University.
Boys, Drugs, and Sex contains numerous photographs of young men injecting heroin and 342
other intravenous drugs into their arms and penises, 27-38, 56; for the nineteenth-century
sexualization of intravenous drug use, particularly in women, see Susan Zieger, Inventing the
Addict: Drugs, Race, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature
(Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 127-154.
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These practices were usually the domain of the narrower leather-man subculture, which was
known generally for its extremes.343
The amplification of pleasure and stamina during actual sex, of course, was a primary
reason for using many other substances. Virtually all of Rofes’ men and over half of the men
(and almost none of the women) surveyed by Jay and Young reported at least trying poppers
during sex, and most of these reported that this was a frequent or constant act, even for some of
those, such as Leo Egashira, who avoided alcohol and drugs otherwise. Roger Peña felt that 344
the inhalation of poppers pushed his sensory experience to its limits, granting a “complete body
sensation” while dancing or during sex. Sharing drugs or a drink was frequently a first step 345
towards a sexual proposition, establishing desire, removing inhibitions, and getting everyone ‘on
the same level.’ The association of poppers or other drugs with sex did not necessarily become 346
problematic––Conrad Harding, for instance, also noted that he used poppers to enhance his
orgasms and overall experience all the time, and with years of hindsight neither he nor Peña
believed poppers or other drugs ever became an issue. Sean Strub even claimed to recall 347
reading about medical research which attested to the health of poppers, and praised all of their
qualities. Jonathan Klein, however, felt that poppers damaged his experiences and avoided 348
them, because their dissociative and visceral properties “ruined the mental eroticism of sex,”
Levine, Gay Macho, 96. 343
Jay and Young, The Gay Report, 497; “Interview with Leo Egashira, 2004,” ER Project, 344
23-24.
“Interview with Roger Peña, 2000,” ER Project, 24. 345
Levine, Gay Macho, 85-86. 346
“Interview with Roger Peña, 2000,” ER Project, 24; “Interview with Conrad Harding, 1999,” 347
ER Project, 23-25.
“Interview with Sean Strub, 2003,” ER Project, 46. 348
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making him feel like something was “wrong” because this effect appeared rare in others.349
Robert Paterson encountered erectile disfunction due to poppers, and Tommi Avicolli Mecca
hated the feeling of his heart racing, while poppers only brought Walter Reuben pain when
another man spilled a bottle of the corrosive substance on his chest. Most men expressed their 350
taste for drugs according to the quirks of their mind and body. Arnie Smith found that he
preferred quaaludes to speed, being “naturally speedy” himself. He loved “bouncing off people”
and “mumbling words” at West Hollywood’s Studio One club, where he apparently found that
his sober “speediness” was corrected by the loopy sedative. 351
Smith proceeded to excitedly remind Rofes that “Room 714” in which the “very kinky
girl” is waiting, from the Rick James song “Super Freak” (1981), referenced the manufacturer’s
number stamped on to some quaaludes, a nod to those in-the-know which would circumvent
stodgy studio censors. James’ cryptic lyric blasted out of stereos as the national mood became
increasingly hostile to drugs and other moral excesses, and the decriminalization-oriented Carter
years transitioned to the era of Ronald Reagan, publicly a devourer of jelly beans as his “Just Say
No” wife Nancy allegedly harbored a private prescription drug addiction. It is foolish to 352
presume that wider political or cultural trends necessarily map onto decades or onto conflicted
presidential administrations. Under Nixon the 1970s began, after all, with the federal enactment
of the Controlled Substances Act, and the broader reaction against drug use in the 1960s
“Interview with Jonathan Klein, 1999,” ER Project, 28-29. 349
“Interview with Robert Paterson, 1997,” ER Project, 29; “Interview with Tommi Avicolli 350
Mecca, 1999,” ER Project, 26; “Interview with Walter Reuben, 2003,” ER Project, 15.
“Interview with Arnie Smith, 2003” ER Project, 26-29. 351
According to her daughter, Nancy relied on tranquilizers and other downers in and out of the 352
White House, Patti Davis, The Way I See It: an Autobiography (New York: Putnam, 1992), 53,
168.
146

counterculture was occasionally linked to homosexuality. Through the 1960s and 1970s, fears
about homosexual seducers weaponizing drugs reached platforms including erotic pulp tell-alls,
medical journals, and congressional proceedings, such as the 1974 Eastland Hearings on
marijuana. But as the decade came to a close, Jimmy Carter’s White House was far more open 353
to discussions with drug legalization and gay activists than Nixon or Ford. As the next chapter 354
discusses, influential forces within the marijuana legalization movement in fact emerged from
San Francisco’s gay milieu.
By the 1980s, a firmer cultural turn against drugs as well as gay rights could be measured
by shifts in public opinion against the liberalization of marijuana laws and the acceptability of
homosexuality. A hardened approach to drugs surfaced in unprecedented advertising 355
campaigns and the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program in schools, new policing
tactics meant to assail the crack cocaine epidemic in America’s urban ghettoes, the expansion of
the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency), other tough-on-crime measures, and interventions abroad
A 1970 anonymously-written pulp exposé tells the story of Duke, a rugged and bisexual 353
common criminal who plies a younger man, Dutch, with marijuana before seducing him into his
life of thievery and sexual debauchery, Anonymous, Stoned Sex: Comparative Studies of Drug
Users and Their Sexual Drives (North Hollywood: Aquarius 7 Publications, 1970), 39-72;
Psychiatrists Moore and Kolansky alleged that a 17-year-old boy became a homosexual after an
older man eased him into regular marijuana use, which made the boy easier to seduce, Harold
Kolansky and William Moore, "Effects of Marihuana on Adolescents and Young Adults,”
Journal of the American Medical Association 216, no. 3 (April 1971): 488; James O. Eastland
and the Committee on the Judiciary, “Marijuana-Hashish Epidemic and Its Impact on United
States Security,” United States Senate (May-June, 1974), 235, 241, 274, 370, 400.
The push for decriminalization under Carter, beginning with marijuana, was stunted by a 354
scandal involving his drug czar’s use of cocaine at a Washington, D.C. party in 1978, see
Torgoff, Can’t Find My Way Home, 274-278.
Katherine Schaeffer, “6 facts about Americans and marijuana,” Pew Research, April 26, 2021, 355
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/26/facts-about-marijuana/, accessed August 24,
2022.
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allegedly intended to break up the narcotics trade. Drugs remained central to much of gay 356
party culture, but as the men who partied through the late 1960s and 1970s aged and experienced
the HIV/AIDS crisis, many slowed down, and in this context some ruminated about the overall
impact of drugs on their lives and the gay world. While few of them would have endorsed 357
Reagan’s renewal of the War on Drugs, an altered cultural climate could prompt some fair and
sober-minded judgments of past highs.
No doubt with a laugh, Arnie Smith told Rofes that he gave out MDA to friends at Fire
Island to prepare for a Grace Jones concert in 1977, but then somehow ended up stuck in a
rowboat before he could see the diva perform. Chuck Forester reflected on some of his 358
favorite drug experiences, such as wandering around the eccentric house he and and his partner
Michael built on acid, which also “vacuum cleaned” his mind, enhanced the beauty of color and
male anatomy, and for him had very few negative effects. One of the most salient features of 359
Rofes’ interviews and other accounts is how many men treasured their memories of drug use,
even those hazy and absurd, and often regardless of whether or not their drug use continued,
ceased, or was believed problematic. A physician interviewed by Rofes, who likely for legal and
professional reasons did not wish to be named (he was also an immigrant), reminisced about his
Farber, Crack; Grim, This is Your Country on Drugs, 92-95. 356
Levine notes that mounting concerns about drug and sex addictions, promiscuity, and 357
sexually transmitted deceases in the national media and professional publications in the early
1980s combined in all sorts of ways to make the gay ‘clone’ a convenient scapegoat. Levine, Gay
Macho, 166.
“Interview with Arnie Smith, 2003” ER Project, 30-32; for a recording of the missed 358
performance, see “Grace Jones - Live At Ice Palace, Fire Island 1976 Or 1977, incl. crowd
cheering…,” Mr. Fonk, Soundcloud, https://soundcloud.com/cracked-a/grace-jones-live-at-icepalace-fire-island-1976-or-1977-incl-crowd-cheering, accessed September 16, 2022.
“Interview with Chuck Forester, 1999,” ER Project, 29. 359
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liberal use of marijuana, alcohol, acid, MDA, and speed. “In NO way (do) I look at these
experiences as negative,” he wrote in the pre-interview questionnaire, adding that it was
impossible to separate gay culture and drugs. One of Young and Jay’s survey respondents 360
concurred, noting that he had used a variety of drugs for years and nonetheless acquired several
university degrees without it effecting his performance whatsoever. Drugs had in fact broadened
his perception in helpful ways he did not elaborate on. Getting “fucked up” could be 361
ridiculous, but also culturally or personally consequential or even numinous, and this was
sometimes quite literal. Alan Helms remembered using psychedelic drugs with several friends as
they scattered a comrade’s ashes while wading in the Atlantic off Fire Island, a somber and
transcendent moment doubtlessly preferable to a tedious Methodist funeral home in Ohio.362
That dead friend, it should be noted, had committed suicide with a handful of sleeping
pills, and had long suffered his own inner “demons." Helms’ portrayals of drugs in his life and
those of his friends during his party years fluctuated between the “pleasures of sun-filled days”
and the sad state of those who overdid it, often under the shadow of long-running personal
struggles. Some of Rofes’ men, such as Thomas Tymstone, looked back on their experiences
with drugs as evenly split between good and bad. Another spoke of those years as the “beginning
of a scourge that exists today, only the drugs have become more sophisticated and addicting,”
probably referencing crystal methamphetamine and other party drugs which had increased in
“Interview with anonymous, 1999 (name restricted),” ER Project, pre-interview 360
questionnaire.
Jay and Young, The Gay Report, 499. 361
Helms, Young Man From the Provinces, 134. 362
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potency and prevalence by the 1990s, when the interviews were conducted. Brian Thom, 363
himself a former user of crystal meth, said that his fun while partying with substances diminished
by the mid-1980s. In the interviews’ only note of comparison to lesbians with regard to substance
use, Thom added that by the 1980s he had “heard that lesbians,” known more for drinking, “were
getting sober and going into recovery groups,” which he thought was previously “unheard of.”364
This in part motivated him to seek treatment.
~ ~ ~
“All I want is someone who reads books, loves his work, and me, too, of course, and who
doesn’t take drugs, and isn’t on unemployment,” pleas Fred, the protagonist of Larry Kramer’s
1978 novel Faggots, who had tried drugs but “found no answers” and quit. Kramer’s book 365
decried the sexual intensity and drug-taking of New York’s in-the-scene gays as an obstacle to
genuine personal growth and sincere, healthy relationships. Andrew Holleran’s Dancer From the
Dance, a novel also published in 1978, was interpreted similarly by some readers given its
mention of men who had died in tragic circumstances, but Holleran himself admitted that its
relative ambiguity reflected his divided feelings about gay party life. Kramer’s much sharper 366
“Interview with Thomas Tymstone, 2003,” ER Project, 34; “Interview with anonymous, 2005 363
(use restrictions unknown),” ER Project, incomplete interview probably due to Rofes’ death.
“Interview with Brian Thom, 1997,” ER Project, 33-35; Jay and Young quoted a couple of 364
women who identified as recovering alcoholics, and another said she knew “too many sisters
who’ve been really messed up” by substance abuse, Jay and Young, The Gay Report, 434.
Larry Kramer, Faggots, 10, 145. 365
One such death resulted from an overdose on angel dust and quaaludes, Holleran, Dancer 366
from the Dance, 31; for the comparison, see Echols, Hot Stuff, 284-285; Holleran’s latest novel,
The Kingdom of Sand, finds the semi-autobiographical narrator lonely in his small town in
northern Florida. However mixed his feelings about his past, Holleran’s fictionalized persona
seems to feel that his age bars his return to any kind of real gay social life, as the title of this
review implies, Alan Hollinghurst, “In the Shadow of Young Men in Flower,” New York Review
of Books, August 18, 2022.
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critics responded that his literary work was merely a reflection of his puritanical personal tastes,
resentments, and shortcomings, but to some Kramer’s role in gay culture took on a new prophetic
glow as his endlessly argumentative self held a leadership position in the Gay Men’s Health
Crisis, an early HIV/AIDS advocacy group, until he was forced out.367
Leaving AIDS aside for the moment, though, there actually were plenty of people who
through the haze of the 1970s had very different experiences of drugs than Kramer, as I have
tried at times to point out in this chapter. Some cherished those elusive moments of psychoactive
ecstasy on the dance floor or in the bedroom, and their ephemerality did not render them
valueless. And not a few––individuals from this chapter such as Lige Clarke, Chuck Forester,
and their partners––also felt that some drugs at particular times could enhance heartfelt and
inarguably genuine moments with other human beings. As French studies scholar Oliver Davis
further points out, for some groups of gay men, including those who surrounded Michel Foucault
during his last years, the mutual experience of drug taking could even serve as the foundation for
bonds of lasting friendship and care.368
In his scholarly work, Foucault’s philosophical turn towards an “aesthetics of existence,”
a move which purportedly began or was at least deepened following his acid trip in Death Valley,
celebrated an autonomous body freed from the disciplinary mechanisms generated by centuries
of institutional and epistemological expansion. More pared-down rhetoric about the right to one’s
own body or mind dominated so many of the political and cultural debates which roiled the
Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, 448; Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: 367
Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 26-27, 210.
Oliver Davis, “Foucault and the Queer Pharmatopia,” in After Foucault: Culture, Theory, and 368
Criticism in the 21st Century, ed. Lisa Downing (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2018), 170-171.
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United States and other Western countries through the 1970s, 1980s, and beyond, not least
abortion and gay rights, and drug use was secondary but still prominent among these causes. In
1970 Gore Vidal, who said he had “tried––once––almost every drug and liked none” (except his
lifelong love, alcohol), argued in the New York Times that the personal right to choose, a legal
market, and accurate education made the best approach to drug policy. At the height of the War 369
on Drugs some years later, the feminist intellectual Ellen Willis declared that “the state has no
right to prohibit me from exploring different states of consciousness” in the Village Voice.370
Timothy Leary, of course, had been saying all of this for ages.
But what happens when one’s body, unintentionally, becomes a seriously lethal threat to
itself and other bodies through the pursuit of pleasure and intense experience? This was precisely
the dilemma gay men, who had spent over a decade positioning sexual freedom as a core facet of
their identity, began to encounter apocalyptically in the 1980s. For Hank Wilson, an energetic
and crusading San Francisco activist, the threat was manifold. The effect of poppers, the ‘gayest’
of the drugs and one occasionally enjoyed even by otherwise teetotalers, was in fact a “Death
Rush” that could be blamed for the ferocious spread of whatever was killing gay men by the
dozens, hundreds, and thousands.
Vidal’s claim to have tried almost every drug might have had as much truth to it as his 369
frequent claim that he was bisexual, like the Roman emperors he liked to style himself after.
Gore Vidal, “Drugs: Case for Legalizing Marijuana,” New York Times, September 26, 1970.
Ellen Willis, “The Drug War: Hell No, I Won’t Go,” Village Voice, September 1989. 370
152

153

Chapter 4: “Hellbent or Heavenly Scent?” Recreational Drugs and AIDS in San
Francisco, 1981-1996
In one of the inaugural texts documenting the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States, a
July 3, 1981 New York Times article written by Dr. Lawrence K. Altman, recreational drug use
among gay men was already proposed as a potential cause of the mysterious outbreak of a “Rare
Cancer.” The prevalence of drugs in gay social and sexual life, so established in the late 1960s
and 1970s, extended to many of the early victims of the new illness who began to disappear from
the streets and clubs of New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and soon smaller communities,
too. “Many patients,” Altman wrote, “reported that they had used drugs such as amyl nitrite and
LSD to heighten sexual pleasure.” Amyl/butyl nitrite (related compounds which differ in 371
potency), or poppers, were used almost exclusively by gay men for their psychoactive as well as
physiological effects, while hippies and gay men were among those who used LSD sometimes to
enhance sex, or at least make it more carnivalesque. But there had been no outbreak of rare
cancerous lesions, one of the first observed AIDS symptoms, among the flower children, though
LSD had once been rumored to have its own set of ghastly medical consequences. And what of
the other drugs many gay men used regularly, not to mention the extraordinary number of sexual
conquests some of them tallied?
Whether or not the patterns of drug use and promiscuity that distinguished many early
people with AIDS was a matter of causation or correlation could only be speculated about before
the disease’s viral origin and true risk factors were determined, and even that became a subject of
Lawrence K. Altman, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals,” New York Times, July 3, 1981, 371
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/03/us/rare-cancer-seen-in-41-homosexuals.html; just a few
weeks earlier, on May 18, 1981, Lawrence D. Mass published probably the first article on AIDS
in the biweekly gay paper the New York Native.
154

fringe controversy. In the meantime, gay men variously attracted fear, hellfire, pity, and
sympathy from the general public as images of gaunt AIDS patients on their deathbeds entered
the mass media. Particularly horrifying were the visible signs of infection: the cancerous growths
of Kaposi’s sarcoma, or the eruptions of fungus around fingernails and mouths. It was all too 372
easy to see these symptoms as the wages of sin, the modern equivalents of Sodom and
Gomorrah’s pillars of salt, or for the secular, nature’s lethal revenge for the aberrant and overindulgent. Whatever the case, only a few years had passed since the psychiatric consensus had
given homosexuals their mental health stamp of approval, and for gay men, the remedicalization
of their very existence was profoundly distressing.
Over the subsequent years, the safety and legitimacy of sexual and psychoactive
hedonism in the gay community was just as contentious as social and legal discrimination. Many
of those who earlier dissented from the centrality of partying in urban gay culture, such as Larry
Kramer, felt vindicated but also dutiful as they pursued wider access to medical resources and
argued for changes in behavior. But just what these changes should be were baffling in the early
years of the disease, and “folk theories” about the origins of the disease, as anthropologist Gayle
Rubin refers to them, circulated widely among gay men themselves. Rubin compares this
conjecture to “superstitions” and accusations of “witchcraft” which, while sometimes amplifying
discrimination and stigmatization of particular subcultures (such as Rubin’s leathermen), was
nonetheless understandable within a climate of fear that lacked much medical insight. Foremost
among these theories was the contention that promiscuity itself bombarded the immune system,
opening an unarmored body to the depredations of ordinarily benign pathogens. The body’s
Shilts, And the Band Played On, 48, 55. 372
155

