Poppers On Main
Excalibur XO by Bompas & Parr (image courtesy of Bompas & Parr).
If you have ever sniffed poppers, you will be familiar with the inimitable poppers high. The rush of blood to the head and the vacant but pleasing brain fog that the drugs bring about. After the high, often comes the headache. But poppers also have the effect of improving blood flow, relaxing the muscles and therefore easing penetration – hence their frequent use for increasing pleasure during sex. The high itself is a short one, frequently inspiring an instant urge to keep huffing, and you may have found yourself grabbing the small bottle of liquid for another intoxicating hit.
Having first tried poppers as a teenager at the back of an English lesson, I was pleased to discover that poppers popped up here and there on the London queer club scene I came of age on in the early 2010s. I remember how at Hot Boy Dancing Spot, a club night held at the Dalston Superstore bar in east London, organisers lubricated proceedings by putting poppers in the smoke machine, their vapour gently emitting into the air. This wasn’t a new idea, but one borrowed from the vaults of queer history – rumour has it that New York’s Studio54 pulled the same trick in the 70s. At Heaven nightclub in London, punters reportedly dipped cigarette filters into poppers before smoking (something I have tried and would say is not for the lighthearted). If they lit the wrong end by accident, the cigarette would emit a fireball.
While poppers use is not limited to gay communities, they have long been a staple of queer nightlife and sex cultures, as a recent book, Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures by Adam Zmith, sets out. Poppers, aka amyl nitrite, Zmith explains, were first discovered in the 1840s by a French scientist named Antoine Jérôme Balard, who synthesised a combination of chemicals that expanded the blood vessels and therefore lowered blood pressure. In 1867, Scottish medical researcher Thomas Lauder Brunton became the first to use the substance as an effective treatment for angina. Shortly after, amyl nitrite became available in pharmacies, packaged within the casing of a glass ampule that could be snapped by an angina sufferer and inhaled to relieve pain. How or when this crossed over from medication to recreation remains unknown, although – as Zmith tells me on Zoom – there is a rumour that it was a group of Harvard medical students in the 1930s who first experimented with poppers during sex.
By the 1950s, records show that men who have sex with men had begun requesting poppers from pharmacies, with news of how they could enhance sexual experiences circulating by word of mouth. In the 1970s, the drug was actively marketed to this demographic in North America through adverts taken out in gay magazines, which often pictured cartoons of muscular men under brand names like TNT or Bolt. Zmith points our attention to an advert that depicts poppers exploding into a mushroom cloud reminiscent of Hiroshima – an ejaculatory image commingling sex and death. He cites one report putting the number of bottles of poppers sold in the US in 1977 at a staggering 4m, perhaps because the product had become associated with these adverts’ promise of “purity, power and potency”. When the AIDS crisis hit in the 1980s, however, poppers were erroneously associated by some with causing the spread of the virus. A period of police raids and criminalisation followed, with Zmith noting how, as a “sex drug”, poppers have, over the years, carried the double stigmatisation of sex and drugs.
Just months after the publication of Deep Sniff, Zmith was contacted by Bompas & Parr, a London atelier of out-of-the-ordinary food and beverage experiences who describe themselves as “architects of taste”. Alongside their branded institutional commissions (Bompas & Parr have worked with names from LVMH and Bombay Sapphire to the Victoria & Albert Museum and Westfield), they produce a rolling programme of in-house passion projects. Robert Smith, their creative director, says they felt inspired to pursue one related to poppers after creating an office “poppers Christmas tree” a few years ago (think 30 to 40 cheap poppers bottles as baubles, and you’ve got the right idea).
In collaboration with London Cocktail Week, Bompas & Parr decided to create their own exclusive premium poppers brand, Excalibur XO – a limited edition design in a run of 10 bottles. An event at The Standard hotel in October 2022 launched the brand alongside a cocktail pairing event. Zmith was brought on board to curate a playful poppers “museum”, a panel discussion on the drug’s history, plus a “sniff-along” screening of poppers porn films, known as “trainer videos for popperbators”. Retailing at £100 per bottle, the profits of Excalibur XO are being donated to the Tom of Finland Foundation to support queer artists.
For Bompas & Parr, explains Smith, the project felt like a natural extension of their work. “I think how it fits within our oeuvre is that it feels a bit different, like looking at something in a new light or from an adjacent or oblique angle,” he says. “We’re also interested in how we can affect you at different touch points – the flavours of the cocktail pairing, notes of the poppers, and the head rush, sound and lighting design, along with the videos, represent our approach to multi-sensual design, as well as just being a fun party.” It is not their first sex-related project either, Smith adds, pointing to a collaboration with New York’s Museum of Sex in 2014, for which they designed a boob-shaped bouncy castle and genitalia-inspired rock climbing wall called “Grope Mountain”.
