A dispatch on drugs and sex and partying.
I got my first hint that the drug culture in my new neighbourhood was different the first time I invited a man over.
It was your standard Grindr set-up: he was hot and nearby, and we were both free. His messages were somewhat muddled. He arrived about 20 minutes later than agreed, which was annoying, given that he appeared to be coming from a friend’s place a mere 100 metres away, but again, he was hot.
We chatted a bit, but we seemed to grasp at the very edges of one another’s meaning. The sex was lacking – he was clearly suffering from performance anxiety. We paused, and he asked if he could smoke.
Now, I’d just moved into a rented flat, and I wasn’t sure the landlords or my neighbours would take kindly to smoking on the premises. I asked whether he meant a cigarette or weed.
‘Tina?’ he said, sheepish.
Ah: well, if I wasn’t sure about smoking a cigarette in here, meth was probably right out.
Now I was the awkward one, bumbling that I’d prefer he didn’t, if that was okay by him. He didn’t push the matter. The energy was gone, and we decided to call it. He disappeared from Grindr not long afterward. He seemed sweet.
Drawn on the map by the A-roads linking Vauxhall, Oval and Stockwell stations, the Tina Triangle forms the core of what might be the gayest neighbourhood in London: the wider borough of Lambeth had the city’s highest proportion of LGBT residents in the 2021 census, and of a normal Sunday afternoon on Grindr, I counted 454 profiles that had been online in the past hour, and all within a kilometre of my flat.
The Triangle’s western edge doubles as a high street for Little Portugal, while its eastern corner takes on the young professional vibe of neighbouring Kennington. The interior – a jumble of elegant white-fronted townhouses and interwar council estates – is all newly peered over by the plastic skyscrapers of neighbouring Nine Elms.
The Tina Triangle is by no means a universally used phrase, even among those who partake, but all the local gays I spoke to recognised the idea of it. Log into the apps here, on any given day, and you’ll probably see at least a few profiles advertising themselves as H&H (high and horny) or looking to ‘chill’ – which means to hang out, do some drugs and have sex. As much about socialising as about desire, chillouts are often group affairs, usually taking place in someone’s flat and running as long as a few days.
The drugs involved – GHB, mephedrone and crystal meth – are collectively referred to as chems, but participants don’t tend to use the term chemsex. There’s no certain etymology for how Tina came to be slang for meth, but the most likely explanation seems that some gay user somewhere ironically feminised ‘crystal meth’ to ‘Christina’, everyone laughed, and it stuck.
That the gays here recognise the Triangle does not mean they approve of it. For every account seeking a H&H encounter, another two instruct high people to stay away. There is intense stigma around chemsex, and guys on the scene are not inclined to disclose their drug use to outsiders. But you can use Grindr for a lot more than just dick on demand, provided you’re polite and choose a cute pic.
Kyle, as I’m calling him, lived just outside the Triangle, which he’d known since he moved here more than a decade ago as the ‘GGT’ – the Grindr Golden Triangle. When I arrived at his home he very generously offered me a line or a spliff, but I demurred for work purposes.
Kyle’s living room was rammed with eye-catching details: a bust of Ronald Reagan, a pop art Lenin print, a framed copy of the Newsweek cover prepared for the election of Hillary Clinton. Atop a bookcase housing biographies of Margaret Thatcher and Daily Mail founder Lord Northcliffe sat a disembodied mannequin crotch, modelling some Aussiebum underwear. Kyle had a porn site up on the TV, too, and he was just wearing a T-shirt and pants.
He was the only person to volunteer to speak in person for this article, and that wasn’t the only unique thing about him: ten minutes into our encounter Kyle revealed he was a dealer. It was just ‘a bit on the side’, he said.
‘I was coming to the end of every month, and there was like two weeks when I had no money whatsoever, and then I’d have to make excuses about not going out for drinks and things like that.’