defenses simply became overwhelmed after years of constant contact with the germs of others.373
Other suggested causes included spiritual deficits, a lack of love, semen, vaccines, biological
warfare, CIA conspiracies, fluoride, macho clone-ism, and hostility to femininity. One letter to a
gay newspaper, Rubin reports, even cheered on the death of masculine clones to AIDS because
they had supported the “white macho sexist dominated system” and alienated the author, who
hated “gender classifications.” Such ruptures in what would become known as the “LGBTQ” 374
umbrella may seem contemporary, but the outbreak of HIV/AIDS decades ago exposed faults
between those interested in building communities of pleasure and sexual liberty, those focused
more so on politicized identities and revolutionary aspirations, and those who redefined what
they saw as political. Historians such as Jennifer Brier and Salonee Bhaman have perhaps
overstated the congruity of these streams during the early AIDS years. The larger divide, 375
however, revolved around stopping the plague, and what exactly the plague was.
As the July 1981 New York Times article spotlighted, poppers, or nitrite inhalants, were
also an early folk-epidemiological candidate, and the advocates of this theory initially proposed
that the precise route for causation could be a bad batch or the carcinogenic properties of the
substance. While the popper theory appeared here and there in articles and conversation for years
Gayle S. Rubin, “Elegy for the Valley of the Kings: AIDS and the Leather Community in San 373
Francisco, 1981-1996,” in John H. Gagnon, Martin P. Levine, and Peter M. Nardi, eds., In
Changing Times: Gay Men and Lesbians Encounter HIV/AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1997), 109-110.
Original quote from Ray Starkey, Bay Area Reporter, April 14, 1983; Rubin, “Elegy for the 374
Valley of the Kings,” 110-111.
See especially the first two chapters of Jennifer Brier, Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political 375
Responses to the AIDS Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Salonee
Bhaman, ““For a Few Months of Peace”: Housing and Care in the Early AIDS Crisis,” Radical
History Review 140 (May 2021): 78-106.
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to come, and became the subject of some medical research, one San Francisco activist, Hank
Wilson, devoted an enormous amount of energy and time trying to eradicate their presence from
the gay community, ultimately with limited successes. Wilson and his collaborators saw poppers
as a vital node in what would be called the “sexual ecology” that gave rise to the AIDS
pandemic. This term was later coined by controversial gay writer Gabriel Rotello with reference
to the constellation of environmental and behavioral conditions––some of them, such as the
intense promiscuity of the 1970s and early 1980s, quite recent developments––that allowed a
pre-existent HIV virus to thrive. Some members of the gay men’s health movement that arose 376
to combat AIDS targeted government, academic, and religious institutions in an effort to change
the broader medical, legal, and social conditions that worsened the crisis. But Rotello, Wilson,
and others also insisted that gay men look for ways to change their own behavior, a critique that
in turn provoked a backlash from those who feared one more state-sanctioned ‘sex panic,’ this
time exacerbated by gay activists themselves.
Born in Sacramento in 1947, Wilson worked as a school teacher and became politically
and socially active in the Bay Area’s gay community by the 1970s. He was a co-founder of the
Gay Teachers and School Workers Coalition and the San Francisco Gay Democratic Club, which
was renamed the Harvey Milk Democratic Club after the councilman was assassinated alongside
San Francisco mayor George Moscone in 1978. Like Milk, Wilson was also involved in 377
opposition to the Briggs Initiative, and he championed efforts to curb homophobic violence and
Gabriel Rotello, Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men (New York: Penguin 376
Books, 1997), 20-21.
Jackie M Blount, Fit to Teach: Same-Sex Desire, Gender, and School Work in the Twentieth 377
Century (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005), 127, 157.
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support homeless and impoverished street youth. Wilson managed a single room occupancy 378
hotel in San Francisco’s derelict Tenderloin neighborhood, which housed many people with
AIDS, from 1978-1996, and coordinated efforts to provide services for people with AIDS and the
homeless. He was thus no stranger to the cause of gay rights, and it was particularly through 379
fighting poppers that he found his most passionate niche in a new era that would be defined by
the AIDS epidemic. Once it had been established that some of those diagnosed with AIDS were
not poppers users, Wilson did not claim that poppers were its direct cause. Interpreting and
occasionally participating in ongoing medical research, he argued that poppers were severely
immunosuppressive in combination with other factors, before shifting to the view that poppers
were strongly linked to some of the worst AIDS-related conditions, such as Kaposi’s sarcoma.
Wilson and his collaborators believed it was the duty of activists, physicians, and the
state to suppress the advertising and sale of poppers, alongside the cultural shifts needed in the
gay community. Sporadic crackdowns on the sale of poppers never remotely approximated the
scale of government response to the contemporaneous crack cocaine epidemic, and the resultant
decimation many communities experienced during the War on Drugs. Wilson nonetheless bore
some kinship with the black community leaders who called for tough penalties for drug
producers, traffickers, dealers, and users, an uncomfortable reality which legal scholar James
Forman Jr. points to in Locking Up Our Own. In the 1970s, the flower of black civic leadership
in Washington, D.C., shuddering at the consequences of heroin addiction in the black
community, advocated a hardened police approach to marijuana, even as the Carter
Rachel Gordon, “Hank Wilson dies - gay liberation activist,” SFGATE, November 13, 2008. 378
Hank Wilson Papers, GLBT Historical Society, Online Archive of California, https:// 379
oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8n018sd/entire_text/, accessed January 24, 2023.
158

administration momentarily flirted with the decriminalization movement. This tough-on-drugs 380
push among black civic leaders grew nationwide. Had some coalition of gay activists, law
enforcement officials, and politicians abruptly determined that poppers posed the same level of
threat that was frequently assigned to crack or even marijuana, the history of the War on Drugs
might have looked somewhat different, which is not to say that antigay policing lacked
occasional drug-related arrests and charges. But aside from Wilson and a handful of other
activists and writers, the overall tilt of gay activists was towards drug decriminalization (passed
in some states for cannabis by the 1970s) or legalization, and the advent of AIDS simultaneously
supported an opposing thrust in this direction.
Membership in Harvey Milk’s political and social network was the common denominator
between Hank Wilson and another notable San Franciscan of the time, Dennis Peron. From his
headquarters at the edge of the Castro, a combined hippy restaurant and “pot supermarket,”
Peron lorded over a deep-rooted subculture of cannabis users in San Francisco before embarking
upon the consequential work of launching one of the first serious efforts at cannabis policy
reform in the United States. Other prominent drug reform activists of the time proceeded through
lobbying campaigns, such as those associated with NORML (National Organization for the
Reform of Marijuana Laws), based in Washington, D.C and funded by Playboy magnate Hugh
Hefner. But Peron, a self-described “gay hippie outlaw,” chose a more brazen approach, at times
risking his life and freedom as his establishments were raided by the police and he was once
James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (New 380
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), 17-46.
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shot. Peron’s partner in marijuana advocacy, ‘Brownie’ Mary Jane Rathbun, deserves the 381
greatest credit for making strides in the popular legitimization of the use of medical marijuana.
Brownie Mary was the stoned Mother Teresa, spending years of her life and facing legal
jeopardy in her mission to distribute cannabis, usually in the form of baked goods, to people with
AIDS who were beginning to elicit sympathy from politicians and the larger public.
This chapter explores these two stories as variations on the relationship between the gay
community and drugs in light of the AIDS crisis and the political climate in which it took place.
On the national stage, drug warriors were ascendant, but in the San Francisco Bay Area itself,
corporate tech had not yet deposed its less-monied stepparent––the drug using counterculture––
as a social presence. At the confluence of Bay Area activism, post-hippiedom, and the AIDS 382
crisis, a new phase of the debate about drugs in America was beginning to form, alongside
already-existent disagreements within the gay world about the limits of sexual and psychoactive
hedonism. Hank Wilson and other gay activists and authors argued that widespread drug use was
one of the combined set of factors and behaviors that significantly widened the scope and
lethality of the AIDS pandemic. Champions of cannabis, however, believed that the treatment of
AIDS symptoms should be added to the long list of ailments the herb should be applied to,
Dennis Peron and John Entwistle, Memoirs of Dennis Peron: How a Gay Hippie Outlaw 381
Legalized Marijuana in Response to the AIDS Crisis (San Francisco: Medical Use Publishing,
2012).
For the complicated relationship between the hippies and Silicon Valley, see Fred Turner, 382
From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of
Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Andrew Kirk, Counterculture
Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (Lawrence, KS: University
Press of Kansas, 2007).
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making a powerful case for the legalization and public acceptance of medical––and eventually,
recreational––marijuana.
While AIDS became less deadly for many gay Americans by the late 1990s thanks to new
treatments, the critique of urban gay social life gained supporters such as journalist Michelangelo
Signorile, who contended that the use of drugs, especially methamphetamine and steroids,
pointed to a deeper malaise. I continue to tackle this debate in the next chapter. But in the
meantime, I show that while AIDS indisputably catalyzed strong but limited apprehension about
some types of recreational drug use, particularly inhaling poppers, the epidemic also prompted
the introduction of a compelling new strategy for advocates of medical cannabis, which was later
adopted by other drug policy reformers. Alleviating the suffering of people with AIDS became
one of the primary rationales for medical cannabis, and over subsequent decades an emphasis on
the therapeutic potential of certain drugs, as well as harm reduction strategies influenced by the
AIDS crisis, became the engines of changing laws and attitudes about drug use. The
consequences of AIDS for drug use in gay culture was thus bifurcated, but anti-drug gay writers
and activists at the same time recognized that various drugs had a spectrum of impacts upon
users. This stands in contrast to the flatness of mainstream political and popular anti-drug
rhetoric in the United States in the 1980s, which often struggled to differentiate between
substances beyond their historically-determined but nonetheless often irrational legal status.
In the pages to come I devote significantly more space to Hank Wilson for several
reasons: firstly, a number of works already detail the lives and achievements of Dennis Peron and
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Brownie Mary, while fairly little has been said about Wilson. Secondly, the primary concern of 383
this dissertation is the recreational use of drugs, a category which inhaling poppers at discos or in
the bedroom clearly falls within, while the treatment of AIDS symptoms with marijuana does
much less so. That being said, Peron and Brownie Mary’s initial love of cannabis was not
motivated by any medical condition, and the boundary between “medical” and “recreational” is
far from clear, as Peron himself frequently alluded. Victories for medical cannabis, furthermore,
were clear goalposts on the path towards reformed attitudes and policies regarding many
recreational uses of some drugs. The moralists of the time who opposed medical marijuana,
fearing a slippery slope to recreational use and to other drugs, were undeniably correct! Finally,
the school of thought which Wilson represented, which used AIDS to promote what it saw as a
healthier paradigm of gay culture, stripped of much of its promiscuity and drug use, plays a
significant role in the next chapter.
It should be noted, lastly, that intravenous drug users constitute another high risk category
for HIV infection, and one typically with fewer economic resources than non-intravenous opioid
These books, some of which I draw from alongside archival material below, include Michael 383
Malott, Medical Marijuana: The Story of Dennis Peron, The San Francisco Cannabis Buyers
Club and the Ensuing Road to Legalization (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform,
2009); Peron and Entwistle, Memoirs of Dennis Peron; Martin A. Lee, Smoke Signals: A Social
History of Marijuana - Medical, Recreational and Scientific (New York: Scribner, 2013); Larry
“Ratso” Sloman, Reefer Madness: A History of Marijuana (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin,
1998); Emily Dufton, Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (New
York: Basic Books, 2017); Peter Hecht, Weed Land: Inside America’s Marijuana Epicenter and
How Pot Went Legit (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014), 45-63. There are no
dedicated works on Wilson or the anti-poppers movement, however he is briefly mentioned with
regard to his fight against poppers in Louis Niebur, Menergy: San Francisco’s Gay Disco Sound
(Oxford University Press, 2022), 170-171; and with regard to his other activism in Christina B.
Hanhardt, Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2013), 100, 247, 276.
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using urban gay males, who also tended to gain access to effective medications more quickly
once they became available. During the early history of AIDS, some intravenous drug users were
of course gay, and while heroin use continued to be somewhat less common among gay men,
intravenous injection of cocaine and methamphetamine with shared needles could also be a
method of HIV contagion. A 1982 New York Native article by psychotherapist Michael Shernoff,
indeed, suggested anecdotally that intravenous injection of drugs such as cocaine, sometimes as a
group activity, had recently increased among gay men in San Francisco and New York. While 384
I do not discuss the confluence between AIDS, intravenous drug users, and the gay community in
depth in this chapter, journalist Maia Szalavitz and historians Nancy Campbell and Sarah
Schulman elsewhere recount the compelling history of harm reduction strategies such as needle
exchange programs, multiple AIDS-impacted populations, and addiction beginning in the
1980s. Methamphetamine use, especially during sex, increased among gay men in the 1980s 385
and 1990s, and I will return to that topic in the next chapter.
Hank Wilson’s War
Beginning in 1980 and continuing through the decade, the United States supplied the
Afghan mujahideen with heavy weapons in their successful war against a Soviet invasion which
Michael Shernoff, “Nice Boys and Needles,” New York Native 74, October 10-23, 1983, in 384
James McCourt, Queer Street: Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985 (New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), 440-442.
Maia Szalavitz, Undoing Drugs: How Harm Reduction Is Changing the Future of Drugs and 385
Addiction (New York: Hachette Go, 2022); Nancy Campbell, OD: Naloxone and the Politics of
Overdose (MIT Press, 2020); Sarah Schulman, “Harm Reduction as a Value, an Ideal, a Way of
Life and Death: ACT UP’s Campaign for Needle Exchange,” in Let the Record Show: A Political
History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 281-316.
163

was originally intended to boost an unpopular client regime. Much of this late Cold War
interventionism was overseen by Congressman Charlie Wilson, a “good time” Democrat from
Texas who liked hot tubs and saw stinger missiles and Islamic fundamentalists as Moscow’s
Achilles' heal. But this particular chapter in US foreign relations was also a typical study in 386
unintended consequences, the sort of irony not unfamiliar to drug scholars which national
security hawks would do well to heed. True, the Soviet Union soon collapsed, and their failure in
Afghanistan contributed to this historic development. But the regime that replaced the Soviets in
the Kremlin eventually turned out to be worse, and Afghanistan festered with religious extremists
holding all manner of millenarian vendettas that were realized in the September 11th, 2001
attacks. Coordination between the CIA, the Pentagon, Pakistani intelligence, and the Afghans
further resulted in expanded poppy cultivation and new logistical structures for the international
export of heroin.387
Meanwhile in the United States, another Wilson––no relation to the congressman––was
embarking on his own zealous campaign, in this case against a sharp-scented bottled chemical,
rather than sclerotic communists. By the onset of AIDS, poppers had become a profitable
national industry advertised prominently across gay media and estimated to be worth roughly
$50 million each year. As the survey data and interviews reviewed in the previous chapter also 388
indicate, their consumption was widespread, and by the early 1980s perhaps 85% of gay men
Tom Kenworthy, “Congressman Charlie Wilson, Not Holding His Fire,” Washington Post, 386
August 20, 1990.
387 Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade
(Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2003), 478-481.
Nathan Fain, “How Dangerous Are Poppers,” Stallion, June 1982, Fain 82, Carton 9, Hank 388
Wilson Papers, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society Archives, San Francisco,
CA (hereafter abbreviated as HW Papers).
164

consumed them with some regularity. Poppers were accessible and contagious. Charlie Wilson 389
and other Cold Warriors believed in halting the spread of communism, and that the global
conflict could be won through the blunt force of economics and weaponry if not ideological
persuasion––the later perhaps a fool’s endeavor when dealing with the mujahideen. Similarly,
Hank Wilson and his collaborators saw ridding the gay community of poppers as a war which
needed to be waged through the “stick” of local and federal law, and the “carrot” of gentle,
scientifically-informed persuasion, article writing, and debate. Hank Wilson represented a stream
of thought in the gay community which urged that men slow down and reconsider their actions,
though his detractors thought him hysterical, puritanical, and selective in his view of science.
The man just might not have like the smell of nitrates. While disenchantment with the excesses
of urban, liberated party life certainly existed before AIDS, the disease appeared to make the
stakes incredibly lethal.
Poppers were sold by mail and in sex shops, pornographic bookstores, bathhouses,
convenience stores, and gay bars and discos, and brands such as Rush, Hard Ware, and Locker
Room were sold by companies such as West American Industries, Pacific Western Distributing
Corporation, and Great Lakes Products. Late 1970s ads featured macho, muscular, and military
imagery, one depicting two brawny soldiers, probably in Vietnam, sharing poppers. Another 390
1980 full-page ad for Rush poppers lauded their endorsement or at least ability to advertise not
just in gay and drug subculture publications, such as the Advocate and High Times, but also in
primarily heterosexual magazines such as Playboy and Hustler and even mainstream news
Rotello, Sexual Ecology, 83. 389
Ian Young, “The Poppers Story: The Rise and Fall and Rise of ‘the Gay Drug’,” STEAM Vol. 390
2, Is. 4 (Winter, 1994), 420-423, STEAM Pro/Con 94, Carton 7, HW Papers.
165

dailies like the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. While popper companies by the
1990s would sometimes be sold as “VHS cleaner,” Rush bottles in 1980 referred to their contents
as “liquid incense.” To the frustration of Hank Wilson, flexible and elusive labelling was one 391
tactic which poppers companies used to evade legal restrictions and the ire which novel
intoxicants usually attract.
Wilson founded the Committee to Monitor Poppers in San Francisco in the months
following the first major reports of what would become known as the AIDS pandemic in 1981.
He also affiliated with other groups such as ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) Golden
Gate, one of San Francisco’s premier AIDS advocacy groups, but he tended to work
independently, occasionally collaborating with other individuals such as writer and HIV/AIDS
science dissident John Lauritsen, the co-author of Wilson’s anti-poppers pamphlet, Death Rush.
The Committee’s primary objectives of warning the “at-risk community” (gay male users) about
the risks of poppers, sending accurate research to physicians and medical institutions, and
stopping the sale of poppers were mainly pursued through Wilson’s own communications,
collection of information, writing, and direct actions. By the time of his attendance of a 1985
AIDS conference in Atlanta, Wilson believed that the previous four years had been productive,
and partly credited his work for a San Francisco anti-poppers law, anti-poppers articles in the gay
press, and numerous businesses and publications that had ceased selling or promoting poppers.392
In the long run however, Wilson was playing whac-a-mole. The financial power of the poppers
“Rush,” advertisement cutout (unknown publication), Poppers Ads-Dismantled Scrapbook c. 391
1976-1982, Carton 7, HW Papers.
“Exhibit Intl AIDS Conference Atlanta 1985,” Carton 9, HW Papers. 392
166

industry and its merchants, the insatiable lust for poppers on the part of some gay men, evolving
scientific findings, and weak or little-enforced laws proved to be resilient stumbling blocks.
One of Wilson’s first broadsides in his war on poppers was to directly coordinate with
gay publications to discourage them from advertising poppers, which Wilson saw as complicity
in the devastation of their own readers. He worked with gay newspapers and magazines in the
United States, but like many AIDS activists, who very quickly recognized the need for global
collaboration to combat an illness that spread across borders, he also made contacts
internationally. In late 1981 correspondence with Spartacus, an originally British gay guide
publisher that had fled obscenity laws by moving to Amsterdam in 1971, Wilson shared some of
his findings. In these letters Spartacus indicated that they had rejected Great Lakes Products
executive Joseph F. Miller’s offer to place his popper advertisements in its pages, and they were
seeking contacts with activists and researchers across the world to clarify the potential dangers of
Miller’s products.
In an August 1981 letter to Spartacus, which the magazine’s staff presumably sent on to
Wilson during their correspondence with him a couple of months later, Miller protested their
refusal to negotiate an advertising deal with his company over the phone. He remarked that it
was shocking to find someone “anywhere in the free world…under the impression that our
products are harmful,” recited a brief history of the safe use of nitrite inhalants, and claimed that
Great Lakes Products was the largest advertiser in the US gay press. Before Hank Wilson and 393
AIDS, poppers were already the subject of a smoldering conflict between business interests and
safety. In a September 1981 reply to Miller, Spartacus omitted any suggestion that poppers were
Great Lakes Products/Spartacus Correspondence, Joseph Miller ’90, Carton 9, HW Papers. 393
167

connected to the novel illness recently reported in the United States. They may in fact not have 394
been particularly aware of this frightening new phenomenon and its possible connection to
poppers until their communication with Wilson.
What became known as AIDS, in fact, was reported late in 1981 and 1982 in the United
Kingdom and the Netherlands, several months after the first recorded cases of “gay related rare
cancers” in the United States. The Spartacus editors instead had in mind other concerns about
poppers, such as their impact on those with heart conditions, held by some in the gay community
before AIDS. In Karla Jay and Allen Young’s 1979 drug survey, in fact, one man argued that
“someday it’s going to come out that poppers are very dangerous.” That caustic scent could 395
evoke disco dancing or orgiastic abandon, but for others it surely smelled like toxic death, much
as many automobile enthusiasts love the ambient scent of gasoline––a dangerous intoxicant
especially when inhaled directly from a rag––while other people find it innately unhealthy.
Spartacus suggested that at a minimum, advertisements should be required to include health
warnings about inhaling poppers, as had recently been introduced for cigarettes, but they also
opened the door to reversing their decision pending medical evidence.
Wilson, as an aspiring amateur medical expert, also began to harness allies in the
scientific community, which was critical to establishing the legitimacy of his anti-poppers
advocacy. Wilson teamed up with Dr. Robert Bolan of the Bay Area Physicians for Human
Rights, an organization of doctors founded in 1977 and dedicated to advancing the health
Spartacus correspondence, Spartacus ‘81, Carton 9, HW Papers. 394
Colette Smit et al., “Declining AIDS Mortality in Amsterdam: Contributions of Declining 395
HIV Incidence and Effective Therapy,” Epidemiology Vol. 15, No. 5 (September 2004): 536-542;
Jay and Young, The Gay Report, 499.
168

