ABSTRACT
By finding more generous and expansive registers of response than abstemious prescription, a gay approach to the analysis and pedagogy of chemsex has a better chance of coming up with ways of reducing harm that resonate with men who have sex on drugs. While terms such as chemsex are deployed to diagnose gay sexual cultures as pathological, sexualised drug use has a much longer history than some chemsex specialists appear to suggest. Chemsex discourse locates geo-social hookup apps as constitutive of the problem, so a more detailed examination of what these devices are and how they work is called for. In their remarkable collection Making Things Public, Latour and Weibel draw attention to the various technologies, interfaces, platforms, sociomaterial assemblages and mediations that people have used historically to make 'matters of concern' public. Hookup apps are implicated in what becomes problematised as a new sense of accessibility – of sex, drugs and more extreme modes of self-administration such as injecting.
