"A good old-fashioned hit of poppers" - TLS essay

Posted on Poppers Guide's Forum

Topic created by Joe Orton
on Mon, 21 Sep 2020 at 20:18

Joe Orton said on Mon, 21 Sep 2020 at 20:18...

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/a-good-old-fashioned-hit-of-poppers/

Drigger said on Wed, 23 Sep 2020 at 03:45...

Very informative. Some I was aware of but much of it was new info. Good read. Thanks

The Dreadful Flying Glove said on Thu, 24 Sep 2020 at 20:36...

Guess what J.A. Lin got for Christmas...a thesaurus:

"The word is childish, plosive and thingly"

"the link is also corporeal"

"the palimpsest of London’s Soho"

"they were to him a kind of mnemonic"

"a synaesthetic correlation"

"I recently found myself in a conversation with a friend about the sociologist Erving Goffman’s conception of the “stigmaphile” and the “stigmaphobe”

As one does of course! I myself was recently chatting to a friend I had just met in a public convenience: "What", I asked, as he produced his chopper from the tight restriction of soft cotton and denim, "is your opinion of the efficacy of grandiloquent verbosity as a means of meeting a word count?" His reply was breviloquent: "Get your gob round this and shut the fuck up" I duly obliged.

Neil Johan Coggins BA said on Sun, 27 Sep 2020 at 10:27...

Criticism based upon knowledge of "big words" is a reflection of your own ignorance. You should buy a dictionary, or apply to The Open University. Alternatively, consult a therapist about managing your toxic sarcasm.

The article is thought provoking; I am unsure what conclusion is reached.

The Dreadful Flying Glove said on Sun, 27 Sep 2020 at 22:23...

There are many who find the idea of a connection between LBGT identity and poppers to be obnoxious. Your man Lin does not mention Poppers Stoppers ( a gay pressure group circa 1990) or Hank Wilson of The Committee to Monitor Poppers. Article is nostalgic, a paean to an imagined golden age of disco queens, clones, and poppers. I do not understand some of the words....and I read Will Self!

A group of gay businessmen in San Fransisco realized they could make money by branding simple chemicals (and buying up pages of adverts in gay publications of the time)...errrr..that's it folks!

The Dreadful Flying Glove said on Sun, 27 Sep 2020 at 22:55...

"The first commercially available brand was Locker Room, which remains a classic in terms of tying user experience to a location."

Actually named because the new formulation (iso-butyl nitrite) reminded the creator (Hassing) of the SMELL of socks. I also don't think it was the first, as snappers (vials of amyl nitrite) were packaged up in cardboard containers with a wide variety of names, including Rush. Amyl was the first commercially available poppers / snappers, not IBN Locker Room. Locker Room was the first iso-butyl poppers....hence the confusion.

The names themselves were surely created to boost sales, not as a refection of any cultural phenomenon. Rave appeared in the 90s, right? Jungle Juice was named because the SMELL of amyl is like tropical fruit...sweet and sticky. I think the reality is divorced from the romantic nostalgia.

101st Chairborne said on Mon, 28 Sep 2020 at 06:19...

Two clues:

1. Essay
2. Times Literary Supplement

It is an essay, and a pretty good one.

It is not aimed at people like you, who think Foucault is a type of Italian bread.

Nitritespecialist said on Mon, 28 Sep 2020 at 14:57...

I don't know the precise history behind the development of "poppers" used purely for recreation. I know more about the differences in the various nitrites. N-butyl nitrite is the one that when left open in a room, quickly makes the room smell like a locker room. I know this for a fact, because I bought 95% butyl nitrite from Sigma Aldrich recently and the smell hit me immediately and solved the "locker room" trade name puzzle immediately. Butyl nitrite also smells like pungent sweet bananas, especially as it degrades. I have also purchased 95% isobutyl nitrite. It smelled very pungent and sweet, but more like nail polish compounds, not anything edible. Isobutyl alcohol has more bitterness to its odor than does butyl alcohol. I have also purchased 95% isopentyl/isoamyl nitrite. At first it had a slight fruity odor, but quickly degraded into a foul dead fish/vinegar odor. I once bought amyl alcohol that smelled like dirty socks. It got on my fingers and made my fingers stink of funk. I have no bought any n-amyl nitrite, because the mark up is huge. The n-amyl I make is mild in odor, doesn't make me cough or have mucous, and lasts a long time without ever turning into a foul odor.

101st Chairborne said on Wed, 30 Sep 2020 at 07:34...

the precise history

neither does the poisonous glove :-( I imagine there is book waiting to be written on the subject. The graphics from the poppers adverts are worthy of a publication in themselves. They go from crude cartoons to glorious graphics. There is also plenty of drama like the Great Fire of San Fransisco, when a warehouse full of poppers caught fire and caused a moral panic, or the various quacks who proposed that poppers caused HIV. I agree with the article that poppers are part of LBGT history. Poppers only showed up at the party because of the zeitgeist (big word, sorry) of that era. They got mixed in with all those disco tunes and helped gay men enjoy sex. That is not a moral question, it is a fact. Are poppers a good thing? or a bad thing? The bad thing is the interference by the guardians of our morals - that created the new formulas. Amyl nitrite should have been left alone. The interference was born of homophobia, so again it is a LBGT issue. There is no debate about whether poppers are part of gay identity, they just are. Like drag queens, leather daddies, Oscar Wilde, cottaging, poppers exist in that space where the gay community expressed itself in the past. In a generation we will see one of two things: complete assimilation of gay culture into the mainstream, or.....well that does not bear thinking about. Vote wisely, wherever you are.

PJ said on Wed, 30 Sep 2020 at 20:22...

Joe Orton said on Mon, 21 Sep 2020

:-) ever read Prick Up Your Ears / The Orton Dairies? Great read!