interests of the gay and lesbian community. Bolan, Wilson, and Dr. Richard Hamilton 396
presented their findings and recommendations to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on
March 23, 1982, urging the need to label poppers with health warnings, restrict advertising, limit
sale, and conduct further research into their potential risks funded by a poppers tax, including
studies of their possible carcinogenic properties. Hamilton had documented frequent reports of
headaches, sore throats, and coughing among poppers users five years earlier, long before the
new illness, and also found that poppers users were mostly aware of the negative impact of the
inhalant on their health. Bolan added that the “acquired, immune deficiencies” that had been 397
observed in the gay community for almost a year were also of great concern, and he and Wilson
believed in the need to clearly establish whether there was a clear link between poppers or other
recreational drugs and the emergent crisis. They cited an early, inconclusive Lancet article
hinting at such evidence, according to which gay poppers users were significantly more likely to
showcase immune-related problems similar to those formally diagnosed with AIDS, although
one non-poppers user also seemed to show possible symptoms. The Board of Supervisors 398
agreed to issue a public warning and consider additional action, pending legal review.
Reactions to Wilson, his team, and other anti-poppers activists came not just from the
poppers industry, but also from the gay media, where some writers were receptive and others
Finding aid of the Bay Area Physicians For Human Rights Records, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, 396
Transgender Historical Society Archives, San Francisco, CA, Online Archive of California,
https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt4q2nd2hk/.
George Mendenhall, “Poppers: Possible Danger, Will City Respond?” Bay Area Reporter, 397
March 25, 1982, BAR 82, Carton 9, HW Papers; “BAPHR Makes Big Stink Over Poppers,” The
BAPHRON (newsletter of Bay Area Physicians for Human Rights), Vol. 4, No. 4 (April 1, 1982),
press, correspondence 1983, 2000, Carton 7, HW Papers.
Randy Alfred, “Gay Physicians Knock Poppers,” The Sentinel, April 1, 1982, SF PT of 398
Warning Law 82, Carton 10, HW Papers.
169

reluctant to consider that any specific aspect of gay culture contributed to the new disease,
however much they were dedicated to ending the crisis. Writing in Stallion, a gay male magazine
in June 1982, Nathan Fain stated that Dr James W. Curran, another leading physician advocating
for the poppers theory, lacked any “strong, conclusive proof” that the chemicals had caused any
of the ailments connected to what was still called GRID (gay-related immune deficiency).399
Curran led the Center for Disease Control’s Kapoi’s Sarcoma Task Force in Atlanta, and pointed
to the strong correlation between poppers use and high levels of sexual activity, while not yet
propounding any firm conclusions. Fain also accepted that the revelation of firmer evidence
could be pending, detailed the nefarious character of the poppers industry, and reviewed some of
the other medical research currently underway to determine the danger of poppers at ordinary
levels of recreational inhalation. As a co-founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the first AIDS
organization, Fain was not necessarily averse to evaluating behavioral conditions that could be
responsible for the illness’s spread. Other gay publications, such as the Canadian monthly the
Body Politic, similarly acknowledged the uncertainty surrounding AIDS and poppers in 1983,
citing the AIDS Committee of Toronto.400
Some of the CDC’s earliest focused research on poppers and AIDS appeared not to show
any relationship, which pleased poppers manufacturers keen to preserve their industry. In April
1983, Joseph Miller of Great Lakes Products met with Dr James Curran of the CDC in Atlanta,
and told TWT News that the experts had essentially cleared nitrite inhalants of any role in the
Nathan Fain, “How Dangerous Are Poppers,” Stallion, June 1982, Fain 82, Carton 9, HW 399
Papers.
John Allec, “Drugs: Changing Your Mind,” Body Politic, November 1983, Alexander Street, 400
accessed January 5, 2023.
170

epidemic. On behalf of Great Lakes Products, Miller sent out a press release extolling the 401
government’s apparent acquittal of poppers, while maintaining the official line that “his company
does not advocate the misuse” of their products. On Hank Wilson’s TWT News clipping about 402
the CDC’s 1983 findings and their meeting with Miller, someone––very likely Wilson himself––
wrote in thick red marker “And the Band Played On” in the margin. This may simply have been
a reference to the fact that Randy Shilts’ 1987 book of that title discussed Curran and his research
concerning a number of AIDS-related questions several times, but it might also have been
Wilson’s own sarcastic personal aside written a number of years later, penmanship visible now in
the archive.
Shilts’ title, of course, evokes a false sense of normalcy in the face of disaster, a metaphor
perhaps adapted from violinists performing a sonata on the keeling Titanic. To Shilts, apathetic
elements of the government, media, and other institutions were emblematic of these band
members. But he also pointed to the gay men who continued to travel the sexual circuits of
America, regardless of how much they knew, did not know, or pretended not to know about the
unfolding catastrophe. Shilts portrayed Quebecois party boy flight attendant Gaëtan Dugas, a
“star of the homosexual jet set,” as a significant early spreader of AIDS, though not exactly the
mythical “Patient Zero” other sources misconstrued him as. And the Band Played On contains 403
denigrating and narcissistic vignettes of Dugas prancing across innumerable parties, baths, and
“Poppers Not AIDS Related,” TWT News, April 16-21, 1983, Miller, Jospeh 90, Carton 9, HW 401
Papers.
Joseph F. Miller, “Press Release for Immediate Release, April 1, 1983, U.S. Government 402
Studies Now Indicate that Nitrite-Odorants Not Related to AIDS,” press, correspondence 1983,
2000, Carton 7, HW Papers.
Shilts, And the Band Played On, 196, 439; Andrew R. Moss, “‘AIDS Without End’,” New 403
York Review of Books, December 8, 1988.
171

bars, all the while fiendishly wielding a vial of poppers. But Shilts also detailed the apparent 404
discrediting or at least demoting of the poppers theory through numerous scientific studies and
epidemiological reasoning, while hinting at the damage inflicted by investing too much time in
the theory that the inhalants were the single or a primary factor.405
Despite the CDC’s position, Wilson did not relent, and other research conducted
following the discovery of HIV by French and American researchers, which was made public in
May 1983, indicated that the anti-poppers cause was far from defeated. Champions of the
poppers theory, including Dr J.C. Chermann, a co-discoverer of HIV based at France’s Pasteur
Institute, reframed poppers as a “co-factor in the development of AIDS,” in the words of a 1984
New York Native article. The revised theory put forth by Chermann and others suggested that
frequent, intense inhalation of poppers degraded the functioning of human T-cells, permitting
HIV to evade the immune system’s protection, become entrenched within the body, and advance
to AIDS. Other medical researchers also claimed that poppers might be linked to cases of 406
Kaposi’s sarcoma, which were common among gay men with AIDS, but much less so in other atrisk groups. Wilson was emboldened by the strengthening case that poppers––though not the
direct cause of AIDS––might trigger specific symptoms or increase the chances of infection.
In the aftermath of Wilson’s presentation to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, a
new law concerning poppers was introduced. It required that a notice warning buyers of potential
health risks be clearly visible at any business selling poppers, pending the consideration of
Shilts, And the Band Played On, 22-23, 165, 196-197. 404
Shilts, And the Band Played On, 156, 393. 405
James E. D’Eramo, “Poppers: The Writing on the Wall,” New York Native, June 4, 1984, 406
Native 84, Carton 9, HW Papers.
172

stronger restrictions. Wilson as vigilante reported violators, who were liable to fines of several 407
hundred dollars, to the city health department. He also lobbied bathhouses to highlight the risks
of poppers on anti-drug posters that were placed on their premises. Beyond San Francisco, 408
Wilson contacted the government of newly-incorporated West Hollywood, and likely the
governments of other cities with large gay populations.
In a February 1986 letter to West Hollywood mayor and cofounder John Heilman, Wilson
explained that while the theory that poppers were damaging the immune system had evidently
been ruled out, there were still ongoing investigations about poppers as a cofactor in Kaposi’s
sarcoma. The CDC, softly reversing its position, had furthermore advised against nitrite inhalants
in August 1985. In response, Heilman consulted with the Los Angeles County Department of
Health and requested that gay publications in the area publish warnings about poppers. In an
additional letter, Wilson reassured Heilman that if stronger action on poppers came from his
office, “it will not be interpreted as a homophobic tactic.” Since the murder of Harvey Milk, 409
Heilman had become one of the country’s most notable openly gay politicians. Like many other
AIDS activists who promoted condoms, less promiscuity, or non-penetrative sex, Wilson
believed that the gay community would be more likely to listen to someone perceived as one of
their own, instead of a generic health official or bureaucrat. In July 1986, the LA Country Board
of Supervisors unanimously voted to ban poppers following the work of activists such as Wilson
George Mendenhall, “Federal Study links Poppers to KS: May Be Co-Factor in AIDS; 407
Businesses Lax on Warnings,” Bay Area Reporter, December 13, 1984, BAR ’84, Carton 8, HW
Papers.
“Club Baths: Drugs and Alcohol,” S.F. Club Baths 84? 85?, Carton 8, HW Papers. 408
Correspondence: Hank Wilson/Mayor John Heilman, August 1985-February 1986, West 409
Hollywood 85, Carton 9, HW Papers.
173

and the anti-poppers Los Angeles City/County AIDS Task Force, while the San Francisco Board
of Supervisors banned their use in public spaces that same year. One prominent member of the
gay health movement, Dr. Bruce Voeller, voiced skepticism of the science behind anti-poppers
sentiment following the bans’ announcements, also fearing that blaming poppers might
encourage men to keep using drug such as “coke, heroin, crystal meth, etc…”410
Voeller criticized a 1986 pamphlet written by Wilson and his New York City-based
collaborator John Lauritsen, Death Rush: Poppers & AIDS. Lauritsen, a writer, activist, and gay
liberationist, challenged established ideas about AIDS throughout his career, reserving special
derision for the hypothesis that AIDS derived from an HIV infection, as well as for the first
antiviral AIDS treatment introduced in 1987, the drug azidothymidine (AZT), which often came
with nasty side effects. Lauritsen believed the business interests of pharmaceutical companies
and poppers manufacturers had an interest in occluding the genuine treatments and preventative
actions necessary to avoid the symptoms of AIDS. Along with many other contributors to the gay
biweekly New York Native, Lauritsen argued that the condition was “not a coherent and
rationally defined disease entity,” and that the symptoms of what was known as AIDS were in
fact caused by “multiple factors, especially toxins,” including certain recreational drugs.
Following his death in 2022, Lauritsen was praised as a brave and historically significant
Richard Labonte, “County Bans Poppers as Health Hazard,” San Diego Update, July 9, 1986, 410
LA 86, Carton 8, HW Papers.
174

medical contrarian by The Defender, the online publication of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s
Health Defense, a notable organization in the anti-vaccine movement. 411
It would be a gross act of presentism to pass harsh judgment against Wilson, Lauritsen,
and other fringe or amateur researchers, who in the 1980s were operating at a time in which most
medical and state entities provided little. The door was forced open to many schools of thought,
some conspiratorial or outlandish. Beat writer William S. Burroughs, artist and actress Cookie
Mueller, and others speculated about the involvement of the CIA or the American Medical
Association in creating the illness to purge society of undesirables. Mueller, who was no stranger
to New York City’s gay and drug scenes and became a prominent female AIDS fatality in 1989,
ran a regular column from 1982-1985 in which she sometimes advocated for homeopathy,
special diets, and other explicitly anti-establishment treatments for AIDS. Wilson and 412
Lauritsen, on the other hand, were usually committed to backing their views about the links
between AIDS, poppers, and other drugs with reference to relevant medical research, which was
itself tenuous and at loggerheads during these years. Though “follow the science” became a
maxim of the early 2020s coronavirus pandemic, “the science” will in truth always struggle to
find a consistent and genuine consensus when faced with a novel disease, making for treacherous
and awkward politics.
“AIDS” By John Lauritsen, Pagan Press Books, http://www.paganpressbooks.com/jpl/ 411
AIDS.HTM, accessed January 12, 2023; Celia Farber, “Tribute to John Lauritsen, Author of
‘Poison by Prescription: The AZT Story’,” The Defender: Children’s Heath Defense News &
Views, April 26, 2022, https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/john-lauritsen-poison-byprescription-the-azt-story/.
Negar Azimi, “Wilder, Riskier, More Generous,” New York Review of Books, April 20, 2023; 412
Cookie Mueller, Ask Dr. Mueller: The Writings of Cookie Mueller (London: Serpent’s Tail,
1996); Gay writer Patrick Moore called the bisexual Mueller “more comfortable in the role of
white-trash fag hag than that of lesbian,” Moore, Beyond Shame, 96.
175

Harnessing the credibility of their preferred faction of medical expertise, in Death Rush
Wilson and Lauritsen lambasted the habit of many gay men to inhale poppers “zombie-like” in
discos, bars, bathhouses, and their homes, where they have become addicted to the substance as
an accompaniment to sex and masturbation. The labelling of nitrites bottles as “room 413
odorizers” was an insidious false pretense that the industry, government, and consumers alike
knew was idiotic. Heroin might as well be sold as a “mosquito-bite remedy,” and Wilson’s old
enemy Joseph Miller, among other poppers manufactures, had led an effective disinformation
campaign to protect their profits. The CDC and regulatory bodies suffered from industry 414
capture, but there was reason for optimism as Wilson and Lauritsen detailed legal victories
including the prohibition or restriction of the intoxicating inhalants in New York State,
Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, as well as the growing momentum
against poppers in the scientific community.
Lauritsen and Wilson argued that the theory that AIDS derived only from the HIV virus
(then called HTLV-III) remained a matter of conjecture, and co-factors including some forms of
recreational drug use were probably just as vital. Wilson and Lauritsen emphasized that they 415
were not claiming that poppers were the absolute, single cause of AIDS. Their contention was
that poppers were very likely one principle cofactor among others such as “toxins” which they
illustrated with a chart, and much about AIDS remained “unknown.” They meticulously 416
summarized the findings of numerous studies from 1982-1986 which claimed to establish a
John Lauritsen and Hank Wilson, Death Rush: Poppers and AIDS (New York: Pagan Press, 413
1986), 5.
Lauritsen and Wilson, Death Rush, 6, 52. 414
Lauritsen and Wilson, Death Rush, 6-8, 58-59. 415
Lauritsen and Wilson, Death Rush, 63-64. 416
176

correlation between AIDS and poppers, as well as the carcinogenic properties of nitrite inhalants
and their other harmful attributes. They also included the poppers-related testimony of AIDS
organizations, the manager of New York’s Mineshaft bar, and other relevant sources. Beyond
simply telling gay men to stop using poppers, Wilson and Lauritsen also demanded that gay men
“avoid the use of any and all recreational drugs,” and listed these comprehensively. The authors
called the term “recreational drugs” a “sick euphemism” for substance use “prominent in the
lifestyle of many gay men.” While other activists were simultaneously urging the acceptance 417
of marijuana as both a valid pastime and an AIDS treatment, Wilson and Lauritsen, championing
“just say no,” were sounding more like Reagan-era “Just Say No” campaigns.
Writing a lengthy rebuttal to Death Rush in Drummer, a gay lifestyle magazine, Voeller
charged that the science on poppers and AIDS was not as conclusive as Wilson and Lauritsen
wanted the readers of Death Rush to believe. He named several notable physicians who shared
his views, and explained the disjuncture between the laboratory conditions that resulted in some
anti-poppers findings on the one hand, and the real world level, duration, and method of
consumption among recreational users on the other. A number of other co-existent factors Wilson
and Lauritsen ignored, meanwhile, could be credited for the evidently greater levels of Kaposi’s
sarcoma among poppers-using men with AIDS, who were moreover likely to live longer than
afflicted non-poppers users, as non-users exhibited greater susceptibility to pneumocystis
pneumonia, a fungal infection of the lungs.
Other researchers found that Kaposi’s sarcoma was strongly linked with other more
determinative factors that were themselves the most associated with AIDS risk, such as engaging
Lauritsen and Wilson, Death Rush, 10-16, 59. 417
177

in frequent, receptive anal sex. All of which is to say, Voeller concluded, that vulnerable
members of the public would better be served by listening to credentialed experts such as
himself, rather than whatever a given activist might have to say on one particular day. Honing 418
in on one unproven factor, he added, was simply dangerous as it could encourage some to “make
some token sacrifice” that would ultimately fail to protect them from AIDS. Predicting the
growing popularity of crystal meth among gay men, Voeller suggested that meth and other hard
drugs likely had a greater correlation with AIDS, and prohibiting poppers would lead to the use
of impure nitrite concoctions produced by unscrupulous, renegade chemists. Wilson’s crusade 419
was a counterproductive waste of time, in other words.
Wilson and the anti-poppers movement continued to achieve legal victories which,
frustratingly for them, rarely materialized into enforced, substantive change. Critics of poppers
increasingly aimed at drug use among gay men more broadly, not least for its role in the
“ecology” of circumstances surrounding AIDS. Appropriately, a federal ban on manufacturing
and selling poppers was included in the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1990. This was a central piece of
legislation within the bipartisan era of “tough on crime” judicial reform from the 1980s-1990s,
and also came into place amidst the most frenzied years of the related War on Drugs.
Representative Mel Levine, a Democrat from California, sponsored the inclusion of the poppers
Bruce Voeller, “Drummer Forum,” Drummer 99, September, 1986, Voeller ’87, Carton 9, HW 418
Papers.
In defense of Lauritsen and Wilson, Drummer writer Robert Payne countered that analysis 419
had shown legally-produced poppers to be already adulterated with harmful chemicals such as
chlorine. Payne further argued that some medical research showing the negative impacts of
poppers was in fact compelling and reflective of real-world conditions, and that two owners of
poppers manufacturing businesses had themselves recently died of AIDS complications. Robert
Payne, “Drummer Forum: Death Rush,” Drummer 99, September, 1986, Voeller ’87, Carton 9,
HW Papers.
178

ban within the bill, meeting little resistance in either chamber and prompting no dedicated
hearings or testimony. Wilson was of course enthusiastic about achieving federal action, and 420
responded to those who warned about a black market for dirty poppers by pointing out that one
already existed regardless, and that ending poppers advertising and legitimate sale was
nonetheless an important cultural and legal success. For the remainder of his life, Wilson pressed
various levels of government and law enforcement, as well as several specific legal officials and
politicians, to combat flagrant violations of anti-poppers legislation, such as advertisements.421
Various debates concerning poppers and other AIDS-related issues, meanwhile, continued
to play out across medical journals and gay publications such as Drummer, The Advocate,
STEAM and Continuum for years to come. At least since the 1970s, gay newspapers and
magazines had occasionally published narrative or encyclopedic articles about drug use,
generally with the message that their readers should be well-informed about intoxicants, but free
to choose what to consume. The issue of poppers and AIDS clearly hit a sensitive spot, though
some publications chose to air both sides, reflecting the lack of a medical consensus and the end
of their reliance on poppers ads for revenue. In a 1994 STEAM article, an anonymous writer
blasted the medical claims of Wilson’s “fringe organization,” the Committee to Monitor Poppers,
Another anti-poppers provision in an earlier bill gave manufactures the opportunity to simply 420
change nitrite formulas. Keith Clark, “U.S. House of Representatives Passes Ban on Poppers,”
Windy City Times, November 15, 1990, Chicago 89-93, Carton 8, HW Papers; “Poppers
Possession Still OK,” Windy City Times, February 28, 1991, Chicago 89-93, Carton 8, HW
Papers; Hon. Mel Levine, “On Banning Volatile Alkyl Nitrites,” Congressional Record––
Extensions of Remarks (E 1433), May 9, 1990, Federal Ban 1990, Carton 7, HW Papers.
Wilson collected poppers-related advertising and other media from the 1970s onwards, 421
including one photograph of a sign simply advertising “$5.00 Poppers” right next to a “$1.00 Ice
Tea” sign at what appears to be an outdoor kiosk in Chicago in 1992. “Photograph: Chicago
1992,” Chicago 89-93, Carton 8, HW Papers.
179