The Excalibur XO project takes a less knowingly juvenile, but equally playful approach, while also “elevating” poppers as a product. “I think there’s something really beautiful about taking an everyday object or something ordinary and making it extraordinary,” comments Smith. “It’s kitsch – in terms of the history of the art world – and camp to encapsulate the spirit of extravagance and exaggeration while also taking the topic seriously.”
Bompas & Parr reached out to a local glass manufacturer, E&M Glass, to create Excalibur XO’s hand-blown artisanal bottle. Its stopper is like that of a decanter, referencing luxury spirits or wine, and the smell of Excalibur XO has been fine tuned, accentuating the notes of almond and orgeat found in a common poppers bottle to “heighten and distinguish the aroma,” Smith notes. They work just as ordinary poppers do, as I discover when a sample arrives and I decide to try it, getting an instant head rush. The bottle, I notice, looks a little like a butt plug. “That wasn’t in the design brief,” laughs Smith when I put this to him, “but there’s a sensuality to it for sure”.
While Excalibur XO fits the Bompas & Parr oeuvre, it breaks away from the general trajectory of poppers design: from ampules, to a later inhaler model, to the small brown glass bottles we tend to see on sale at newsagents and sex shops today, and which usually come with child-lock safety lids and plastic wrapping. Well-known brands include the gold plastic clad “Liquid Gold”, the fascist-looking “English” brand with a Saint George’s flag, or “Rush”, reminiscent of battery design with its redand-yellow colour scheme and lightning bold logo. “It’s all more or less the same stuff,” explains Zmith, “just with a different name and branding”.
Image courtesy of Jerry Mills and Adam Zmith.
In the UK, it is now illegal to sell amyl nitrite for human consumption, so most labels are required to list another use such as “room odouriser” or “leather cleaner”. Excalibur XO’s bottle moves away from this. “We have kept the bottle clean, as it was a hand-blown bespoke bottle,” says Smith. “The warnings, however are very important, and we have a separate card that goes alongside them with all the relevant information. (i.e. do not drink!).” Excalibur XO is also much more “classy” or “tasteful” looking and weightier than your regular £5 shop-bought poppers – an objet d’art, something that might be mistaken for a vase on your mantel piece.
Just as Zmith’s book explains, given that poppers have been intertwined with underground sex cultures, they are sometimes viewed as scuzzy, cheap hits that have – for better or worse – historically carried some of the societal shame placed on gay sex through association. In causing a kind of blankness of the brain, they have also come to be associated with sexual nihilism. (See Andrew Holleran’s 1978 gay novel Dancer from the Dance: “You put the popper to your nostril, you put a hand out to lightly touch the sweaty, rigid stomach of the man dancing next to you [...] and you are thinking, as grave as a judge: What will I do with my life?”).
Some may be pleased to see the poppers lid lifted so freely, while others – who cherish their traditional design and underground history – may balk at Bompas & Parr’s slick rebranding of poppers, and its accompanying £100 price tag. Excalibur XO seems to be giving poppers a makeover, almost gentrifying or sanitising their design. The event at London Cocktail Week, for example, holds the vague scent of turning something sordid into, well, “organised fun”. Then again, we are no longer living in the 70s or 80s; while queer sex still comes with a stigma, we’ve also witnessed its mainstreaming across the board. Queer sex parties are listed in Time Out magazine and the Tom of Finland Foundation recently held its first London-based arts and culture festival at Second Home, a co-working and members club. You might now also spot the accoutrements of leather communities, such as harnesses and chaps, on the red carpet, while JW Anderson sells a leather penis keyring and a handbag with a Tom of Finland design on it. These items are worn proudly by queers as a high fashion nod to our history and subcultures.
In line with these shifts, Zmith believes we’ve witnessed a general move of poppers into the mainstream and fashion worlds of late: he references a 2022 New York Times article with the headline “Poppers, Once a Fixture at Gay Clubs, Now a ‘Party Girl’ Favorite”. Zmith’s friends who are longtime queer club kids groan at this shift, causing him to pause and consider whether the collaboration with Bompas & Parr would feed into the increasing adoption of poppers by new audiences, and whether that was a bad thing. Zmith ultimately decided that working on Excalibur XO was about engaging more people in the conversation around how poppers have “contributed to our sexual freedom” as well as, importantly, how we can keep expanding said sexual freedom.
