Chem­sex

For doc­u­men­tary mak­ers, hav­ing sub­jects cry on cam­era must be some kind of the­o­ret­i­cal Holy Grail. Actu­al­ly being able to then build a cogent film around those tears – to actu­al­ly sup­ply them with ample and rig­or­ous con­text, to explore their mean­ing – is anoth­er mat­ter entire­ly. Direc­tors William Fair­man and Max Gog­a­r­ty achieve this feat with gus­to in their dynam­ic and pow­er­ful work, Chem­sex, which explores a dan­ger­ous new fash­ion trend with­in cer­tain sec­tors of the gay community.

The title refers to a process by which gay men ingest hard drugs (often intra­venous­ly) pri­or to sex­u­al trysts as a way to stim­u­late and pro­long the orgasm. Though short-term gain is actu­al­ly becom­ing long-term loss, as the entire sub­cul­ture is revealed as one that is fuelled by glassy-eyed self-anni­hi­la­tion. Yet this is not an advo­ca­cy doc­u­men­tary, and it nev­er once chides the hedo­nis­tic activ­i­ties of its sub­jects, even though it does give ample room for the sub­jects to chide the activ­i­ties them­selves. And they do, often com­ple­ment­ed with the
afore­men­tioned tears.

We learn in graph­ic detail exact­ly what’s hap­pen­ing, how it’s being
per­pet­u­at­ed by social media (and how social media has even emo­ji­fied things such as injec­tions and HIV), we see a range of dif­fer­ing reac­tions to the pur­suit, and those who have tak­en it upon them­selves to tack­le it. The man­ner in which the mate­r­i­al is arranged keeps a dra­mat­ic sweep locked inside, as paralysing tes­ti­monies take strange twists, and char­ac­ter don’t mere­ly form, but they develop.

There is one man who, very calm­ly and ratio­nal­ly, announces him­self as an HIV denier, and has a handy email ready for any­one want­i­ng to pick his brains regard­ing this con­tro­ver­sial choice of per­son­al sta­tus. It’s a vig­or­ous piece of hard inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism which is (just) for­mal­ly dar­ing enough to jus­ti­fy its exis­tence as a film rather than an eye-open­ing longread.