citing more recent studies showing that recreational drugs including poppers had no impact on
AIDS. The author further made the common rhetorical point that drugs like alcohol and tobacco
indisputably killed thousands every year, yet were legal. Poppers bans were thus
“homophobic.”422
STEAM’s editors made sure to add a note at the end of the article, however: the
anonymous writer “is a major manufacturer and distributor of poppers.” In keeping with the
spirit of open debate and freedom of speech that STEAM lauded, the pro-poppers article was
followed by one espousing the opposite view by gay writer Ian Young. Poppers, Young insisted,
were associated with a whole host of medical issues, some related to Kaposi’s Sarcoma and
AIDS, and he regretted a resurgence in the popularity of poppers, despite the latest medical
findings. Young nevertheless opposed a legally-enforced ban, preferring a shift in attitudes and 423
behaviors brought about through education. He also expressed his skepticism about the
government’s preferred school of thought, which prioritized HIV as the single cause of AIDS.
Two years later, Continuum, a British magazine that challenged the link between HIV and AIDS,
republished the same pair of opposing articles with the new title “Hellbent…or Heavenly
Scent?” Poppers continued to polarize, for some epitomizing a reckless nihilism within gay 424
sexual culture, while for others remaining a thrilling toy deployed in the search for new heights
of pleasure.
Anon., “A Different Story: The Poppers Myth,” STEAM Vol. 2, Is. 4 (Winter, 1994), 424-426, 422
STEAM Pro/Con 94, Carton 7, HW Papers.
Ian Young, “The Poppers Story: The Rise and Fall and Rise of ‘the Gay Drug’,” STEAM Vol. 423
2, Is. 4 (Winter, 1994), 420-423, STEAM Pro/Con 94, Carton 7, HW Papers.
Ian Young and Anon., “Hellbent…or Heavenly Scent?” Continuum Vol. 3, No. 6 (March/ 424
April, 1996), 22-25, Continuum 96, Carton 10, HW Papers.
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By the mid-1990s, arduous but more effective medications significantly reduced the
lethality of AIDS for those who could access them, including for Wilson who was himself
diagnosed with AIDS. While the worst phase of the epidemic was over, at least for gay men of
means in much of the Western world, AIDS activists continued to pursue numerous objectives.
Wilson pressed on with his anti-poppers efforts, alongside a number of other campaigns, such as
a failed attempt to become a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Federal and 425
local anti-poppers bans continued to be very loosely enforced, not least because of a new legal
tactic which reclassified them as VHS cleaner (the “room odorizer” label no longer valid), and
Wilson attempted to recruit powerful officials and politicians to his cause. He also targeted
poppers manufacturers who he had feuded with for years, such as Joseph Miller of Great Lakes
Products. In 1998, Wilson contacted United States district judge Rudi M. Brewster and assistant
United States attorney Anthony Barkow with allegations that Miller was guilty of obstruction of
justice in a case that resulted in the conviction of an associate of Miller’s for poppers-related
crimes. Miller, allegedly, had failed to mention that his firm manufactured poppers in a character
reference letter, a matter of material consequence to the case. Wilson further suggested that
Miller’s donations to the Democratic Party and Bill Clinton may have sheltered him from the
Justice Department’s ire. Little came of Wilson’s allegations, and Miller’s legally dubious 426
practices continued until his suicide in 2010.427
Hank Wilson Papers, GLBT Historical Society, Online Archive of California, https:// 425
oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8n018sd/entire_text/, accessed January 24, 2023.
Correspondance: Wilson/Barkow, Morgan vs Rush Jospeh Miller 98, Carton 10, HW Papers; 426
Correspondance: Wilson/Brewster, Morgan vs Rush Jospeh Miller 98, Carton 10, HW Papers.
“Star Posts Online Story On Joe Miller's Death And Then Yanks It,” Advance Indiana, https:// 427
advanceindiana.blogspot.com/2010/08/stars-post-online-story-on-joe-millers.html, accessed
January 24, 2023.
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The inclusion of a poppers ban in the 1990 federal crime bill was perhaps the high point
of the campaign against poppers led by Wilson and others, however lackluster its application.
Over the subsequent years Wilson was also in communication with San Francisco’s most
prominent voice in federal politics, congresswoman and later House speaker Nancy Pelosi, first
writing to her regarding the Consumer Products Safety Commission’s ability to enforce federal
law in September 1998. Amidst the second Bush Administration’s largely bipartisan 428
intensification of the War on Drugs in 2004, Wilson again wrote to Pelosi’s office, urging that the
law against poppers should be maximally enforced with the full strength of the federal
government, including by the heavily militarized Drug Enforcement Administration. Clearly
unsatisfied, a month later Wilson wrote of Pelosi’s deputy Dan Bernal, “met with Dan, no help,
no suggestions.” 429
The early 2000s saw very occasional raids of poppers sellers in San Francisco and other
cities by local and federal agents who confiscated the products and issued warnings or fines, but
never at the scale Wilson dreamed of. Wilson’s views found additional validation, as 430
researchers suspected a link between the infection of white blood cells with HIV and the dilation
of blood vessels caused by poppers. This meant that the poppers/AIDS theory could, in fact, be
consistent with the notion that HIV infection was the cause of AIDS, even as Wilson’s
collaborator John Lauritsen had earlier disputed the primacy of a viral origin in explaining the
Correspondence: Pelosi/Wilson, CPSC 97, Carton 8, HW Papers. 428
Correspondence: Wilson/Bernal (Pelosi office), Pelosi 2004, Carton 7, HW Papers. 429
Adrienne Sanders, “‘Popper’ bust in Castro,” San Francisco Examiner, September 2, 2002, 430
Clippings, Carton 7, HW Papers.
182

epidemiology of AIDS. In one of the latest studies to address the link between poppers and 431
AIDS, published a decade after Wilson’s death from lung cancer in 2008, researchers continued
to argue for a strong relationship between HIV risk behaviors and poppers, without necessarily
claiming any specific physiological connection.432
Brownies for the “Kids”
In 1991, the year after Wilson’s movement achieved its greatest de jure victory in the
federal poppers ban, a very different set of Bay Area AIDS activists led by Dennis Peron and
“Brownie” Mary Jane Rathbun found what would prove to be a far more consequential triumph
with the overwhelming passage of Proposition P, which declared San Francisco’s support for the
legalization of medical cannabis. While this did not carry legal force, it cleared the way for
similar measures in other Californian cities such as Santa Cruz. These efforts finally led to the
passage of the voter initiative Proposition 215 in 1996, which granted the use of medical
cannabis across the state, the first law to do so since federal restrictions on marijuana introduced
nationally via the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 and the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. The 433
subsequent three decades have seen an ongoing cascade of states legalizing marijuana for
medical and recreational purposes, despite a federal government which has either been hostile or
apathetic. The kindling that initially propelled this gradual but unprecedented democratic
Joe Dignan, “Poppers Strongly Linked to HIV,” San Francisco Bay Times Vol. 25, No. 10 431
(December 4, 2003), Clippings, Carton 7, HW Papers.
H. Rhodes Hambrick, Su Hyn Park, Joseph J. Palamar, Anthony Estreet, John A. Schneider, 432
and Dustin T. Duncan, “Use of poppers and HIV risk behaviours among men who have sex with
men in Paris, France: an observational study,” Sexual Health Vol. 15, No. 4 (July 2018):
370-373.
Dufton, Grass Roots, 219. 433
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revolution in drug policy was sympathy for the suffering of people with AIDS, precisely a force
that also evolved into later shifts in public attitudes and laws concerning gay marriage and other
legal rights.
Peron and Mary’s efforts oversaw a pivotal transition in the overriding rationale for the
legalization of cannabis, which was enabled by the suffering wrought by the AIDS epidemic. To
understand the gravity of this shift, it is crucial to appreciate the fluctuating paradigms in the
ways many Americans have viewed drugs. The 1960s counterculture and sexual revolution
celebrated personal expression and bodily freedom, which for most true believers meant that
recreational drug use could not only be acceptable but perhaps politically, socially, and spiritually
meaningful. An emphasis on individual bodily autonomy also helped to propel the gay rights
movement and many aspects of the feminist movement, particularly workplace rights and the
belief that women should have legal, safe, and affordable access to contraception and abortion.
Liberals and old school leftists could be skeptical of the objectives pursued by feminists, gay
rights activists, and especially drug enthusiasts. But the freedom to determine the use,
enjoyment, and purpose of one’s body––which certainly carried important economic
dimensions––surely felt like a material cause in the most concrete sense, a cause one could argue
preexisted the economic structure of society.
By the late 1970s and 1980s, however, bodily autonomy proved limited as a strategy for
proponents of drug legalization. The Washington-based drug reform organization NORML
influenced a wave of state-level decriminalizations, but by the decade’s end, progress stalled,
despite the continued efforts of lobbyists and generous private donors. NORML suffered from 434
Torgoff, Can’t Find My Way Home, 274-278. 434
184

in-fighting, and following a disagreement about the herbicidal spraying of Mexican cannabis
between NORML’s head, Keith Stroup, and Jimmy Carter’s liberal-minded drug czar, Peter
Bourne, Stroup told a journalist that he had witnessed Bourne snort cocaine at a party. This
incident devastated both men’s careers. Public support for legal cannabis, meanwhile, declined in
sync with a resurgent religious right wary of the previous decade’s sexual and psychoactive
hedonism, and parent organizations loudly articulated their fears that drugs were falling into the
hands of children, inspiring the Reaganite renaissance of the War on Drugs. The anti-drug 435
parent movement pushed for tougher enforcement of drug laws, demanded the reversal of
decriminalization laws, targeted drug paraphernalia shops, and denounced the presence of drugs
in the media, including in publications such as High Times.
Led by groups such as the National Federation for Drug-Free Youth, many parents feared
that marijuana was a dire threat to all aspects of their children’s health and development. These
fears extended, naturally, to homosexuality, as the visibility of gay people had exploded into the
mainstream over the previous years and links between drugs and homosexuality continued to
float around in the public consciousness. In 1980, Vince Stone, the head of a Canadian antimarijuana organization, declared that estrogen in marijuana was responsible for the growing gay
male population. During public comments in 1986, Ronald Reagan’s drug czar Carlton Tuner 436
noted the presence of homosexual activity among youth drug treatment patients, and hinted that
there was a causal relationship between marijuana use and homosexuality. Among drug users,
“inhibitions against everything are gone,” Turner stated, echoing psychiatrists past and present,
Dufton, Grass Roots, 123-164. 435
“Reefer-Madness Item of the Month: Pot Smoking Makes You Gay,” High Times, May 1, 436
1980.
185

and not a few drug users themselves who might say, with some qualification, yes, that is the
point. Many parents, no doubt, were alarmed by associations between drug use and sexual 437
license. Particularly for family values conservatives, more high-profile celebrity overdose deaths,
such of those of musician Sid Vicious in 1979 and comedian John Belushi in 1982, the crack
cocaine epidemic, and AIDS all portended America’s decline at the hands of sex and drugs.
AIDS was a divine reckoning, the “wrath of God among homosexuals,” according to
televangelist Jerry Falwell.438
But the ultimate impact of the AIDS epidemic on the drug debate, as the victories of
Brownie Mary and Dennis Peron as well as Hank Wilson’s crusade demonstrated, proved
conflicted and counterintuitive. While Wilson was among the first of a chorus of gay writers and
activists who saw AIDS as an indication that recreational drug use and promiscuity had become
very dangerous, Peron and Mary’s quest to legitimize medical marijuana rejuvenated the drug
legalization movement. Born in the Bronx in 1946, Dennis Peron grew up and first encountered
marijuana as a teenager on Long Island, served in the Air Force in the Vietnam War during the
late 1960s, and finally settled in San Francisco, jumping between urban communes and
marijuana sales. As a self-described hippie, Peron associated with the counterculture and antiwar
movement, the gay rights movement, advocacy for cannabis legalization, and later AIDS action,
all while maintaining good humor. His career as a stoner and as an activist was shaped by his 439
Elizabeth Kastor, “The Great Drug Debate,” Washington Post, October 22, 1986. 437
Levine, Gay Macho, 143. 438
Peron and Entwistle, Memoirs of Dennis Peron, 1-Early Life; 2-1970’s-Return from Southeast 439
Asia-The War at Home (digital edition); Brownie Mary and Dennis Peron, Brownie Mary’s
Marijuana Cookbook and Dennis Peron’s Recipe for Social Change (California: Trail of Smoke
Publishing Co., 1996), 25-32, Brownie Mary’s Marijuana Cookbook, Box 1, Brownie Mary
Collection, San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, CA.
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collaboration and friendship with “Brownie Mary,” whom he met in 1974. An IHOP waitress,
lover of weed, and fellow resident of the Castro area, the providentially named Mary Jane
Rathbun, born in Chicago in 1922, baked and sold ridiculously popular marijuana brownies.
Following their acquaintance, these sales sometimes occurred in Peron’s communal home, which
was known as the “Big Top,” and was a mecca for pot-smoking gay men and hippies keeping the
flame of the counterculture alive.
Peron was busted by the police at the Big Top in 1974 along with 43 other friends,
customers, and associates. With the assistance of notable Bay Area lawyer Tony Serra, who also
counted Black Panthers, Hells Angels, and later Brownie Mary among his clients, Peron
managed to secure a nights-only sentence of six months. This allowed him to resume work at an
additional, more established storefront, a members-only restaurant called the Island. His new
headquarters quickly joined the Big Top as another hangout for the Castro’s pot smoking scene,
decades before the first legitimate Californian cannabis cafes, and also served as a jovial space
for Harvey Milk’s campaign events.440
With the ascendancy of Californian politicians such as Milk and George Moscone, and
the near-victory of marijuana-tolerant district attorney candidate Carol Ruth Silver, gay rights
and drug law reform played growing roles in local and national politics. Milk’s little-remembered
support for the liberalization of cannabis law was not just a sign of his progressive politics; it
was a reflection of the views and lifestyle of his most dedicated voters, gay men in the Castro,
most of whom used drugs, with weed and poppers being the most ubiquitous other than
Mary and Peron, Marijuana Cookbook, 28-29; Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street: The 440
Life & Times of Harvey Milk (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 95.
187

alcohol. A backlash headed by the likes of Florida orange juice spokeswoman Anita Bryant, 441
California assemblyman John Briggs, anti-drug warriors, and other conservatives grew in turn.
Peron saw an additional police assault on the Big Top in 1977, which was more intense than the
1974 bust, as a battle within this broader conflict, and he was shot in the leg by a narcotics
officer who knew him from the previous raid. To the most hardline of San Francisco police,
particularly the narcotics officers, the Big Top epitomized three, often overlapping enemies:
hippies, homosexuals, and dopers.
The officer who shot Peron reserved a special animus, and personally confronted him in
the courthouse hallway during a trial break, wishing the bullet had been fatal. Despite a relatively
short jail sentence of six months, Peron, with Milk’s help, managed to organize a successful
voter proposition that would call for the end of marijuana prosecutions in San Francisco. Peron
believed this alliance had a direct impact on former police officer and city supervisor Dan
White’s decision to assassinate Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone on November 27,
1978. A few months before the assassination, in fact, White had publicly denounced Milk’s
collaboration with Peron during a Board of Supervisors meeting. For Dennis Peron and other 442
gay San Franciscans, the subsequent months and years were filled with personal and political
tragedy. The aftermath of the assassination saw a lenient sentence for Dan White, violent
See previously referenced surveys and interviews, see also a 1988 study claiming that among 441
gay San Francisco men, 78% used marijuana and 58% used poppers, Ron Stall and Hames
Wiley, “A Comparison of Alcohol and Drug Use Patterns of Homosexual and Heterosexual Men:
The San Francisco Men’s Health Study,” Drug and Alcohol Dependence 22 (1988), 68; Milk’s
partner, Scott Smith, was once arrested for drug possession, State of California vs. Scott Smith
(various documents regarding drug arrest), 1984-1985, Folder 33, Box 10, Harvey Milk
Archives--Scott Smith Collection, 1930-1995, San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, CA
Mary and Peron, Marijuana Cookbook, 30-36; Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street, 199. 442
188

skirmishes between protestors and the police, mayoral successor Dianne Feinstein’s dismissal of
the marijuana proposition, Peron’s failed attempt to be elected city supervisor, the outbreak of
AIDS, more trouble with the police, and the death of Peron’s partner, Jonathan West, from AIDSrelated complications.
Well before Brownie Mary would provide many of them with marijuana edibles to
remedy AIDS symptoms, Mary––who lost her own young daughter in a car accident––already
referred to the young men of the Big Top, the Island, and the rest of the Castro as her “kids.” She
was arrested twice for her cannabis activities. Following the first arrest, in 1981, she was
convicted on ten felony counts related to the possession and sale of marijuana and magic
mushrooms, but a lenient judge sentenced her only to probation and community service,
generosity no doubt influenced by her Mrs. Clause-like appearance. By the time of her second
arrest, in 1992 in Sonoma County, she had devoted herself to volunteering for community health
organizations and the San Francisco General Hospital’s AIDS ward for many years, and with
Peron’s assistance provided joints and baked goods to those who suffered from AIDS and other
ailments such as glaucoma and chemo-treated cancer free of charge, the donations taking place
outside of hospital grounds. 443
Mary’s “kids,” living with AIDS and other conditions, felt that cannabis eased their pain
and nausea and brought back their appetites, granting them enormous relief and even additional
months or years of improved life. By the mid-1990s, in San Francisco alone at least eleven
Dufton, Grass Roots, 213-217; parallel to Brownie Mary, Mer Volz was another well known 443
brownie baker among San Franciscans living with AIDS, as her daughter recounts, see Alia Volz
Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco (Boston, MA: Mariner
Books, 2020).
189

thousand gay men were treating the symptoms of AIDS with cannabis. Research institutions 444
and funding agencies were nonetheless committed to the denigration of all illegal drugs, though
independent-minded medical researchers such as San Francisco’s Donald Abrams did eventually
secure some concessions. In their marijuana cookbook, Peron and Brownie Mary stated that 445
anti-marijuana health officials knew “the truth about marijuana just like McNamara knew the
truth about Vietnam.” Politics and bureaucratic intransigence, in other words, were imposing
utterly unnecessary suffering, forcing clearer heads to break the law, and inspiring great
admiration for those who put themselves in such jeopardy. “This is about love,” Peron the gay
hippie reminded an interviewer. Recognized as a beloved and eccentric Bay Area celebrity, a 446
public campaign in Mary’s defense and a great deal of media attention contributed to the
dropping of all charges in Sonoma County. In the meantime, with Peron at the forefront of
political organizing, San Francisco’s Proposition P (1992) and later California’s Proposition 215
(1996), granting medical use regardless of federal law, were propelled to victory, forecasting
Hecht, Weed Land, 53. 444
Mary and Peron, Marijuana Cookbook, 57-58, 62-63. For Donald Abrams’ quest to secure 445
rare approval and funding for marijuana/AIDS research from the National Institute on Drug
Abuse in 1998, see Hecht, Weed Land, 45-63. Columbia psychologist Carl L. Hart suggests that
to this day, National Institute on Drug Abuse head (and Leon Trotsky great-granddaughter) Nora
Volkow steers federal funding away from studies likely to grant positive attributes to the use of
cannabis, which remains categorized as lacking any medical benefits despite the testimony of
millions of users for millennia. Few policies have ever so damaged the credibility of scientific
expertise. Carl L. Hart, Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear (New
York: Penguin Press, 2021), 85-86, 166. Much credit for the medical marijuana movement’s
origins also goes to Robert C. Randall, a gay Washington, D.C. college professor who in 1976
successfully fought possession charges on the basis of his medical necessity to treat severe
glaucoma. He later advocated its use in treating AIDS following his own diagnosis. See Robert
C. Randall, Marijuana & AIDS: Pot, Politics, and PWAs in America (Washington, D.C.: Galen
Press, 1992).
Mary and Peron, Marijuana Cookbook, 60-62. 446
190

