Original subtitles

(music, glass shattering)

(groaning ominous music)

- I'm just familiar with it.

I'm pretty much slamming every day,

four slams a day,

about 400 pounds in week I can.

That's not so much.

(heavy breathing)

See, now what I want to do is get fucked, have sex.

Crazy.

- [Voiceover] Straight away?

- Uh-huh.

Yeah.

Just by cock, cock, cock, cock, cock.

I'm not like a proper drug addict.

Do you know?

I know that like to some people

it would seem that I am, but--

- [Voiceover] What's a proper drug addict?

- I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know, probably me.

(ambient music)

- [Voiceover] If you could just introduce yourself

by name and age and where you're from.

(voices speaking over one another)

- [Voiceover] What is it that you're here

to talk about today?

- Um.

Well, really it's uh...

- I'm here 'cause I'm worried

about what's happening on the scene.

I'm worried about my friends.

I've seen people get hooked on crystal

and just what they look like when they're on it.

- People got addiction in their life

and they get addicted to drugs and sex and the lifestyle.

- Chems, fetish, that kinda world,

it's very taboo

and a lot of people don't want to talk about it

even if they're involved in it,

they don't want to admit it and talk about it.

- I'm here today to kinda talk about chemsex

and what it's meant to me

and what it's kinda meant to my community.

- I'm here because,

I'm here 'cause I'm alive.

I did get out.

And why not,

should I not tell this story?

(pulsing ambient music)

- They just look possessed.

Wild and hungry and desperate.

I am scared of this kind of perversion of the gay scene.

It's pathological.

There's something scary happening.

- In my day, you'd get asked out in a bar, perhaps.

These days, 15, 16, you leave your home in Hertfordshire.

You come to London to find your gay life

and you find Grindr,

and within, perhaps, four conversations,

you're gonna be introduced to chems.

Within eight conversation on Grindr,

you're gonna be introduced

to injecting or slamming, as it's called.

- I need you to behave yourself for me please.

- There is no textbook for how

to be a safe gay man in modern times,

in a changing health care world,

in a changing app word,

in a changing hooking up technology world.

(excited chattering)

Where do these kids the tools to manage this?

- [Voiceover] Are you in London tomorrow?

- I'm coming to your house tonight.

Look at this boy.

Sexy boy, sexy boy, sexy boy.

- [Voiceover] What happened to your legs?

- I'm sick of alcohol, man.

That's it.

- And what else?

- Mephedrone.

- [Voiceover] Really?

(moaning)

- Originally sex and drugs were two separate things.

However, somewhere along the line

they became one in the same.

So you were no longer having sex without drugs

and you were no longer having drugs without sex.

- What's tapping into our sexual dark places

and our fantasies and why's it like that

for gay men almost exclusively?

There's something about our relationship

to our sex for gay men that's causing harm

and that needs addressing.

(dark ominous music)

- I'm Dick.

I'm 32 and I'm from Watford

and I like chemsex.

I'm seeing someone at the moment who's 70.

It's not really going great.

I'm just waiting for him to die.

Here you go, go on.

If you're in Vauxhall at six o'clock on a Sunday morning

and you turn on one of these apps,

then they normally pop up

and every other name has got point,

implying that they use needles

and Tina, the abbreviated name for crystal meth.

This one's Grindr.

See, I haven't been on it for a while,

so I've got 66 messages.

"Morning mate, I've got my phone.

"Hope you get well and get sleazy.

"Oink, oink, oink."

Oink, oink is kind of trying

to say they're piggy and sleazy.

"Be good to meet up with you and breed you

"and open your ass with my fist."

Do you want a cup of tea?

- [Voiceover] When you have had chemsex,

what are the drugs that you prefer to take?

- I like ketamine.

Ketamine the horse tranquilizer.

I think it sort of loosens the bum

so it's quite good for gay sex.

I suppose that's why gay people take it.

I was never a pill person.

A bit like cocaine,

I tried it, it didn't really do much

and then this crappy meow meow, M-CAT shit took over,

but again, I haven't really fussed by that.

Once, I was at a club and I went home with three guys,

then one chap overdosed on G.

I had him in the kitchen, he said,

"Oh shit, I've just taken another one by mistake."

And I thought how do you take another one by mistake?

So, I just think it's best to leave it alone.

Crystal, I sort of took too.

A lot of the things that is wrong with the whole thing,

you know the drugs are illegal,

the sex that's going on isn't probably morally correct.

We're tarts now with new names to make it sound acceptable.

We're not injecting drugs like the heroin addicts,

we're slamming and using pins not needles.

Do you fancy using five month old syringes

to get off your face and not know what you're doing?

Doesn't sound like a very tempting invite.

Do you fancy a chemsex session?

Oh yes, please.

- I'm currently using a variety of things,

various letters of the alphabet,

so my alphabet soup consists

of V, T, G, M, K

and more T, more G.

V is Viagra, T is Tina, methamphetamine,

G is GBL, swallowed with liquid,

M is mephedrone, K is ketamine.

T and sometimes the M, I slam it

or inject it intravenously

and K, snort it through the nose in tiny little bumps.

- If you switch on Grindr, you switch on Scruff

or any of these apps, you know,

Tina, T, G,

all of these factors come into play

and they all mean one thing.

It's time to party.

(tranquil ambient music)

- [Party Host] This is my party tonight.

I'm hosting it.

Because I work both in London and down in Bournemouth,

I've tried to include people I play with in London

and also people I play with down here.

