Articles
Digital Ghosts:
The men who never come back.
Introduction: Ghosts in the Glow
Open any queer hookup app at 3am any night of the week and you’ll see them: half-lit profile pictures, blank torsos, messages that trail off into silence. Men who appear and vanish, promises of connection dissolving into unread chats. Sometimes it’s harmless - a casual ghosting, another notification swallowed by the scroll. Other times it’s heavier. The man who never replies again because he overdosed last weekend. The name that stops showing up in Telegram groups because he disappeared, literally or metaphorically, into the shadows of chemsex.
These are the digital ghosts of queer life: fragments of presence flickering in apps, threads left dangling in our phones, reminders of how fragile and fleeting connection can be when it is mediated through both chems and digital platforms.
Ghosts are everywhere in queer chemsex cultures. They haunt parties, chatrooms, hospital corridors. They linger in the silences we don’t talk about, in the men who never come back.
Ghosting as a Ritual
In digital culture, “ghosting” is very ordinary. You match, you flirt, you (or thehy) vanish. In queer spaces it’s almost expected. The swipe economy has taught us that attention is disposable and that connection can be abandoned mid-sentence. Quite literally.
But in chemsex contexts, ghosting takes on sharper edges. The man who disappears mid-party invite isn’t just avoiding rejection - he might be unconscious on someone’s floor. The profile that vanishes from Grindr isn’t just moving on - it might belong to someone who overdosed, relapsed, or just didn’t wake up.
What apps frame as casual avoidance, queer communities experience as potential tragedy. The Dopamine Loop of apps (craving → anticipation → reward → crash → reset) feeds this instability. People appear, disappear, reappear, but not always safely. Ghosting is no longer just about rejection, it’s about survival, or the lack of it.
The Party and the Disappearance
Anyone who has been to a chemsex party knows the rhythm: bodies arrive, clothes come off bottles are poured, powders are lined up. Phones light up with new arrivals en route. For hours, there is noise, touch, sweat and sexual encounters.
But eventually the rhythm falters. Someone slips under too far on G, unconscious on the bed. Another quietly gathers their things and leaves, unable to carry on. Someone else vanishes into the bathroom and never comes back.
And then comes the morning. Sheets tangled, mirrors smeared, bottles tipped over. The silence hits. People leave without goodbyes. Phones light up again, but some numbers never reply. Some men become ghosts.
The bed becomes both cradle and grave: a site of pleasure, intimacy, overdose, and absence. And in the aftermath, we are left not with closure, but with digital traces - unread messages, frozen profile pictures, Grindr or Scruff handles that go dark.
The Clinical Ghosts
In A&E, the ghosts take another form. Men brought in unconscious, unresponsive, no ID. We resuscitate or sober up bodies we don’t know, piece together stories from friends half-sober enough to explain what happened. Sometimes they live. Sometimes they don’t.
And then, days later, we open Grindr and see the same usernames, the same pictures. Some of them message again. Others never do. The hospital bay and the app blur together in my memory: bodies collapsing offline and disappearing online.
The clinical ghost is the hardest. Because you see the line between life and death so close. You realise how little 0.5ml of GHB can mean - life, or overdose. And you know that for every patient that makes it to hospital, there are others who never do.
Ghosts of Desire
Ghosts also live in the way we desire. The endless scrolling, the searching for validation, the craving for attention that never quite lands. Apps feed this hunger, each profile a potential fix, each reply another dopamine hit. But just as quickly, the silence returns. A man doesn’t reply. Another blocks. Another says yes, then disappears before arriving. We are trained to expect absence. Desire becomes a haunted house, each room filled with shadows of what could have been.
This is the emotional ghost of chemsex culture: the loneliness that lingers after the high, the ache when intimacy collapses into rejection. It is not just overdose that haunts us, but the ordinary grief of being unseen, unwanted, disposable.
Ghosts in the Machine
Apps themselves are haunted. Scroll through Telegram chemsex groups and you’ll see old usernames which are long inactive. Look through WhatsApp party chats and find numbers that never reply. Profiles deleted, accounts gone. Men who were once part of the network now reduced to digital traces.
These ghosts remind us that platforms are not neutral. They host our desires, but also archive our losses. They amplify risk, accelerate encounters, and then quietly absorb the disappearances. Grindr doesn’t mourn. Telegram doesn’t pause. The algorithm simply keeps feeding new profiles into the feed, new men to replace the old.
The machine keeps running, indifferent to the ghosts it leaves behind.
The Cost of Silence
What makes these ghosts unbearable is silence. Families who don’t know why their sons died. Hospitals that don’t train staff to recognise GHB overdoses. Platforms that refuse to acknowledge chemsex at all.
Silence is structural. Grindr publishes safety guides about online dating and HIV safety but says nothing about overdose. Telegram hides behind encryption. The same with WhatsApp. Policymakers treat chemsex as marginal and not worth investment. The result: queer people are left to carry the ghosts ourselves.
We whisper harm-reduction tips in encrypted chats. We check in on each other when no one else does. We create memorial posts when another name disappears. But the labour of survival is ours alone.
Queer Survival, Queer Ghosts
There is resilience in this. Queer communities have always lived with ghosts. From the HIV/AIDS crisis to today, we carry the memories of those lost. We build infrastructures of care in the ruins of silence.
Ghosts can be heavy, but they also remind us of what we must fight for. Each overdose prevented, each harm-reduction message sent, each check-in is an act of defiance against both death and neglect.
To live queerly is to live with ghosts. But it is also to refuse to let them define us.
Naming the Ghosts
The ghosts of chemsex are not metaphors alone. They are men we have lost to overdose, men who vanish into addiction, men who disappear into silence. They are also the fragments of intimacy left hanging in our phones: profiles that vanish, conversations that end without goodbye, faces blurred into the feed, never to return.
Naming them matters. Because silence kills. Ghosts thrive in silence - in the spaces where healthcare refuses to ask the right questions, where platforms pretend harm reduction doesn’t exist, where families look the other way. Each ghost is not only an absence but a reminder of neglect, stigma, and structural failure.
But ghosts also remind us of survival. Queer history has always been written alongside absence - from the men lost to HIV/AIDS, to those taken by violence, to those erased from public records because our lives were never deemed worthy of archiving. And yet, in every generation, queer communities have found ways to resist that erasure. We have remembered, we have mourned, we have built care networks in the ruins left by silence.
The question now is whether we will continue to carry this burden alone. Will platforms like Grindr, Scruff, Telegram and WhatsApp remain indifferent, content to profit from our dopamine loops while ignoring the deaths that follow? Will hospitals continue to under-train staff on GHB overdoses and chemsex education leaving lives hanging in the balance? Will public health bodies treat chemsex as too niche, too inconvenient, too queer to deserve serious investment?
Chemsex will not disappear. Apps will not disappear. Desire will not disappear. To pretend otherwise is naïve. The real challenge is not whether these practices exist, but whether we build systems that acknowledge them, care for the people living them, and refuse to let them be reduced to ghosts.
Because queer life is haunted, but it is also resistant. The ghosts may linger, but they are also guides - urging us to demand more, to speak louder, to refuse the silence that makes them multiply. Each act of harm reduction, each whispered dosing tip, each message that says “are you safe?” is a way of breaking the cycle, of honouring the living and the dead at once.
To name the ghosts is to fight for the living. To demand infrastructures that protect as much as they connect. To insist that queer pleasure and queer survival are not contradictions, but twin necessities.
The men who never came back deserve more than memory. They deserve change. And the first step is to speak their absence, to refuse the silence, to break the loop.
By Clyne Hamilton-Daniels