If five years ago I was to predict where I would be on Sunday the 20th of July 2014, I would not have guessed my current situation. Sixteen year old me would have aspired to be waking up next to the love of my life, getting up, making pancakes and walking around London, my new home. While I have moved to London and mastered the art of breakfast, the love of my life I’ve woken up to isn’t a beautiful man, it is a baggie of drugs.
When parents worry that moving to the big city will turn their lovely suburban babies into quivering heroin addicts, they are usually wrong. Scaremongering Daily Mail journalists and vicious rumours circulating among the mums leave them thinking that this is the city with two dealers on every corner. In reality, they have nothing to worry about, unless they have a gay son.
It all started for me about a year and a half ago, when my own worried suburban parents gave me the best Christmas present ever: an iPhone. Immediately upon returning to London, I downloaded Grindr and made up for years of teenage awkwardness by sleeping with about 10 men in a week. Suddenly, I was pretty and popular; this magic orange app had made me a sexual being. After years of feeling inadequate and ugly, here was my chance to live my secret dream of being Samantha Jones.
However, like the Selfridges Boxing Day sale, things quickly spiralled out of control. I got into the habit of sleeping with older men, you could practically smell the daddy issues on me. A couple of weeks in, I went to this guy’s apartment. He was an investment banker for UBS, so my sugar daddy senses were tingling. I went over there wanting rough sex and maybe someone to buy me a Kenzo sweatshirt; all I left with was a taste for mephedrone. I’d dipped my toe in the pool of drugs and the water was just perfect, if you could ignore the body floating face down in the shallow end.
Mephedrone, otherwise known as mkat, meow or confusingly ‘meph’ (not meth) used to be legal and available to buy over the internet in the mid to late 00’s. My hometown in rural England was for a while the world centre of this legal high. My earliest memory of it is at a house party with someone doing a line of it off my mum’s Michael Buble CD. Cringe. Since illegalisation in 2009 it’s gone on to be a £20 a gram class B substance that gets gay men across London ready to party. The high is like MDMA meets cocaine: you’ll dance all night, fall in love with someone, and then want to talk about it endlessly. Other substances that often come up are horse tranquilliser Ketamine and G (GHB/GBL) a liquid used to remove graffiti from concrete. The former brings on waves of hallucinogenic looseness, the latter is taken by the millilitre, mixed with Fanta, and makes the user messily lethargic and very horny.
The investment banker introduced me to not just these drugs, but a whole world of gay activities that I didn’t know existed. He introduced me to Vauxhall, the Disneyland of gay clubbing. It’s very much the stereotypical image of gay clubs, with sweaty naked men dancing on podiums until midday. It was amazing, even though I’d lived in London for a year and a half I’d never seen anything like it. My inner country boy was dazzled, and totally in awe. Life had never seemed so fabulous.
The thing with mephedrone is that it’s hopelessly addictive. Not in the sense of heroin, where you need to feel it every day, but addictive in the style of Pringles. Once you pop, you just can’t stop. I could easily do lines of it straight for three days without sleeping, always chasing just that little bit more. This plays well into the Vauxhall mentality, where clubs are truly 24 hour. Promoter Orange Nation times the parties so that as one ends, another swiftly begins. If you have enough drugs, money and will to party, it’s perfectly possible to go out on Thursday night and come home on Monday morning.
This plays into the phenomenon that is the gay ‘chill out’. The formula for the chill out (or party) is simple. An older gay guy with a good dealer will stock up on drugs, invite his friends and let the good times roll. The party always grows, as Grindr is used to recruit ranks of drunk and horny men who want group sex and chemical happiness. This was how I was conscripted into the army of skanks.
After nearly a year of flings with thirty year olds, occasional weekends in Fire and infrequent drug use, I got the party bug. Like a bad case of herpes, once I had the urge to ‘chill’ it was nigh on impossible to shake. After a night with my straight girls at Farringdon’s MDMA-alicious club Fabric, I showed up at one of these seedy affairs and life took another downward turn. I remember the evening vividly. My best fag hag had thought it would be a good idea to climb St Paul’s Cathedral in her drugged out state, so after spending 35 minutes talking her down off a five hundred year old ledge I was keen for the good times to roll again. Angrily, I arrived at the party. The first guy I saw ended up being my boyfriend for the next two months. He was the loveliest ex-convict I’d ever met; the time he’d spent in Wormwood Scrubs the year before for dealing cocaine had really made him such a people person. It was every middle class mother’s worst nightmare: baby boy leaves home and gets sodomised by council estate fodder. I was at his place every weekend, doing drugs for days with his skanky gay friends. Eventually, he had to move to the Midlands (shudder) for suspect reasons that were never fully disclosed. It seemed my life of all weekend partying had reached a natural end. The normal, well adjusted person would take the hint, stop doing drugs and calm the fuck down.
Suffice to say, this is not what happened.