We've got about 20 people who've said they're gonna come.

Whether they do or not is another matter.

So I have a spreadsheet.

It's got people's names, people's avatars

and then I've got an arrival time

and I've got my G o'clock timetable

to see when people take G.

How many queens does

it take to put up a sling?

I was never very good at camping.

This weekend, this party is a bareback party.

Everyone knows it's bareback,

so the vast majority of people

are positive non-detectable.

The couple of neg guys that are coming,

you know, they are fully aware of the risks

and it's up to them what they want to do.

- My name is Matt Spike,

I'm a photographer,

a gay fetish photographer specifically.

People who wouldn't be aware of chemsex

found their way into it via social networking.

You could probably find yourself

in the middle of a full on drugged up orgy

within the hour using this website.

Quite easily.

Just looking at this profile here.

This guy said that he likes

sleazy sex sessions with chilled breaks.

And the chilled breaks is a clue that,

basically what that means is that

between fisting the living shit out of each other,

they'll probably just sit on the couch

for half an hour and shoot up again.

Yeah, I mean there's nothing subtle about that.

Ass is nasty, kink pigs,

kind of the name really says it all, doesn't it actually?

Morals are not exactly a priority.

I mean, this basically is just a place

where people come to find others

that basically want to slam.

This site also,

you could find guys that would pos you up,

that will give you HIV.

For somebody to be willing to give you HIV

is such a brutal thing to want to do.

I think it's just a really extreme form of sadism

and I think that really extreme masochists

will just seek out this, and just...

(camera clicks)

This is basically a dungeon that's used

by people who want to organize private play sessions.

Nothing that goes on here is vanilla.

It's all about the bondage,

it's all about the piss,

it's all about servitude

and gags, collars and hooks.

Just really give me a real pained look.

That's it, yeah.

So what we're doing is we are showing

what it's like in a play session shooting up crystal meth.

I can't help the fact that the drug was invented.

I can't help the fact that people merged it with sex.

So for me, it's an artistic thing

just representing what's going on

and if that happens to look sexy, that's not my fault.

(thumping electronic music)

You can open up receptors or areas

of your mind or imagination using drugs.

I mean that's stuff that I did because I was on drugs

and I've been able to do later sober,

'cause I learned how to do it whilst on drugs.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, Sam look up to that needle.

- I was at a sex club and I met these two guys

and went back with them to threesome

and then they tied me up in the sling

and said did I slam.

And I said, "No, I don't know what you're talking about."

As soon as they said injection drugs,

I thought fuck, you know, this is hardcore.

And I said, "No, this isn't for me."

And then they said, "Well it don't really matter,

"'cause you're tied up now.

"So you're going with it."

And then that was it.

They did it.

Are you alright?

- Mhmm.

- I've had the best sex with it

and I've also had the worst sex.

I met somebody, a bit of a loose canon

and went to his house.

(men chatting)

We slammed and then

as soon as that kicked in, it was just...

I'm somewhere else.

(moaning and grunting)

I thought it was alright at that point,

and then out of the corner of my eye,

I see him reach for his phone.

He was on the internet looking for the next shag.

And being with him, you think oh put it down.

Pages and click through the faces,

sending messages, hello.

I mean for me, I don't get the apps and websites up.

Other people just can't get off them.

- They don't quite fit as well.

It's not worth it.

I decided I didn't like the kitchen floor,

so I wanted to put this down myself, which I did.

When I went to the HomeBase,

the guy was like,

I was like I need some help

because I don't really know what I'm doing,

I've never done this before.

I said, "What do I need?"

And he was like, "You need one of these saws."

So he like took me back in the shop control.

I came out with like a tool drawer

and my dad was like so impressed.

He's like bought me a screwdriver with a light on it.

Because I suppose sometimes like you might

have to do something under the sink.

(screwdriver whirring)

- Continuing.

- Probably until Monday.

- [Party Host] So the time now is coming up to midnight.

Time is a bit blurry with me now.

We got quite a good turn out.

We've got about 10 people here so far.

I have done M-CAT,

I think about four or five lines.

And I've done one shot of G.

I'm nicely chilled and nicely relaxed

and not so drugged out that I can't still fuck.

(moaning)

- The feelings that you get

is like a fucking firework display.

It's always incredible.

- In two seconds you are in the planet

that hasn't been discovered yet by humanity.

- Everyone will just leap on each other

and you'll just dissolve into this sweaty mess

of sex and lust and you'll just lose yourselves

and you'll lose everything and that's when it feels good.

That's when it just feels like bliss.

- There is a planet,

that you arrived there,

but you don't arrive alone

and if you're lucky and that person is as horny as you are,

and he wants the same sex as you want,

let me tell you that planet has got beautiful gardens.

Amazing fountains, beautiful trees and all that stuff.

- Successful, good looking, gorgeous,

business men running around naked,

giggling like little boys,

high off their nut having a laugh.

And it's incredibly free.

It's everything I wanted.

- Have another shot of G,

give it 10 minutes and all of a sudden

everyone's back in the rolling mess

and it's brilliant and it's fantastic.

When you've had that and you go back to sex

when you're not on drugs, you think,

"Oh is that it?"

- This sobriety is fucking dull.

No offense, but if I have

to spend the rest of my life as sober,

you might a well just fucking

take me to the euthanasia clinic.

- The last time I slammed was just before,

about 15 minutes before you turned up.

So, yeah.

Got online and met a guy.

