How A Victorian Heart Medication Was Transformed Into A Homosexual Sex Drug

Get up and take a popper sniff.

I observed a nun perform poppers when I first encountered them. In fifth grade, I was.

It was the last scene of Act 1 of the outrageous Off-Broadway musical "Nunsense," which told the story of the fundraising exploits of a bunch of unfortunate yet adorable convent sisters. In a high school lavatory, a nun had discovered a suspicious-looking package and brought it to Mother Superior Mary Regina. When she was by herself, Reverend Mother searched through the bag and took out a little, vividly colored glass bottle. She gave it a quick glance before reading its name, "Rush," with some skepticism.

Mary Regina unscrewed the container and quickly recoiled at the overpowering chemical odor it contained, but not before taking an accidental inhale of the powerful vapors. The straight-edge sister soon felt a head rush of biblical proportions in a sexual sense. The remaining nuns discovered her writhing on the ground, higher than a church steeple, screaming, "FREE WILLY! FREE WILLY!" and wailing incoherently.

I laughed at the Reverend Mother's antics when I was ten years old, but it would take me another ten years to truly comprehend what had happened on that stage, until I finally came across a neon yellow bottle of Rush. However, this one was about as far away from a convent as you could get.

Similar-sized bottles by countless other brands exist alongside RUSH. The names of some of the others include "Jungle Juice," "Quicksilver," "Ram," and "Blue Boy." All have a strong industrial odor and a similar chemical make-up. And even though they might be marketed as "room odorizer" or "video head cleaning," sex shops are where you'll mostly find them. It's safe to assume that nobody is purchasing them for house remodeling.

This group of substances known as alkyl nitrites is commonly referred to as "poppers." They have been around for a long time, despite the fact that they may appear to be the newest way for rebellious youngsters to vent. And they stand for much more than just a passing drug trend; they are a phenomena of culture whose development has influenced LGBT life as we know it.

Men who were active in the homosexual nightlife scene in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s claim that the smell of poppers could be detected as soon as you entered a club. In the second half of the 20th century, the smell served as a backdrop for the achievements and struggles of LGBT men. Now, it brings to mind common perceptions of homosexual bars from the past, complete with tight pants, dim surroundings, and speakers blasting Donna Summer and The Village People.

The Stonewall uprising of 1969 gave the 1970s a cautiously optimistic tone and gave queer people hope that they would soon be able to be with each other without apology. More queer men became ready to discover their sexual self after the decade's larger sexual liberation movement. Additionally, fewer police raids on gay bars, clubs, and discos (like the one that led to Stonewall) made locations that encouraged that exploration more common. But there was a price to pay for that. Many people used drugs in these clubs as a way to combat the still-dominant stigma associated with being gay.

According to psychotherapist and sex therapist David Wohlsifer, sex and drugs are frequently intertwined. Drugs lessen sexual inhibitions, which are frequently brought on by traumatic experiences, bodily dysmorphia, or feelings of shame. According to him, queer men in particular experience a great sense of guilt about their identities, both within and outside of the bedroom. That humiliation might be crushing fifty years ago, when society was considerably less accepting of homosexuality than it is now.

"You enter this club hating who you are and what you want to accomplish, and you don't even know who you are. Then there's this wonderful medication that gives you a brief feeling of euphoria and causes you to experience pride rather than shame, according to Wohlsifer. "People try it,"

Poppers are an alternative to pills that do not actually produce a drug-like high. After taking a few deep breaths from the amber glass bottle, you can feel the blood rushing to your brain and throughout the rest of your body. You can also feel your face warming up. The sensation goes away within a minute or two, and you can repeat the process. "Fans argue that poppers serve the twin function of putting them more out of it and at the same time putting them more into it," Louis Parrish writes in "The Poop on Poppers," which featured in a 1977 issue of the Bay Area Reporter, a queer weekly journal.

It's a peculiar high that leaves you vulnerable emotionally, physically, and, especially for homosexual males, sexually. The psychiatrist Thomas Lowry described poppers as "the closest thing to a true aphrodisiac" in a 1982 research on their use.

Alkyl nitrites are, of course, far from being a Greek myth; their immediate physiological effects are widely known. They immediately relax unconscious smooth muscle when breathed. Additionally, they function as vasodilators, which open up blood vessels and reduce blood pressure while boosting blood flow throughout the body. Due to the increased oxygen in the blood and the resulting head rush, together with the relaxation of tense muscles, Mother Superior Mary Regina was able to capture the giddy high so beautifully.