‘Ironically, you get the extra money, but you lose more time. My social life disappeared because, of course, Friday and Saturday is when people tend to want to come and get stuff.’ Luckily, he said, he had a ‘genuine distaste for sleep’.
His clients were ‘regular people’, he said, albeit mostly ‘quite affluent’. He didn’t actively seek out new customers, instead dealing to friends and friends of friends. His first supplier ‘actually used to be a member of Tory central office’.
Kyle’s clients weren’t all gay men: among his Tina customers were a straight man and a straight woman – the latter, he said, a high-powered marketing executive. ‘She thrives on it. Absolutely motors on… it’s her valium, I suppose. Everybody has something that they need to get through the day at work.’ Kyle didn’t have any lesbian meth customers. He said they tended to prefer mephedrone.
He sold Tina at £70 for a single gram or £250 for five. (A casual user’s typical session will probably involve between 0.05 and 0.1 grams.) Mephedrone was between £30 and £40 per gram, up from £20 before ‘the mephedrought of 2015’.
He popped up from the couch opposite to put the kettle on, informing me ‘I’m going to slam shortly’ – i.e. take Tina intravenously – and that a friend was coming around to inject him. He had a few hook-ups planned for the evening once I’d left, but to my surprise, he had no expectation whatsoever that I leave before he got high.
Before I met Kyle, the first two local guys to speak openly to me about their experiences chilling were both, by coincidence, locked subs: men whose dicks are imprisoned in fitted chastity cages so they can’t get erect, with the key, in some cases, held by a dom who (consensually) controls the sub’s sex life.
One of the subs, who I’ll call Miles, was still happily on the H&H scene. Another, who I’m calling Luke, has gone sober. Both said they’d done each of the non-Tina chems, as well as much else besides, and both were open that they got a bit of a sexual kick out of discussing the whole business with me.
Miles thought ‘chilling’ within London’s gay community had become both more widely adopted and more visible over the past four years, something he likened to the mainstreaming of cocaine among the wider British population. As it has become more popular, he said, the threshold for trying it has decreased. In the Triangle, especially, he felt it had become a fact of life.
To the extent that chemsex is known to the general population, it’s largely because of stark news reports about deaths on the scene. GHB, which produces a high sometimes described as akin to being drunk but better, is particularly easy to overdose on. Usually taken in tiny, precisely measured increments mixed with a soft drink, an extra fraction of a millilitre administered in distraction can be the difference between a fun time and hospitalisation.
The London Ambulance Service says it gets a chemsex-related call at least once a day, and incapacitation provides an opportunity for sexual assault. When something does happen, people fear calling 999 in case the police turn up – an apprehension the health services are keen to stress is only the case in exceptional circumstances.
But these sorts of nightmares are not why Luke, the other locked bottom, left the scene. ‘I don’t think I ever got to the point where it took over my life, but I felt very close to it,’ he said. ‘I was doing drugs and drinking every weekend when I went out, and while I wasn’t thinking about it during the week like a lot of people, it definitely felt like a problem.’
Although he’s sober now, Luke’s sexuality has been remade: previously versatile, he’s now exclusively a cumdump, which means he gets off on condomless receptive sex with multiple partners.
‘When you can’t get hard because you’re high, but you’re horny and suddenly everyone is inside you… you soon become a bottom,’ he said. ‘It is very hard to go back to having sober vanilla sex. I don’t do the drugs anymore, sure, but the other stuff is still there.’
He wasn’t sad about the change. ‘I guess it’s just different.’
Luke still goes to group settings where drugs are taken sometimes, but by and large he avoids anyone on chems. ‘After I decided to go sober, I found that high people are very dumb and boring. And flaky.’
He thought the discourse around chemsex could be ‘kinder and more helpful’, and that guys on the scene shouldn’t be shamed. But he also rejected the view that ‘these are just party boys doing drugs and sex’.
‘Mostly these guys are addicts. A lot of them feel trapped. I think a more helpful approach would be [to ask] why a big percentage of gay men feel the need to do drugs and have sex for 72 hours straight.’