Sat up and took meth and had sex all day

and not long got back, really.

So, a bit battered, but I had a good time.

School and childhood were pretty much fine.

I had no complaints.

I'm very fortunate with that.

I'd never experienced misery, depression, anxiety.

I don't know therefore why I do this to myself.

Slamming seems to have become part of the habit now.

That's how swollen they get.

Ridiculous.

- [Voiceover] Do you mix it with anything else?

- This evening I did take G.

It gets you a bit more whapped out

and a bit more out of it.

So it was good.

It kind of builds into a crescendo with the slamming.

I find it's very difficult to stop

at a certain point unless you're out.

I've been using every weekend.

I don't seem to have an ability to stop and say no.

I have an issue and a problem

that needs to be dealt with,

unless I end up taking too much

or taking it over a period of time

and ending up in hospital or not here anymore,

so it needs to kind of be sorted out.

- What I do is I address the chemsex trends

that are happening amongst gay and bi men

in London mostly, I guess.

That's the sexualized drug use

of crystal meth, GHB or GBL and mephedrone.

56 Dean Street is a sexual health clinic.

It's more of a sexual well being center I would say.

These are our touch screen terminals.

And so it's just asking me a series of questions

about who I have sex with.

How many sexual partners?

Let's assume I've had, let's say 80.

Have I had a penis in my mouth?

Oh yeah.

In the last three months, have you had anal sex?

Anal as in anus.

Oh yeah.

And because I clicked the chemsex tab,

one of the nurses will get in touch with me

and I'll give the patient a call.

The way things work in the UK is

if you have a sexual health issue,

you come into a sexual health clinic

and if you have a drug issue,

you go off to, usually, a heroine service

where hopefully they can talk to you about those things.

This wasn't working for gay men,

so we felt very strongly that we needed

to support them within sexual health.

It's brand new.

It hasn't really been done before.

I'm the first person doing this job

within sexual health in the UK,

but the idea is to create a model here

that can be rolled out to other sexual health clinics.

It's all new, nice.

We like the way it's decorated.

We hope our patients do.

We have an issue with sex.

We do.

If you don't believe me,

go to your local sexual health clinic

and you will see hoards of gay men

in this town self-medicating their way

through complicated sexual identity

and experience with really harmful drugs.

The average number of partners

somewhere between five and 15 people per weekend.

They are sometimes sharing needles if they run out.

They are douching from hoses with the shower heads taken off

and if there are cut and marks from rough sex on drugs

you're gonna catch Hepatitis C.

There's a lot of risk.

Five gay men are being diagnosed with HIV

every single day in London.

Just in London and that's a huge number.

At 56 Dean Street, there was one weekend

where 33 gay men showed up for PEP.

If you're exposed to HIV

through an accident or a condom break,

you can take this medicine for a month

and it will pretty much prevent you from catching HIV.

31 of those were the result of a chemsex weekend.

Simple question.

Do you use drugs for sex?

In the last three months, 300 people here have said yes.

Hi, what brought you here today?

- [Patient] It doesn't seem that anybody nowadays

has sex without drugs

and so intimacy isn't there.

- Can I check with the G?

'Cause that's the most dangerous of the bunch.

- [Patient] G has recently come back into my life.

It's one of those that I find really difficult to not have.

I start getting the anxiety attacks and withdrawal symptoms.

- What's your favorite drug?

- [Patient] Mephedrone and G together.

- Together.

If you have to prioritize one over the other,

could you?

Or it's always together?

- [Patient] G.

Actually that's the killer.

- These drugs are so harmful

and guys are finding themselves in such a bad way.

They're not sitting going,

"Oh I did drugs for three days.

"It could have been a bit out of hand.

"I had a really good time, but I wanna make some changes."

That's not what's going on.

They're sitting in front of me traumatized,

"Why do I do that?

"Pushing things to such an extreme length

"and I'm devastated and I haven't had sober sex in ages

"and I don't know why."

- [Simon] I'm here to see David.

- It's about a gay community emerging

from a really traumatic past, a complicated past.

Vulnerable gay men with issues around sex

new drugs are tending to that problem rather well

and changing technology,

what they call the perfect storm.

And we need a different way of thinking to address it.

- [Simon] Great, thank you.

- What brought you here today?

- I realized that really over the years,

all my sex has been either drunk or more,

since I was 24 and onwards

and especially since my mid to late 20s and onwards

has always been drug fueled sex.

It has to stop at some point.

So.

- [David] Is this that time now?

- [Simon] I feel so, yes.

- When you've hooked up before,

what apps are you using, what sites?

How do you find a shag?

- The last year or two, BBLT just because I prefer

to have bareback sex with people who are taking drugs

and that's a very easy site to find those kind of people.

- First thing that I would like to do

would be to give you a feeling of yeah, I can do that.

And that starts with an experiment

of a short amount of time.

One week of your life.

No drugs.

It's an invitation and a suggestion.

I'm not telling you what to do.

You may not have solved world hunger

and you may not fixed every problem in the world,

but you did that.

Going home and sitting at home

twiddling your thumbs doesn't work.

You know there actually is all over the place.

The only important thing is to identify it.

You don't have to put your hand up in the air

and say, "I'm a raging addict, chemsex alcoholic," whatever,

you can just say I've got a big day tomorrow.

I'm gonna keep it kinda light tonight.

Simple as that and then your friends

are supporting you to do it, hopefully.

- Let's do it.

