One of the most interesting speakers we’ve had at ‘Let’s Talk About Gay Sex and Drugs’ is undoubtedly the glamorous Carolyn Cowan, a therapist who works closely with gay men and chemsex.
Patrick Cash spoke to her to find out her views around the subject, and her campaign to get the hashtag ‘#sobersex’ more widely used on social media.
On whether Chemsex is ‘bad’:
If somebody’s happy doing what they’re doing, why is that a problem? I don’t have a moral judgement. But if somebody comes to me and says ‘I don’t know how to stop, I don’t know how not to do this, I find myself absolutely out of my comfort zone, I can’t get back, I’ve never felt so dark or disconnected’, now I have a problem.
On the change of drugs:
Yes, the use of drugs has changed but the behaviours aren’t any different. In a way, I think what happens now is that the internet opens up the ability for everybody to judge it and therefore it becomes a focus of attention… It isn’t really so much about how badly the drugs will affect you as what happens to you mentally and spiritually and emotionally and what it is you’re trying to cover up. Because there’s nothing else that will cover it up and it doesn’t go away, the shadows just get darker.
On the science of hormones:
The dopamine hit of crystal meth is something like 1200 times what you get off cocaine, so the high is phenomenal… You’re working with cortisol, testosterone, adrenaline and then that drives the reward which is the dopamine. So, one of the problems you have with these very extreme drug addictions is it’s very difficult to understand how you get high again. You’ve messed up your reward system and not only that, you’ve been getting high on a bed of negative emotions a lot of the time.
“You’ve messed up your reward system and not only that, you’ve been getting high on a bed of negative emotions a lot of the time.”
On #sobersex:
I said let’s add a hashtag to it and let’s create the tribe. A line of people who use the internet, and if you use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, you will start to drive an energy about this and eventually I will follow up with Grindr and see if I can persuade them to make it a tribe. It would actually allow people to start opening up and the thing with sober sex is it can be quite frightening. Some people have never had sober sex. Sober sex is quite a frightening thing, because suddenly there isn’t freedom, you’ve got to make choices, you’ve got to show yourself. Intimacy is a really scary thing for a lot of people and a lot of drug use and alcohol use allows for people to remove their inhibitions. So sober sex is a massive leap.
On self-objectification and the ‘body beautiful’:
There is this horrible sort of body beautiful that transcends any personality to a degree. I deal with a lot of gay men, such beautiful men, and they’re so delightful and they’re in so much pain, and it’s so sad because they disconnect. The idea that the only value that they have is in their own objectification, the way that they deny themselves, and all that they are is the visual and external.
On social media and the internal/external:
Think about how we live. The lack of value, how fast images now are discarded – look how fast images go down your Facebook page – it takes no time. Twitter, you’re just descending into a dustbin of images and crap and web pages that mean nothing. So, how do you stand up if you believe in and you follow and you’re part of this social networking society where nothing that you say or do or look like has any value because it doesn’t stay there? Because it just disappears down. If you can learn to sit still and anxiously experience yourself outside of the speed of light and outside of the insanity of Facebook and Twitter and social media, and ‘how tight’s my arse and how big are my muscles’ and all that stuff, there’s actually this extraordinarily exquisite reality that transcends any drug use.
On the biggest struggles gay men practising chemsex have getting back to sober sex:
Erectile dysfunction. Fear of intimacy. Fear that they’ll never be loved. And self-loathing. If you’ve got to the point where you’re very disconnected from intimacy and you really fear intimacy and you’re using a large amount of drugs to cover up how you feel emotionally then there are deeper problems. There’s a very, very good gay meeting in Soho at 56 Dean Street, named the CODE Clinic.
To read the full ‘In conversation with’ interview with Carolyn, visit: qxmagazine.kinsta.cloud/blog-event/in-conversation-with-carolyn-cowan/
