What Chemsex Tells Us About AIDS, Love, Death (2017)

Chemsex. Why consume drugs for sex? There is nothing new about using psychoactive substances to lower inhibitions, enhance performance, improve pleasure, or simply make it possible. Drinking alcohol, smoking weed, taking Viagra, and eating aphrodisiacs are known to be part of the sexual habits of many people; it does not need to be a majority to be significant. We are aware of these historical and current possibilities.

Chemsex among gay men, however, does not quite meet these same criteria, nor can it be explained by these overly superficial reasons. The consumption of certain substances in a sexual context, sometimes intravenously (slam), does not solely reflect the conquest of a new sexual territory and its innovative pleasures. Nor is it merely the pursuit of individual or communal sexual performance by gay men, who are encouraged by their identity to push the boundaries of known sexual practices ever further, so as not to fail their reputation as “sexually liberated.” These “reasons” would be very flimsy and insufficient, and also malicious. Based on current clinical experience, and even if it still seems difficult to gain acceptance for certain explanatory and interpretive elements useful for the discussion, chemsex among gay men tells us at least two things: an attempt to subvert jouissance, and the persistence of the traumatic legacy of AIDS. Let us begin with the more visible one and see how the second (and older) supports it.

Under the influence of drugs, the ordinary qualities of sexual coitus are redefined in both substance and form. The jouissance that usually permeates the body is no longer circumscribed by known subjective limits; it is emancipated, expands, and reforms, thus temporarily opening up to a radically new subjective experience. The sexual experience is profound, definitive, supernatural. But every ecstasy corresponds to a field of possibilities that always encounters the limits of life; this was true for Saint Teresa of Ávila and remains true for anyone. If the risks taken are too great, the experience can be cut short, injure, harm, or kill.

This reformed jouissance, for the duration of a psychotropic effect, frees itself from the limits of orgasm, and its effects are redefined, often downgraded given the difficulty of achieving what usually concludes sexual encounters. This opens up sexual exchange to a new space, to new horizons that often benefit from a dilation of time as well. Jouissance changes place and moment; the resulting destabilization attracts, makes one waver, troubles for better or worse. It is at this cost and by this power that the diversion of jouissance partially operates. Not without being supported by a decisive transgression applied through the imaginary walls distinguishing life from death. Playing with jouissance is a game on the limit of what lives, and thus what dies. From an avoided “petite mort,” it is with the other, the inevitable, that a non-dialogue emerges about the inaccessible. Sex, here, is not far from joining the absolute. Such is jouissance, such is sex, which always lead us to explore our points of origin and our vanishing points. When you think about it: what a project!

Why this initiative on the part of gay men, today? For what reasons do they attempt to subvert jouissance at its most extreme? Because they, more than anyone else, know, even unconsciously, what the death of some establishes for all others, what the community for survivors and those who follow owes to the repressed dead and absent, which all cannot avoid, nor deny for too long, unless their bodies eventually bear its knowledge, its expression. This initiative stems from a sexual, identity-based, subjective necessity to process, with the body and affects, what AIDS has done.

AIDS is a name for an experience still little thought about, still unthinkable, which is beginning to yield its knowledge (the upcoming release of Robin Campillo’s film 120 BPM is an important step, as is Elisabeth Lebovici’s book What AIDS Did to Me), but often forgotten by everyone and by gay men themselves, because the horror of the epidemic is still current, in memories, in the unconscious, in desires and fantasies, in the present. The Real of AIDS, that which no word can grasp, has not yet begun to be defined; it was not yet possible. Only homage is possible, but it produces nothing more than the memorial consensus that needs to be surpassed. For Act Up-Paris, in its time, was founded on this Real: the unspeakable, the most inaccessible of human experience, the most unfathomable terror. (Thus, the term association is not quite suitable, nor even that of group, and certainly not movement). Act Up-Paris was above all, and forever, an experience of the impossible, according to what I encountered and lived there. The impossible that makes up the commonality of proletarian bodies. And today, it is an essential contribution to history for understanding chemsex, a current sexual issue.

One does not need to be an expert in Lacan’s arguments on the Real, or proletarian bodies, to grasp within oneself, each for oneself, what pertains to or depends on this limit beyond which no one dares to venture unless guided by an absolute necessity, even when survival is no longer a tangible or sufficient objective. The colossal strength drawn from this errant, faceless, formless state joins that of the cry, at the juncture of word and thing. Act Up-Paris was a limit experience of language, an inner experience. When even the death of God no longer provides support, what remains at its feet is the necessity of writing, the writing of oneself, that of words thrown onto banners in large letters, screamed towards Absence.

Then the urgency of the epidemic faded, and it could be sidestepped. The social stakes (equality of rights, representation, power, survival) took precedence over forgotten past imperatives that reappear, later, striking the bodies of subsequent generations. Time passes, what remains is represented memory and the violent expressions of denied knowledge that gay men experience today in unheard demonstrations.

Who can attempt to read what chemsex writes, in 2017, on the bodies of gay men about AIDS, love, death? If Act Up-Paris came into being on a day of great misfortune, gay men will know how to grasp the richness they carry within them, that which makes life more livable, even mortal. It is time. It is time for a new experience of speech to emerge that can transform into words the silent urgency rumbling in these bodies ignorant of their treasures, a speech that measures its own saying.

Vincent Bourseul