I stayed friends with his flatmates, and continued my spree of drug fuelled weekends. A spree turned into a regular habit, which in turn became a lifestyle. Their flat was the after party destination of East London, where the night never seemed to end. A drug den within a new build magnolia walled flat, the place has become a second home, and its occupants are now good friends. While they look out for me, care about my well being, will always keep me safe and like me for who I am, I only ever see them when I’m high. The only thing we have in common is drugs. The alpha male has become a father figure to me, offering the support advice and bonding that my own dad couldn’t fully give to a gay son, which is comforting but fundamentally flawed.
Without a boyfriend in tow, I was free to pursue full blown debauchery. Now I could easily list ‘Orgy Management’ on the special skills section of my CV. Group sex quickly became my forte, as I could apply my talent for multitasking. At the time of writing, I estimate that I’ve slept with around fifty men, of which forty have been since this saga began. Five years ago I may have wanted to be this sexually experienced, Samantha Jones inspired figure of slutdom, but now that I’m here it’s not really all that.
Because, where partying and sex lead, HIV follows. Whilst 95% of the men at chill out parties will thankfully only have safe sex, there’s always a few assholes that slip through the net. Early on in my partying career, I made the mistake of having mindblowingly good, unprotected banging with a very hot guy. I later saw him shooting up at a party (thankfully a rare sight), which sparked a fire of fear inside me; Intravenous drugs and HIV are closely related. Although I play safe, there are times when you’re just too high to remember that condoms exist.
This is a depressingly real danger. Last year, I had a HIV scare. My blood test came back positive, then a second test to confirm came back negative. It had never been seen before. The smart and compassionate gay Australian doctor at the switched on Central London clinic I visit said my chances weren’t great. It was a total unknown. Not helped by the gripping, dark, three day comedowns from mephedrone, I was severely depressed for the two weeks while I waited for secondary blood test results. Luckily, I escaped HIV free, but am left with a crippling fear of STI clinics.
This lifestyle affects every aspect of your life – work, friends, family, education, relationships – everything changes and becomes strained. Whilst I kept up with uni well enough (a fashion/media degree isn’t massively taxing) my part time job became hell on earth. The trendy clothing store on London’s Oxford Street where I worked became just ‘that place I go when I’m on a comedown’. Luckily, the tourist clientele and overworked managers would never catch on that I had been snorting lines off a naked man just a few hours before my shift. I would occasionally have a cry in a cupboard filled with mannequins, as the bleak reality of my situation consumed every thought.
The comedowns really are the very worst part of this toxic lifestyle. The aftermath of spending one day high as a kite, I would feel physically drained for another, and mentally unbalanced for another two after that. The sadness lasts out because, put simply, your body has a limited amount of happy chemicals and being high will use them all up fairly quickly. As the weeks went on, the residual emptiness blurs into an all consuming dark cloud of negativity. The only thing to bring you out of it is more drugs.
Additionally, my finances have taken a beating to support an expensive party life. A student loan isn’t designed to factor in a drug habit, and a shitty McJob in retail does very little in the way of income once the daily bread is bought. My lack of self control is evident in that my student overdraft was maxed out long before all this began. Subsequently, I am now the proud owner of two credit cards, that my aforementioned long suffering suburban parents may have to eventually have to bail me out of. In addition to my two children (Lloyds Credit and Barclaycard), I have resorted to escort work to make money. While this should bum me out (if you’ll excuse the pun), the fact is that now I can have mechanical sex with pretty much anyone. Being paid £100 an hour doesn’t hurt either.
So, after a week of feeling blue, by the weekend I’d be desperate for another night of wild fun to pick myself up again. The amount of men caught in this cycle is underestimated. As time went on, it became ever more clear that this issue affects gay men quite specifically. Our amount of drug abuse is much more than among the straight population. Within young, urban social circles it could be described as rife. Now I know what mephedrone smells like, I’ve realised that the toilets of a lot of clubs reek of it. Similarly, saunas are hotbeds of drug use, combining the love of a high with casual sex. In London especially there are a lot of saunas, with infamous chain Chariots operating multiple locations across the capital. Like Starbucks, except with less coffee and more penises.
There seems to be an issue within ourselves, something that drives us to live this life. While today’s Britain is often called the world’s most accepting country for gays, backed up by a shitload of research, there is still the feeling that around the world we are discriminated against or looked down upon. And whilst here in Europe the LGBT community has got it pretty good, this wasn’t always so. I remember my 1990s upbringing being particularly unfriendly to gays, and myself and many others like me were bullied as a result. These factors contribute to a feeling of persecution and inadequacy, which arguably leads to the deep seated need for escape and an untarnished feeling of a happiness. We all want to feel accepted and loved by all, in spite of what a cruel and judgmental world thinks of us. A quick and easy fix for these problematic societal issues has been to absorb oneself in quick, sexual closeness and to numb the negativity with drugs.
I’ve realised now that mephedrone, and its friends G and K, are doing me no long term good. Aside from being harmful physically, my mental state feels fragile and I don’t like the person I have become. Now it’s the time to find someone who cares for me, and will make me feel as blissfully happy and accepted as drugs do. That someone to wake up next to on a Sunday morning and make pancakes for. It won’t be easy, but it’s time to get to know myself and find inner peace. To quote RuPaul “if you don’t love yourself, how the hell are you going to love somebody else?”
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