Text by Matteo Pini

I was about 40 minutes into a screening of Bruce LaBruce’s 2024 film, The Visitor, when a peculiar mood of ennui descended upon me. My disquiet had little to do with the content of the film itself, inflammatory and pornographic though it was. If anything, The Visitor, a gender-bending take on Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), is business as usual for LaBruce, the crowned king of Ontario’s queercore scene. The politics are sledgehammer subtle, the cinematography has that queasy, arthouse porn register of looking simultaneously cheap and expensive, and LaBruce pays ample homage to his queer filmmaking forebears, this time to John Waters in a tellingly simulated scene of shit eating. In other words, a great time at the pictures. No, my disquiet came from a more diffuse place: the realisation that LaBruce’s lexicon of outrage – once calibrated to real social and bodily risk – is now gay culture’s common currency.

Modes of gay subversion have travelled far beyond my own (admittedly limited) London-centric cultural pool. The practice of “fujoshing out” – delighting in homosexual relations between men, once predominantly the remit of fanfiction – has been omnipresent of late, with films like Challengers (2024) and TV shows like Boots (2025) and Overcompensating (2025). As I write this, Heated Rivalry (2025), which began life as smut fanfiction with a hockey theme, is a global phenomenon. (It is notable how the spaces these media occupy – frat houses, military bases, playing fields – tend to construct their own kinds of closet, bro-centric zones that are vividly homosocial.) These are spaces where masculinity is both performed and policed, yet their very intensity creates a sanctioned intimacy that queer culture has long dreamed of queering from within. Elsewhere, apps like Feeld transpose the fluidity of gay dating culture onto heterosexual relations with varying degrees of success. The cultural dominance of Charli XCX’s BRAT (2024) casualised the aesthetics of gay excess – drugs in the club toilet, blown-out electroclash, ecstatic abrasion – for a global audience, while Chappell Roan’s theatre-kid melodramatics performed a similar translation. Drag is as likely to be performed at brunch to drunk straight women as it is to gay men in dive bars, and Troye Sivan’s “Rush” is likely playing in a gym near you right now. Faggotry has escaped its dungeon to become part of the global cultural vernacular.

Spend enough time in contemporary gay culture, and you can sense a decisive shift from the affective modes that characterised the 2010s. The learned respectability, #itgetsbetter positioning and trauma narratives that characterised the pre-Covid era – television like Queer Eye (2018) and Pose (2018), films like Moonlight (2016), Call Me By Your Name (2017) and Love, Simon (2018), books like The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2012) and A Little Life (2015) – have given way to more outwardly eroticised, ostensibly transgressive forms of expression. Aesthetically, we have transitioned out of Tumblr-era delicacy – melancholic masculinity framed by lithe twink bodies, the “we’ll always have summer” ephemerality of teenage desire – into a more hypermasculinist, gym-and-creatine current.

In contemporary art, Louis Fratino and Soufiane Ababri fixate on the before, during and after of gay fucking; Dean Sameshima’s text work “Anonymous Faggots” decorates JW Anderson’s latest collection; nightlife terrorist Leigh Bowery is celebrated with a blockbuster exhibition at Tate Modern. Beloved gay photographer Peter Hujar is the subject of retrospectives, biographies and a recent film where he is played by Ben Whishaw. In fashion, apparel company Eric flogs t-shirts with “cruising” or “BB” (“bareback”) in confident block capitals; troublemaker Mexican brand Barragán decorates theirs with “j’adore your hole”, “meth”, or in a collaboration with cruising platform Sniffies, “cocksucker for str8/dl/masc”. Sniffies might be said to be the most emblematic symbol of the unabashedly horny direction gay culture is taking, publishing podcast episodes with titles like “How to Plan the Perfect Pump & Dump” and “Fisting for Compliments”. In nightlife, central London club Lost looks to recreate the Blitz Kid spirit of the 1980s with (supposedly) debaucherous, sex-and-drug-fuelled parties, while queer rave HOWL advises its attendees on how to douche in the club toilets using a water bottle.

The movement of pornography into the social media sphere, as embodied by platforms like OnlyFans, has characterised this new era. On platforms like TikTok or Instagram Reels, there is an entire engagement-bait economy in which creators – hetero-presenting but performing for mostly gay audiences – advertise their accounts through flash bulge flashes or by acting out absurdist roleplays. Fetishwear brands like Nasty Pig and Addicted stage more outwardly pornographic campaigns in various flavours of wish-fulfilment: a raunchy office party, sleazy Santa gifting his “boys” jockstraps for Christmas. AI is increasingly integrated into this soft porn landscape: Instagram account @geelherme, the project of Brazilian artist Guilherme Vieira, shares posts of AI-generated twinks in various states of undress. Some images are standard thirst trap fare (flexing muscles, crotch shots) while others – a curly-haired youth gorging on cheeseburgers, a kneeling boy surrounded by bearded men wearing thawbs – have a more explicitly fetishistic charge. All of Vieira’s pillowy-faced “boys” stare back at the viewer with the same self-aware gazes as the pornstars in William E. Jones’s The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998). But where Jones’s film analyses pornography as an inadvertent historical document, Vieira’s figures have no such anchor. As with much of this digital pornographic landscape, their gazes do not testify to lived experience as much as they simulate it into a glossy, reproducible aesthetic.

