Once upon a dark and stormy Saturday night—OK, it wasn’t stormy, but my brain certainly was—I made the wildly ambitious decision to attend a chemsex party… relatively sober. Yes. Sober. At a chemsex party. That’s like turning up to a nudist beach in a three-piece suit or going to Burning Man to hand out Bibles. Bold. Questionable. Definitely confusing for everyone involved.
Now, this wasn’t just any chemsex party—this was my first one in someone’s flat. Not a hotel, not some sweaty underground club with a dodgy DJ and a fog machine that smells like regret. A flat. Like… with a toaster and bills and a designated recycling bin.
I wasn’t alone—I arrived with someone I knew (a comfort, until it wasn’t), and upon entry, I spotted another guy I vaguely knew. “Vaguely knew” as in, we’d once exchanged a series of flirty glances over mediocre cocktails and mutually decided not to pursue it. Wise in hindsight.
We booked an Uber and, in classic fashion, arrived way too late—peak “we missed the plot but not the chaos” hour. Upon entering, I was hit with the scent of poppers, anxiety, and some kind of off-brand air freshener battling for dominance. People were mostly naked, either haphazardly sandwiched onto a flimsy IKEA bed that screamed for structural support or floating around in various states of chemical transcendence. The bed sheets were stained—not with shame (that left the building hours ago), but with the sort of mysterious fluids that could only be identified by forensic scientists and a priest.
Then it hit me: I’d been to this flat before. Déjà vu smacked me across the face with a sweaty gym sock. I’d met someone here sober once, on a nice little one-on-one. He wasn’t there—his soul had clearly moved out in protest.
So I wandered into his flatmate’s bedroom—because boundaries had clearly died earlier that evening—and found about five guys in various stages of undress, lounging around like a low-budget, post-apocalyptic version of Love Island. Now, me being a chemsex newbie and a mostly-sober spectator, I had this naive thought that people would just, you know… start playing. Like some sexy, pansexual game of musical chairs.
But oh no. That’s not how chemsex works.
See, before any genital tango can commence, there’s a whole ritual. A ceremony, if you will. You don’t just jump in like it’s a sober orgy. No, no, darling—you must first take your chems and “get on a level.” It’s considered wildly inappropriate—sacrilegious, even—to try anything before everyone’s consciousness has left the building. I learned this the hard way when I smiled too long at someone and was met with a suspicious squint and the unspoken question: Are you… sober?
Here’s where it gets weird. And I mean David Lynch levels of weird. Once the chems kick in, people morph into these uncanny, twitchy, jaw-grinding gremlins of desire and confusion. Their voices change. Their mannerisms glitch like a broken simulation. Their conversations veer between overly intense and completely incomprehensible. One guy spent twenty minutes explaining the metaphysical symbolism of his nipple ring. Another offered me a Pringle and then whispered, “This is the last real food left in the world.”
It was surreal. It was awkward. It was like being at a dinner party where no one brought food but everyone brought existential dread and vibrating butt plugs.
Eventually, I realised I wasn’t going to “get on a level.” I was already on my level: confused, sober, and quietly judging everyone like a Victorian aunt at a burlesque show. I made my polite exits, left behind the cracked-out energy vortex, and walked back into the night feeling like I had just seen behind the curtain of some great cosmic joke—and let me tell you, the punchline was rough.
So yeah. 10/10 would not recommend doing chemsex parties sober unless you enjoy feeling like Jane Goodall observing the chimps. From inside the cage.
