This week we're taking a look at queer books that focus on drugs, sex and addiction. From explicit East London chemsex parties to a deep-dive into the history of poppers, dark murder mysteries and first experiences with BDSM, here are 15 LGBTQ+ books with a focus on chemsex, drugs, addiction and screwing:
Note: All of these books are explicit and tackle difficult themes - please check trigger warnings before reading these books.
Tweakerworld - Jason Yamas
Memoir - Non-Fiction
Queer Rep: Queer Men
Reading Age: 18+
Meet Jason: a college-educated documentary film producer, cat parent of two, and one of San Francisco’s top drug dealers.
After Jason’s world falls apart in LA, he moves to Berkeley for a fresh start with his kid brother. Just one problem: his long-closeted Adderall addiction has exploded into an out-of-control crystal meth binge. Within weeks, Jason plunges into the sprawling ParTy n’ ’Play subculture of the Bay Area’s gay community. It is a wildly decadent scene of drugs, group sex, and criminals, and yet it is also filled with surprising characters, people who are continually subverting Jason’s own presumptions of the stereotypical tweaker.
Soon Jason becomes a dealer on the pretense of researching this tweaker world for a project that will carry him, like a life raft, back to the shores of a normal life. But his friendly entrepreneurial spirit and trusting disposition disarm clients and rival dealers alike.
100 boyfriends - Brontez Purnell
Fictional Memoir - Fiction
Queer Rep: Queer Men
Reading Age: 18+
Transgressive, foulmouthed, and wildly funny, Brontez Purnell's 100 Boyfriends is a filthy, unforgettable, and brutally profound ode to queer love in its most messy of variations.
From one-night stands to recurring lovers, Purnell's characters sleep with their co-worker's husbands, expose themselves to racist neighbours, date Satanists, and drink their way out of trouble, all the while fighting - and often losing - the urge to self-sabotage. A horny, punk love song full of imperfect intimacies, 100 Boyfriends takes readers on a riotous journey through dirty warehouses and gentrified bars, from dysfunctional houseshares to desolate farming towns in Alabama.
Drawing us into a community of glorious misfits living on the margins of a white supremacist, heteronormative society, iconoclastic storyteller Brontez Purnell gives us an uncompromising vision of desire, desperation, race, loneliness, and queerness that will devastate as much as it entertains.
Horny & High Vol. 1 - Ed Firth
Contemporary Fiction - Graphic Novel
Queer Rep: Queer Men
Reading Age: 18+
Do you enjoy graphic nudity and the firm seductive grip of self-annihilation? Horny & High is a dark, raw and moving collection of stories from breakout artist Ed Firth, including The Nightbus (printed in WIP's Success 2020 anthology), and Chillout, shortlisted by Myriad Editions' First Graphic Novel Prize 2020.
The Chillout story continues, in the second volume of Horny & High, the adults-only graphic novel series prising the lid off the London chemsex scene in the 2010s. Stu hooks up with a group of horny guys just trying to get high on a long wet weekend. But he soon finds he's getting in over his head again... Prepare yourself for chemsex, cruising and heartbreak in these adults-only hand-inked stories.
Something For The Weekend - James Wharton
Gay Studies & Drug Abuse - Non-Fiction
Queer Rep: Queer Men
Reading Age: 18+
When James Wharton leaves the army, he finds himself with more opportunities than most to begin a successful civilian life – he has a husband, two dogs, two cars, a nice house in the countryside and a book deal. A year later he finds himself single, living in a room and trying to adjust to single gay life back in the capital.
In his search for new friends and potential lovers, he becomes sucked into London’s gay drug culture, soon becoming addicted to partying and the phenomenon that is ‘chemsex’.
Exploring his own journey through this dark but popular world, James looks at the motivating factors that led him to the culture, as well as examining the paths taken by others. He reveals the real goings-on at the weekends for thousands of people after most have gone to bed, and how modern technology allows them to arrange, congregate, furnish themselves with drugs and spend hours, often days, behind closed curtains, with strangers and in states of heightened sexual desire.
Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger - Brontez Purnell
Contemporary Fiction - Fiction
Queer Rep: Queer Men
Reading Age: 18+
A raw, dirty, hilarious, and often poignant cult classic, Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger paved the way for a new kind of queer writing that changed how we talk about sex, relationships, drugs, identity, race, HIV, and what it means to be gay in the 21st Century. Recounting the life of an artist and 'old school homosexual' who bears more than a small resemblance to author Brontez Purnell, Johnny Would You Love Me takes us cruising in late night parks and bath houses, searching for sex and intimacy in a newly gentrified city where even the gays are getting fancy. A collection of short, hilarious, profound, and filthy vignettes, Johnny Would You Love Me is a radical thrill ride through the nuances of queer sex and queer love that shows truly what it means to live on the fringes of a conservative society as a black, working-class gay man.
Sedating Elaine - Dawn Winter
Contemporary Fiction - Fiction
Queer Rep: Queer Women
Reading Age: 18+
Frances was not looking for a relationship when she met Elaine in a bar. She was, in fact, looking to drown her sorrows in a pint or twelve and nurse a broken heart, shattered by the gorgeous, electric Adrienne.
But somehow (it involved a steady stream of beer and weed, as things often did with Frances) Elaine ended up in Frances's bed and never left. Now, faced with mounting pressure from her drug dealer, Dom (and his goon, Betty), Frances comes up with a terrible idea: She asks Elaine to move in with her for real. Unfortunately, this seemingly romantic overture makes Elaine even more sex-crazed and maniacal with love. Frances fears she may never escape the relationship, so, given no choice, she makes the obvious decision: She will sedate Elaine.
A story as enthusiastically madcap and funny as it is smart and emotionally surprising, Sedating Elaine introduces a roster of unforgettable characters and an indelible, wildly exciting new voice in fiction.
Deep Sniff: A History Of Poppers and Queer Futures - Adam Zmith
Cultural Studies - Non-Fiction
Queer Rep: Queer Men
Reading Age: 18+
3, 2, 1... inhale, deep. From the Victorian infirmary and the sex clubs of the 1970s, poppers vapour has released the queer potential inside us all.
This is the intriguing story of how poppers wafted out of the lab and into gay bars, corner shops, bedrooms and porn supercuts. Blending historical research with wry observation, Adam Zmith explores the cultural forces and improbable connections behind the power of poppers. What emerges is not just a history of pub raids, viral panics and pecs the size of dinner plates. It is a collection of fresh and provocative ideas about identity, sex, utopia, capitalism, law, freedom and the bodies that we use to experience the world.
In Deep Sniff, what starts as a thoughtful enquiry into poppers becomes a manifesto for pleasure.
Boyslut - Zachary Zane
Adult Memoir - Non-Fiction
Queer Rep: Queer Men
Reading Age: 18+
A sex and relationship columnist bares it all in a series of essays - part memoir, part manifesto - that explore the author’s coming-of-age and coming out as a bisexual man and move toward embracing and celebrating sex unencumbered by shame
As a boy, Zachary Zane sensed that all was not right when images of his therapist naked popped into his head. Without an explanation as to why, a deep sense of shame pervaded these thoughts. Though his therapist assured him a little imagination was nothing to be ashamed of, over the years, society told him otherwise.
Boyslut is a series of personal and tantalizing essays that articulate how our society still shames people for the sex that they have and the sexualities that they inhabit.
In At The Deep End - Kate Davies
Contemporary Adult Romance - Fiction
Queer Rep: Queer Women
Reading Age: 18+
A fresh, funny, audacious debut novel about a Bridget Jones-like twenty-something who discovers that she may have simply been looking for love — and, ahem, pleasure — in all the wrong places (aka: from men)
Julia hasn’t had sex in three years. Her roommate has a boyfriend—and their sex noises are audible through the walls, maybe even throughout the neighborhood. Not to mention, she’s treading water in a dead-end job, her know-it-all therapist gives her advice she doesn’t ask for, and the men she is surrounded by are, to be polite, subpar. Enough is enough.
So when Julia gets invited to a warehouse party in a part of town where “trendy people who have lots of sex might go on a Friday night”—she readily accepts. Whom she meets there, however, is surprising: a conceptual artist, also a woman.
Just By Looking At Him - Ryan O-Connell
Contemporary Romance - Fiction
Queer Rep: Queer Men
Reading Age: 18+
A darkly witty and touching novel following a gay TV writer with cerebral palsy as he fights addiction and searches for acceptance in an overwhelmingly ableist world. Elliott appears to be living the dream as a successful TV writer with a doting boyfriend. But behind his Instagram filter of a life, he’s grappling with an intensifying alcohol addiction, he can’t seem to stop cheating on his boyfriend with various sex workers, and his cerebral palsy is making him feel like gay Shrek. But after falling down a rabbit hole of sex, drinking, and Hollywood backstabbing, Elliott decides to limp his way towards redemption. But facing your demons is easier said than done. Candid, biting, and refreshingly real, Just by Looking at Him is an incisive commentary on gay life, a heart-centered, laugh-out-loud exploration of self, and a rare insight into life as a person with disabilities.
Bath Haus: A Thriller - P.J. Vernon
Mystery/Thriller - Fiction
Queer Rep: Queer Men
Reading Age: 18+
Oliver Park, a young recovering addict from Indiana, finally has everything he ever wanted: sobriety and a loving, wealthy partner in Nathan, a prominent DC trauma surgeon
Despite their difference in age and disparate backgrounds, they've made a perfect life together. With everything to lose, Oliver shouldn't be visiting Haus, a gay bathhouse. But through the entrance he goes, and it's a line crossed. Inside, he follows a man into a private room, and it's the final line. Whatever happens next, Nathan can never know. But then, everything goes wrong, terribly wrong, and Oliver barely escapes with his life.
He races home in full-blown terror as the hand-shaped bruise grows dark on his neck. The truth will destroy Nathan and everything they have together, so Oliver does the thing he used to do so well: he lies.
Against Memoir - Michelle Tea
Feminist Memoir - Non-Fiction
Queer Rep: Queer Women
Reading Age: 18+
Valerie Solanas, a lesbian gang, recovering alcoholics, and teenagers surviving at a shop: these are some of the figures populating America's borders. These essays include fights and failures and the uncovering of and documentation of these lives. Michelle Tea reveals herself through these stories.
Michelle Tea is our exuberant, witty guide to the hard times and wild creativity of queer life in America. Along the way she reclaims SCUM Manifesto author Valerie Solanas as an absurdist, remembers the lives and deaths of the lesbian motorbike gang HAGS, and listens to activists at a trans protest camp.
This kaleidoscope of love and adventure also makes room for a defence of pigeons and a tale of teenage goths hustling for tips at an ice creamery in a `grimy, busted city called Chelsea'. Unsparing but unwaveringly kind, Michelle Tea reveals herself and others in unexpected and heartbreaking ways.
Diary of a Drag Queen - Crystal Rasmussen
Humor/Memoir - Non-Fiction
Queer Rep: Non-Binary, Queer Men
Reading Age: 18+
Life's a drag... Why not be a queen? Stories like the one where you shagged a 79-year-old builder and knocked over his sister's ashes while feeding him a Viagra. Or the time you crashed your car because you were giving a hand job in barely moving traffic and took your eye off the car in front. That's the kind of dinner-party ice-breaker I'm talking about. Northern, working-class and shagging men three times her age, Crystal writes candidly about her search for 'the one'; sleeping with a VIP in an attempt to become a world famous journalist; getting hired and fired by a well-known fashion magazine; being torn between losing weight and gorging on KFC; and her need for constant sexual satisfaction (and where that takes her). Charting her day-to-day adventures over the course of a year, we encounter tucks, twists and sucks, heinous overspending and endless nights spent sprinting from problem to problem in a full face of make-up. This is a place where the previously unspeakable becomes the commendable - a unique portrayal of the queer experience.
Limbic - Peter Scalpello
Poetry Anthology - Fiction
Queer Rep: Queer Men
Reading Age: 18+
Limbic is Peter Scalpello’s glittering ode to sex, intimacy, and queer discovery. Taking us on slippery nights out fuelled by chemsex, on drunken lads’ holidays, and into the quiet violence of small domestic moments, this is a world where tracksuits hide queer desire, where shame masks vulnerability, where wallets hide wraps of crystal meth.
From the eager trepidation of teenage sex, to the ecstasy of parties, to the stigma around HIV, Limbic is at once a therapy and a celebration, showing how queer learning can be both soft-edged and brutal at once. An exploration of masculinity, addiction and trauma, this is a revelatory collection of poems; wise, tender, and vital.
Circuit - James Berry
Science Fiction - Fiction
Queer Rep: Queer Men
Reading Age: 18+
An explicit and dark spicy gay murder mystery romance with a time-loop twist. The weekend before Pride in London and Bear is ready to spend it partying with his cadre of friends. Sniping, drinks, drugs, and casual sex ensue, but he's really thrown a curveball when a bomb is detonated in the nightclub he was running late to, killing his friends and many others. And then his night resets.
Now he's stuck reliving the same night out, trying to figure out how to stop the attack and save his friends.
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