- [David] In nearly every case I've ever seen,

there's an explainable reason

why these guys are using drugs.

Gay men who have grown up feeling isolated,

they're looking for a disinhibitor.

They're looking for something that enables communication

with other people, connection to other people,

to be part of a community and the drugs kind

of enable that in a big way.

- I think there is meaning in chemsex.

I think it does have a function.

It allows you to stop worrying

about all the shit that the gay world

tells you you should always worry about.

- Having felt lonely, and being into the chemsex thing,

you actually find yourself in a group

of six, seven people having fun, having a great time

and none of these people, hardly any of them,

ever become any real friends in your life,

but they can fill a void on a Friday night,

a Saturday where you could have

been alone the whole weekend.

- You've got fuck all in common with them.

You don't know anything about them,

but the drugs will let you think

that you do have something in common with them

and that you do really feel for them.

For days, you get to feel that you're worth something.

You're important, at least to the person

who's fucking you or who you're fucking.

You're important to the people whose house you're at.

And the gay scene can be such a lonely, alienating place,

that you can see the function that that sex serves.

- I was living in this flat where the light is on,

constantly smoking crystal meth.

The guys are still living there.

The light is the same.

The blue, the purple.

Normally the sex was,

involved unprotected sex with a lot of partners.

I normally used to do things I've never, ever done before

without the effect of crystal meth.

I was born in Spain.

I came into UK three years ago.

I met the last partner that I had in UK

and I said to him three things, you know,

"I'm HIV positive, I'm not ready for a relationship

"and I'm a drug addict."

The perfect recipe for a disaster.

- [Voiceover] The person whom you're trying to reach

is currently unavailable.

- When I was 20, I start exploring sex and chems.

The drugs gave me the confidence that I never had.

I smoke crystal meth and I feel like a porn star.

I've been working for ten years

in commercial banking in Spain.

In my past I had money

that I invest in drugs

that I invest and I didn't really

consider the consequences of my using.

At the end, I was homeless, jobless,

hopeless and I was selling my body.

- [Voiceover] So you were a highly educated professional

in your past with a B.A. and an M.A.

and then you were at a point where you're selling your body.

(heavy sigh)

- Yeah.

- [Emcee] Who likes filthy, sleazy,

nasty, fucked up, bareback sex?

Come on, who likes nasty, bareback sex?

Let's hear you boys.

Okay, right.

We've got two porn stars now

who will get up on the stage and do a bit of a show for you

and then when they've done whatever they're gonna do,

they want you to come and join in, okay?

They're here for your pleasure, okay?

We want you to dump your loads

in their cum filled asses

or they want you to take their fucked up loads

in your holes, okay?

- I'm 21.

I've only done chems about 10, 11 times in my life.

I've done everything.

I've bummed, I've snorted, I've boost, I've slammed it.

I've done mephedrone, cane,

crystal meth, GBL and crack cocaine.

About 18, I caught the chem side of the scene.

And then about last July,

it kind of all got a little bit, not darker,

but into the chem world and all that kind of thing.

Basically I got into chem because I wanted to try fisting

and every time I've done chem, I've done fisting

and the two are linked in my head.

Black means fisting and if it's on your left

it means you give or you're dominant.

If it's on your right, it's passive or submissive.

It wasn't sex, that's just a given.

If you're into say tough sex

or you're into a particular fetish

it's just a way of showing, of course, what you're into.

Once you've crossed the line,

and once you're in that world of chems

and you're in that world of incredible sex.

If you never come back across the line

and see what else is there,

you could just very easily just stay in there

and forget about what was behind you

and just keep going forwards and down, inevitably.

When I got diagnosed, it wasn't a shock.

I'd accept that if I had bareback sex,

if I did chemsex both together,

it comes with the territory, unfortunately.

I know it sounds bad,

but I think you kind of expect people

down there to be HIV positive.

I mean, admittedly, it is something you then

have to think about when you go into treatment.

It's kind of you feel like responsible

you're gonna give it to someone else.

Yeah, it's just one of those things

that I think if you think about too much,

you're just gonna (mumbles)

and I think more than anything where

you just kind got to deal with

it's a fact about you, it's not a defining fact about you.

I'm me, I'm not a walking HIV virus, so yeah.

- [Voiceover] What's your status?

- My status?

And to which are you referring?

- [Voiceover] HIV.

- HIV positive.

- People are bare backing here, people are positive,

people are slamming as well.

And the truth is some people, you know,

are not scared at all.

- I think there's probably a lot of guys at this point,

in fact I know, we've gone like fucking rabbits,

saying at the time,

this is really fucking horny,

this is great.

This is really fucking horny.

And then afterwards saying I wish I'd stopped doing that.

I don't like doing that.

- I mean some people,

they can be like crawling on the floor

and not being able to talk,

but I'll still use a condom

'cause then it's like hardwired into their head

that they're not catching HIV, Hep C, all these STI's.

Some people, they'll just do it, they'll ask,

"Are you positive?

"Are you negative?"

This that and the other.

- Well I know I've met people and they've said to me,

"Just go, get it over and done with.

"Just take a tablet and you're alright."

- Everything is okay, but you are HIV positive.

You test positive.

I was in shock.

I didn't talk to my family.

I didn't share with friends.

I didn't pay attention about the dimension of the problem.

- I'm still negative, but people told me,

on this website where you can basically

go to find sex and chems,

they told me, "You should tell you're undetectable,

"because it's gonna freak them out,

"'cause they're gonna think they might infect you."

