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“It wasn’t conceived as one,” says Fairman. A lot of gay men didn’t experience that’: David Stuart of 56 Dean Street, London’s sexual health clinic. ‘Intimacy is a skill we learn as children. “It is a horror story,” says Tom Abell from the film’s distributors, Peccadillo Pictures, a company that operates at the vanguard of sophisticated gay storytelling. Stuart says that when the filmmakers first visited the clinic to shadow him, “The story, which they thought was about gay men taking drugs and having fun but leading to harm, was flipped upside down. “Spend a week in clinic with me and you go home with the dark feeling you get when you’ve watched the film.” “This is ugly,” says David Stuart, sexual health worker at the pioneering London clinic 56 Dean Street, who provides Chemsex’s voice of reason. Instead Chemsex has something of the hard found-footage and testimonial flavour of this year’s other cinematic addiction piece, the harrowing Amy Winehouse documentary Amy.
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Indeed, anyone who wants to see the exact flipside of Chemsex’s harsh portrait should watch the scene in Haigh’s glossy HBO series Looking, in which the beautiful, affluent gay hero takes a first ecstasy tablet at a moonlit party in a wooded glade before being theatrically rogered against a tree trunk by Russell Tovey. Yet the further he has gone into fiction the more Haigh has moved from his starting point.
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Prior to Chemsex, film and TV auteur Andrew Haigh looked closest to capturing this gay demographic, directing a debut documentary in 2009 about a male prostitute fuelled by ketamine, Greek Pete. Hidden world: William Fairman and Max Gogarty, the Chemsex diectors, photographed at the Soho Theatre in central London. Yet up to now there hasn’t been a reliable film rummaging beneath the undergrowth.
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It speaks of the generation for whom life itself is a movie of their own editing, captured on endless smartphones, torsos tightened in the bathroom mirror.
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There are ghostly stories of everyday annihilation – social-panic inducing yet also filled with gentle empathy – that are likely to stay with viewers. There’s no doubt it digs deep into the subculture. And it is a long six years since valid questions raised by boyband star Stephen Gately’s death were effectively suppressed after Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir aired some questions with clumsy disapproval.Ĭhemsex is a film made for Vice by two straight filmmakers, 34-year-old William Fairman and Max Gogarty, 27. (For the uninitiated, lethal amounts of the drug are difficult to quantify and chemsex is still unknown enough for the Barking constabulary to fail to connect the deaths until the fourth body had been discovered.) Then there is steroid use, for many men the first hurdle jumped over in society’s needle taboo, which is barely acknowledged in the media. It entered public consciousness this year after the toxicology reports on the bodies of four dead young gay men in and around Barking cemetery revealed overdoses of the liquid narcotic.
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The documentary uncovers a world we are not used to seeing onscreen but which is hiding in plain sight. The cast look and sound like your friends. I think this documentary is a huge step in reaching out to the general public and showing that we’re not hopeless junkies who will die in their own various bodily fluids.”Īs a gay man, it is impossible to watch the film and be unmoved. “They filmed me on various comedowns, meltdowns and on one very losing-the-plot crystal meth binge. “I rapidly agreed to have my face unblurred,” he says. Meth, meph and G create a potent cocktail enabling extremes of behaviour, which carries significant risks for the sexual and mental health of habitual users.įor anyone unsure about the impact of chemsex on real lives, the tale of Miguel should offer some clarity. There is candid talk on film about “pozzing up”, the practise of knowingly becoming infected with the virus. In London four new positive diagnoses are currently made daily. The testimonies in the film from people involved in the subculture directly link chemsex to alarming rates of HIV infection. These parties involve multiple people and are mostly facilitated online. Chemsex is identified in the film as the habit of engaging in weekend-long parties fuelled by sexually disinhibiting drugs, such as crystal meth, GHB, GBL and mephedrone.