other legislative changes and voter initiatives permitting medical and recreational use across
much of the United States.447
~ ~ ~
It is frequently acknowledged that while AIDS initially stoked public fear or ridicule of
homosexuals, attitudes shifted towards sympathy as more people became aware of friends,
family members, or public figures such as actor Rock Hudson and musician Liberace suffering
and dying from the disease, the media portrayed those afflicted with its often visible symptoms,
and the efforts of activists brought greater attention. Peron, Brownie Mary, and their 448
collaborators were able to capitalize on this sympathy and extend it to the broader cause of
Bony Saludes, “County Won’t Prosecute Brownie Mary,” The Press Democrat, December 16, 447
1992, Arrest and Case in Sonoma County, 1992, Box 1, Brownie Mary Collection, San Francisco
Public Library, San Francisco, CA; for other examples of media coverage of Brownie Mary and
Dennis Peron, including their appearance on The Maury Povich Show, see “Brownie Mary,”
YouTube.com, https://youtu.be/LutgOU1ao2o, accessed February 24, 2023; for more on the
medical and recreational marijuana movement from the early 1990s onwards, which is far
beyond my scope here, see Dufton, Grass Roots, 225-262.
37% of respondents to a survey reported in the New York Times on December 15, 1985 agreed 448
that AIDS had made them “less favorably disposed toward homosexuals” than before the
outbreak, Levine, Gay Macho, 144. Following pressure from Nancy and Ron Jr., however, even
Ronald Reagan was willing to increase federal research funds and speak publicly about AIDS by
1987, though not yet in a way that would remotely satisfy activists, who insisted upon safe sex
education rather than moral instruction, Karen Tumulty, “Nancy Reagan’s Real Role in the AIDS
Crisis,” The Atlantic, April 12, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/04/fullstory-nancy-reagan-and-aids-crisis/618552/; For a discussion of the impact of the sometimes
shrill and alienating, sometimes emotionally moving tactics of ACT UP on public sympathy, see
Patrick Moore, “ACT UP,” in Beyond Shame, 121-145; Sociologist Deborah B. Gold recounts
the range of emotions that propelled AIDS organizing and attempts by activists to shape public
sentiment in Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2009).
191

medicinal cannabis. Peron, indeed, argued that all cannabis use was inherently “medical.” As 449
philosophical and emotional fuel for efforts to liberalize drug policy, bodily autonomy was
effectively superseded by the urgent need to alleviate suffering. While Hank Wilson depended
upon harnessing medical findings to justify his crusade against poppers, a tactic which his
opponents argued was enacted selectively, Dennis Peron and Brownie Mary instead supported
their cause through the subjective but powerful sentiments of cannabis users who also suffered
from AIDS or other severe diseases, and felt strongly that marijuana was a medicine capable of
making their lives better. This shift had lasting consequences. For one, it proved far easier to gain
public support for recreational marijuana once medical use had already been well established
without significant negative consequences. This was especially so once an imperative for social
and racial justice, which incorporated elements of the bodily autonomy and sympathy paradigms,
became a dominant argument for liberalized drug laws. On the more distant horizon, the 450
alleviation of suffering became the guiding source of legitimacy for the reintroduction of
psychedelic drugs as a potentially legal therapeutic treatment in the 2010s and 2020s, a chapter
in the history of modern medicine which it is far too early to write.
This view led Peron to the eccentric ideological stance that recreational legalization should 449
not occur, as it does not actually exist. Chris Roberts, “The Man Who Didn’t Legalize Marijuana:
Dennis Peron’s Complicated Legacy,” Forbes, May 31, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/
chrisroberts/2020/05/31/the-man-who-didnt-legalize-marijuana-dennis-perons-complicatedlegacy/.
There are now countless works which tackle the consequences of drug prohibition for the 450
poor and some racial minorities, particularly black Americans. For three prominent examples,
see Forman, Locking Up Our Own; Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration
in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010); Elizabeth Hinton, From the War
on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); for the use of social justice rhetoric by marijuana reform
activists, see Dufton, Grass Roots, 225-248.
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Sympathy, justice, and requisite harm reduction strategies have also motivated the
contemporary push to decriminalize all drugs in places especially plagued by fentanyl and other
synthetic opioids, such as Oregon and British Columbia, Canada. Critics charge that these new
policies have only added to the blight and crime consuming once desirable urban cores. Cities
such as San Francisco, indeed, have begun to reverse tolerant approaches to drugs, reprioritizing
the police enforcement of drug trafficking laws to clamp down on dealers and end open drug
markets in the streets. Defenders of harm reduction policies counter that decriminalization or
legalization, alongside properly funded treatment and clean use programs, will require time to
generate success, and that returning to tough-on-drugs approaches will only end up punishing
those who need help. This highly fraught debate will no doubt continue for years to come, 451
however the most urgent of harm reduction activists would do well to recall that negative results
or perceptions will mean electoral defeats, meaning the reversal of more measured gains. Peron
and Mary, of course, could never have guessed precisely where the drug reform movement
would go, and their desire to puff up socially or bake weed brownies to alleviate pain or bring
back an appetite was indeed worlds away from the complexities and challenges of chronic
fentanyl use.
Hank Wilson, no doubt, felt frustrated but vindicated in his stance against poppers and
other drugs in the gay community by the escalating use of crystal methamphetamine by gay men
into the 1990s, a drug that also received notoriety alongside fentanyl and other opioids during the
For the situation in Oregon and British Columbia, see “Why did British Columbia 451
decriminalize hard drugs?” About That, CBC News, YouTube.com, https://youtu.be/vv0-Fvdi7LA
(accessed February 28, 2023); for San Francisco mayor London Breed’s shifting position on drug
enforcement, see Mallory Moench, “Mayor Breed and S.F. police launch new operation to target
Tenderloin,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 21, 2023.
193

urban homelessness crisis of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As an activist,
Wilson did not add meth to his list of pet issues in any significant way, though he did have his
eyes on the issue, as material among his papers related to crystal meth attests. Combating the 452
meth menace would become the task of other activists and health workers.
Assessing the Attitudes and Opinions of San Francisco Gay/Bisexual Men Who Use Crystal 452
Methamphetamine, April 20, 1998, Speed Research $, Carton 8, HW Papers.
194

Chapter 5: Party and Play: Synthetic Drugs and the Second Coming of Speed,
1990s-present
“Today I am proud to announce that I am seven years sober,” one of the hosts of the 2024
Big Gay Super Bowl Party announced over loudspeakers to a crowd of several hundred gay men.
Held in and around an angular, glassy modernist home halfway up Outpost Estates in the
Hollywood Hills, the annual gathering serves to bring together men from LA’s distinct
gayborhoods spread across the basin below, few of them with any genuine interest in the national
sport but even fewer needing any excuse to party. The sober host made his very loud 453
disclosure as most of his guests rotated between disposable cups of tequila and vodka supplied at
several open bars or snorted lines or bumps of cocaine and ketamine. These white powders,
cocaine a long established stimulant and ketamine a somewhat more recent dissociative
anesthetic, are aside from alcohol the most popular gay recreational drugs of the 2020s, despite
the creeping and occasionally realized fear that Mexican methamphetamine or much worse,
fentanyl, might be present in the little transparent plastic baggies.
Alongside the obvious irony of the scene, this poolside moment captured key dynamics at
play within one of the world’s most hedonistic social scenes. In the general population, reports of
largely tech-fueled social isolation are skyrocketing. Meanwhile, assimilationist (or techdystopian) proclamations that societal acceptance and smartphone apps like Grindr had
“liberated” gay men from the bars and the gayborhoods were recently in vogue, though were just
Occasionally, larger events that generate legitimate sales through tickets or drinks are also 453
fundraisers for addiction treatment organizations or AIDS care and research, which became a
source of criticism in the past as large organized parties were accused of encouraging illicit drug
use and unsafe sex in a vicious cycle. The 2024 Big Gay Super Bowl Party donated thousands of
dollars from ticket sales to an LGBTQ teenage summer camp.
195

the latest rendition of earlier calls to drift from the gay ghetto. On the contrary, however, in 454
cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Miami, and New York, a sense of social cohesion
among large groups of gay men remains strong, in-person, and localized in the 2020s. This is the
case for ever fewer sectors of American society, which have become increasingly fragmented by
political divides and the impersonality of the internet as well as the decline, for better or for
worse, of social or mixed-purpose institutions such as churches, unions, physical workplaces,
and civic associations. Perhaps for the majority of gay men who flock to America’s coastal 455
metropolises in search of community, intense forms of socialization are utterly dependent upon
the bars, parties and semi-private events at homes and rented venues, and the substance use that
keeps many coming or, in the case of alcohol, provides revenue. As this dissertation has
explained, patterns in recreational drug use have had a mutually constitutive relationship with the
evolution of urban gay culture in the United States and other Western countries. The growth in
popularity of synthetic drugs, especially methamphetamine, has been closely tied to the
trajectory of HIV/AIDS, as well as cultural formations in urban gay culture, such as the circuit
party.
David Kirp, “The End of the Lavender Ghetto,” The American Prospect, November 14, 2014, 454
https://prospect.org/culture/books/end-lavender-ghetto/, assessed February 28, 2024;
Michelangelo Signorile, Life Outside, The Signorile Report on Gay Men: Sex, Drugs, Muscles,
and the Passages of Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 187.
Anton Jäger, “From Bowling Alone to Posting Alone,” Jacobin, December 5, 2022, https:// 455
jacobin.com/2022/12/from-bowling-alone-to-posting-alone, assessed February 28, 2024.
196

This final chapter sets out to chart the history of “speed” and other synthetic drugs in
contemporary urban gay culture, particularly the use of crystal meth and its associated sexual 456
practices, phenomena which many argued attained a tyrannical hold over the minds, bodies, and
sex lives of many gay male users by the 1990s and 2000s. I also explore the larger shifts in party
cultures, sex, and drug use while the mortality of the AIDS epidemic declined, and the gay scene
regained some of its earlier vibrancy alongside new challenges. While nothing that approximates
a chronological history of gay methamphetamine use appears to exist, there are innumerable
medical studies on the subject, as well as memoirs and exposé-style accounts, sociological
analyses, documentary films, polemics critiquing gay culture’s wider excesses from within, texts
published by addiction treatment organizations, and articles appearing in the gay and mainstream
press. Understanding the rise of amphetamines, especially crystal methamphetamine, in the gay
world requires a broader contextualization rooted in late twentieth century developments in gay
social culture such as the introduction of enormous ‘circuit’ parties, the growth of organizations
dedicated to addiction and recovery, and the continued HIV/AIDS epidemic, including attendant
debates about pleasure, risk, and harm reduction. Towards the end of the chapter, additional
recreational party drugs, such as ecstasy, GHB (gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid), and ketamine,
inevitably require attention as they are often consumed by gay men in the same contexts as
“Speed” and “amphetamines” can sometimes refer to any drug within the “substituted 456
amphetamine” class of drugs, while “uppers” can refer to amphetamines and less often other
stimulants, such as cocaine. Without getting too bogged-down in the chemistry, I will generally
use the terms “crystal,” “crystal methamphetamine,” or “meth” for most of this chapter, as this is
the specific type of substituted amphetamine most pertinent here. An often injectable version of
methamphetamine hydrochloride was frequently marketed as “methedrine” beginning in the
1960s. Street terms such as “Tina,” “T,” or simply the crystal emoji, have been popular among a
subculture of gay meth users in more recent years.
197

