MQFF NOTES: Chemsex (2015, Dir. Max Gogarty, William Fairman)

A collective crisis of connection and intimacy has been the overarching theme of this year's festival. And nowhere does this concept come into more harrowing focus than Max Gogarty and William Fairman's interrogation of the increasingly insidious overlap of drugs and sex and technology that is taking place in the gay community.

Chemsex draws its sample group from the roster of patients of 56 Dean St. in the heart of the gay district in London's Soho, which Gogarty and Fairman suggest has become the epicentre of these practices. Sitting face to face with the camera, the group of men recount their experience on the scene, which generally amounts to getting intermittently fucked up on a cocktail of drugs while attending extended group sex parties hooked up online or via apps using barely disguised codes (PnP, parTy, chill sessions).

These men, at various stages of entrapment within the lifestyle, talk of the extent to which real world connection no longer appears possible. They mourn the loss of sustainable life in their chase for a never-ending (but increasingly dark) sexual high. It is real rabbit hole stuff.

Gogarty and Fairman don't go hard into numbers but David Stuart, the attending specialist at 56 Dean St. and the world's leading expert on what's come to be known as chemsex, speaks of a frightening increase. Anyone who has been on Grindr, Scruff or any other hook-up site can track its growth. I daresay the statistics, were they offered, would be frightening, but Gogarty and Fairman's approach in taking their camera to the streets is far more successful in building a balanced picture of the community.

They capture both the ups and the downs, and the openness of the men who are sharing their stories gives a complete picture of the experience. From a strict content perspective, then, the documentary, though scary, steers clear of blatant scaremongering. It is explicit and “all access” as you’d expect a documentary out of the Vice stables to be, but there is a reasonable amount of sensitivity to balance the starker moments. Less balanced is Daniel Harle's ominous score, which brings to mind those throbbing backing tracks that would accompany the demonising docos they’d serve up in highschool. Deployed over some of the more uncompromising imagery, it darkens the tone unnecessarily.

This jarring aspect of the film is at odds with its more compassionate moments, many of which are related by Stuart in his unpacking of the experience, which he himself has lived. He’s a supportive character and one who goes out of his way not to judge the men who request his help. It is Stuart who teases out this idea that a hunger for intimacy and connection drives this community. He draws a line from the scars left on our community after the once-solidifying HIV epidemic through to this desire to drown out the world in this manner. Like a collective PTSD.

It is an idea that opens Chemsex up and offers a line of self-examination we should begin to explore as a community. If the film can open that conversation, and it appears it has, its flaws will be easily overlooked.

★★★☆

Trailer:

Chemsex screened as part of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival 2016.

You can check out other films from the festival here.