No one could tell me for sure how the Triangle got so gay. David Coke, a historian of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, which opened immediately north of the Triangle in the 17th century, said its masquerades and densely foliated wilderness would have ‘provided a comfortable context for cross-dressers of both sexes’. Specific evidence of queer use (or cruising) there has eluded him. He saw the famous Royal Vauxhall Tavern – which has been an explicitly queer venue since at least the 60s – as a more likely nucleation point for the community.
Queer nightlife had become entrenched by the 90s with the arrival of gritty, alternative clubs under the Vauxhall railway arches. With their Friday-to-Monday parties, darkrooms and pre-PrEP bareback sex – as well as the introduction of Tina and G as club drugs – those venues seem to have been where the modern chemsex phenomenon began.
But rents went up, the clubs closed, and anyone who wanted to continue with these sorts of parties had to move them into private residences. Nowadays, gay men seem drawn to this part of town because, recursively, there are gay men here. It doesn’t hurt that Stockwell in particular is probably the cheapest place you can live within walking distance of central London.
Those Vauxhall clubs, incidentally, were also where concerned media coverage of chemsex as a manifestation of gay self-loathing got its start: as far back as 2006, the Sunday Times was warning that gay clubbing in Vauxhall had stopped looking like a party and ‘started looking like a death wish’.
Characterisations like these are a matter of contention. Plenty of gays – to say nothing of straight outsiders – see chems as a scourge on the community, its greatest health crisis since AIDS. Participants, goes the thinking, are using risky drugs to achieve oblivion. And amid the escalating number of deaths and horror stories, few dispute that care is needed.
But these are simple stories, and drug use is not a simple thing. That there are many tragedies on the scene doesn’t mean every participant is a lost soul. As Dr Jamie Hakim, a KCL academic who has worked on chemsex, told me: ‘We don’t only hate ourselves because we’re gay.’
In a homophobic culture, gay self-loathing might well play a role in problematic drug use. But everything from class to migration status to urban isolation can influence how someone arrives at drugs and how their use of those drugs develops.
Price is also a factor. I know one guy who doesn’t really drink alcohol anymore because it’s expensive and carries a hangover. GHB, precisely deployed, is more likely to be his weeknight tipple of choice: a millilitre, the most common dose, costs £1. For similar reasons it’s popular as a going-out drug – to the occasional exasperation of queer club promoters finding their attendees G’d out on the dancefloor.
Aedie, a sometime chillout attendee who introduced himself to me on Grindr with the phrase ‘Greedy cumdump here’, said the people he had met on the scene covered an incredible range of backgrounds, and there was no single care approach that would meet all their needs.
‘They need support for their drug addiction, but also any factors that may be a driver towards addiction.
‘Yes they’re gay men, but many are also other things. I’ve met gay men with disabilities, victims of domestic abuse, ex-prisoners, immigrants, parents, sexual assault survivors, etc…
‘The guy I met who was a victim of domestic abuse told me that he goes to chillouts simply to get away from his partner. He didn’t want to go to standard support groups as they were mainly women – who often don’t feel safe around men – and the male-only groups were filled with straight men.’
Identity and background-specific support methods, he said, were key. Asked about his own experience of H&H encounters, Aedie said: ‘Complex… I’ve had some really fun times on chems, but some very low times too. The lows are always more impactful than the highs in terms of immediate feeling, but also in terms of what you learn about yourself.
‘I’ve become more resilient, open-minded and more accepting of myself. I’m grateful for being able to develop in those ways, but it’s unfortunate that it was due to drug-related issues.
‘I have a lot of respect for drugs and am fully aware that they have no respect for me. If I start thinking I can just carelessly use or get overconfident, the drug can destroy me.’
Kyle, the drug dealer, had a view of addiction that sits outside the Overton window.
‘Have what you want when you want it,’ he said. ‘If a drug helps you, then do it, but don’t beat yourself up about it. Ultimately, it’s helping you, and if you didn’t do it, you’d be in a lot worse state.’