methamphetamine, and the later two have especially become more popular in recent years as
meth appears to have some extent faded.
Genealogy of Meth
Speed, it must firstly be noted, has at different times in its history been consumed by
large swaths of the population far beyond gay men—from medically-supervised children with
ADHD to 1950s housewives. It was only by the 1990s and 2000s that stronger, illicit crystal
meth was popularly associated with urban gays as well as rural, predominantly white poverty and
crime. The drug’s origins chart (or tweak?) a meandering path through laboratories, battlefields,
kitchens, trailer parks, nightclubs, and bedrooms, and span multiple specific types of
amphetamines and related methamphetamines, which vary in production, potency, and method of
administration. Arguably the most emblematic drug of the modern, technological era,
methamphetamine’s parent compound amphetamine (both also sometimes known as “speed”)
was first derived in Germany in 1887 from the ephedra plant, which had historically been used in
traditional Chinese medicine to treat respiratory illnesses. Much like LSD however, it was a 457
number of years before this new synthetic drug’s full potential was understood by scientists and
the new business of industrial pharmaceuticals.
In 1934 amphetamine appeared as a popularly-sold multipurpose medicine in the form of
benzedrine inhalers marketed by Smith, Kline & French. Until 1959, benzedrine was readily
available over-the-counter in American pharmacies, and purportedly intended as a decongestant
Nicholas L. Parsons, Meth Mania: A History of Methamphetamine (Boulder, CO: Lynne 457
Rienner Publishers, 2014), 46-47.
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and general cold remedy, but widely used recreationally and as a work-aid across the general
population. Closely-related methamphetamine, synthesized in Japan in 1893, first appeared as
the mass-marketed pharmaceutical product Pervitin in Nazi Germany, though amphetamines and
methamphetamines were also utilized to some extent by Allied forces. Germany, however, was 458
the setting of methamphetamine’s first popular introduction, and was used widely across civilian
society, the military, and the political leadership, including by the Fuhrer himself.459
In May 1940, Nazi panzer divisions smashed their way through the Ardennes forest into
Picardy and Champagne, bamboozling Allied forces into encirclement and heralding the swift
defeat and occupation of much of France. At their backs was a growing industrial economy that
had overcome years of inflation and depression, including a booming pharmaceutical industry
that promised the Reich a brighter, more perky future. Nazi Germany’s blitzkrieg tactics were
energized by copious amounts of Pervitin, which granted a period of enhanced performance and
evasion of sleep at the cost of inevitable withdrawal and hangover. With Pervitin, a tank crew
could stay wide awake for two or three days at a time, allowing it to outpace opponents and
pingpong between strategic targets. Once acquainted with the drug, some soldiers no doubt felt
Pervitin to be a revelation, as vital for the war effort as the procurement of new oilfields. This
eureka moment was little different from the discovery made by many gay men later in the
twentieth century that methamphetamine could also facilitate ravenous volumes of sex.
While Berlin in particular was known for its drug-and-sex scene during the earlier
Weimar years, there does not appear to be any evidence that the homosexuals among the heavy-
Parsons, Meth Mania, 53. 458
Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich (London: Penguin Books, 2016). 459
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drinking SA “Brownshirts”––a paramilitary Nazi faction rumored to host orgies––consumed
methamphetamines before their purge in 1934. Lurid scenes of methed-up, romping gay Nazis
must be reserved for ahistorical pulp, though decades later there were no doubt leather bars that
hosted such intoxicated and salacious fantasies in San Francisco and New York. We can, 460
however, be certain that many of the guards who hounded bearers of pink triangles condemned
to concentrations camps for their sexuality consumed Pervitin to get through lengthy shifts with
pharmaceutically boosted cruelty. Significantly better-researched than the relationship between
drugs and sexuality, a few historians have recently taken the impact of intoxicants on war and its
attendant atrocities particularly seriously.461
While no doubt sometimes useful during the Wehrmacht’s earliest successes, once it
became clear that the war would not be short, German officials recognized the drawbacks of
speed and instituted restrictions. Many soldiers exhibited irritability, severe fatigue, and even
heart attacks after consuming Pervitin, leading to restraint in its disbursement. The symptoms 462
of what would later be termed “methamphetamine psychosis,” which can emerge after prolonged
and heavy use, probably interacted horrifically with the conflict’s surreal violence, especially as
An advertisement for one such event is depicted in the 1980 film Cruising (dir. William 460
Friedkin), which was filmed on location in New York’s fetish underworld. See also Susan
Sontag’s exploration of the erotic allure of Nazi aesthetics, particularly among some gay men in
“Fascinating Fascism,” The New York Review of Books, February 6, 1975.
Ohler, Blitzed; Edward B. Westermann, Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in 461
Nazi Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2023); Peter Andreas, Killer High: A
History of War in Six Drugs (London: Oxford University Press, 2020); Łukasz Kamieński,
Shooting Up: A History of Drugs in Warfare (London: Hurst & Company, 2017).
Stephen Snelders and Toine Pieters, “Speed in the Third Reich: Methamphetamine (Pervitin) 462
Use and a Drug History From Below,” Social History of Medicine, 24.3 (December 2011): 691–
692.
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German troops poured into the endless nightmare that was the Soviet expanse to the east, and
then crumbled, exhausted, in the face of the revived Stalinist juggernaut.
During the early postwar era of consumerist prosperity in the United States, speed
reached a golden age of popularity and social acceptance, an “amphetamine democracy” in the
words of drug historian Charles O. Jackson. Alongside benzedrine inhalers or “bennies,” 463
prescribed tablets sometimes called “mommy’s little helpers” were frequently consumed by
bohemian artists, as well as suburban housewives tinkering away at new, multi-mode chrome
home appliances. Others injected amphetamines in the form of dexedrine, including John F.
Kennedy, who was purportedly high on speed during the first televised presidential debate in
1960, in which he trounced a sweatier-than-usual Richard Nixon. JFK’s source was Max 464
Jacobson, also known as “Miracle Max” and “Dr. Feelgood,” physician and meth dealer to the
stars, whose other patients included Elvis, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Leonard Bernstein,
Judy Garland, Tennessee Williams, and Truman Capote. Tabloid writers in-the-know might 465
have mused about whether Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe’s alleged trysts were ever enhanced by
Dr. Feelgood’s injections. State and federal laws restricting pharmaceutical amphetamines
brought into force between the mid-1960s and the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, in the
meantime, catalyzed some of the first production of amphetamines by renegade chemists in illicit
home labs.466
Charles O. Jackson, “The Amphetamine Democracy: Medicinal Abuse in the Popular 463
Culture,” South Atlantic Quarterly 74.3 (Summer 1975): 308–323.
Courtwright, Forces of Habit, 79. 464
William J. Barnes and Richard A Lertzman, Dr. Feelgood: The Shocking Story of the Doctor 465
Who May Have Changed History by Treating and Drugging JFK, Marilyn, Elvis, and Other
Prominent Figures (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2013).
Grim, This Is Your Country on Drugs, 64. 466
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The 1950s and 1960s also saw amphetamines enter predominantly homosexual
subcultures, and there is some sporadic evidence of law enforcement and researchers observing
the use of legal or illegal forms of speed among gay men and lesbians in cities like Seattle and
Los Angeles. Notoriously, the artistic and literary underground of New York City, including 467
the social circles orbiting the Beat writers and pop artist Andy Warhol. Allen Ginsberg, Jack
Kerouac, William S Burroughs, and most of the other Beats all used amphetamines and virtually
every other recreational drug available during the creative process and as they roamed across
America and beyond. Kerouac typed his 1957 novel On the Road on a single scroll of paper––a
tell-tale sign of heavy amphetamine use if ever there was one––during a three week benzedrine
binge. 468
Among Warhol’s set, a “silver” aesthetic predominated that was propelled by the allure of
shiny metallic objects and fragmented mirrors beloved by speed heads. Warhol himself managed
to be both obviously gay and outwardly reserved in his homosexuality, and preferred to consume
amphetamines through concealable capsules such as Obetrols rather than brash methedrine
injections. But the much more open “Amphetamine Rapture Group,” which associated with
Warhol and Dr. Feelgood, was composed of prima donnas such as artist “superstar” Edie
Sedgwick and flamboyant “speed queens” who presented their sexuality and drug consumption
as loud elements of their social style and aesthetic taste. In 1964 one of the gay male members 469
Duncan Osborne, Suicide Tuesday: Gay Men and the Crystal Meth Scare (New York: Carroll 467
& Graf, 2005), 56-57.
Nicholas Rasmussen, On Speed: From Benzedrine to Adderall (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 468
96.
The Amphetamine Rapture Group was also known as the “Mole People” for their nocturnal 469
habits. Torgoff, Can’t Find My Way Home, 160-161; Rasmussen, On Speed, 172.
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of the Amphetamine Rapture Group, dancer and artist Freddie Herko, was rumored either to be
on a break from intense speed use or possibly on LSD, then the hot new drug, when he
choreographed his way from a bathtub, across a Greenwich Village apartment, and out the
window to the elegant tune of Mozart’s Requiem.470
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, just as Congress was tightening the regulation and
scheduling of meth and other recreational drugs, Dr. Feelgood’s ever stronger injections were
making their way into less-famous quarters of New York’s gay elite. According to Alan Helms, 471
methedrine injections were very common at Fire Island by the 1970s. These were provided by
Dr. Feelgood via a barber who knew many gay men who circulated between the party scenes of
the Long Island beach resort and the discos and apartments of Manhattan. Similarly to large
portions of the gay and straight population, Helms was originally introduced to the amphetamine
family through Eskatrol pills prescribed by his doctor during a particularly challenging stretch of
graduate school. But Dr. Feelgood’s much stronger injections of methedrine, the “Dom Perignon
of speed,” were rapturous. One shot could last an entire weekend, and made cleaning the beach
house or having sex an exhilarating experience. Helms learned how to administer his own
intramuscular shot—a potentially perilous act––and felt “wholly charged, carefree, invincible”
on methedrine, especially enjoying it in combination with marijuana, acid, and poppers, and
while rafting into the water and tumbling in the surf while peaking. 472
Steve Watson, Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties (New York: Pantheon, 2003), 172; 470
Torgoff, Can’t Find My Way Home, 167-168.
Osborne, Suicide Tuesday, 78. 471
Helms, Young Man From the Provinces, 133-134. 472
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Given that many trends in the gay community, including those surrounding drug use,
evolve in the more connected or hedonistic echelons of urban social life, it is surely plausible to
speculate that a major seed of methamphetamine’s rising popularity among gay men in social and
sexual contexts originated in this set of New York partiers provided for by Dr. Feelgood as well
as ordinary street-level dealers lacking any pretense of medical legitimacy. Author Felice Picano,
indeed, recollected ketamine in its early years as a recreational drug, new forms of
amphetamines, and early versions of ecstasy (MDA or perhaps the earliest MDMA) on offer as
free samples on Fire Island in the 1970s. Dealers operating at the resort understood that the
“tastemakers” partying there would provide accurate discernment on behalf of leisure purists
from across the gay population, quickly creating new markets by spreading the word back in the
city and beyond. At the Saint, a popular 1980s New York gay club, disc jockey Kerry Jaggers 473
recollected the introduction of MDMA in 1981 while the drug was still legal, and being supplied
by a therapist via a network of dealers.474
As late as November 1983, amphetamine still attracted relatively little commentary in a
comprehensive article on recreational drug use in Body Politic, a Toronto-based gay magazine.
The article did not mention sex with regard to speed, and merely suggested that amphetamines
were unlikely to cause problems if consumed orally and occasionally. The article writer, John
Allec, did caution against “chronic heavy use,” but amphetamines would warrant many more
words in an equivalent article two decades later. According to American survey data collected 475
Douglas Sadownick, Sex Between Men: An Intimate History of the Sex Lives of Gay Men 473
Postwar to Present (New York: HarperOne, 1997), 90.
Torsten Passie, The History of MDMA (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2023), 98-99. 474
John Allec, “Drugs: Changing Your Mind,” Body Politic 98 (November 1983), 33. 475
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in the late 1970s on the other hand, amphetamine use was starting to increase among gay men,
and their Canadian brothers may have been slower to the punch. Karla Jay and Allen Young’s
1979 survey reported that 19% of gay men had used speed while having sex, though very few
with any frequency. As noted in chapter three, this survey included respondents across a range of
geographies and ages, and it can safely be presumed that at this point, use was probably higher
among the younger and more urban set. Notably, lesbians reported only half as much lifetime use
during sex: in this survey, only 10% of women disclosed having used speed during sex at least
once, one commenting that “speed dries me out” and killed her libido. Both gay men and
lesbians reported lifetime use of amphetamines during sex about as little as cocaine, but not as
little as heroin. The fact that Jay and Young asked only about use during sex is especially 476
significant here, as many respondents had no doubt at some point used benzedrine, Obetrols, or
other medically-sanctioned amphetamines earlier in their lives, perhaps without actually
knowing their chemical relationship to recreational substances illicitly sold as “speed,” and not
necessarily with any purpose related to sex or partying. Responding positively to the question of
lifetime use of uppers or speed during sex more likely indicated that they consumed the
substance for recreational purposes, and probably acquired it from a friend or directly from an
underground source.
Some of the men from Eric Rofes’ extended interviews about gay experience in the
1970s, who were more likely to have been absorbed by that decade’s urban sexual culture than
Jay and Young’s broader group of respondents, attested to the use of speed, as mentioned in
chapter three. These men included Roland Schembari, Sidney Brinkley, and Brian Thom, who
Jay and Young, The Gay Report, 431-434, 496-499. 476
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described taking a combination of drugs including crystal meth—that is, fragments of illicitlysourced crystalline methamphetamine rather than pharmaceutically produced speed capsules––in
the 1970s and early 1980s. Well before the terms “party and play” or “chem sex” gained wide
usage, Thom found that binging on meth and other drugs could give him the stamina to have sex
in bathhouses for two days. John Cailleau’s drug-using circle, however, “didn’t even know 477
what speed was” in the 1970s, while Jonathan Klein believed speed was too “fringe.” In his 478
1997 book Sex Between Men, gay psychotherapist Douglas Sadownick described the sad state of
those most despondent and zonked-out on drugs at the baths of the 1970s, remarking that some
less-desirable “men tweaked on speed…became sexual predators.”479
Despite its higher cost, cocaine was probably a more common gay party drug in the late
1970s and early 1980s, given its more frequent reference among Rofes’ sample of men (who also
reported more usage than Jay and Young’s respondents). While the popular imagination might
conjure up images of Al Pacino’s Tony Montana surrounded by vast snowy mounds for days on
end, cocaine might have been more widespread simply because its shorter duration of effect lent
itself better to casual use, as opposed to the many hours which a speed high can last. Chronic
cocaine users are probably less common than occasional users. It probably took time for
dedicated speed heads to proliferate, as a speed habit was a real commitment, and this was
especially the case with the more potent methamphetamines that became available by the 1990s.
“Interview with Roland Schembari, 1999,” ER Project, 21; “Sidney Brinkely, 2000,” ER 477
Project, 24; “Interview with Brian Thom, 1997,” ER Project, 33.
“Interview with John Cailleau, 2000,” ER Project, 24; “Jonathan Klein, 1999,” ER Project, 478
28.
Sadownick, Sex Between Men, 98. 479
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Shifts in the culture of gay drug use, particularly involving stronger amphetamines and
other synthetic drugs, were hinted at by the three editions of Charles Silverstein’s The Joy of Gay
Sex, the first of which was introduced here in chapter three. This 1977 edition, coauthored with
Edmund White, contains separate entries for different drugs, and warns against amphetamines or
“Ups” as addictive drugs sometimes used for dancing and sex, but with the potential to dampen
and distract the libido or cause erectile disfunction. While the dramatic rise in gay 480
amphetamine use is usually considered to have begun in the 1990s, Charles Silverstein and
Felice Picano do not seem to have considered it particularly noteworthy in the second 1992
edition; they merely mention amphetamines as a drug to stay away from, given their addictive
properties, but do not remark further. 481
But much changed over the subsequent decade, and the 2003 edition warranted lengthier
explanations of methamphetamine alongside other drugs which they explain had risen in
popularity, including ketamine, ecstasy, GHB, and viagra. They described the physiological,
chemical, and psychological effects of meth, including a higher sex drive and feeling “more
attractive,” due to a flood of dopamine unleashed on the brain. Meth users, Silverstein and
Picano explain, are also more likely to have passive anal sex without condoms, attracting the
attention of HIV researchers, especially in the years before PrEP became available. The 482
National HIV Behavioral Surveillance Study, in fact, found that meth use among urban gay men
White and Silverstein, The Joy of Gay Sex (First Edition), 221. 480
Charles Silverstein and Felice Picano, The New Joy of Gay Sex (Second Edition, New York: 481
HarperCollins, 1992), 58.
Charles Silverstein and Felice Picano, The Joy of Gay Sex (Third Edition, New York: 482
HarperCollins, 2003), 69-77; there was more than a grain of truth to the idea that AIDS was
linked to speed use, a “folk theory” that emerged alongside the more popular poppers theory
during the epidemic’s early years, Rubin, “Elegy for the Valley of the Kings,” 111.
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probably peaked sometime around 2004, with 22.8% of surveyed men reporting use within the
previous year in San Francisco, 15.1% in Los Angeles, and 13.9% in New York City. Whether 483
or not this constituted an “epidemic,” as many researchers, journalists, and addiction specialists
called it, is perhaps debatable, but certainly a large set of hardcore as well as casual users had
established themselves within gay enclaves by the early 2000s.
So what exactly explains the popularity of crystal meth in the gay community, which by
the late 1990s and 2000s had spawned several tell-alls and memoirs, a proliferating medical
literature, countless online sex groups, and innumerable recovery clinics and organizations? The
more cynical might ask, alternatively and quite simply, what took so long? The reasons behind
patterns of drug use can be murky and to some extent random, but a number of discernible
factors were surely at work. Certainly, the ambient history of medically prescribed amphetamine
use recounted above was an important foundation for subcultures of recreational meth users that
ballooned later in the twentieth century. Influential ‘seeders’ of drug use in the right places, such
as among the jet-setting partiers based in Manhattan and on Fire Island during the 1970s, also
played an important role. But the rise of recreational, illicit methamphetamine use in the gay
community and beyond can probably also be credited to stronger meth.
There is a frequent pattern that has played out repeatedly in the modern history of drug
control. First, a drug becomes popular, whether across society or in particular subcultures, and its
real or perceived downsides are identified as a major social problem deserving of forceful state
intervention and even destruction of the substance, sometimes coordinated internationally. An
Martin McElhiney, Ph.D., “Methamphetamine and HIV,” AIDS Education & Training Center 483
Program, Northeast/Caribbean (2021), 16.
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unregulated black market then incentivizes adulteration with cheaper, potentially dangerous
filler, or a substitute in the form of synthetic psychoactive compounds which create a stronger or
more addictive high.
There are variations on this insidious phenomenon. Modern technological developments
might be improvised by renegade chemists, and replace less harmful or natural substances with a
more profitable or plentiful but often more dangerous alternative. The contemporary European
drug market, for example, is saturated with “spice,” new synthetic cannabinoids which are far
more hazardous than natural cannabis. In countries such as the United States, some illicit drug 484
producers synthesize completely untested novel psychoactive substances that can temporarily
escape legal sanction, filling some of the demand for better known but prohibited substances
such as psilocybin mushrooms. During the late 2000s, the Cambodian government, in
coordination with the United Nations and other organizations, destroyed large amounts of
sassafras oil, a key ingredient in the production of MDMA (ecstasy). This prompted illicit
manufactures to replace MDMA with PMA (para-Methoxyamphetamine), a far more toxic
substance, which caused many deaths among mostly young and unknowing recreational drug
consumers across the world well into the 2010s. If the intention of prohibition was to eliminate 485
dangerous drugs, these attempts at control have had the opposite impact, as occurred often during
alcohol’s prohibition.
Sam Gruet, “Experts issue warning over cannabis sweets laced with Spice,” BBC News, April 484
7, 2022.
Ian MacKinnon, “'Ecstasy oil' factories destroyed in Cambodian rainforest,” The Guardian, 485
February 25, 2009; “The Great MDMA Drought and Its Deadly Consequences | The War on
Drugs,” Vice, August 10, 2020, https://youtu.be/RUNvLPNLxSw.
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While the great 1960s drugs––LSD and marijuana––joined cocaine, quaaludes, poppers,
and alcohol to dominate the urban gay renaissance of the 1970s, a new era in the history of speed
was gestating. State and federal restrictions vastly reduced legitimate pharmaceutical production,
and renegade chemists were left searching for new methods as the supply of phenyl-2-propanone
(P2P), a precursor in meth production, was strangled by order of law. By the 1980s, illicit meth
was being produced with pseudoephedrine, which was an easier process and created a much
more potent high. The injection, snorting, or inhalation of crystalline or powdered
methamphetamine, rather than the oral consumption of pharmaceutical tablets, also increase
potency, as they avoid most of the body’s shock-absorbing internal organs. Attempts to tamp
down on abusive speed use, in other words, only heralded the inception of a more formidable
drug.
According to journalist Ryan Grim, the pseudoephedrine method of production became
prevalent not just among American rogue chemists, but also in the clandestine laboratories of
northern Mexico. While the Mexican cartels had got their start with opium and marijuana
production and export in the mid-twentieth century, by the 1980s and 1990s they were also
acting as the middlemen for Colombian cocaine rerouted away from the Caribbean and Florida,
and producing their own methamphetamine using precursor chemicals such as
pseudoephedrine. The 1990s wave of meth use in America was frequently perceived to have 486
begun on the West Coast and the deserts of the Southwest, and this is probably in part because of
Grim, This Is Your Country on Drugs, 63-65; Osborne, Suicide Tuesday, 80. 486
210

the huge market for Mexican drugs located immediately on the border in Southern California.487
Grim adds that the boom in trade initiated by NAFTA (1994) multiplied the number of trucks
crossing the border on which meth could be smuggled from Mexico into the United States.488
The border is really not so far from West Hollywood, where at least as early as 1991 researchers
observed a high prevalence of meth use in association with the gay male population.489
Some of the factors that gave rise to the gay meth ‘epidemic’ of the 1990s overlapped
with the broader reasons for meth’s growth in popularity across America at large during the same
decade, but changes unique to gay culture were also determinative. If some urban gay men
tempered their drug use and promiscuity during the fearful, early plague years of the mid-1980s,
as ‘clone’ sociologist Martin Levine argued in Gay Macho, then the replacement of disco culture
with mega-clubs and circuit parties and the greater availability of arduous but effective HIV/
AIDS treatments by the late 1990s may have reversed the tide. Drugs, of course, thrived in 490
many of America’s discos, but multi-day circuit parties and their attendant orgies demanded an
altogether different class of drug with effects which could outlast quaaludes and cocaine. For
The West Coast’s earlier preference for crystal meth was certainly the perception of 487
Michelangelo Signorile in his report on gay men. Signorile, Life Outside, 24, 117. Sociologist
Steven P. Kurtz came to the same geographic conclusion, see Kurtz, “Post-Circuit Blues:
Motivations and Consequences of Crystal Meth Use Among Gay Men in Miami,” AIDS and
Behavior 9.1 (March 2005): 63-72; journalist Frank Sanello came to similar conclusions in his
Tweakers: How Crystal Meth is Ravaging Gay America (Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 2005),
80-88.
Grim, This Is Your Country on Drugs, 66, 104-105, 112. 488
Bruce Heischober and Marissa A. Miller, “Methamphetamine Abuse in California,” in 489
Methamphetamine Abuse: Epidemiological Issues and Implications, eds. Marissa A. Miller and
Nicholas J. Kozel (Rockville, MD: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1991), 65.
By the mid-1980s tricks were “out” and wedding bands “in,” Levine states, Gay Macho, 140. 490
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some, crystal methamphetamine––now far stronger than the benzedrine and Obetrol of decades
past––became the answer.
Collective Euphorias or Vicious Circuits?
While the gay community—much reduced—was remarkably resilient in maintaining
cultural relevance and social cohesion by the late 1990s, when more effective AIDS treatments
were beginning to emerge, critics such as Michelangelo Signorile lambasted old and new dangers
in his 1997 polemic Life Outside, The Signorile Report on Gay Men: Sex, Drugs, Muscles, and
the Passages of Life. The book investigated and generally condemned many of the activities and
shared interests responsible for bringing gay men together in large cities such as New York and
Los Angeles as well as party resort towns like Palm Springs, Fire Island, and Provincetown.
Prime components of this “gay fast life,” as he termed it, are stronger, more dangerous drugs,
stricter expectations of physical fitness (frequently permitted by steroid use), and sinister brews
of danger and anxiety. Signorile and other gay intellectuals such as Andrew Sullivan, who 491
advocated gay marriage as a political objective, and Gabriel Rotello, who asserted that the
promiscuity of the 1970s lay the groundwork for HIV/AIDS, were in turn lambasted by a set of
academics and writers who founded Sex Panic! in 1997. The members of Sex Panic! maintained
that sexual honesty and freedom as well as non-monogamy were essential ingredients within a
more radical agenda devoted to causes such as keeping bathhouses open and building coalitions
with other groups deemed marginalized, though they had little to say about drugs. Sex Panic!’s
“Declaration of Sexual Rights,” for instance, did not mention anything about drug use, though it
Signorile, Life Outside, xx-xxi. 491
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is probable that some of those who participated in their activities had some affinities with the
early harm reduction movement.492
Rather than the “fast life” of partying, drugs, and sex, Signorile instead urged that young
gay men find a “life outside” of “narcissism and hedonism,” which he believed were selfdestructive, and veered gay culture away from worthy political goals and towards
commercialism. While some of the more radical members of Sex Panic! may not have been 493
enthralled by the apolitical “narcissists” of Signorile’s chagrin, as radicals they feared the
consequences of becoming mainstream or even suburban, as Signorile proposes. By the end of
Life Outside Signorile struggled against a strong tide to present a more appealing vision of
community center-based youth groups, workshops, meetings, gay-friendly churches, sobriety,
and some take on monogamy. He attempted to give an ambiguous arrangement of near-total
monogamy a sexy ‘rebranding’ by labelling it “postmodern,” and made the historically
questionable claim that the normalization of non-monogamous lifestyles only occurred after
Stonewall. For many open gay couples his suggestion of intricate rules to specify extremely 494
limited circumstances for non-monogamy are probably Sisyphean at best and a recipe for
convoluted arguments at worst. Given Signorile’s clear bias against pursuits deemed hedonistic,
he did not arrive at the possibility that many sustained couples maintain healthy non-monogamy
Sex Panic! members might have granted the legitimacy of drug use during sex, but been 492
reluctant to extend an already radical platform amidst the most heated years of the War on Drugs.
Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality (New York: Vintage,
1996); Rotello, Sexual Ecology; David Salyer, “The Panic Over Sex Panic!,” The Body, August
1, 1998, https://www.thebody.com/article/panic-sex-panic, accessed April 2, 2024.
Staunchly leftist Gay Liberation Front activists of the early 1970s, such as Steven Dansky, 493
likewise denounced commercial gay institutions such as bars as a concession to “The Man” (or
perhaps the mafia). Sadownick, Sex Between Men, 87-88.
Signorile, Life Outside, 50-51, 178-179, 213, 216. 494
213

