The twisty, titillating, controversial history of gay sex drug poppers

You'll recognize it if you smell it. "Nail polish remover with a hint of permanent marker." "Photo chemicals." "It's hard to describe the smell, but I know I hate it."

These Reddit users – of the subreddit "Ask Gay Men" – are talking about poppers, alkyl nitrite inhalants that many gay men sniff from little bottles in order to feel euphoric on the dance floor and/or loosen up before anal sex. They may "hate" the smell, but that isn't stopping them, either.

"It's just a momentary high like that's like a minute- or two long, every time you sniff," says Adam Zmith, author of "Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures."

Poppers as a gay sex drug dates back to the 1960s in the U.S. People joke that you can smell the poppers "through the screen" when perusing social media footage of gay men jiving, gyrating. Troye Sivan's song "Rush," for example, shares a name with a poppers brand.

But that euphoric, sexual feeling – which comes from sniffing chemical compounds called nitrites – isn't always so euphoric or sexual. It can be unsafe in excess (though many users don't realize it or care – or both).

The FDA has warned against using poppers following an uptick in reported deaths and hospitalizations after people have inhaled or even (more dangerously) ingested them. Use can lead to severe headaches, a rise in body temperature, difficulty breathing, extreme drops in blood pressure and even brain death, according to the FDA. Reported alkyl nitrite exposures more than doubled in the U.S. annually between 2013 and 2022 (from 138 to 365), and the number of people who needed medical attention rose from 59 to 185. Use of poppers has increased at nightclubs and festivals in recent years. It more than doubled between 2018 and early 2024.

Yet researchers say there's a clear through line of why gay men still sniff poppers today – just as much as there's reason for anyone to heed warnings about possible dangers.

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The history of poppers

Amyl nitrite was first synthesized more than 150 years ago. A French chemist sniffed the chemical and it made him blush, according to Zmith. A few other chemists over the next couple of decades played around with it and tested it, discovering it helps blood flow more easily through the body. Thomas Lauder Brunton, a doctor in Scotland, figured out it could help patients with angina, or chest pain, and doctors in the U.S. and U.K. embraced it as treatment.

So how did it make its way to the gay community? "It's hard to find traces often in the history," Zmith says, though at some point in the 1960s, pharmacies and regulators in both the U.K. and U.S. began to notice healthy young men not suffering from angina kept asking for it. A drug that made it more comfortable to have anal sex wasn't going to stay hidden for long.

Michael Bronski, a Harvard University professor and author of "A Queer History of the United States for Young People," found out about poppers from a sexual partner, but doesn't recall people talking about it much in bars. The little glass ampules – which used to actually "pop" when opened – were ideal for quick hookups. "There was no sort of popper culture," he says. "You could only get them through a prescription, so you were relying on people who were doctors being able to write prescription, knowing that they were not going to be used for a heart condition."

It wasn't too hard to figure out people were sniffing recreationally, though; restrictions followed.

"I don't know exactly if homophobia played into that, or if sex phobia played into that, knowing that it was being used for sex and that it was gay sex, but for sure, pharmacies and regulators don't want people using drugs for things that they're not made for," Zmith says. Restrictions or not, though, it was too late. Gay men knew what they wanted and so did manufacturers, who started to make and sell it as a product outside of the pharmacy system and market it to gay men with muscular, macho, homoerotic imagery.

"It seems to me that the marketing of poppers is really connected to the emergence of male homosexuality as a visible cultural trend as well as a marketable one," Bronski says.

Disco fever took over and so did poppers; at the end of the night in Studio 54 in New York, poppers vials littered the floor. It was as common as cocaine.

But between concerns about poppers and the AIDS crisis and the War on Drugs in the U.S., they were ultimately banned for commercial purposes in the early 1990s. Though companies began skirting the ban by adjusting chemical compounds, BuzzFeed News reported. It was sold as tape cleaner, VHS cleaner, leather cleaner.

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Poppers in gay culture today

Now, with bright colors harkening back to disco, consumers buy it as nail polish remover online or in sex shops. They maintain a mythic quality of the past – of bathhouses, of long nights dancing, of new lovers. Of queer history.

Gay men are the most prevalent users, followed by bisexual men, according to Joseph Palamar, associate professor in the department of population health at New York University. But heterosexual men and women are experimenting, too, likely because younger generations are more open-minded when it comes to sex.

But some are more susceptible to adverse events than others: If you're taking blood pressure medication, or taking Viagra which increases your blood pressure, inhaling will confuse your body and could lead to loss of consciousness. There's also evidence that heavy users could temporarily damage their vision. And they can go hand-in-hand with other party drug use.

So why do many risk it? "I would not make a plea for a 'fairer' representation of poppers, whatever that might mean," Zmith wrote in his book. "Or even a more 'positive' representation... If this book is a plea for anything, it is for pleasure – for the time and space to dream about it, to plan for it, to experience it."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Poppers: What are the gay sex drugs? Are they dangerous?