He said he’d had a lot of clients over the years who struggled with feelings of shame over their drug use. ‘They started taking the drugs because they had a problem, and then they think: “Oh, I’m going to give up the drugs and that’s going to solve the problem.” Then the problem’s back again.
‘The drugs actually help, because they give you that crutch to at least cope with your problem, if not face it head-on and deal with it.’
Asked whether he knew people who had died from chems, Kyle said yes, ‘but it’s hard to say it was exclusively because of the drug use’. He gave the example of a friend who had died of a G overdose, but who had also, he said, had an underlying heart condition.
‘With G, certainly, I think most of us have taken too much at some point, probably in the beginning. I certainly did, by mistake.’
Kyle ended up in intensive care once after he stopped breathing while on G, but he argued it was ‘kind of beneficial’ – it had turned out he’d had pneumonia and hadn’t noticed. I asked him what taking meth is like. ‘There’s a weird feeling that comes over you first of all for an almost indescribably minute amount of time,’ he said. ‘You feel slightly ill, kind of like you’re gonna maybe throw up. Like you’re gasping for air for a bit.’
But it quickly switches to relaxation, he said. ‘And then you feel slutty as fuck, basically.’
Kyle’s friend arrived as he was showing me some of the artistically self-designed harm reduction tipsheets he sends to customers alongside their purchase. Advice for G included making sure you either prepare the mixture yourself or watch each step as someone prepares it for you, and that you should take a phone screenshot once you’ve dosed: you want to wait at least an hour before you dose again.
Kyle and his friend chatted as they prepared their paraphernalia. Kyle fiddled with a small gas canister and a pneumatic tourniquet while his friend, a medical professional in their day job, prepared the needle and Kyle’s meth – an unremarkable clear liquid in a plastic vial with a cheerful red cap. The friend had been notified that a journalist would be there, and seemed nonplussed, but did confess they’d thought Kyle had been kidding.
This was a paid service, it turned out: the friend injects Kyle, and a few other clients, for £70 a pop. While you can inject yourself, it’s not recommended – for anyone untrained it’s easy to hit the wrong kind of blood vessel. They said they can make £3,000 in a night at a big weekend H&H party.
With Kyle sitting comfortably on the couch, and the tourniquet back in place after coming loose with a gaseous hiss, the friend jabbed him. It took a little time. The friend was crouched between Kyle and I, so I could only sit and listen.
‘Did they do your washing machine in the end?’
The Aussiebum mannequin, I noticed, had a bulge: a generously sized dildo appeared to have been stuffed into the front of the underwear so as to suggest tumescence.
When it was over, Kyle pitched forward, eyes half closed, before swinging to the side and beaching himself against the arm of the sofa. As promised, it didn’t take long for the nausea to pass. He thanked his friend; the friend wished me good luck on the story; we were alone again.
Kyle shucked his underwear and settled into his reverie, draped over the couch like it was a chaise longue. The most intense high would follow over the first 20 minutes, but he’d remain up for a few hours.
I was surprised Kyle would choose to spend the peak of his high speaking with me, but chillouts are, after all, social. His speech, already fast, accelerated to a pace that could break from orbit – he sprang from topic to topic, covering the evils of organised religion, Elon Musk being a Nazi, and what he saw as posthumous slander against Walt Disney, whose likeness appeared several times on the walls.
He liked Rachel Maddow. He said he wasn’t a conspiracy theorist, but he reckoned there was a decent chance the Pyramids were an ancient nuclear power plant. He asked me to hand him the massager that had been charging on the sofa arm next to me, which he subsequently held buzzing atop his crotch for the rest of the chat.
We drew the interview to a close as a customer was shortly to arrive. Kyle said I should hit him up if I ever wanted to come by and chat.
I asked him why he’d been open to speaking with a journalist in the first place.
‘Why not?’, he said. ‘You don’t much get the chance to feel like your opinion is required.’