So I do say I'm undetectable.

- [Voiceover] You say you have the virus, but you're

undetectable in order to have the sex that you want.

- Yes, I do.

I do say that I'm undetectable so they I will find more sex.

- I heard someone say they wanted HIV.

And the sick thing is I can actually

understand it in this life,

'cause it's just easier to know you've got it

than to always be worrying about getting it.

But I can see people now coming onto the scene

and they're 18, 19, 20

and they talk like I used to.

Like it was all just a game.

Like it was all just something that,

don't give a fuck, give a fuck,

STD's, get a shot up your ass,

you got syphilis and all this shit.

Oh you know, let's all deal with it.

Being diagnosed with HIV, it was a wake up call

'cause it happened

after I'd OD'd on G

and physically died.

I went to the doctors to ask for the medication

about a month ago

and they said it was

it was not the right time for me.

Physically they want me to go on it.

They're aiming to get me there for summer,

but I'm not there mentally.

I'm not secure in myself, 'cause it's a lifelong commitment.

I'm 26 years old.

(melancholic ambient music)

- So it's been a week since I

went to the first counseling session.

Last night, went out for a friend's birthday party.

We were quite drunk and there was that trigger

to kind of really want to go and get online

and find some drugs and find some people,

but I woke up this morning a little hungover

and I've had a good day.

It's felt good.

Taking drugs and having sex parties and chemsex,

I don't know whether I'd specifically say whoa,

it's becoming a massive epidemic in society.

Sex and drugs and drinking has always

been a big part of society.

There's certain people obviously

who would probably judge you.

People in the workplace, people in the street you meet,

especially if they're not on the same level.

So to talk about it now and to be open about it

and to be going to a counseling session about it

it's quite a frightening thing to do, in a way.

- This is Simon's second session.

I'm not always sure they come back a second time,

because we give them a hell of a lot

to think about the first time.

Simon.

- [Simon] Hey, David.

- Welcome back, it's been one week, yes?

- It has been one week, yes.

I haven't used anything.

I haven't had sex.

I haven't had any, I haven't been,

I've been tempted

and remember when I had triggers, I'd go on.

You know, it's just trigger and recognizing it

and just seeing it for what it is.

- What we can talk about today,

see if you want to extend that for another week.

- Little worried.

There's two things coming up

where I've made a conscious decision

to already have something on me.

There's a party coming up this Saturday

and I end up getting tired and then

feel the need to take drugs more.

- You've hear the term of self-medicating,

taking some substance to medicate a feeling

and then taking another medication

to deal with the side effects of that.

Can you see how a little bit of what you're doing is that?

- Definitely.

Absolutely, 'cause actually when I take mephedrone,

I take propranolol which is a beta blocker.

Do you know it all started

when I was first given antiretrovirals?

Which I don't take anymore, but--

- Are you keeping in check with your health care team

to know that you're well and everything then?

- No, to be honest, it's a whole different discussion,

a different story.

I've got background in science and genetics,

but I did a lot of research back in 2011,

documentaries, books, websites and out of that,

I decided to become an HIV/AIDS dissident.

So, I don't believe I've got HIV

and I don't believe that CD4 or viral load means anything,

'cause lots of different reasons.

- When you got an HIV diagnosis,

do you think you were lied to?

- No, no, no.

It's probably a discussion I don't want to have,

to be honest.

It's not my reason for being here

and I've got a whole email put together,

that I put together with links and documentaries

and things for people to read,

because as soon as I say something like that,

not surprisingly, you get a reaction.

So I deliberately put together the email to say

"Look, you know what, happy to talk about it,

but give me your email address.

Have a look at all this and then come back to me."

And that's where I ended up.

- Alright, I think I've been shut down here, which is cool.

Send me the email.

- [Simon] I will do.

- We were talking about a plan, weren't we?

Imagine if you're sitting in that chair next week

and you'd have two weeks off

and you'd go, "You know what?

"I had an awesome time at that party.

"I didn't need to do drugs.

"What a ridiculous conversation that was."

- [Simon] Yeah, that would feel pretty good.

- Okay, do we have another plan for a week then?

- [Simon] Yes, let's do it.

Thank you.

- [David] I'm sorry I brought that up

if that was a sore point

- I've not taken any antiretrovirals since 2011.

I came off them gradually, the ones that I were on

and I've been fine.

It wasn't an easy decision to come to,

to stop taking antiretrovirals,

with such a disease that has a big stigma about it.

If you ignore it, you will die of a destroyed immune system.

But then I was introduced to this group of HIV dissidents,

of which I know there are quite a lot around the world.

It was phenomenal and it was shocking at the same time,

to watch and see people

who had been diagnosed 20, 30 years ago

and refused to take medications still alive today.

I believe the only thing that will ever kill me

is to continually hard hit my body with drink and drugs.

- When I get an email from a patient

saying that HIV does not exist,

you would think my immediate reaction

would be, you know, nonsense.

How ridiculous.

But no, my first reaction is empathy.

I get how traumatic an HIV diagnosis is.

The stigma and the trauma is gonna come

with a variety of responses and reactions and beliefs.

This is a bitchin' virus

and it's a bitch of a thing to live with.

I struggled with, I've been HIV for a very long time.

I've been HIV for 23 years.

People are scared to touch you

and there are conversations at dinner tables

about drinking out of the same glass

and then there's the confusion of the doctors around you.