separately or by primarily seeking threesomes, and benefit from the community-building many
gay men experience by enjoying affable though sometimes challenging continuums between
friends and lovers. Signorile could also not at the time have anticipated the extent to which the
risk and lethality of HIV/AIDS would decline when this process was just beginning when Life
Outside appeared.
A community inherently defined by sexuality and pleasure is unlikely to remain coherent
if opportunities for pleasure seeking are sapped in favor of workshops and church, regardless of
whether or not it is invested in politics. It is perhaps the case that there will always be a 495
portion of gay men who orient their activities based on their sexuality for only some fraction of
their time, and those full-timers who more consistently define themselves and their social tastes
by their same-sex attraction (or “cult of masculinity,” as Signorile referred to it), and therefore
not just some ideal of romance but also the pursuit of collective pleasure (be it sexual or
psychoactive). This search may in some sense be “narcissistic” or “hedonistic” to some, and like
many activities it has the potential to not fully satisfy or veer into the self-destructive, but we
might also ask if it is productive to regurgitate the categorical pathologization of this
“narcissism” and “hedonism” in echo of past psychiatric authorities. Signorile condemned the
rule of “parties, drugs, and gyms,” though in truth many individuals subject to tyrannies of all
Others might speculate about the strong contrast between gay male and lesbian couples when 495
it comes to committed monogamy, probably as great an argument as any against purely
constructivist views of gender and sexuality. For recent stats see Amy C. Moors et al.,
“Internalized Consensual Non-Monogamy Negativity and Relationship Quality Among People
Engaged in Polyamory, Relationship Quality Among People Engaged in Polyamory, Swinging,
and Open Relationships,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 50.4 (May 2021), 1390.
214

sorts would probably be envious of such a pleasure and consumption-oriented regime that at least
has the potential for autonomy and moderation.496
The trends Signorile denounced, such as rigid adherence to a certain body image, have
only increased since 1997, largely due to the immensity of online imagery that appears to
especially impact the most image-conscious demographics such as young gay men and teenage
girls. As for Signorile’s more pertinent critique, dangerous drug use, this too escalated in the 497
immediate years following Life Outside’s publication, as reflected by statistical data referenced
above, the growing addiction treatment profession, and a genre of memoir and tell-all books and
documentaries which address the use of crystal meth and other synthetic drugs by gay men. The
zealous use of drugs like ketamine, ecstasy, cocaine, and meth, for Signorile, catalyzed the
formation of a collective “theology” that in gay lifestyle magazines such as Circuit Noize was
spoken of in very spiritual terms.
Circuit Noize featured lifestyle articles, social gossip, images, and advertised and
promoted lengthy gay ‘circuit’ parties held in warehouses, hotels, theaters, and other spaces
across the United States and abroad. Some of its writers wrote of these events as the later-day,
house music-saturated kin of ancient Bacchanalias and Eleusinian mysteries that celebrated
Signorile, Life Outside, 27. 496
In a vast over-correction typical of its time, social media, the shadier corners of academia, and 497
even respectable medical authorities have spawned a body acceptance movement that at its most
surreal denies biology and promotes obesity. For a recent discussion of the body acceptance
movement, see Katie J. M. Baker, “They Promoted Body Positivity. Then They Lost Weight,”
The New York Times, February 26, 2024. For gay men, body image, and social media, see Eric
Filice et al., “The Impact of Social Media on Body Image Perceptions and Bodily Practices
among Gay, Bisexual, and Other Men Who Have Sex with Men: A Critical Review of the
Literature and Extension of Theory,” Sex Roles 82 (2020), 387-410. As I will suggest below,
concern with fitness and beauty may have its downsides, but it has probably also contributed to a
healthy stigma against the use of crystal meth.
215

pagan gods with herbal intoxicants and orgies. Some gay writers as early as the 1970s had 498
revered the numinous, “ritual" qualities of “the night and the music and the drugs and the men”
as legalized gay spaces, a cultural renaissance, and new sound technology enabled experientially
intense nightlife venues. Such spiritual allusions may also have originated in the imaginative 499
rhetoric of 1990s psychedelic neo-hippies such as Terence McKenna, who was popular in the
more heterosexual world of electronic rave music, a close cousin of the house music played at
gay events.
McKenna extolled an “archaic revival” of psychological, cultural, and sexual “boundary
dissolution,” though preferably via the group consumption of natural substances such as
psilocybin mushrooms, rather than the more synthetic offerings of the circuit parties. For gay 500
men living with terminal AIDS, “told they have less than a year” and “dancing with friends…
partying like there’s no tomorrow,” as West Hollywood politician John Duran put it, there might
have been an amplified spiritual dimension found in new modes of partying. Prominent gay 501
author Andrew Sullivan suggested that circuit parties fulfilled the “need for amnesia” as AIDS
mortality faded, and while they were a stage for some synthetic drugs rare or absent in the 1970s,
these new exercises of hedonism did not quite appear to replicate the volume of sex common in
that earlier decade.502
Signorile, Life Outside, 77. 498
Sadownick, Sex Between Men, 87. 499
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods, 65-68; “Terence McKenna - Boundary Dissolution 500
Parties,” Youtube.com, https://youtu.be/J4jIWnmx-Pg?si=MSzWlkltHa1R1c4M, accessed March
27, 2024.
Chris Kuo, “Gay party impresario Jeffrey Sanker dies at 65,” LA Times, June 10, 2021. 501
Andrew Sullivan, “When Plagues End,” The New York Times Magazine, November 10, 1996. 502
216

Circuit parties typically run for several days and thus see the greatest intensity of
synthetic drug use. These events would be difficult to fuel without stimulants to achieve greater
energy levels, dissociatives to enable euphoria and free movement, or a combination of both that
makes standing amidst a half-naked crowd of hundreds or more enjoyable or at least tolerable.
For most attendees, a few drinks and a joint simply would not do. Signorile contends that the
circuit extreme feeds trends regarding drug use and style across the larger gay community. For
the most circuit-dedicated of the men he interviewed in LA and Palm Springs, attending every
possible event and taking the necessary drugs was about having “more fun than straights” and
“celebrating life,” particularly in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic’s most lethal years, the
mid-1990s. Drug use and the circuits were inseparable, as most men Signorile spoke to explained
that they would not be interested in participating if they were not high. All of the synthetic drugs
popular at the circuit parties come with their associated risks. One man joked that the presence of
an ambulance––perhaps carrying someone who had taken too much GHB, which is particularly
likely to trigger seizures or a comatose state via overdose or combination with alcohol––was a
sign of a good party. 503
Alongside the risk of overdose, the encouragement of addiction, and chronic drug-related
health issues, of course, is the relationship between unsafe sex and intoxication. One of
America’s most popular circuit events in the 1990s, Fire Island’s Morning Party, came under fire
in the summer of 1996 for exacerbating the very problem it claimed to address. Prominent 504
among the Morning Party’s critics, writer and activist Larry Kramer charged that the Gay Men’s
Signorile, Life Outside, 90-91, 108-109. 503
David W. Dunlap, “Fire Island Fund-Raiser is Criticized Over Drug Use Linked to Unsafe 504
Sex,” The New York Times, August 17, 1996.
217

Health Crisis (GMHC), which he had cofounded but broken from, was practicing hypocrisy by
taking donations in the hundreds of thousands from the party’s ticket sales. While the event did
not officially promote drug use for obvious reasons, none of the organizers could maintain any
plausible deniability about the ubiquitous consumption of synthetic drugs at the event, and the
unsafe sexual practices that were virtually guaranteed to result. Attending the event himself,
Kramer experienced flashbacks to the hedonism of the 1970s that he so passionately blamed for
the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.
The GMHC’s directors countered that refusing the event’s money would do nothing for
the cause of reducing drug and alcohol abuse, which was discouraged through fliers and
tempered with a First Aid Tent. Plenty of substance-free fundraisers, usually oriented around
running, cycling, or other athletic activities, also collect large amounts of money for AIDS
research and treatment. But these events tend to miss affluent partiers, a very large segment of
the gay population which also includes many older, wealthy donors likely to write a check for
much more than the price of a ticket. Unless explicitly held for a limited, sober or recovering
clientele, virtually any large organized party of gay men will entail alcohol and drug use. A clash
between symbolic currency and realistic expediency is therefore inevitable.
The incident, moreover, reflects another dilemma surrounding hard drug using
subcultures central to discussions around harm reduction: is it better to end events or close
establishments in which drug use is prevalent, or hope that such spaces can be repurposed as
venues in which education, counseling, or first aid (including naloxone in more recent years)
might, however subtly, be made available, in contrast to the isolation of private homes? For the
GMHC, episodes at subsequent festivities ended the debate and they terminated their association
218

with the Fire Island event. Drug possession arrests continued and one man died from a lethal
GHB overdose in 1998. Given that several of his friends were also hospitalized, it is possible that
they combined it with alcohol or simply did not know how to limit and time their dosages.505
Prominent circuit parties of the 1990s, such as Fire Island’s Morning Party and Palm
Springs’ White Party, were exploding in popularity just as therapists, drug treatment
professionals, and critics of gay social life from within began to notice the prevalence and
consequences of crystal meth use. This included its link to HIV/AIDS, and by the late 1990s
some prominent commentators such as Andrew Sullivan and Eric Rofes were insisting that
effective treatments meant the worst years were over, while others like Michelangelo Signorile
and Gabriel Rotello contended that vigilance was as important as ever, and that a “superbug”
could emerge in a renewed, methed-up “sexual ecology.” In January 1995, Douglas 506
Sadownick observed in Genre magazine that crystal meth appears “tailor-made for the very class
of gay men benefiting from the political strides of the gay movement,” that group—for the time
being—tending to be white, professional, middle class, and financially able to spend the
weekends following the circuits and other gay happenings to expensive resorts and
metropolises. By the early 2000s, drug researcher Cathy Reback observed that meth was the 507
most popular substance at circuit parties, even surpassing alcohol. The drug was perfectly 508
suited for the multi-day, sex and dance heavy parties of the circuit, but for many men meth also
Osborne, Suicide Tuesday, 121. 505
Osborne, Suicide Tuesday, 159-160. 506
Douglas Sadownick, “Kneeling at the Crystal Cathedral,” Genre, January 1995. 507
Sanello, Tweakers, 6. 508
219

became the handmaiden of extreme, internet-facilitated sex addictions, and grew to encompass
and mangle larger portions of their lives.
Methpocalypse
In the late 1980s, Van Ness Recovery House drug treatment therapist Kathy Watt
claimed, drug taking among gay men began to shift alongside the gradual increase in meth use
which would reach its height a decade later. Which is not to say, she added, that drug problems
did not arise before these years—rather, having your life “torched” by alcohol had been a more
likely occurrence, and those who partied through the 1970s with predilections towards addiction
were drifting strongly in that direction by the end of that decade. This was no surprise given the
centrality of bars to gay social life, and bars were the obvious place to seek out and consume
alcohol as well as illicit substances and those who deal them. “There was an attempt to cushion
the coming down” from the liberated 1970s, Sadownick noted, with “a little marijuana, some
mescaline, mixed with a quaalude or a Valium.” But by the late 1980s, Watt observed that for 509
many of her therapy patients, “speed was what allowed you to do life,” and drug taking began to
eclipse its relegation to the weekend, fun social outings, and the experimental paradigm of the
counterculture era. It instead became a more full-time activity “integrated into the daily lives” of
some gay men whether that meant the use of meth for focus during work hours or in solitude, or
a much greater commitment to activities that incorporated meth use, such as the phenomenon of
party and play or chemsex, which replaced romantic, sober, or at least less-intoxicated sex. For
Sadownick, Sex Between Men, 102. 509
220

said men this dark turn also became more about “shutting off the voices” and trying “to fit in,”
tasks strong stimulants are well suited for.510
If the social use of intoxicants created and preserved a valuable but not untroubled sense
of community within gay culture, then we might ask what range of experiences existed amidst
meth’s rise in the 1990s and 2000s. According to Sadownick’s Sex Between Men, one common
phenomenon among meth users saw a retreat into endless pornographic VHS tapes and selfpleasure in a sort of “Holy Sacrament,” as one user thought of it, for a high-tech era. But for 511
most users, this solitary experience of meth was typically accompanied or surpassed by more
collective activities detailed by several authors by the 2000s, most having their own histories
with meth. In a uniquely high-tech fusion, gay users of meth and other synthetic drugs were able
to connect thanks to the commercialization and popularization of the internet and later, the
introduction of smartphone apps like Grindr in 2009.
Both published in 2005, Frank Sanello’s Tweakers and Duncan Osborne’s Suicide
Tuesday are two of the most revealing memorials to meth’s peak years in the gay community,
based on both men’s extensive interviews with experts and hundreds of gay meth users,
alongside research on the wider context of meth in America. Osborne and Sanello suggested 512
some of the factors and motivations explaining crystal meth’s popularity, including some
pertinent to gay men in particular, alongside the enhancement of the libido and the obvious
strength and raw pleasure of a crystal meth high, which is also far cheaper and longer lasting
Patrick Moore, Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality 510
(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2004), 55-57.
Sadownick, Sex Between Men, 231. 511
Sanello, Tweakers; Osborne, Suicide Tuesday. 512
221

than powder cocaine. Some HIV positive men suffering from chronic fatigue, for instance, felt 513
that it significantly improves their energy levels. By the late 1990s, some HIV positive men were
taking combinations of early medications like AZT alongside meth, ketamine, and ecstasy in a
kind of pharmacological experiment, with little understood of possible interactions. Kathy 514
Watt suggested to Sanello that for some older users, crystal might even “numb the mind” enough
to “pretend” its the 1970s, eliminating fear of HIV, whether the user is infected or not. Richard, a
troubled user and resident of Los Angeles, found that he was “out and proud” while on meth,
rather than racked by guilt instilled by a Southern Baptist upbringing, with hellfire as much of a
potential source of fear for some as HIV/AIDS. One study of gay and bisexual men in New York
found that 22% reported some use of meth, with 10.4% disclosing recent use, while other
researchers estimated that 40% of gay men in San Francisco had tried meth by the early years of
the new millennium.515
Osborne was frequently in agreement with Sanello in assessing the meth phenomenon,
particularly highlighting the role it filled as an entrance to the gay community for newcomers
and as a seeming cure for loneliness and depression. For some of the men he interviewed,
cravings for meth became utterly inseparable from sex, the experience of gay social life, or even
the ability to enjoy the company of other people. In a departure from Sanello however, 516
Prices fell as production rose through the 1990s and 2000s, and the amount of money required 513
for a day-long high by the 2000s was equivalent to a drink or two at a bar—meaning that it was
cheaper than most other recreational drugs. Meth and its behavioral consequences can
nonetheless still be financially ruinous for some users. Sanello, Tweakers, 7, 48-49, 128, 169.
Kane Race, “A Lifetime of Drugs,” in Scott Herring and Lee Wallace, eds., Long Term: 514
Essays on Queer Commitment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 98.
Sanello, Tweakers, 4-5, 89, 154. 515
Osborne, Suicide Tuesday, 21, 40, 165, 174. 516
222

Osborne voiced significant concern that meth hysteria might be somewhat overblown, and even
lead to an excessive crackdown on the gay community in parallel to the often abusive War on
Drugs. He cited several gay men serving long prison sentences, and the apathy of umbrella
LGBT organizations pulled by that unwieldy acronym in other directions. He further believed 517
that it is possible for some men to avoid the worst problems associated with meth use through
careful planning. Sanello, on the other hand, postulated a sort of “meth exceptionalism,” and
quoted users who argued that meth was utterly unique in its addictive properties and potential to
trigger psychosis, and that they had previously spent years as drinkers and recreational drug
users without experiencing any major negative consequences.518
Most scholars as well as exposé journalists writing about gay men, meth, and other
synthetic drugs have for good reason focused on motivations and consequences related to
escapism, the self-medication of traumatic experiences or emotions, addiction, and HIV/AIDS in
their work. The problem cases, after all, are more likely to come to the attention of researchers,
which was as true for Samuel Kahn at New York’s City Jail in the 1920s as it was for meth
researchers in the 1990s. In her study of mostly heterosexual group sex, Plays Well in Groups,
anthropologist Katherine Frank points out that there are additional factors involved adjunct to the
enhancement of pleasure. Most pertinent to her chief preoccupation, Frank found that some gay
male users of meth found that it enabled them to participate in group sex when not attracted to
everyone in the room, a frequent hitch inherent to such a pastime. In casual parlance we would 519
Osborne, Suicide Tuesday, vi-viii, 176-177. 517
Osborne, Suicide Tuesday, 169; Sanello, Tweakers, 14, 172. 518
Katherine Frank, Plays Well in Groups: A Journey Through the World of Group Sex (Lanham, 519
MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013), 192-193.
223

simply call this “lowering standards,” but perhaps for some men this fulfills a useful social goal:
it prevents the insult of friends or acquaintances, and avoids the creation of awkward situations.
Frank finds that this was not coincidental to situations that happened to come up during meth
use, but was rather a planned expectation for some imbibers. Other drugs such as MDMA/
ecstasy even resulted in users “temporarily” feeling “in love” with sexual partners they would
not regularly find attractive, which is not to say that this emotion would be persistent or
appreciated upon the comedown. While chemically related to meth, MDMA’s stimulant effects
are somewhat more subdued, but it has a much greater capacity for enhanced positive emotions.
Users might report feelings of love during forms of non-penetrative intimacy, as opposed to the
ravenous sex drive that can be induced by meth.520
It is this exaggerated libido that adds dimension to meth’s addictive properties, alongside
meth and the brain’s biochemistry, a sense of strength and invincibility, and cultural contexts
such as circuit parties, high-pressure social scenes, group sex, and the internet. A brain flooded
with dopamine due to meth will produce fewer natural neurotransmitters (to simplify a more
complicated chemical process), leading to stronger cravings as the substance’s initial high is
pursued. Other source of pleasure can then become muted. Many chronic users can start to
experience especially insidious side effects, including the triggering of latent schizophrenia or at
least a comparable level of paranoia or delusion. Given the expansion of these meth-related 521
outcomes across a growing number of gay meth users between the 1990s and 2000s, some
Observers of the MDMA-laden, part-gay, part-straight early electronic dance music scene of 520
the late 1980s and 1990s, for instance, reported lots of cuddling, but very little sex, see Passie,
The History of MDMA, 98-99, 170.
Sanello, Tweakers, 35, 50, 61. 521
224

commentators predicted that America’s gayborhoods, such as West Hollywood, already
devastated by HIV/AIDS, would become ghost towns within a couple of decades as crystal meth
and the unprotected sex it appeared to encourage took their fatal toll. From a later vantage 522
point, this prediction appears to have been overly catastrophic, though it would be an act of
historical blindness to deny the many ghosts who do inhabit gayborhood boulevards. But a total
cultural or demographic apocalypse was averted, and this was in large part due to the progression
of HIV prophylactics such as PrEP and more effective and convenient AIDS treatments, in
addition to more targeted and perhaps effective drug treatment programs. By the 2010s
furthermore, regular meth use had clearly declined by perhaps two thirds—but only among white
gay men, who had earlier been the most likely users. Between 2004, when recent meth use was
highest among whites (18%), and 2017, when it had fallen significantly (6%), use among black
men had increased (7% to 12%) while use among Latinos had decreased before going back up to
2004 levels (13% to 4% to 13%), according to this same study. Some regular users from the 523
late 1990s and 2000s had of course died or quit the drug, often with the assistance of
innumerable treatment programs and clinics that cater to gay men, but among whites at least no
equivalent cohort had arisen. Notably, higher rates of meth use among black and Latino men
Sanello, Tweakers, 134. 522
See for instance Alexis V. Rivera et al., “Trends in methamphetamine use among men who 523
have sex with men in New York City, 2004-2017,” AIDS and Behavior 25.4 (April 2021):
1210-1218. Racially blended data by city during the same period showed overall decreases in
San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, by approximately one third or more, see Peter
Staley, “Meth Use By Gay Men Remains Stable After 2014 Uptick,” POZ, June 19, 2019.
225

