Deep Sniff

Is there a “queer soul” lurking beneath the multiplicitous names that we give to nonnormative sexual and gender identities—and what if that “soul” could be released with the aid of a little brown bottle? This provocative question is at the heart of Adam Zmith's Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures, a highly readable and playfully digressive blend of queer history, material culture studies, and personal reflection. Amyl nitrite (and related alkyl nitrites) is an inhaled vasodilator—first available in paper-wrapped glass vials (hence the name “poppers”) and later in plastic bottles—that relaxes the soft musculature and produces temporary euphoria. Its therapeutic uses, as a treatment for angina pectoris, were first publicized in 1867, the same year that jurist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs publicly called for the decriminalization of homosexuality. From these coincidental origins, Zmith traces the intertwined history of poppers and male-desiring men as a history of queer futurity that, to paraphrase José Esteban Muñoz, is always on the unreachable horizon (36).1 Drawing from the annals of medical journals, gay-cultural publications, tabloid newspapers, LGBTQ helpline logbooks, mystery novels, electronic dance music, performance art, pornographic websites, and works of queer theory, Zmith follows the scent of poppers both backward and forward in time, sniffing out less homonormative moments of potentiality.Echoing Zmith's promiscuously assembled archive, “versatility” is a key word across the book: from the sexual versatility of bodies opened to emergent forms of pleasure, to the practical versatility of a chemical compound rebranded for vastly different purposes since the Victorian era. By the 1970s, poppers were an almost ubiquitous ingredient in queer worldmaking—or at least the post-Stonewall gay clubbing and cruising scene. And yet, not unlike homosexuality itself, poppers flourished in a legal gray area, their recreational uses closeted behind misleading labels like “room deodorizer” or “leather cleaner.” For Zmith, this inability for simple labels to describe the container's volatile contents helps nominate poppers as a quintessentially queer substance, much as our proliferating labels for categorizing genders and sexualities invariably fail to encapsulate one's interiority (147).Although Zmith claims that Deep Sniff's intent “is not to make a case for or against poppers” (14), the book's largely celebratory tone is unmissable. Paul B. Preciado's pharmacological self-experimentation in Testo Junkie is an acknowledged influence, from the diaristic fragments that preface each of Zmith's chapters to the larger biopolitical argument about how the commodification of an ingested chemical has shaped modern identity.2 Although the brief head rush of a popper high arguably has lower stakes than Preciado's project of hacking one's own gender with unprescribed testosterone, this very ephemerality allows Zmith to celebrate “the way that poppers free me for forty-five seconds from these ideas that I am ‘gay’ or a ‘man’” (17). Thus, although the book focuses on gay male experience, amyl nitrite's continued sale as a cleaning solvent also speaks to its queerer potential as a solvent for stable identities (as further suggested by Zmith's side-eyed preference for the acronym “QUILTBAG” over “LGBTQ”). Poppers may technically be a poison, he suggests, but so too are the minoritizing constraints of identity politics (141); as a pharmakon, the difference between “poison” and “remedy” may be measured by degree rather than by kind.At various moments in gay history, poppers may have provided a temporary affective rush of what freedom might feel like, but the drug's circulation also played a role in regulating gay identity. For instance, so many early HIV/AIDS sufferers were also regular popper users that US activists John Lauritsen and Hank Wilson erroneously blamed the drug as a disease vector, calling for the rest of the gay community to put down the bottle (68). But despite activists’ well-intentioned efforts to stamp out poppers, police wielded the correlation between poppers and AIDS as an alibi for raiding UK gay clubs under the auspices of public health protection (84). Still, as Zmith observes, constraints on queer worldmaking were not merely imposed from outside. The important leather magazine Drummer (1975–99) primarily originated as a venue for marketing poppers, but Zmith repeatedly expresses his disidentification with the hard-bodied, hypermasculine clone popularized in 1970s popper ads (53). He instead celebrates how poppers (literally) open the body, regardless of gender, to more fluid experiences, not simply reproducing already-known pleasures. Indeed, by helping facilitate bottoming, poppers have erotic affinities with dominance/submission dynamics—such as when users of “popperbator” porn videos cede control to a video creator's commands over when to take a hit of poppers, when to climax, and so on (128). For Zmith, these amateur-produced porn supercuts demonstrate how poppers might continue to build imagined communities among male-desiring men, even in an era when poppers seem especially antiquated compared to other varieties of chemsex (137).In celebrating the rush of momentary, self-shattering pleasures over the homonormative demands of contemporary gay identity politics, Deep Sniff certainly complements the strand of “antisocial” queer theory associated with Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, and Tim Dean.3 By sniffing a noxious substance like amyl nitrite, sex and death momentarily bend toward each other in the service of “sex for fun, sex for now, sex as an emotion and physical experience at the same time. Call it queer sex—sex that doesn't care about creating families, or categories, or even relationships that are seen as acceptable” (77). Yet, by the book's final chapter, Zmith largely moves away from the history of poppers, into the speculative futures of science fiction—not unlike Muñoz's call to retain queer utopian imaginings in the face of antisocial cynicism. Whereas poppers were once ubiquitous in gay subcultural spaces, but seemingly peripheral to more central activities like dancing and fucking, the feelings of freedom they can engender are more broadly applicable to imagining different futures today. “A better future is like a poppered-up body's bumhole: open” (178), Zmith concludes, inviting the reader to join him in the next hit. But much like the drug itself, quickly evaporating and leaving one with a headache, some readers may come down from Deep Sniff with an annoying suspicion that Zmith's argument is, for better or worse, little more than a paean to sexual pleasure. Can a utopia be built from successive moments of pleasure? If the potential for these “hits of freedom and momentary utopia . . . was there in our bodies all along” (18), then how else might a queer soul find release? Regardless, Deep Sniff is a fascinating salute to a chemical that has played an outsized role in Anglo-American gay life, and thus deserves this belated analysis as far more than an open secret

Art · Economics · Futures contract · Psychoanalysis · Queer · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Cinema and Media Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Psychology

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