And all the while, you're in the midst of all this confusion

knowing that you feel terrible,

it gets worse and then you die.

When I first moved in here,

I'd been living with AIDS as the UK defines it,

which is having five AIDS defining illnesses.

I had a sofa along here.

I'd had a nail in the wall,

which I would hang my drip on.

So everyday, for two hours, I would plug myself in,

hang my drip up and watch TV.

It was over in the corner before we had cable.

It was a terrible end way to die.

I had one friend that came around

with two grams of coke every Thursday night.

She said David, "You're gonna die.

"Let's have a good time."

So yeah, on that sofa, with my drip up there,

we'd get high on cocaine.

I guess speaking therapeutically,

I was learning that that time,

at that very vulnerable time,

that drugs served a purpose in making you feel good.

And when you do learn tools when you're vulnerable,

it's hard to let go because they work.

It worked.

I felt good for six hours once a week.

And there was lots of experimental times.

There were lots of trials they would put you on,

but really, the protease inhibitors,

when they were invented,

awesome, awesome things.

They are still part of the antiretroviral therapy now.

They made you vomit.

It was like 12 pills.

They were giant, big things covered in wax

'cause they were so big.

The wax would help you swallow them.

But they worked.

Within a month, I started to look good.

Put on weight, feel good, having energy.

It was so dramatic.

It wasn't like you get to adapt

to this over a six month period.

It was like within a month, just so good.

Then you have to figure, "What do I do with this?"

I had money because I had some benefits.

I had my health.

I had my trauma.

And I had a scene outside my door, a gay scene.

And a whole lot of things I needed,

like intimacy, friends, being part of a community, sex.

And crystal meth.

There was no mephedrone then.

I was never into G.

But crystal meth, it tapped into something I needed.

It served the purpose that I needed at the time.

And so there was another decade missing,

so before I knew it, I was like 40 and still missed out

on like a whole adult life of normality.

What's amazing about chemsex now is an unidentifiable issue.

It looks to some people like a whole bunch

of greedy, self-indulgent, promiscuous gay boys

going out having fun on drugs.

It's more complicated than that.

Don't worry about the weather.

Nothing's stopped Pride before.

The law didn't stop Pride.

Riots didn't stop Pride.

Haters didn't stop Pride.

What do you think this street will be like

at five o'clock today?

- Packed, absolutely rammed.

And people'll be going and doing drugs in toilets.

There'll be a lot of people linking up saying,

"Oh, come on, meet with me tonight.

"We'll go to this party."

And they'll forget they've

got all the alcohol in their bodies.

They'll start taking G and G, alcohol, not good together.

Straight to A&E Hospital.

Point about Pride is just to remember all the crap

the gay people have been put through this year,

like with what's going on in Russia,

homophobic attacks in Vauxhall,

people getting acid thrown in the face.

Sometimes you can understand why people

want to get out and get twatted off their face,

because it's escapism from all the crap

that they've gone through through this year.

(cheering)

- I've been a psychotherapist for 30 years

and worked as a sex therapist

for pretty much all of that time.

There's been this idea

around the good gays and the bad gays.

The good gays get married and settle down

and reproduce like heterosexuals

and assimilate into society

and then there are the bad gays

who party and take drugs

and have sex with anonymous strangers

as if there's a kind of binary.

I think it's more complex than that.

Not everybody wants to assimilate.

We've always been outside.

We've always been on the margins.

We write our own rules.

We make our own relationships.

We don't follow a heterosexual norm.

Gay men grow up in a society where they feel

they're mad, bad, or dangerous to know.

Many times I think we police ourselves

and we turn it inwards.

And shame is probably one of the most common

underlining issues that I see in my consulting room.

Shame and a hyper-vigilance to being pathologized

or being seen as mad, bad or dangerous to know,

permeates the lives of all of us

who are queer to some degree or another.

- I used to work in television a long time ago,

but now I own a gay gym and sauna

in London called Sweatbox.

Pretty much within the last 18 months to a year,

something dramatic has happened.

- [Voiceover] What would you say to someone who would argue

that you are potentially part of that?

- Because I own a sexy based establishment?

Well, I am part of it.

We are all part of it.

We all have sex.

I think everybody wants to blame everybody

except the people that are actually,

that really need to acknowledge that it is their problem.

- Can we ask the audience here who feels

that chemsex is kind of a normalized part

of something you have to deal with when you're online?

- So here, no drinks allowed,

because drinks is how they bring GBL into the building.

Zero tolerance warning.

Every locker has a G zero tolerance and reminder,

"Do you really want your friends and family

"finding out you died in a gay sauna?"

That actually, this is not a nice place to end your days.

Two massage rooms here.

We come through,

the jacuzzi bath.

Two steam rooms, you can see steam room.

That's what it is.

There are kids coming to London from all over the world

hearing about the great London gay club scene

and all the drugs and all the wild parties

and they go, "Well, that's obviously what you're supposed

to do and can I have some too, please?"

For most of the rest of the world,

this is the best place to be gay in the world.

We do live in a culture, the gay culture,

that is always about excess.

It's about the biggest cock,

the most amount of drugs,

the longest you've ever partied.

Just by that's what you see.

The vast majority of us are not like that

and I think this is the danger of externalizing,

looking for external causes of the problem.

The problem's only on the inside.

The problem is we're normalizing a type

of behavior that's extreme.

I have this on my iPad at home,

'cause I sit at home.

Particularly I look at the locker room,

'cause that's where you can see people

going back to their lockers rather too often,

which means that they're taking something

out of there they shouldn't be.