We are living in the era of “peak gay sluttiness”, according to writer Steven Phillips-Horst, where what once functioned as a subcultural provocation now serves as a dominant aesthetic mode. The aforementioned Bruce LaBruce is just one of a panoply of anti-assimilationist gay provocateurs who are benefiting from this smutty cultural upswing: figures like Gregg Araki, Dennis Cooper, Brontez Purnell and José Esteban Muñoz are all enjoying career renaissances. This turn – call it liberation if you will – is inseparable from the political successes of recent years. Secure (albeit precariously) in the gains of the 2010s Rainbow Wave, gay men enjoy a level of legal parity like never before. With the advent of PrEP, the threat of HIV is no longer an existential horizon shaping desire itself but a preventable afterthought. Danger has not disappeared from gay politics – homophobic hate crimes are statistically rising compared to the 2010s – but it no longer functions as gay life’s defining background characteristic. In the West, as the risk of social estrangement and disease no longer organises political identity as it once did, gay life feels safer than ever. The public staging of threat has now decisively shifted onto trans life, allowing gay men a provisional insulation from panic that can easily be mistaken for security.

Louis Fratino. Kissing Couple (2019) © Louis Fratino, courtesy of Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, New York, and Galerie Neu, Berlin.

“Has the gay man – homosexual, queer, or inverted – rendered himself obsolete?” anxiously asks Inversion: Gay Life After the Homosexual (2025), an essay collection edited by Pierre d’Alancaisez. Looking to identify the essence of homosexual desire in an era of “profound discontent”, the collection laments the perceived dullness of contemporary gay culture, less concerned with articulating a clear alternative than with restoring a sense of friction. The essays, mostly by writers from anti-establishment outlets like UnHerd and Compact, look to reintroduce some sense of risk into a culture that feels overly managed and spread too thin. “If you’re a faggot who is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, this is the book for you! Guaranteed to trigger, or your money back!” shouts the promotional quote from Bruce LaBruce.

The essays propose a range of provocative arguments with the broader aim of invigorating our era of “lost depth”, from Travis Jeppesen’s fond recollections of 1990s New York and his longing for a revival of its “be-the-worst-you-can-be” gay culture, to Amir Naaman’s bizarre argument that liberal gay support for Palestine comes from the objectification and fetishisation of the Arab subject. Elsewhere, David Moulton asserts that the victories of the 21st-century gay male have made us lose sight of the importance of gay suffering, as espoused by writers like Jean Genet and Djuna Barnes. None of these are necessarily unworkable ideas, but what emerges from the book is not a coherent political or social project, but a form of negation.

That nostalgia ultimately coalesces around a fantasy of the self-sufficient man – a kind of gay cowboy whose estrangement from the mainstream becomes a measure of authenticity. The gay man who emerges across Inversion is almost always alone and at odds with everyone else: traits like love or care are mere forms of capture, and attachment is inherently suspect. Those who have committed the supposed heresy of assimilation – through gay marriage or child-rearing – are cast as traitors to the cause of faggotry. “Our desire to set a mark and a standard in this conversation is partly borne out of our midlife crises … and the anger and contemplation they come with,” reads the opening blurb, and there is certainly a wounded, post-twink death quality to much of the essays. What animates these arguments is not so much a hunger for transgression as a desire to police it, to distinguish between noble and degraded forms of risk: the virile outlaw on his knees in a public toilet versus the cringey, castrated institutionalised subject. It is amusing how closely this positioning resembles that of contemporary manosphere politics: grievance is equated with rebellion, intimacy is equated with emasculation, and salvation is found in a reflexive retreat to an imagined masculine past.

Amid the longing for a more daring, disobedient homosexuality, one transgression has slipped out of reach, not because it cannot be imagined, but because its historical weight is still too raw. If writers like Dennis Cooper once toyed with paedophilia as a theoretical provocation, even the most avowed contrarian subcultures today stop short in its defence. The association of homosexuality with child abuse, weaponised throughout the 20th century and bolstered by pro-paedophile groups like NAMBLA, has rendered this particular taboo unusable, a signal of the outer boundary of what is acceptable. In this way, the hunger for abject status that Inversion stands for reveals its limits. The conclusion it reaches – that the homosexual must return to its rightful place in the margins to reanimate some lost vitality – pines for the aura of transgression without confronting the histories that made exclusion, danger and abjection lived realities rather than aesthetic poses.

