Aggressor, Victim, Agent, or "Horny Meth Gay"?: Narratives of Party and Play and their Impact on Conceptions of Health


Nic Kuzmochka, Dalhousie University

Party and Play (PnP), also commonly referred to as Chemsex, is a practice most commmon among men who have sex with men (MSM) where individuals engaging in sex use drugs with the intention of enhancing their sexual experiences. The substances most involved include crystal methamphetamine (crystal meth), gamma-hydroxybutyrate (GHB), and ketamine, with crystal meth being by far the most common (Bourne et al., 2014). Studies of PnP have been primarily characterized by analysis of it as a risky sex behaviour, especially considering increased rates of HIV/AIDS transmission among PnPing men (Prestage et al., 2015 Sewell et al., 2017; Souleymanov et alk., 2019; Tomkins et al., 2019), with some focusing on how PnP facilitates the growth of social networks and connections among MSM and interacts with broader facets of queer culture (Power et al., 2018; Race, 2011; 2015). What has remained relatively unexamined, however, is exactly how queer men both within and outside the scene talk about and conceptualize PnP as a cultural behaviour. This approach, which centres Weber’s (1978) interpretive frame, allows for an understanding of how PnP fits into a broader range of queer behaviours and attitudes in the current cultural landscape. I chose to explore this question using two publicly accessible sources of data. The first data set includes five reddit threads containing more than 600 comments posted in queer-centered groups that included significant discussion of PnP as a behaviour and included comments in support of, decrying, and relaying experiences with PnP. The second is a collection of eleven short interviews with men who currently or have previously engaged in PnP discussing their experiences published by the Men’s Sexual Health Alliance (GMSH). While these interviews do center a harm reduction approach, they include a range of current users and those who have left use behind, considering it harmful, and a variety of perspectives to those who see significant benefits to those who regret their participation. Through this review I find that PnP is a site of considerable conflict among queer men, with conversations of the practice dominated by condemnation not just of it as a risky behaviour but of individuals who choose to engage with it. Three common narratives of PnPers emerged from this data: aggressor, agent, and victim. Narratives from non-PnPers generally considered them to be of poor moral character and potentially dangerous to other queer men or considered them to be victims of a totalizing addiction stemming from the substances themselves and a culture of promiscuity and risky behaviour. This is contrasted by narratives from PnPers themselves that centered agency, personal responsibility, and characterized harm as often stemming from stigma surrounding their behaviour. As such, I argue that, among gay men, narratives of health are being weaponized against PnPers, considering their risky behaviour to be endemic of poor character, obscuring cultural processes of PnP, and potentially enhancing the risks of PnP itself. This work is deeply reflective of how narratives that are generally positive such as ‘take care of your body’ and ‘don’t engage in risky behaviours’ can become weaponized into forces of exclusion that may do as much or more harm than practices themselves. This is especially important within communities of queer men, where the spectre of the HIV/AIDS epidemic colours conceptions of health and risk and establishes strict links between community belonging and health. In order to combat hate, health narratives must rely instead on discussions of agency and choice and decenter narratives of health based stigma.

This paper will be presented at the following session: