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i am going to be firm on this: chemsex is an *event* and not a sexual practice. to refer to it as the latter - as blood donation policy newly does - is to construct a many headed monster of HIV risk. legislating against chemsex is like legislating against... attending a rave.
many things can happen there, even epidemiologically significant things. but chemsex alone is not a risk practice. what happens when a PrEP user walks into the sex party? a condom user? someone who only has oral sex? is playing with a third with GHB chemsex?
suddenly chemsex simply comes to mean everything that good monogamous gay men don’t do (or is the unlikely occasion of doing crystal with your life partner considered chemsex? probably not.)
and all we’ve done is propagate the illusion that monogamy or the outer coat of respectability is a form of HIV/STI prophylaxis. when, in fact, the data shows that men who engage in chemsex are more likely to get regularly tested and more likely to use PrEP and so on and so on.
