Poppers, gay subculture, and queer futures

Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures

Author: Adam Zmith

Publisher: Repeater Books

Pages:191

Price: Rs 1,121

The measurement 16.97056274847714 metres is the length of the diagonal in the gymnastics floor event. In March 2020, in a London exhibition, a white strip of the same length was spread across its space. Visitors were stumped by the entry of a hairy Arab, wearing a red leotard “adorned with glistening rhinestones” navigating the length of that strip. They were unaware that the performance artiste Luis Amália was presenting his piece “16.97056274847714”.

Adam Zmith, author of Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures, takes this performance as a conduit to communicate that Mr Amália’s “act of performing these moves on his line” is a queer attitude, with which one can begin to look into the history of poppers because in it one “finds dozens of characters like Amália: Different, daring, difficult.”

An abundantly wholesome and one-of-its-kind text on poppers Deep Sniff speaks to Mr Zmith’s immense scholarship. Interrupted only by personal stories, his narrative history of poppers can be taken back to 1867, a landmark year, as before that “there was nothing gay about amyl nitrite.”

He offers two “unconnected works”: Thomas Lauder Brunton’s 1867 paper “On the use of nitrite of amyl in angina pectoris” — signalling increased popularity and interest in research involving amyl nitrite — and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ arguments against sodomy laws at a conference in Munich, where Ulrichs became the first person in documented history to “come out” publicly (even the word “homosexual” would be coined two years later.)

According to Mr Zmith, both hint towards “a queer future that neither man imagined.” Though “Victorian researchers made no mention of sexual arousal,” a century later amyl nitrite in little brown bottles was being sold and played an instrumental role in the formation of a homo-masculine identity. One Roland Chemist in London, Mr Zmith writes, sold 185,700 ampoules of amyl nitrite between 1975 and 1976. This is an impressive statistic, yet Mr Zmith credits the increased popularity of poppers, which offers instant highs, to the US with this eulogy: “Poppers, like man, were made in the USA.”

In the US, poppers were marketed “aggressively” and especially for the gay demographics by using brand names like “Hulk, Black Tiger, Fist, Iron Horse.” He credits a lesser-known Fonda, Howard Breese Fonda (1896), who began selling amyl nitrite in inhalers — a first back then. (As of June 2021, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has discouraged the use of such “products [that] are marketed as nail polish removers but are being ingested and inhaled for recreational use.”

The excitement and euphoria around poppers were unreal and unmatched and remain so. Mr Zmith efficiently translates the nature of the high in short chapters, each discussing unique and sometimes exciting subjects like popperbantors, with tantalising titles. In one such chapter, he mentions poet Ian Young: “Some disco clubs would … spray the dance floor with poppers fumes.” Mr Young saw poppers as “a staple of ghetto life, promoted almost exclusively through the commercial gay magazines and gathering-places.” This is something that a sexual health activist, Steve Spencer, in a 2019 VICE video, echoes, too.

Showing a bottle of Rush, a popular popper brand, to the camera, Mr Spencer chuckles saying that “amyl (nitrite) is fantastic for butt stuff” because of its muscle-relaxant quality. With a bottle tattoo on his chest, Mr Spencer has also paid “homage to my community because I know it brings people together.” Mr Zmith, however, hesitates to fully credit poppers for this organic formation of gay identity. Much of it is due to capitalism.

In a way, poppers foreshadowed the AIDS epidemic. “In 1981, many of the men who lived in this way began to die, fast and horribly … the dream that gay sex was a valid way to live [turned] into a nightmare. Suddenly, it was a way to die,” Mr Zmith writes. He feels queer futures are tied to them. The adverts that “idealised and sexualised male bodies,” helped create a gay identity, making it “possible to express this as a legal category in order for certain humans to have their rights respected.”

But these categories — like “gay” and “man” — are mere “projections” that help “explain” oneself to the world and are becoming obsolete now. There awaits a “future without boundaries.” 

Mr Zmith cites a transwoman and filmmaker Drew Gregory, who desires to “live in a world without dysphoria,” “to inhale chemicals out of a bottle,” to experience “those forty-five seconds when it all feels possible,” and to float with their nonbinary body like Mr Amália did, to demonstrate that queer utopia is possible. Even though this possibility may last only for “forty-five seconds” — a measurement again —yet it’ll free queer people and such a future will be open.

The reviewer is a queer writer based in Delhi. Instagram/Twitter: @writerly_life