The half-ironic longing for a rollback of queer rights – in the hope that it will make the sex better, that everyone will stop being so #triggered, that we might return to some Platonic notion of the “homosexual”, rather than the bloated inclusivity of the “queer” – is less an endorsement of oppression than a performance of nihilism. The book’s call for a revival of the gay male as an exclusive identity category frequently collapses into resentment towards trans politics, which are cast as overbearing and censorious, emblematic of the very managerial culture these writers claim to reject. Yet projects like Inversion depend on a selective blindness to where risk is currently concentrated. In contemporary queer life, that burden falls disproportionately on trans people. For many cis gay men in the West, the risks once imposed by the state, medicine and society have become optional. For trans people, they remain compulsory. To romanticise marginality while disavowing its present bearers is a return not to politics but a lapse into solipsism: we have our rights, we have our PrEP, and we’re still oh-so-terribly bored.

As gay life in the 20th century proves, risk was not something chosen but was the condition that allowed desire to take shape. When homosexuality became entangled with social estrangement, criminality, disease and death, a web of communal ethics emerged in response. Discretion, mutual obligation, hedonism, and even a certain welcome sleaze produced an affective charge that organised gay sociality. As structural pressures have loosened, this charge has not so much disappeared as it has drifted from its original moorings. In the absence of its deliberate imposition, risk is increasingly aestheticised, manufactured and appropriated, divorced from the social imperatives through which gay life once defined itself.

Faggotry has escaped its dungeon to become part of the global cultural vernacular.

Cruising is instructive here. Historically a practical response to exclusion from public life, the act of public sex once functioned as a system for negotiating desire under the surveillance of heteronormativity: it ensured anonymity and distributed risk among its participants. Today, cruising still happens, but more often through app-based economies like Grindr or Sniffies, which facilitate spontaneous, location-based sexual encounters with (ostensibly) more predictability. Sniffies accelerates Grindr’s automation of gay sexual encounters: face pictures are generally eschewed, replaced with an endless array of body, dick and ass pictures, plotted on a map. Even as it trades on the nostalgic allure of cruising, it is eerie how adroitly Sniffies has adapted the practice to the rhythms of 21st-century pleasure-seeking. Where cruising was once clandestine and geographically specific, on Sniffies, it is gamified, like a particularly horny version of Pokémon Go. You can attend a “no-loads-refused” cumdump happening 20 metres from your home and be back in time for lunch.

In its defense, Sniffies also serves an educational purpose, with community-created guides to local cruising areas. Nor is Sniffies’s promise of infinite sexual possibility far removed from the affective logics of the gay sauna or sex club. Yet in attempting to digitise cruising, Sniffies may have inadvertently made it riskier than ever. In September 2025, reports abounded that since the start of Pride month, nearly 200 men had been arrested for public lewdness by undercover Amtrak policemen in the toilets of New York’s Penn Station. At least 20 of those arrested had been taken into ICE custody, even if their lewdness charges were later dropped. The tone of the operation, described by civil-rights group Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.) as “algorithmic McCarthyism,” was made explicit when one officer reportedly described the detainees as “fag pervs”. Furious questions followed about Sniffies’ culpability. The idea that the platform – which also features a merch line and a short film division – could be so easily repurposed as a tool of surveillance captures the fragile bargain of gay life in the 2020s: the openness hard-won through liberation now doubles as a site of exposure. The historical power of cruising lay in its fugitivity: encounters were deliberately transitory, left little physical trace, and were unified by a shared commitment to not finding out too much about the other. Platforms like Sniffies invert this logic: desire is now searchable, surveillable and semiotically mediated by an apathetic digital infrastructure. The commitment to mutual pleasure that once defined cruising is increasingly privatised, even as its riskiness remains constant.

The continued popularity of chemsex pushes this logic further. Chemsex – the practice of long sessions of sex combined with stimulants, often methamphetamine (“Tina”), mephedrone (“mcat”), Viagra and GHB (“G”)  – internalises risk even further, displacing it from the body politic onto the body itself. The practice of gay people having sex on drugs is hardly a new development: Hubert Selby Jr.’s 1964 novel Last Exit to Brooklyn memorably features a benzedrine-fuelled party of transgender women and drag performers to rival anything the dolls are doing in the warehouses of Fish Island or Bushwick today. Rather, what’s changed is that the experience is now an individual threshold to be crossed rather than a collective condition to be managed.

