Few drugs are more intimately — or more controversially — bound to queer life than poppers. I first encountered them during a night out at the Brooklyn lesbian bar Ginger’s, when the sudden appearance of a small brown bottle, tentatively held beneath my left nostril, eliceted a moment of unmistakable giddiness and clarity. (It’s worth noting here that poppers, like any drug, have potential side effects and should be used with caution.) Ever since, the substance has proven surprising in its ability to loosen my body’s inhibitions, adding newfound pleasures on the dancefloor, or wherever else I might find myself.
Despite a 1978 Time Magazine article noting their use among a small subset of “avant-garde heterosexuals,” the chemical (amyl nitrite and its various offshoots) is typically associated with queer people, especially gay men. Since their widespread adoption in gay circles in the mid-20th century, poppers have become a quintessential facet of gay nightlife and sexual pleasure — small bursts of chemical ecstasy that have retained a murky legality in the US and UK, despite being (dubiously) tied to the HIV/AIDS crisis.
In his book-length exploration of the substance, Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures, out now from Repeater Books, British writer Adam Zmith explores the role of poppers in commercializing gay identity, spurring HIV/AIDS fears, and tightening the straightjacket of hyper-macho gay masculinity — an experience Zmith himself has wrestled with for much of his life.
Zmith is a natural fit to narrate the drug’s complicated legacy. As co-host of The Log Books, a podcast that explores queer British history, his work has long considered how unearthing forgotten LGBTQ+ histories can reveal new possibilities for the queers of today and tomorrow. Taking this archival approach to the legacy of poppers, Zmith seeks to use the substance as a historical prism through which we can “sniff out the multitudes contained in that word [queer].” More than just a survey of the past, Zmith’s text aims to employ queer history to help imagine new spaces where all of us can feel the rush of freedom and pleasure approximated (momentarily) by drugs like poppers.
Though Zmith critiques poppers’ ties to narrow visions of gay masculinity, elsewhere in the text his attention turns to their utopic potential, most notably depicted in Leo Herrera’s 2020 film, The Fathers Project. An alternate historical drama in which the AIDS crisis never happened, Herrera’s work recasts poppers as an STI-protecting drug distributed in crowded gay clubs. Still, Zmith takes issue with how even within Herrera’s reimagined timeline, the world is improved solely for hyper-macho gay men. “Herrera wanted to build queer utopia, and he managed to remove the poison of disease from it – but he made no progress on opening up the future to different bodies,” he writes.
To learn more about poppers’ past and future, them. caught up with Zmith from his London flat, where we discussed popper’s contradictory status as industrial substance and consumer product, struggling with nostalgic images of past gay life, and the drug’s ability to aid in envisioning queer utopia.
In Deep Sniff, you trace the sometimes-contradictory position of poppers as both a chemical substance, as well as their status as a commercial product. What led to the strange marketing of poppers, particularly their relationship to macho gay masculinity?
Well, I don't come from a business background — I've never made and marketed a product, never studied business or economics or anything like that. Poppers became a part of gay culture and gay art through posters and advertising. Here, I'm using “gay” specifically as a restrictive category, because that's what the demographic for this activity was, especially in the ‘70s when we saw those adverts emerge. The fact that there was this expression of gay feeling and gay experience in our culture, and that the materiality of that in arts culture, and that all of this was put to the services of selling a product, is probably the most patriotic American thing.
What’s more, it interested me how you could take the feeling of a growing community of marginalized people, people who found power in each other in concentrated places like San Francisco and New York, and then take that experience and commodify it to sell a product to them. It’s not a thing I would think of doing as a member of that community. But it does raise the question: What the hell is sexuality or sexual orientation or identity? We feel these things in our bodies, they're very real to us, and yet they're also extremely abstract. The fact that that [experience] can be commodified in a material object was so interesting to me.
You have lots of thoughts about The Father’s Project, and its reimagined past in which AIDS didn’t take millions of lives. What made the project so complicated for you?
I know I give it a bad ride in the book, but you can enjoy something while pointing out its flaws. I was disappointed to see it imagining things like autonomous LGBTQ+ communities or queer utopias, but it was so focused on one particular body type and experience. Even within that category of gay men, they were extremely narrow representations — I don't have the body they were showing, I’m two feet smaller than any of those guys, and I don't even have one ab, like any of the guys in the film. It’s something that bugs me about showing things in queer nightlife spaces, a problem we have within the community of inclusivity. Still, I loved that idea of poppers being used as a vehicle for STI prevention. It's always fun to imagine new uses for old products, and as an old product poppers has constantly reinvented itself over the past century and a half. I can see why the makers of The Fathers Project ran with the idea that poppers could be used as a vehicle for STI-preventative substances. The beauty of sci-fi like that is that it allows us to imagine a better future, in this case certainly a more convenient future, through this use.
In the book, you suggest that poppers point towards more hopeful, utopian futures, loosening people up in the way towards finding both their identities and communities more effectively. Given that, what does queer utopia look like for you?
I try not to think of it as a concrete, specific thing. If a book or movie is trying to imagine a queer utopia based on things that we should have — equal rights, free trans healthcare, same-sex or consensual multi-partner marriage, stuff that seems completely fantastical to some people — I think that's missing the point of what the exercise of imagining utopia is about. For me, it's way more futuristic and less concrete, and there's a value in dreaming big. And for me, that dream, the way that I ended up doing that in the book is just thinking about it as a kind of a posture, a way of moving through the world for us as queer people. There’s this way of moving through the world beyond things like shame and stigma and viruses and bacteria, and nostalgia as well. I’m asking readers to think a bit differently about how to move into the future — it's never about moving to a specific destination.
How do poppers specifically fit into your vision of seeking utopia?
After I set about writing a book about poppers, I found myself thinking hard about what they do and what they mean, beyond the purely medical and sexual. I realized that because sniffing poppers relaxes us and reduces some of our inhibitions about sex, that this puts us on a footing to think about who we might become. I'm always thinking about the future and how we approach it. I find the challenge of “utopian thinking” often to be useful in that regard. So that's how I came to think that sniffing poppers opens up our bodies and minds to ways of dreaming about what's possible. For me, that isn't only specific concrete policy goals, but also the less concrete thing of living more without the inhibitions that hold us all back.
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