For penetrative sex, poppers have additional physical advantages: The anal sphincter, albeit actively controlled, is surrounded by smooth muscle that can facilitate entry when it is relaxed. Smooth muscle makes up the majority of the human reproductive system. Poppers have clear practical uses for many males who engage in male-on-male sexual activity. They naturally developed a reputation for being similar to sex in a bottle.

However, the history of poppers began in 1844, when French chemist Antoine Balard created amyl nitrite for the first time, long before gay bars and glass bottles. Even then, according to Balard, inhaling the chemical's vapor caused him to feel dizzy, which today we understand to be a result of your blood pressure lowering. An rise in pulse rate, flushing of the face, and throbbing arteries were among the additional physical symptoms that British chemist Frederick Guthrie recorded fifteen years later.

At a medical conference, British scientist Benjamin Ward Richardson gave samples of amyl nitrite to his audience so they may try it for themselves since he thought no other chemical at the time had such a dramatic impact on the heart. He was the first to postulate that the chemical resulted in vasodilation in 1864.

Sir Thomas Lauder Brunton, a Scottish physician, summarized the medical uses of amyl nitrite three years after the substance was first discovered. During his early rounds at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary one chilly December night, he first became aware of a patient whose angina pectoris attacks were worrisomely severe, frequent, and protracted. Angina pectoris, or chest discomfort, is one of the most prevalent signs of cardiac disease and happens when the heart muscle lacks blood. Agents commonly employed to soothe that suffering, such as bloodletting and cognac, weren't working. Brunton ran out of choices and thought that the angina might be brought on by an abnormally tight artery, so he placed several drops of amyl nitrite on a cloth and had the patient breathe it in.

In the British medical publication The Lancet, he stated, "My dreams were entirely realized. The patient's cheeks reddened, and the agony vanished entirely in less than a minute. Over the ensuing decades, doctors from all over the world learned about Brunton's finding but were hesitant to use amyl nitrate as a common treatment, possibly due of its distinctive rush. Amyl nitrite was labeled "a neglected medication" in 1881 by the editor of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, who chastised physicians for failing to use it to treat patients who were obviously in pain.

Amyl nitrite ultimately gained popularity among medical professionals and is now one of the vasodilators used to treat angina pectoris. Patients began receiving glass ampules of the chemical packaged in fabric, resembling bits of saltwater taffy, in tin boxes before the turn of the 20th century. They would crush the capsules during angina attacks so that the amyl nitrite would seep through the cloth and be breathed. This medication was given the nickname "poppers" because of the sound of breaking glass.

Poppers were a common angina treatment for many years before newer vasodilators like nitroglycerin took their place. However, it is still unclear how poppers made their way to the clubs of The Castro and Greenwich Village. Richard Davenport-Hines assumes that patients who were prescribed amyl nitrite may have observed some pleasurable effects occurring outside of their chests in Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics.

Amyl nitrite users "certainly learned that the rush of blood induced by breathing heightened the sexual desire of men as early as the 1870s," according to Davenport-Hines.

It's conceivable that persons who were prescribed poppers rapidly learned about their alternative applications, according to Toby Lea, a social scientist at the German Institute for Addiction and Prevention Research who investigates the interaction of substance use and LGBT communities.

If a medicine initially sold as a prescription medication has any psychedelic side effects, Lea argues, people will find out relatively quickly. And many drugs start out in the LGBT community before spreading to other cultures.

The FDA authorized poppers as an over-the-counter medicine in 1960, nearly a century after amyl nitrite's verified medicinal use was first recorded, with no deaths reported in that time. However, soon after there were allegations of extensive recreational usage, the prescription requirement was reintroduced. The first commercially available brand of poppers, "Locker Room," was available in Los Angeles by the time of Stonewall, at the end of the decade. It was isobutyl nitrite, a different type of alkyl nitrite (with comparable effects) that was used to get past the need for a prescription. Soon, almost everyone in the club scene had detected the scent.

Denton Callander, the deputy director of the Spatial Epidemiology Lab at New York University, conducts a lot of research on the sex and LGBT communities. He believes that a crucial step in the movement of poppers from the pharmacy cabinet to the nightstand was the dance scene.

He asserts that disco is not just for gay males. Disco, a mainstay of the mid-20th century counterculture, began as a place where outcasts went to have fun rebelling; they were kaleidoscopes of identity and experience. Every night, interactions between people from all walks of life were centered on dance floors. Poppers were introduced to this explosive, promiscuous mixture, and the result was nothing short of an explosion.

Even if they weren't the only ones, Callander claims that homosexual men gravitated toward amber bottles throughout the disco period due to their usefulness for gay sex. They quickly gained acceptance in homosexual bathhouses, where gay men would congregate to unwind and have sex.

