We need to talk about chemsex

Stonewall and the rest of the Pride industry are world-class when it comes to running their mouths. Pronouns. Rainbow lanyards. The mythical ‘trans genocide’. You name it, they’ll support it with hashtags, awareness days and corporate sponsorships. If talking shite was an Olympic sport, they’d win gold. But when it comes to an epidemic that’s actually killing gay men, there is not a word. Silence.

I’m talking about deaths from chemsex – sex parties fuelled by the consumption of drugs such as methamphetamine and GHB. Chemsex deaths might not be on par with the AIDS epidemic of the 1990s. But the danger is significant, and it is growing. In London alone, the Met Police say up to three gay men a month die at chemsex parties. The London Ambulance Service estimates treating at least 764 men between 2021 and 2023. It is suspected that the death of as many as 1,000 men over the past decade in the UK can be linked to chemsex. NHS figures show a surge in GHB overdoses linked to the scene. And still, not one glossy campaign, not even the token gesture of an ‘awareness week’.

The only groups willing to talk about chemsex are the ones Stonewall and similar groups despise: the LGB Alliance, Not All Gays – the gays they brand as traitors. In other words, if you actually want to hear the truth about what’s killing gay men, you need to look outside the rainbow industry altogether.

Stonewall can stick rainbow laces on Premier League footballers. The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association can publish statements about Bi Visibility Day and fall over themselves for IDAHOBIT – the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Intersexim and Transphobia, or whatever mouthful they’re calling it now. Hashtags, slogans, the whole lot. But when gay men are dropping dead every month at chemsex sessions? Not a peep. They can mobilise vast PR machines around ‘trans genocide’. But when gay men are overdosing week in, week out, across Europe’s capitals? Nothing. Because it doesn’t sell. It isn’t hashtag-friendly. It can’t be turned into a fundraising drive.

And that’s the heart of it. Chemsex doesn’t come with a pantomime villain. No far-right thug, no priest, no Tory minister. Just men making destructive choices.

This is what the Pride industry can’t stand. After all, you can’t raise money on responsibility. You can’t spin self-destruction into a righteous slogan. So they look away. Liberation’s grand, until you see the psychosis, the overdoses, the young lads who can’t even get it up sober. These realities just don’t look pretty on a Pride float.

This isn’t the first time that Pride organisations have been highly conspicuous by their silence. Take the case of Stephen Ireland. The founder of Pride in Surrey was sentenced to 24 years prison in June for raping a 12-year-old boy. You’d think the Pride industry, always going on about ‘safeguarding’ and ‘safe spaces’, would have something to say about one of their own leaders (Ireland was also head of safeguarding) being a convicted paedophile. A statement, a bit of outrage, even a single line disowning him. But there was nothing. It was too awkward, and so easier to pretend it never happened.

Or take the two gay men – Aidan Moffitt and Michael Snee – murdered in Ireland by an Iraqi immigrant in 2022, who police said was motivated by a hatred of gay men. If their killer had been Catholic or conservative, we’d have had vigils, hashtags, rainbow-lit bridges, maybe even a Netflix documentary. But because the murderer didn’t fit the script? Silence. Gay men butchered in their own homes, and the Pride industry stayed quiet.

That’s the cowardice we’re dealing with. Chemsex is just the latest version. No blood on the pavement this time, but gay men dying all the same. Alone, ashamed and abandoned.

Instead of dealing with the latest scourge in the gay community, Pride prefers theatre. These organisations take corporate cheques, hand out rainbow tote bags in Tesco and tell us that pronoun badges save lives. They promote ‘visibility’ for everything except gay men’s suffering. As a result, gay men are erased. And we’re told these organisations represent us, that we should sit back and let them speak for us.

But they don’t speak for me. And I know I’m not alone. As gay men, we deserve better than silence, better than tokenism, better than being disposable when we don’t fit the narrative.

They told us visibility saves lives. But when gay men actually die? Pride looks the other way.

Seán Atkinson is vice-president of Not All Gays.