Yes, we have the wall of shame.

We have somewhere between 16 and 20,000 people

coming through our doors a month.

We had a death here and I'm not gonna allow

that to happen again.

We had two guys in a couple of weeks ago,

one of them overdosed on GHB.

His partner didn't give a fuck.

He was off trying to pick up other guys

and fooling around while we were nursing his boyfriend

in and out of a coma and then suddenly,

the partner went down, as well.

So by that time, the ambulance had come,

took them both away.

They were both comatose.

They were hospitalized.

They recovered, they were fine.

The next day, one of their friends smuggled G

into the hospital.

They took it again.

Both of them went back into the coma.

That's the level of the problem we're dealing with.

But that's specific to G.

A lot of gay men have died from GBL.

Far more than actually I think we realize,

because toxicologists tend to say a cocktail of drugs

when they find all the others in there

and don't acknowledge that the active ingredient

and every time is GBL.

(dark ominous music)

- This world spirals quite quickly.

I was out...

looking for a good time.

I thought I was going to this guy's house

to go to a chill-out.

I met him on the street.

If I knew I was waking up on the floor of a bathroom,

not knowing what they've done,

I'd never done it.

There's humiliation you suffer

when you put yourself into these situations.

And of course, you've gotta

live with all these thoughts and all this pain.

It's shit, so what do you do?

You get high.

I just put it to the back of my mind.

And so I got wrecked.

I fucked any guy that pretty much came onto me.

In these parties,

you could get up to 50, 60 guys when it's all through.

It's promising that little bit of escapism.

(men chatting)

(moaning)

- [Voiceover] Slamming Tina, it is the most experience,

when you come off on it, it's amazing.

Bizarrely, there is something slightly sexual

about the act of doing it.

It's quite intimate.

It's quite horny.

Now, I get a hard on while it's being prepared.

- If slamming would be as easy as every time you slam,

you got the high, you hit the vein correctly

and it was safe,

I would say, wow, this is amazing.

I really don't know what happened.

I thought I'd hit the vein correctly,

but I obviously didn't.

I injected the solution under the tissue

and just to show you,

I'd like you can focus on the other arm,

you can see these kind of lumpy areas.

Again, this is from overusing veins.

It gets all very hard.

- There's a younger boy, he took his clothes off

and half of his arm, it was purple.

Because mephedrone is so bad for your vision,

he had basically blood.

- The line between reality and fantasy blurs.

If people are doing that each weekend,

they're perhaps not even living at all.

They might actually just be the walking dead.

- One day, I freaking out

that I don't even notice that it was a week gone.

A week.

- I pulled my teeth out psychotically with a screwdriver.

I weighed seven stone

and I sprayed myself bright orange

to make myself look healthy,

which was probably the most insane part of it.

- Drug induced psychosis is a frightening thing,

for people to feel they're being followed

by vans with darkened windows.

They get home and they think their computers

are bugged and they can't use their computer or their phone.

They're convinced that they're being watched

through the webcam and entirely convinced of this.

It's a very normal consequence of being awake

for three days on this powerful drug.

- [Voiceover] When was the last time you slammed, Miguel?

- This morning around six AM.

It's like one minute I was fine

and the other day I was taking all the covers

I could find in the flat and going inside them

and saying, "What is wrong?

"I have a fever.

"Maybe I injected a bacteria."

My head was like, "I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die.

(groaning ominous music)

It was 40 now, five of water and a bit of my blood

and I did all of that.

- [Voiceover] What are you checking for?

- I did not put the lock, so if he comes in,

'cause I don't want him

to discover the whole story, by mistake.

That depends.

I have a self-destruct button.

I press it quite a few times.

I got clean five months, then two months,

then one month and a half, then one month,

and now I can barely stay clean two weeks.

Like I hear things that are not here

and when I close my eyes it all disappears

and once I thought I heard somebody,

an angel saying, "But he doesn't know he's isn't addicted."

And if I do that,

I don't hear anything anymore.

I'm making it worse.

Last time I had slamming stop,

because sometimes I have done it.

No, I will insist (mumbling).

For some reason, no.

- [Voiceover] Just one last thing.

What's your message?

- My message would be this is a disease.

This is not something you can slap out of

and say, "I'm not taking drugs anymore."

You have to put in the work.

You have to be in contact.

Don't let the drug control you.

'Cause if they do control me,

I don't have the ability to stop.

- [Simon] It's now nearly nine o'clock.

I have some meth in my back pocket

and I've not taken any yet.

I have to admit,

the more I drink, the more I'm tempted.

It's now nearly 10 o'clock.

I caved in and did my first sniff in the loo.

Now that I've come home,

I'm awake and wanting to get on the internet

to look for men.

I just did another slam

and it didn't get me really high,

but being online, I'm on Grindr at the moment.

So, yeah.

I think it is difficult to stop a ball rolling now.

- It's our third session together.

We're just hoping, fingers crossed, he's broken his cycle.

If not, we battle on.

- [Elevator] Floor three.

- Almost 48 since I last slammed, yeah.

48 hours.

- [David] When did you start to become aware

that you wanted to use?

- Because I had stuff on me and because I was drinking.

So again, it was almost a well, I've got stuff on me,

I'm drinking, it's gonna happen.

And so I did.

The trigger just run away with itself.

It's like when you're so used to doing something,

to suddenly say this is my last time,

it's painful.