Chemsex is not confined to any single gay demographic; it cuts across class, race and geography, enjoyed by both the hypervisible, elite queer scenes of London and New York, as well as more underground networks. To describe chemsex as a site of risk is not to undercut its social vitality: it creates a fleeting sense of liberation, sociality and bodily autonomy that is otherwise difficult to access amidst the closure of queer venues and the thinning out of communal gay infrastructure. Yet it also crystallises the neoliberal reconfiguration of the gay male subject. Orgies often go on for days, conforming to capitalist rhythms of endurance and productivity, even as they promise escape from them. The popularity of GHB in the chemsex world echoes this: marketed as a “comedown-free” drug, it requires the kinds of precise dosages that mirror Silicon Valley’s ethics of relentless self-monitoring and calibration.

It is worth recalling that, less than ten years ago, chemsex was subject to a full-blown media panic, with histrionic news reports and the 2015 Vice documentary Chemsex. Stigmatising and patronising as that period was – the film was directed by two heterosexual men – it at least regarded chemsex as a collective issue. In the post-PrEP era, the panic has significantly dissipated. GHB, which has already lived multiple moral lives – first as a bodybuilding supplement, then a date-rape accessory, and now a chemsex staple – has become just another feature of an “afters” culture that society no longer concerns itself with. The reduction of public health campaigns does not equate to the reduction of harm, but its privatisation. The risks of chemsex persist, but they no longer cohere into a shared cultural object of worry, circulating instead as muted, atomised anxieties, managed by charities like Antidote and Controlling Chemsex in the absence of government-funded support.

This development owes much to chemsex’s emergence in the digital era. So prominent is chemsex that it has developed its own aesthetic codes. Receiving a photo on “the apps” illuminated by an LED light and clouds of smoke or fielding messages with an erratic blend of upper and lowercase text often functions as an unspoken invitation. In a circuitous way, we are returning to the gay semiotics of the 1970s, as memorably outlined in Hal Fischer’s 1977 book. Coloured handkerchiefs have been replaced by rocket emojis and the telltale signifiers “chill” or “HnH” (“High and Horny”), which advertise what participants are seeking. No longer embedded in shared spaces with shared imaginaries – the beach, say, or the bathhouse – today’s signifiers drift through a decontextualised digital sphere.

Perhaps this demand for context lies behind the recent surge in popularity of media nostalgic for a pre-neoliberal gay culture, seen in works like Jack Parlett’s Fire Island (2022), Alastair Curtis’s AIDS Plays Project and Siavash Minoukadeh’s curatorial programme Films That Fuck. Such projects harken back to when gay life expressed itself as a social form: the decades they memorialise were indeed a time of sex and excess, but also a time of scenes, of evidence. Pleasure was rendered legible; risk was embedded within recognisable worlds of care, ritual and memory. The gay culture of the period presumed the existence of desire as well as a public capable of holding it.

There might be a chemsex masterpiece one day – Tom Firth’s graphic novel series Horny 'N'High (2023) is certainly a contender, and artist Matt Spike has produced some vivid photography on the subject – but chemsex leaves little in the way of cultural residue to make this a reality. Today’s culture of chemsex does not represent a return to the drugged-up orgies described by writers like Samuel R. Delany, or even the meth queen elegy of the Scissor Sisters’s “Return to Oz” (2004). Rather, it reveals its afterimage: risk stripped of its communal logic; intimacy detached from relational obligation; desire compelled to justify itself through extremity. Through the ways its intensity is managed and mediated, chemsex more closely resembles a charged form of brainrot: indeed, an evening (or morning) of chemsex can involve more time spent scrolling, swiping and negotiating invitations than fucking itself. It marks a condition in which risk no longer coheres into a shared world, circulating instead as a series of private thresholds – marathon sessions alongside marathon comedowns – that are negotiated alone, even when one is in the presence of others. Here, risk does not signal transgression so much as its opposite: the failure of liberalisation to furnish gay life with durable forms of attachment.

If my sense of ennui watching The Visitor had a source, it was not that LaBruce has lost his edge – the transgressions duly arrive on schedule – but that his grammar of outrage no longer knows where to land. What we are missing is a social field where transgression functions as anything other than orthodoxy. In its place remains a theatre of extremity, and the restless insistence that if one pushes far and hard enough, something like depth might finally appear. It is not that gay culture has become too free, but that freedom has outpaced the forms capable of giving it weight. Meaning was never produced by danger alone, but through the forms of relation danger forced into being. The task facing gay culture now is not to resurrect danger as an aesthetic, nor to fantasise a return to the margins. Rather, it is to reckon with what it means to desire and take responsibility in a world where liberation has arrived unevenly. Until then, what remains is a culture fluent in the aesthetics of risk, yet increasingly unsure of how to live alongside it. .