Remaking Chemsex Event Networks in the Age of HIV Pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP)

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‘Let’s be honest: it’s a party drug’, declared the president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation of Los Angeles, following the approval of Truvada for HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). Drawing on the accounts of gay and queer-identifying men, we explore the ways in which PrEP has not only made chemsex possible for a new group of people, but has also changed what chemsex is. If the association with HIV infection has helped render chemsex an object of sexual health concern, PrEP can be understood to interfere with the very ontology of chemsex, and the human and more-than-human bodies imbricated in it. This rethinking invites us to consider antiretrovirals as part of the infrastructure, or event network, of chemsex, in turn producing new kinds of embodied sexual subjects. In doing so, we argue for a more expansive account of chemsex that troubles the binaries of licit and illicit drugs, therapeutic and recreational use, and normal/deviant bodies.