UC Riverside

Recently, popular culture has been riveted by depictions of addiction, overdose, and recovery in multiple media formats. These representations obsess over a before-and-after concept aligning drug use strictly with death and destruction and recovery with health and happiness. This mimics traditional examples of drug users as anti-social found in stories rooted in moral panic ubiquitous in mainstream media. Most examples connect both sexual exploration and drug use, arguing they are inherently dangerous and follow a trajectory ultimately ending in death. My work examines transgressive sexual exploration and drug use while questioning issues of culpability and castigation. Although there has been a surge of interest within academia around drug use, most critics focus on abuse and addiction, which is sometimes divorced from drugs completely. Even so, this decision limits the narrative of drug use to the harm it creates in bodies, among people, and within communities. While this work is useful, it also creates a rhetoric that obfuscates the ways in which drug use does not always fit within the narrative of addiction.

In the first chapter, I situate my project within the historical and cultural context of drugs, homosexual identity, illicit pleasures, and queer theory. Next, I trace how the medical discourse's reconfiguration of the drug user as contagious and pathologizing the homosexual identity during the late Victorian period are intricately connected. I argue the 1980s panic of AIDS as the "gay disease" is deeply rooted in these disease-like narrative precursors. Chapter three analyzes the crisis of representation in gay male circuit party culture while questioning the sensationalization of drug use and promiscuous sex. By turning to recent gay and lesbian fiction, I analyze representations of safe drug use and sexual exploration with guidance. In the final chapter, I argue that many prominent theorists have both ingested and digested illicit drugs out of curiosity and a quest for knowledge. Their work provides a strong cultural lens, based on Western ideology, through which to study accounts of drug use; however, their preoccupation with forcing the experience into empirical product-centric normative values of stable identity, time, and space will always fail.