In some respects, Callander asserts, "they are part of our past, of what it means to be a homosexual man, even if you don't use them or think they're silly.

According to Jason Orne, a sociologist at Drexel University, there were other deeper motives at play. He raises the idea of minority stress, in which marginalized groups go through psychological suffering as a result of harassment, discrimination, and associated situations, which puts them at a high risk for both physical and mental health problems. This, he claims, "creates settings where we drink more, do drugs more, and have more sex." We "kind of" exist in these places where we are free to pursue certain sorts of pleasure and derive some power from them.

Orne mentions "the charmed circle," or what society views as "good" or "moral" sex, such as heterosexuality, monogamy, sober sex, etc. Gayle Rubin is a cultural anthropologist and sex theorist. Along with all the other forms of sex that society views as "evil," queer sex is positioned outside of that circle. Orne explains, "If you're already outside in one way—you're queer—then you start to rethink the rest of those moral concerns." We have alternative moral systems that place a strong emphasis on difference.

Additionally, social bonding takes place in public areas like dance floors. When people in sexually charged environments like discos feel closer to one another, particularly when having drug-fueled out-of-body experiences, Orne refers to this phenomena as "bare intimacy."

The social experience that people have is somewhat biologically mimicked by poppers. So I think they go pretty nicely together," he says. A form of "collective effervescence," as sociologists refer to it when a group of people emerges from themselves collectively, was made possible by these bottles for disco patrons. Orne claims that it occurs at homosexual bars, sporting events, concerts, and religious gatherings, among other places, and that it helps forge connections between total strangers.

Someone frequently discuss sharing really private information about their lives and having profound conversations with people they hardly know because they used drugs or had sex in the same location, according to Orne.

If you look through LGBTQ weeklies' back issues from the 1970s and 1980s, you'll see that poppers were a staple of queer hookup culture long before the advent of the internet. Sexual preference code words were used in personal ads: "Aroma," one of those words, refers to poppers. Posts in the local ads promoted mail-order poppers. Some newspapers featured full-page advertisements from the poppers' makers themselves: Readers were persuaded that all they needed to do to transform into Adonis was sniff a bottle of Rush or Bolt in Tom of Finland-style illustrations of beefy, shirtless guys riding motorbikes or sparring in boxing rings.

Early in the 1980s, as the AIDS crisis began to grip LGBT communities all over the world, poppers began to lose popularity. Numerous people—mostly queer men—were affected by uncommon and mystery diseases in cities across America beginning in the late 1970s. Doctors raced to determine what was causing the immune systems of these young, previously healthy patients to fail. The disease was first referred to by the CDC in 1982 as "acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS)" but neither its origins nor means of transmission were known at the time. It would take another year for researchers to pinpoint HIV as the culprit, and more than ten years to determine the virus's animal source.

One potential link, however, stood out back when AIDS was still a terrible and rapidly fatal mystery without any effective treatments: almost all queer men who died from the disease had taken poppers at some point.

Poppers were connected to Kaposi's sarcoma, one of the most prevalent illnesses in AIDS patients, in a 1985 research. However, the study's findings were based on correlations discovered in a survey of patients; it did not examine the physiological processes that might have related them. Most AIDS experts had abandoned this notion about a year later.

Nevertheless, a poppers craze spread across the United States, and several well-known AIDS campaigners passionately backed a ban on alkyl nitrites. "Death Rush," a book co-written by Hank Wilson and John Lauritsen, details what the authors claimed to be conclusive proof of the connection between poppers and AIDS as well as allegedly damning information about their producers. The poppers market was estimated to be worth $50 million in 1978; Wilson and Lauritsen hinted that this amount may have "doubled or treble" by the time they published their book in 1986. The authors made the argument that Big Popper, as it were, was strong and corrupt enough to fuel a lethal pandemic by citing "misinformation" campaigns and studies on the safety of the pharmaceuticals.

But more than 30 years after AIDS was first discovered, there is still no conclusive proof that poppers are to blame. Poppers, according to Callander, may actually lower some people's risk of HIV transmission: Skin tearing during sex can be avoided by relaxing the sphincter muscle, reducing the risk of the infection spreading by contact with blood (which is why HIV is so much more common in men who have sex with men in the first place).

Wohlsifer does, however, note that while poppers do lessen inhibitions during sex like in phim sex vn, the molecular signature of alkyl nitrites does not lend themselves to HIV transmission. "You're more likely to be risky when your inhibitions have decreased," he claims.          pornsexzone.com