Chemical Companionship: Erotic Collaboration of Users and Drugs in Chemsex Porn Publics

Before Pornhub’s 2020 content purge, a networked chemsex public briefly flourished around amateur, meth-themed gay porn. In this article, I explore this public through 450 pseudonymous user comments, asking how sex, drugs, and desire are imagined, narrated, and shared. Drawing on critical chemsex studies, feminist theory, and new materialism, I develop the concept of “chemical companionship” to describe the affective and agentic relationships between viewers and the drugs they fantasise with. This public was shaped by the affordances of porn platforms—anonymity, minimal moderation, and algorithmic visibility—but is now largely erased due to the ongoing deplatformisation of digital sexual expression. I argue that this erasure weakens not only the cultural self-understanding of gay people who engage in sexualised drug use, but also the ability of sexual health organisations to understand and reach them with harm reduction initiatives. By reading these comment sections as ephemeral zones of queer intimacy, the article shows that their expansive social space allows for socio-sexual creativity that is nevertheless finely attuned to the hegemonic morality and stigma around drug use.