Excalibur XO, he argues, also fits into the general evolution of poppers marketing over the years more broadly; since the ubermasc associations in the 70s, branding has diversified to include less heavily gendered editions to appeal to 21st-century customers. Over our Zoom call, we browse the many designs now available, which include: Ibiza, a sort of poppy party design; Juic’d, which looks not unlike the packaging of a Terry’s Chocolate Orange; and Pig, which might appeal to those who enjoy pig play. Excaliber XO, notably, has a sort of universal, if luxury look. It could appeal to anyone across the gender or sexuality spectrum – if they can afford it.
When I ask Smith at Bompas & Parr about the high price, he explains that everyone involved – from consultancy, to the cocktail week panel, to the glassblowers – needed to be recompensed, with enough money left over to send Tom of Finland’s way. We might not really need luxury poppers, he adds, but we might want them. “I think there’s a lot of stuff that people do in order to ritualise things, to spend time on themselves, to share beautiful experiences,” he says, “so we wanted to create something that embodies all of the ritual of the wine world, say.” In this sense, Excalibur XO bares comparison to the explosion of the luxury sex toy industry, which has led to, for example, the existence of silver-plated dildos. “I suppose if you’re going to spend £200 on a vibrator you want it to look nice,” muses Smith. “Flip flops can cost £5 or £100 – why shouldn’t poppers?” Zmith concurs, pointing out that you can still get the cheap bottles of poppers at the corner shop if you want to.
I am inclined to agree with them both – if customers are willing to pay for Excalibur XO, if the price of poppers is not being driven up, and if no one is exploited in the making, then why not? Yet, in the era of the rampant commercialisation of queer culture, we do need to be wary of the “queer collab”, where brands team up with queer creators to score diversity points, often around Pride Month, with the end result being the sanitisation or homogenisation of queer history and aesthetics. Take, for example, the casting of gender nonconforming people in brand ad campaigns, but only under the dictum of what falls into “conventionally attractive” beauty standards, or the lazy tendency for brands to stick a rainbow flag on something and call it supportive of LGBTQ+ rights.
What was important to Zmith about the collaboration with Bompas & Parr, even if it did knowingly break from the traditional aesthetic of poppers over the last couple of decades, is that they have built poppers’ history into the product, and done their research. Excalibur XO is a reference to “XO” as seen on premium alcohol products as shorthand for “extra old”, but it also nods to queer history. Excalibur – as in the sword – is a reference to “Raging Sword”, the name of a pamphlet written by Karl Ulrich, who gave the first known public speech in defence of homosexuality in Germany in 1867 (as discussed in Deep Sniff). The project unearthed a history that is little known, even among many poppers aficionados, Zmith points out, while still supporting queer artists in the process.
In this sense, Excalibur XO is, to my mind, comparable to a project such as The Aesop Queer Library – a Pride initiative from skincare brand Aesop that turns the brand’s stores into pop-up houses of queer literature (visitors can take away one book for free). In boosting sales for queer authors and championing queer stories, while the Aesop products take a backseat, it feels like a net win for queer people and for Aesop. While the impact of Excalibur XO is more limited, due to the small run and the fact that Bompas & Parr is an agency, rather than a global brand, it appears to be, all things considered, a fairly smart collaboration – the poppers seem not to have gone to Bompas & Parr’s heads.
The bigger question is, should we be worried about the sex positivity movement’s gentrification of marginalised sex cultures and history, and the ways in which it is being supported and carried out through design? You might argue that it is part of the deal. We wanted to popularise non-monogamy, we got the slick interface of the Feeld app. We wanted to destigmatise female pleasure, we got silver vibrators and jade dildos. If the next frontier is to normalise poppers play, then we’ll likely get a poppers sommelier at a luxury hotel. Under capitalism, everything gets commercialised eventually, right?
Then again, we should probably keep asking ourselves what it means to “elevate” design in the sex space. In the queer world, “respectability politics” refers to the harmful idea that there is a “right way” to be LGBTQ+ – desexualised, heteronormative, inoffensive – in order to be seen as “acceptable” to society. It’s the same puritanical tendency that has centred same-sex marriage and kids in our rights movement and that has seen displays of kink kicked out of Pride. To what extent does design, branding and marketing contribute to this tendency? These questions are not going anywhere fast, and extend far beyond the confines of the marbled bottle of Excalibur XO. So while capitalism and heteropatriarchy remain in place, I will leave you to dwell on them, while I go back to huffing on my sumptuous free bottle of £100 poppers.
Words Amelia Abraham
This article was originally published in Design Reviewed #1. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.