In 1978, the poppers industry was worth an estimated $50 million, a figure that Wilson and Lauritsen teased may have “doubled or tripled” by the time they published in 1986. Hank Wilson and John Lauritsen co-authored “Death Rush,” a book detailing what they believed to be unequivocal evidence of the link between poppers and AIDS, and supposedly damning information about their manufacturers. Still, a poppers hysteria rippled throughout the U.S., and some prominent AIDS activists fervently supported a ban on alkyl nitrites. About a year later, most AIDS researchers had discounted this theory. However, the study didn’t look at the physiological pathways that would may have connected them-its results were based on correlations found within a survey of patients. In 1985, a study linked poppers to Kaposi’s sarcoma, one of the most common infections in AIDS patients. It would take another year for scientists to identify HIV as the cause, and more than a decade to trace the virus back to its animal origins.īut during the days when AIDS was still a terrifying and fast-killing mystery without any real treatment, one potentail link stuck out: Nearly all queer men dying from the disease had used poppers at some point. In 1982, the CDC called the disease “acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS)” for the first time, but how it spread or where it came from remained a mystery. Doctors scrambled to figure out what was causing these young, previously healthy patients’ immune systems to collapse. Starting as early as the late 70s, rare and mysterious infections afflicted large numbers of people-mostly queer men-in cities across America. The tide started to turn on poppers in the early 80s, when the AIDS crisis began to take hold of queer communities across the globe. Some publications ran full-page ads from poppers manufacturers themselves: Tom of Finland-esque drawings of buff, shirtless men riding motorcycles or swinging at each other in boxing rings told readers that all they had to do was sniff a bottle of Rush or Bolt to become Adonis.
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Nearby, in the classifieds, entries advertised mail order poppers.
SEXY GAY MEN CAUGHT AT CLUBS CODE
Personal ads contained code words for sexual preferences: One of those words was “aroma,” which referred to poppers. “People routinely talk about telling very intimate details of their lives and having very deep conversations with people they barely know, because they did drugs together or had sex in the same space,” Orne says.įlip through archives of LGBTQ weeklies from the 70s and 80s, and you can tell that poppers were part of queer hookup culture long before the digital age. It happens during religious experiences, concerts, sporting events, and, yes, at gay bars-and Orne says it helps create bonds between complete strangers. These bottles helped disco-goers achieve a type of “collective effervescence,” a sociological term for when a group of people come out of themselves together. So I think they pair together really well,” he says. “Poppers, in a way, mimics physiologically this social experience that people have. Orne calls this phenomenon “naked intimacy,” when people in sexually-charged spaces like discos feel more connected to each other, especially when having drug-fueled out-of-body experiences.
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There’s also social bonding that results from communal spaces like dance floors. Exhausted of all options, and suspecting that an overly-tense artery caused the angina, Brunton put several drops of amyl nitrite onto a cloth and had the patient inhale it.
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From bloodletting to brandy, agents typically used to ease that anguish weren’t helping. One of the most common symptoms of cardiac disease, angina pectoris is chest pain that occurs when the heart muscle is starved of blood. At the start of his career as a physician, while making his rounds at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary on a cold December night, he noticed a patient whose bouts of angina pectoris were concerningly severe, frequent, and long-lasting. Three years later, Scottish physician Sir Thomas Lauder Brunton brought together all prior research on amyl nitrite and outlined the compound’s medical applications. In 1864, he was the first to theorize that the chemical caused vasodilation.
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British physiologist Benjamin Ward Richardson believed no other known substance at the time produced such a profound effect on the heart, and even passed around samples of amyl nitrite at a medical conference so his audience could try it for themselves.