Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures

by Adam Zmith

Amyl nitrite was sold in sealed glass ampoules, which were crushed by users to release the vapour of the liquid inside. This action made a “pop”. This is how amyl nitrite, and similar substances, were packaged and used before the little brown bottles with safety caps came along. It’s also how they got their name “poppers”.

But someone, somewhere, always wants to see sex as improper.

Joseph Miller began to manufacture poppers in the 1970s. Through the 1980s and 1990s, he became a rich and powerful figure in the business community in Indianapolis, where he based his company, Great Lakes Products. The company absorbed Freezer’s after he died, and Miller even registered Freezer’s old company name Pharmex in the state of Indiana.

Miller knew and funded local Democratic politicians. If you search for it, you can find a photograph of him with Bill Clinton, the US president. He gave money to the Damien Center, which was founded in 1987 to care for people living with HIV and AIDS-related conditions in Indianapolis. Today it serves more than four thousand people, many of them through its Joseph F. Miller Testing Center. You might wonder if the board members, or even Clinton, knew how Miller made his money. Well, plenty of people did ask questions; Miller was frequently the subject of investigation and rumour. In the 1970s there was a paedophile case, later dropped, naming him as a person of interest. By the time of his suicide in 2010, he was a deeply controversial figure in Indianapolis. Blog posts reporting on his death, and the comments beneath them, range from tributes to his warmth, generosity and thoughtfulness to allegations of paedophilia and the manic statement “JOE MILLER WAS ONE OF THE GREATEST MEN WHO EVER LIVED”.

She was ejecting great quantities of fluid from her stomach, which saturated the whole room with an amyl-like odour. Her face was grayish-white, her pupils widely dilated, her eyes glassy and vacantly rolling in their sockets. The mouth was wide open, breathing spasmodic and irregular. This account was made by a doctor in Evansville, Indiana, after treating a young woman who had swallowed a dessert-spoon of amyl nitrite by mistake. His antidote was coffee, opium and a massage.

There are few acts derided as much as “meaningless sex” – it is a term that people disdain on dating apps as they proclaim an orientation towards a long-term relationship. Many of us share the idea that the less sex you have, the more meaningful it will be.

The problem with prohibition is people.

Preferably moral sex is more about emotional connection than physical pleasure too, for many people. This gives it more meaning, whatever that means.

Just like a lot of sex education, pleasure is the bottom priority after all the talk about mechanics, pregnancy and disease.

Espresso and synthpop stimulate the heart and mind.

When Jean-Luc Picard fought the Borg as they tried to assimilate people into their clan of cyborg automatons, I felt the power of recognising my individuality.

As with the USA, the forces that Roddenberry put into keeping the United Federation of Planets going as an ideal are actually not so desirable. All the Star Trek series and films have shown that the Federation maintains peace through war and political interference, often in the name of science and development. Underpinning the Federation, and Star Trek as an entertaining exposition of politics, is the idea that we can engineer an ideal world. In fact, the idea that any one group of people comes up with to create an ideal world is a profoundly arrogant one. One person’s idea of an ideal world bulldozes through another’s. The British Empire tried to establish an ideal world through “civilisation”, the revolutionaries in France and Russia through equality and solidarity, the Nazis through racial purity. When you try to build your ideal world, you always spill blood.

We often constrain ourselves within a certain category for years more than we should, just because we want to be consistent.

It’s hard to read about people with lots of freedom interfering with others and not think of rich white gays telling their fellow gays in poor, post-colonial countries how to be free.