mirror higher rates of HIV infection into the twenty-first century. What accounts for this shift, 524
and why the racial discrepancy?
A Place for Stigma?
In his forward to Cathy Reback’s groundbreaking 1997 study of meth in Los Angeles,
The Social Construction of a Gay Drug, artist and activist Ferd Eggan offered his insights about
meth and what motivates many gay men to use it. Eggan himself had experience as a meth user
and participant in LA’s drug-laden gay social scene, leading him to ask questions more cloistered
bureaucrats and researchers might not consider. A veteran of the Gay Liberation Front, ACT UP,
and other organizations, in a transition from activist to official Eggan served as Los Angeles
AIDS coordinator from 1993-2001. From this position, he funded research such as Reback’s
report and coordinated city resources towards HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, expanding
the reach of public programs to related factors such as crystal meth, shared needles, and
homelessness. Reback’s study claimed that 42% of gay males regularly using crystal meth 525
were HIV-positive. For Eggan, clinical and conventional understandings of meth addiction
drawing upon biochemistry and behavioral contexts (i.e., linkage with sex or socializing) were
not necessarily wrong, but he found that they were insufficient to explain the crisis at hand. Meth
use, Eggan argued, was also about coping with the oppression of hierarchy in the gay community
“Black Americans and HIV/AIDS: The Basics,” KFF (Kaiser Health), February 7, 2020, 524
https://www.kff.org/hivaids/fact-sheet/black-americans-and-hivaids-the-basics/, accessed May
22, 2024.
Elaine Woo, “Ferd Eggan, 60; ally for those with HIV, AIDS,” LA Times, July 12, 2007; Ferd 525
Eggan, “I’m wretched because I’m sore…,” Whitewalls: A Journal of Language & Art (Fall/
Winter 1994), 82-83; Moore, Beyond Shame, 50-54.
226

and Los Angeles society at large, as well as the ambiance of epidemic disease in place of the
“support and solace” men were looking for.526
No doubt Eggan’s analysis can help us to understand the subsequent decline of meth use.
A large portion of the social stigma towards homosexuality across America evaporated between
the 1990s and the 2010s. The concurrent, longer-term decline of HIV/AIDS transmission and
lethality have also diminished the aura of disease, though other commentators like Patrick Moore
have argued that the initial years of effective HIV/AIDS treatments were in part what gave rise to
the meth party and play phenomenon to begin with, as dangers seemed to recede. Racial 527
discrepancies in meth’s decline could be explained by the persistence of homophobia—though
that has also begun to change––or the lack of “more geographically-distributed, culturallycompetent services.” At the same time, in cities like Los Angeles officials like Eggan and 528
Reback were highly attuned to matters of socioeconomic and racial disparity from the beginning,
though there is only so much city resources and treatment clinics can make possible. At the time
of their report in 1997, black and Latino men in Los Angeles generally perceived crystal to be
“primarily white and professional,” and this clearly shifted over the following two decades.529
Cathy Reback and Ferd Eggan, The Social Construction of a Gay Drug: Methamphetamine 526
Use Among Gay and Bisexual Males in Los Angeles (City of Los Angeles: Office of the AIDS
Coordinator, 1997), iv.
Patrick Moore, “Keep the bathhouses, lose the shame,” The Advocate, August 17, 2004. 527
Megan Durell et al., “Race, Gender Expectations, and Homophobia: A Quantitative 528
Exploration,” Race, Gender & Class 14.1-2 (2007), 299-317; Rivera et al., “Trends in
methamphetamine use among men.” Especially outside of the gay urban centers, religiosity and
the closet might also be factors, at least at an anecdotal level—see the dramatic revelation that
famous megachurch pastor Ted Haggard was using meth with male escorts in 2006, John
Holusha and Neela Banerjee, “Evangelical Leader Says He Bought Drugs,” New York Times,
November 3, 2006.
Reback and Eggan, The Social Construction of a Gay Drug, xiv. 529
227

There were probably a number of other factors involved which have come into focus
since the late 1990s––and might not be obvious to the social justice-oriented paradigm of
commentators like Eggan. There is to begin with an element of randomness and cultural fashion
associated with the ebbs and flows of drug use, which might jump across lines of race,
socioeconomics, and age for all kinds of different reasons, not least due to intangible registers of
“coolness.” If urban gay men, especially those who are white and affluent, are frequently charged
with being overly looks or youth-obsessed, then it is likely that that very obsession resulted in
the development of a stigma towards a drug associated with an earlier, more AIDS-impacted
generation of gay men. Since the 1980s many gay male users of GHB, in contrast, have believed
that the ingested organic liquid depressant improves muscle growth and that it does not lead to
hangovers, making it especially appealing to body builders. But the potentially lethal interactions
that can emerge from G in combination with alcohol and other drugs, extremely disciplined
dosage and timing required for its safe use, and its relative scarcity in the drug market have
prevented it from becoming a default drug. 530
Certainly by the 2000s and 2010s, strong associations of meth with decaying body mass
and looks (especially of the face and teeth), rural “white trash,” and mental breakdown were well
established in popular culture. By the 2010s you could purchase frightful fake “meth teeth” at
Halloween costume shops for instance, and the popular 2008-2013 AMC crime drama Breaking
Signorile, Life Outside, 173-175; Silverstein and Picano, The Joy of Gay Sex (Third Edition), 530
74; Patrick Strudwick, “Revealed: The Hidden Epidemic Of Abuse, Overdose, And Death
Caused By The Sex Drug G,” BuzzFeed, September 5, 2019, https://www.buzzfeed.com/
patrickstrudwick/sex-drug-ghb-abuse-overdose-death.
228

Bad did not exactly boost meth’s reputation. Not least of all, America’s homelessness crisis, 531
which began to metastasize in the 2010s, has solidified undeniable associations of meth and
fentanyl with overdose and graphic psychosis, particularly for residents of cities like Los
Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland. It is far beyond the scope of this dissertation to comment
at length about the relationship between homelessness, crime, and drug use, though West Coast
cities like Vancouver and Portland have recently abandoned experiments with the comprehensive
legalization of public hard drug use, along with other well-intentioned but perhaps misguided
progressive fancies of the 2010s and early 2020s. Some activists and academics, such as Carl 532
Hart, oppose the stigmatization of drugs like heroin and meth, claiming that many users do not
become “addicted,” and that there is no hierarchy of harm between drugs like cannabis and
heroin. Hart, a Columbia professor, may well find that such beliefs can be validly applied to 533
himself or others of his ilk, but socioeconomic and cultural realities frequently trouble
universalist aspirations. Context matters, and so does perception. The drug legalization
movement would be well advised to consolidate its victories, such as the state-level legalization
and destigmatization of cannabis and reintroduction of legal psychedelic medicine, while
carefully reappraising future ambitions for fear of a rational backlash.
Targeted stigma against specific drugs––not an easy attribute to intentionally induce––
does diminish the prevalence of that drug within and across subcultures, or ensures that it never
I found one such example at a costume store in the San Fernando Valley in 2021. For an 531
example at an online store, see “Billy Bob Meth Teeth,” hockeypokeyshop.ca, accessed May 16,
2024, https://hokeypokeyshop.ca/billy-bob-meth-teeth. The impact of cultural representations
can also be random—just as many viewers were probably encouraged as discouraged to try
cocaine upon viewing Scarface (1983), for example.
“British Columbia to recriminalize use of drugs in public spaces,” CBC News, April 26, 2024. 532
Hart, Drug Use for Grown-Ups, 11, 45-46, 178. 533
229

rises in the first place. Frank finds that among the drug-using, predominantly white and middle
class gay and straight group sex participants of her study, the use of crack cocaine is virtually
absent, despite the prevalence of that drug in many lower class (and illegal but more commercial)
sexual cultures, which David Farber points to in the crack houses of cities like Atlanta and LA.534
Among gay men, it is possible that public health campaigns about meth or popular
documentaries such as Vice’s Chemsex (2015) have also had some impact, though in other
contexts educational anti-drug media can also boost the popularity of drug use, a testament to the
complexity and partial randomness of drug vogue. 535
It is equally possible that other, novel or less stigmatized synthetic drugs such as the
stimulant mephedrone (and its chemical analogues such as 3-MMC) or ketamine––now an
accepted and regulated therapeutic, usually at lower than recreational doses––have displaced
meth, which is not to negate the commonality of poly drug use. Powder cocaine, which maintains
a sheen of elite glamor and never seems to be damaged by stigma for too long, has made a
comeback in recent years as shifts in Colombian politics and economics have reduced prices.536
Cocaine is notoriously impure, especially given its price and the number of hands it must travel
through on the journey from Colombia to the United States, usually via Mexican cartels, and so it
534 Frank, Plays Well in Groups, 189; Farber, Crack, 101
America’s D.A.R.E. generation experienced their first awareness of the full drug cornucopia 535
in high school classrooms. At music festivals and other drug-laden events, D.A.R.E. t-shirts
jokingly worn by revelers are a common sight. For the ineffectiveness of D.A.R.E., see Lee V.
Gaines and Nicole Cohen, “'Just say no' didn't actually protect students from drugs. Here's what
could,” NPR, December 19, 2023. See the trailer for Chemsex, which features London’s late
David Stuart, a former meth user turned NHS therapist who introduced the term “chemsex,”
“CHEMSEX - Official Trailer (2015),” https://youtu.be/sZLqFHVnaMs?si=j8ce3Sjol3ajQnsp,
accessed May 16, 2024.
Nick Miroff, “American cocaine use is way up. Colombia’s coca boom might be why,” The 536
Washington Post, March 4, 2017.
230

functions as one avenue through which cheaper, stronger, and more stigmatized substances like
meth and fentanyl sometimes do make their way into the bodies of users who ordinarily only see
cocaine as acceptable, unaware of what they might actually be snorting. Tablets sold as MDMA,
moreover, such as ubiquitous “purple Teslas,” are often adulterated with or wholly made up of
cheaper substances like meth. Some users of synthetic drugs like MDMA who are wary of meth
or other adulterants use at-home test kits to determine composition—not a replacement for
laboratory assessment, but nonetheless an example of drug users implementing their own
procedures when no legitimate avenue exists to do so in order to reduce risk.537
Intentional, often problematic use of meth, of course, has not gone away in the gay
community—it remains an endemic phenomenon, even if it never reached the catastrophic
heights imagined by some in the 2000s, and has even declined in some quarters. Cultural 538
studies scholars such as Kane Race and João Florêncio argue that there exists a side of the
chemsex phenomenon neglected in approaches which stress harm reduction, addiction &
recovery, and punitive measures alike, one “life-affirming” and generative of “creative
experimentation with bodies, pleasures, and subjectivities.” Some users may find that this is 539
the case, but is it possible to accept both the potential upsides of some forms of recreational drug
use, while disposing of any delusion that certain drugs, such as crystal meth, are undeserving of
stigma, which has developed quite organically? Can these “life-affirming” properties be located
See products offered by DanceSafe, https://dancesafe.org/, accessed May 20, 2024. 537
Jim Mangia, “Gay Men Are Dying From a Crisis We’re Not Talking About,” The New York 538
Times, January 22, 2020.
João Florêncio, “Chemsex cultures: Subcultural reproduction and queer survival,” Sexualities, 539
26.5-6 (January 2021), 572-573; Kane Race, “The use of pleasure in harm reduction:
Perspectives from the history of sexuality,” International Journal of Drug Policy 19.5 (2008):
417-423.
231

in drugs which pose significantly less danger or can be regulated? As this dissertation has
frequently argued, spaces and communities organized around a collective sexual identity are
bound to incorporate collective pleasurable acts, including drug consumption. For gay men so
involved, navigating the potential risks and pleasures of an evermore technological era capable
of producing all sorts of synthetic drugs, whether entirely novel or just new iterations, remains a
core challenge.
232

Conclusion: Harm and Pleasure in the New Drug Era
If modern American gay history has been deeply implicated in questions of risk and
pleasure defined by the pursuit of sexual and often psychoactive ends, as this dissertation has
explored, then how might this history help us to understand contemporary struggles over drugs in
politics and society? From the perspective of 2024, the push towards comprehensive drug
legalization in the United States appears to have approached a wall, and at least two major and
related factors explain this terminus. Firstly, America’s housing and homelessness crisis, 540
infused with fentanyl and meth, has made the consequences of extreme poverty compounded by
drug-induced psychosis a daily sight in the streets and the media. Secondly, in the 2010s and
early 2020s many of the progressive activists and politicians dominant in America’s major cities
came to ignore certain unpleasant aspects of reality in service of imagined social justice ideals.
This error has often benefited their counterparts on the right, who have themselves fallen prey to
their own delusion in the form of a cult surpassing Christianity in political relevance. Many
voters will hesitate to tolerate politicians who accept large encampments and the consumption of
meth and fentanyl by their residents—some of them violent and disturbed—within reach of
schools, homes, and commercial streets. While this dissertation has certainly pointed to adverse
institutional practices enabled by the psychiatric profession earlier in the twentieth century, it has
also become painfully obvious that large numbers of people do, in fact, require non-voluntary but
See for example the second failed passage of psychedelic therapy legalization bill in 540
California, or the rollback of public drug use policies referenced in chapter five, Tran Nguyen
and Sophie Austin, “Psychedelic therapy and workers’ rights bills fail to advance in California’s
tough budget year,” KTLA, May 16, 2024, https://ktla.com/news/politics/ap-politics/appsychedelic-therapy-and-workers-rights-bills-fail-to-advance-in-californias-tough-budget-year/,
accessed May 23, 2024.
233

humane institutional care. The psychiatric deinstitutionalization of the late twentieth century,
initiated from actors across the political spectrum but now maintained primarily by the left, was
an overcorrection not unlike police and prison abolitionism. Scholars would be well advised to
temper the overreach that has delegitimized the academy in the eyes of millions of Americans
while nourishing extreme policies.
On the other side of the contemporary drug debate lies the acceptance of the medical
utility of softer drugs like MDMA and psilocybin, which have been recreational staples for
decades. The Trump and Biden administrations have not attempted to reverse the FDA’s
willingness to grant new legal research amidst what has been excitedly termed a “psychedelic
renaissance.” Researchers continue to make progress in demonstrating the utility of these 541
substances, though some have raised the alarm over inherent difficulties in standard phased
clinical trials, not least the impossibility of placebo. This novel area of experimentation is 542
surely jeopardized by association with urban crime and the excesses of progressive drug policy,
yet it may badly be needed in a troubled mental health landscape. Regulated institutional
settings, moreover, are liable to the limitations, bureaucratic oversights, and prejudices of current
expertise. The use of psychedelic drugs in the outside world poses undeniable risks, but deep
social relationships and organic culture––the “set and setting” key to the psychedelic
experience––are at the same time difficult to replicate in a professional context.
MAPS and its Founder Rick Doblin have spearheaded this “psychedelic renaissance,” and are 541
leading funders and organizers of research, trials, and legal therapy, see Multidisciplinary
Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), https://maps.org/.
David Ovalle and Daniel Gilbert, “Agony over ecstasy: FDA bid shows it’s hard to test 542
psychedelics,” The Washington Post, April 27, 2024.
234

Regulation, at the same time, is the only pathway towards accurately calibrating dosage
and eliminating the presence of more dangerous contaminants in drugs. In states that lack a
regulated cannabis market, fentanyl has begun to appear in black market weed. The federal 543
government has moved to reschedule cannabis, though stopped short of giving the green light to
state level recreational legalization, adjusting the drug’s status to having “some medicinal value
and [a] lower potential for abuse.” It has also indicated increasing financial support for drug 544
testing and other harm reduction strategies in communities effected by the abuse of meth and
fentanyl. This represents a dramatic reversal from the politics of the early 2000s, when 545
bipartisan legislation attempted to stop the testing of drugs for purity at music festivals, LGBT
Centers, and other venues, no doubt leading to needless deaths. Ever-more dangerous synthetic 546
substances, such as fentanyl, are meanwhile easier than ever to produce and obtain, and every
year contaminate more of the illicit drug supply. For the moment, the “new drug era,” a change
in course from the strictest years of the War on Drugs, poses as many new opportunities as it
does threats. While there have been marked shifts in popular attitudes, law, and policy towards
different drugs, this is fragile, and genuine gains are jeopardized by the continued perception that
The same could occur in the still thriving black market for weed in states that have legalized, 543
but at least consumers can make safer decisions in legal states, see “Fentanyl-laced marijuana
found during drug arrest in North Austin: APD,” FOX 7 Austin, May 6, 2024.
Eileen Sullivan, “The U.S. Is Easing Marijuana Restrictions. Here’s How It Works.,” The New 544
York Times, May 16, 2024.
Abby Goodnough, “Helping Drug Users Survive, Not Abstain: ‘Harm Reduction’ Gains 545
Federal Support,” The New York Times, June 27, 2021.
An earlier form of the Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act (2003) was termed the RAVE Act. 546
Tammy L. Anderson, “Molly Deaths and the Failed War on Drugs,” Contexts: Sociology for the
Public (Fall 2014), https://contexts.org/articles/molly-deaths-and-the-failed-war-on-drugs/.
235

progressive activists, medical workers, and lawmakers have gone too far at the cost of overall
public safety.
As examined in chapter one, there is a tendency to blame drug use––all drug use––on
“escapism,” however that nebulous concept is defined, necessitated by deep trauma, probably
caused by strange and horrible events that occurred during childhood, or the scars of a more
present misery. According to this view, quests for exotic, peak experiences of pleasure are futile
attempts to heal a damaged soul, and actually acts of self-harm. While such a paradigm can
sometimes have its merits, particularly with regard to harder drugs, this dissertation has also
pointed the way to a more nuanced conception of the role of drugs in urban gay culture. Experts
charged with granting medical legitimacy will always struggle to take into account the
unquantifiable experiences of pleasure and social cohesion. But to echo Kane Race, clinicians
studying the utility of softer drugs while locked away in sterile fluorescent may want to consider
the ways gay men have been using these substances in discos, parties, and clubs for decades.547
Whatever the problems of the modern gay community’s more hedonistic circles, in no other
place can one find such a strong connection between the desire to make love with other males
and the search for chemically altered states. In a world perpetually marred by male violence and
hurtling towards World War Three, perhaps this is not such a terrible thing.
Race, “A Lifetime of Drugs,” 109-110. 547
236

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract The twentieth century saw the development of modern concepts of homosexuality and drug addiction, as well as the genesis of a gay subculture in the United States which became concentrated in major cities. Using a range of sources including medical and psychiatric literature, interviews with drug users, activist texts, newspapers, gay periodicals, memoirs, novels, and visual media, my dissertation charts the relationship between recreational drug use and modern gay male culture. I argue that the relationship between psychoactive drugs and sexuality has put a contest between pleasure and risk at the center of urban gay culture in the United States, profoundly shaping communities united by the pursuit of sexual desire and freedom. I explore the connections experts drew between substance addiction and the “addiction” of homosexuality among their incarcerated and clinical patients. Some psychiatrists used the potent psychedelic LSD to “correct” the psyches of homosexual patients. During the gay ‘golden age’ of the disco-fueled 1970s, recreational drugs were celebrated as many gay men shared hedonistic experiences in America’s metropolises. This culture was devastated by the AIDS epidemic, and many speculated about the relationship between the illness and drug use. The rising popularity of methamphetamine and other synthetic drugs by the 1990s ushered in new thrills and challenges debated and studied by gay writers and treatment professionals into the twenty-first century. Foregrounding timeless questions of pleasure, experience, community, and care, looking at gay history with psychoactive goggles permits completely fresh interpretations of the highs and lows of this contentious past.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Miller, John Stuart (author)

Core Title Deviants and dope: psychoactive drugs, the construction of sexual pathology, and gay culture in the United States, 1922-2000

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program History

Degree Conferral Date 2024-08

Publication Date 08/13/2024

Defense Date 08/08/2024

Publisher Los Angeles, California (original), University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag cannabis,cocaine,Drugs,Gay culture,Gay men,HIV/AIDS,LSD,methamphetamine,partying,poppers,quaaludes

Format theses (aat)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Echols, Alice (committee chair), Church, Terry David (committee member), Kunzel, Regina (committee member), Lerner, Paul (committee member), Velmet, Aro (committee member)

Creator Email johnsmil@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC113998TFL

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Legacy Identifier etd-MillerJohn-13381

Document Type Dissertation

Format theses (aat)

Rights Miller, John Stuart

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