Poppers Once a Most in Gay Clubs and Sex Now is a Party Girl Fav
A new generation is experimenting with the disco-era inhalants.
 |
| Tonje Thilesen for The New York Times |
The New York Times
The party blogger and aspiring “It” girl known as Meg Superstar Princess was at Rash, a club with a tiny dance floor in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn in March, when someone spilled a bottle of alkyl nitrites — better known as “poppers” — on the dance floor.
“The whole place fumed up, it was amazing,” said Meg, 24, whose real name is Meg Yates. “I feel like at any party I go to, eventually someone’s going to pull out the poppers.”
She’s not totally exaggerating. Several sources reported spotting poppers being sniffed recently at a 100 Gecs concert at Terminal 5, at a rowdy fashion week party at the Blond, and on the sweaty dance floor at Nowadays.
For those unfamiliar with the inhalant, poppers were popularized by gay men during the 1970s for sex and partying. Sold in little brown bottles, the alkyl nitrite is inhaled by the user. It typically causes a head rush and can be a muscle relaxant.
Poppers are also known as “liquid incense” or “tape cleaner,” and their pungent chemical smell has been a familiar scent in gay nightclubs and bedrooms for decades. Ads for brands like Rush and Locker Room were prominently featured in gay pornographic magazines.
So how did poppers make the jump to the pages of The Drunken Canal and rich-kid fashion parties?
“Fashion gays give it to them,” said Ms. Yates, who became a fan of poppers during her first year at Parsons School of Design. “That’s how straight girls get poppers.”
Ms. Yates said she and her friends inhale poppers mostly for a quick buzz on the dance floor, or to liven up a boring party — if only for a moment (the effect usually lasts for a couple of minutes). “It’s the kind of drug that’s really fun at first, but it punishes you really quickly,” she said, referring to the throbbing headache that often follows. “So you can’t really, truly get addicted to it.”
Dr. Rosemary Busch Conn, a resident psychiatrist at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital who has researched inhalants, disagrees. “Some people can use it and not really have any trouble, and then some use it and the effects are highly reinforcing,” she said.
“You never know your personal risk until you have the exposure and that’s not a recommended way to determine a propensity for addiction.”
Last summer, the Food and Drug Administration issued a warning to consumers not to buy poppers for “recreational use or sexual enhancement.” The warning cited “an increase in reports of deaths and hospitalizations,” and recommended that consumers discard any unused products.
Ariel, 20, a student at New York University who asked to be identified by only a first name to avoid being stigmatized as a drug user, said that poppers were popular among classmates. “I’m a trans person, I’m in a heavily trans community, and I feel like a lot of us definitely do poppers,” said Ariel, who added that “tech guy friends” and “fratty guys” were also into it.
 |
Poppers are now sold in a variety of scents. There are even “artisanal” brands. Credit...Tonje Thilesen for The New York Times |
 | |
|
Cat Marnell, 39, who wrote about her omnivorous drug use in the 2017 addiction memoir “How to Murder Your Life,” is also a convert. While Ms. Marnell said she is “drug-free,” she said she considers poppers an exception.
Like some gay men, Ms. Marnell uses poppers mainly for sex, calling them a “red-light district in a bottle.” “If I’m going to the guy’s house, I bring my own,” she said.
While poppers have retained a certain underground appeal, they have also appeared in pop culture in recent years. In 2019, a video clip of the pop star Charli XCX brandishing a bottle of Rush while shouting “Gay rights!” became a meme.
On Andy Cohen’s Sirius radio show in 2020, the musician Sam Smith addressed rumors about using poppers while clubbing in London. “I completely confirm, I love poppers,” Mx. Smith said.
The market for these tiny aromatic bottles now includes more artisanal options. Double Scorpio, a company in Austin, Texas, markets its product as “farm-to-disco,” a jokey reference to “farm-to-table” restaurants. Double Scorpio “tape cleaner” comes in a variety of aromas including eucalyptus, frankincense, and pumpkin spice.
There are fashion accessories, too. Khirea Jewels sold made-to-order silver pendants shaped like bottles of Rush priced between $110 and $175.
 |
| While the sale of poppers as a recreational drug is illegal, some retailers get around the law by labeling the chemical as “liquid incense” or “tape cleaner.”Credit...Tonje Thilesen for The New York Times |
Poppers, it should be noted, preceded the disco era by nearly a century. In 1867, a Scottish doctor named Thomas Lauder Brunton published a paper in The Lancet, a medical journal, documenting the use of amyl nitrite to relieve angina, a type of chest pain caused by reduced blood flow to the heart.
The practice continued throughout much of the 20th century and is still occasionally used by doctors today. In the 1920s, amyl nitrite was sold in glass ampules, which made a popping sound when opened, spawning the nickname “poppers.”
Selling amyl nitrite has been illegal in the United States since 1968, but chemicals called alkyl nitrites are still available for purchase. These chemicals produce a similar effect to amyl nitrite when their vapors are inhaled.
The sale of poppers for non-prescribed human consumption is illegal, but many retailers get around this by selling the bottles as a leather cleaner, liquid incense, or nail polish remover, which allows them to be sold at bodegas, nightclubs, bars, head shops, and online stores.
The greatest danger associated with poppers is drinking the liquid, which can be fatal. But there are harmful side effects of inhaling poppers for recreational uses, too, including increased heart rate, headaches, dizziness, and fainting. Of particular concern is mixing poppers with Viagra and other erectile dysfunction drugs; the combination can cause a precipitous drop in blood pressure that can lead to a stroke or death.
“Poppers can change your red blood cells so they can’t get oxygen anymore,” said Dr. Will DeWitt, the clinical director of anal health at Callen-Lorde, a community health center in New York that serves the L.G.B.T.Q. community. “And it only really happens in super-heavy use, but that definitely happens.”
Dr. DeWitt saw a patient recently who went to the emergency room after a four-hour poppers binge that left his lips blue, though he added that such incidents are rare and that reliable research on poppers is scant.
For some, the risks associated with poppers are outweighed by their potential for joy or even freedom.
“If the queer liberation movement, broadly defined, has brought us anything, it’s the pursuit of pleasure as a political strategy for emancipation,” said Adam Zmith, 37, the author of “Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures,” who lives in London. “That’s the whole point.”
Comments