Okay, this is...

Sunday morning.

Anyway, I'm off to a guy's flat.

Well here I am at a guy's house

and we've been doing mephedrone together.

I've had a really good time

and a really great weekend.

And I'm kind of almost ashamed to go back

and to admit that

I've just been doing the same old stuff really.

- There is something really desperately unhappy

and kind of desperate that you don't spend

a lot of time thinking about.

That you're reluctant to talk to me about.

And you spend a lot of time not letting it get in

and the more drugs you do,

the more denial takes over and you push that away

and that's just not gonna do you any good.

What?

- I don't know.

I just feel ridiculous.

This is so silly.

It's silly that you even question it, isn't it?

(sobbing)

It's so fucking stupid.

- [Voiceover] Nice to see you all again.

Welcome to Let's Talk About Gay Sex and Drugs at Manbar.

We go to clubs, we take the drugs.

There's nothing more to judge, but why?

Why?

Because it's fun.

We dance and snort and sniff and kiss.

We don't ever need to sleep.

The meth keeps you up, the G makes you horny,

the crystal even more so

and the sex is the best you've ever had.

But there's a problem, I said.

Beneath the skin there's a dragon stirring.

You can only dance with it so often

before it burns and bites.

Why am I even speaking to you right now?

Why?

Because underneath the sex and drugs,

hidden in the dragon's shadow,

I feel there might yet exist

an irresistible wish for love.

(applause)

- Got my pocket as go for the toilet,

pull out a bag, insert a key,

powder heaped and I snort it.

I agree.

Lunatic.

- Why pretend your love must accompany erection?

This is a moment free affection,

a curiosity bound to end.

Which as good human muscle may,

against the muscle try it's strength,

exhausted into sleep at length

and will not last long into day.

(applause and cheering)

- When I was in the chemsex scene,

I was looking for someone who was caring and loving.

And obviously, you can't find that there.

When you are in crystal meth and you are slamming

and you are injecting crystal meth to other people,

you are taking a really high risk

and you have a big responsibility,

not only for your health,

also for a lot of people around you.

Now that I have my brain clean,

I can see properly.

It's like oh my God, this is really, really not okay.

I have to think what I want in my future.

I don't wanna hide anymore.

I want to help people.

You know, maybe feel really good.

Sorry.

- These are new trends.

Crystal meth, G and mephedrone.

Crystal meth looks like this.

It's called Tina, like Tina Turner.

Talking about drugs and chemsex every day,

do you think that would be something that triggers you

or that helps you in your recovery?

- I can see exactly all the risks that I took

when I was on the effects of drugs

and now it's like I can see clearly what I want.

It's helping me definitely to develop

and go on in my recovery.

We are here to support them.

Help them whatever they want to achieve.

I'm not gonna be judgmental

in the sense that they can trust us,

no matter what happened, we are gonna be here.

You know where I've been in hell,

the worst consequences is over.

Now, coping with reality is doable.

I'm facing my fears.

I'm proud of myself.

I'm not scared anymore.

- The experience of a gay man growing up different,

they might be in safe, loving homes,

but they might not experience it as safe and loving,

because they've got this secret.

Being at camp, at school and being bullied,

having the odd effeminate reaction to something

and knowing that's wrong, that's bad,

that gets me judged, that gets me beaten up,

that gets me rejected,

so I must become hyper-vigilant.

Don't let that happen again.

There's something different and wrong

and unlikable about my very nature.

So what we have is a kind of population of gay men

that are trying to incorporate intimacy

into their sex lives and their romantic lives

in the middle of an HIV epidemic.

There's no frame of reference.

- There is something about chemsex,

the privacy, the secrecy, the furtiveness,

that feels like it's part of it, otherwise shame.

It doesn't feel bold and open and in public and kind of

out there in a kind of out and proud way.

- Addressing the HIV epidemic should not have been about

medicine, dispensing condoms and getting people tested.

It should have been about addressing homophobia,

internalized homophobia, equal rights and well being

and we fell down there.

And we have the results here right now.

- Life is getting better.

This problem is getting worse.

What's going on?

What are we doing wrong?

- A good majority of my life I've wasted

by fighting a cause that meant nothing.

To fight for the right to be gay,

to fight for the right for what they believe in

and then to go and destroy it all

by becoming a drug fuck mess,

there seems no point.

- [Voiceover] Can you stop?

- I'm trying.

- I can't imagine myself doing this in my 30's, in my 40's.

That would be just kinda weird.

Even though a lot of people obviously

in the chem scene are in their 30's, 40's, 50's

because this wasn't such a big thing 20 years ago

and they're just getting into it

whereas I'm kind of at the age where,

as it's blossoming, I can kinda get into it.

- There's real way to be clean,

to have a fulfilled relationship,

like when I say to people,

cause some people told me,

you'd do anybody I suppose.

And then I say, actually I want to have kids.

I want to get married.

I want to have a cat.

I want a normal life.

- If I could turn back time,

on that day, July 15th,

when somebody said, "Take these pills."

If somebody would have said to me,

this is what it would have been like

(sobbing)

six months later,

I would have never done it.

- For a lot of guys,

a lot of them I don't really see anymore.

We used to do stuff.

Maybe not that amazing, we used to go out for food,

maybe go to the cinema

and now they don't

and every time you talk to them

it's just talking about the party they were at

or how much they're coming down or...

and you just think, I don't care.

I just want my mate back

and you don't know where they've gone.

(dark ominous music)