Articles
Locked Silence:
Chemsex, Consent and Silence.
Introduction: The Weight of Silence - Chemsex and Sexual Violence
When I was an undergraduate in Bristol (around 2004), I was raped by two men. They gave me what I now know to be G. I woke up locked in a toilet terrified, and disoriented. I remember staring at the door, frozen, not knowing if someone would come back or if I would ever get out. I had met these men during a night out, smartphones didn’t exist, Gaydar was the equivalent of Grindr, and ‘High and Horny’ wasn’t a thing.
At the time, I didn’t have the words for what had happened. I didn’t tell anyone. I carried the secret like a stone in my chest, convinced that if I said it out loud, I would be blamed. I knew I’d been abused, but shame kept me silent.
For years afterwards, this memory lived in fragments - flashes of fear, pieces of sound, the cold floor beneath me, the disorientation of waking with no sense of time or control. It lived inside me like something toxic, reshaping how I saw myself and how I related to others. I didn’t yet know that this single night would become a fault line in my life: a before and after, a silence that would haunt me until I found the courage to break it.
The Weight of Silence
For years afterwards, I replayed that night in my mind. What if I hadn’t gone? What if I had fought harder? What if I had known what G was back then?
That’s what silence does - it makes you turn the harm inward. Instead of looking outward at those who caused it, you punish yourself with endless questions, each one suggesting that you could have somehow prevented it. Silence becomes a kind of second violation: you live with the memory, but you also live with the crushing belief that it was your fault.
I tried to bury it. I convinced myself that if I didn’t name it, it would lose its power. I pushed it down and told myself I was strong, that I could move on. But trauma doesn’t disappear just because you refuse to look at it. It hides in your body, your relationships, your trust in others. It surfaces when you least expect it - in the middle of intimacy, in a glance from a stranger, in the sound of a lock clicking shut.
Silence never really lets you go.
Realisation, Years Later
It was only much later, as I began to study chemsex as part of my academic work, that the truth forced itself into focus. Reading about GHB and GBL, learning how they erase memory and collapse the body, I realised with a sickening clarity: this wasn’t an accident.
I hadn’t “just got too high.” I hadn’t “lost control.” I had been drugged and raped.
The realisation was both liberating and devastating. Liberating because I could finally name what happened for what it was. I could finally acknowledge that the shame I had carried all those years wasn’t mine to carry. But devastating because the recognition came with the weight of lost time: years in which I had blamed myself, mistrusted others, and lived in silence when I should have been supported.
Looking back, I understood how deliberately the drug had been used. G was not incidental; it was instrumental. The men who assaulted me relied on its effects — on my body’s collapse, on my inability to resist, on my silence afterwards. That knowledge cut deeply, because it stripped away the illusion that what happened was a mistake. It was a violation built on intention.
The Rugby Encounter
Some years later, I met a man socially through rugby. At first, he seemed charismatic, confident, friendly. He began to introduce me to his world - invitations to parties, suggestions of new experiences, casual talk about drugs, sex, and pushing limits.
It was framed as fun, as freedom, as something everyone was doing. The language was subtle, almost persuasive: “You’ll feel amazing,” “This is how people have fun now,” “Don’t overthink it, just try it.”
Essentially, normalising it.
But because of what had happened to me before, I could see it for what it was. I recognised the grooming, the attempt to lure me into chemsex, the same manipulative tactics of normalising harm and minimising risk. Where once I might have been drawn in by curiosity or peer pressure, now I felt a visceral recognition: this was danger disguised as invitation.
That earlier trauma had scarred me, but it had also sharpened me. It gave me the ability to see patterns others might miss - the ways consent can be eroded through persuasion, the ways drugs can be offered not as pleasure but as power.
I walked away. Not without conflict, not without questioning myself, but with the certainty that I knew what was happening and that I refused to let it happen again. This moment stays with me as much as the assault itself. It reminds me that trauma reshapes us, but sometimes it also arms us. It gave me a lens through which to see not only my own risks but the wider systems and cultures where consent and coercion collide.
The Impact
That night in my undergraduate years left scars beyond the memory. It made me untrusting of others in ways that are hard to articulate. Even now, I find myself questioning people’s intentions, wondering what lies behind the smile, the compliment, the touch. Relationships feel heavier when you’re always bracing for harm.
It reshaped intimacy. What should have been moments of connection often felt like moments of risk. What should have been pleasure sometimes felt like surrender. Even years later, the act of letting someone close carried with it echoes of fear: will I lose control again? Will I be safe this time?
There was also anger — but even that felt complicated. Anger directed outward risked tipping into anger at myself. Why didn’t I tell someone? Why didn’t I go to the police? Why did I let shame dictate my silence? These questions became another loop I couldn’t escape, another way the assault continued to live inside me.
And yet, I survived. That survival, messy and complicated as it is, has become part of why I do the work I do now. The scars didn’t erase me; they gave me a reason to speak.
Chemsex, Consent, and Abuse
My story is not unique. In queer spaces, chemsex often blurs lines between choice, coercion, and harm. The very drugs that can bring euphoria and intimacy can also erase memory and consent.
Chemsex is often portrayed in binary terms: either as dangerous deviance to be condemned, or as liberated pleasure to be celebrated. The truth is far more complicated. Chemsex is both - pleasure and danger, intimacy and risk, liberation and harm. And within those contradictions, abuses of power occur.
Consent under the influence is fragile. When drugs are used intentionally to strip someone of agency, what we are witnessing is not blurred consent but its complete removal. This isn’t about regretting a decision made while high. It’s about being denied the right to decide at all.
Yet too often, survivors are left carrying the shame alone. Communities are reluctant to talk about it for fear of feeding stigma. Health systems are hesitant to acknowledge it, focusing only on medical harms like overdoses or infections. The result is a silence that isolates survivors, while allowing cycles of harm to continue unchecked.
From Survival to Change
If chemsex is to be understood honestly, we must include stories like mine - not to feed stigma, but to demand care. Too often, the narratives we hear about chemsex are simplified: pleasure without consequence on one side, danger without humanity on the other. The reality sits in the uncomfortable middle - where joy, intimacy, abuse, and survival all coexist. To tell the truth about chemsex is to hold these contradictions in view, without flinching.
Harm reduction, in this context, cannot stop at dosing charts or overdose prevention. Those things matter, but they are not enough. Harm reduction is also about creating cultures of consent, accountability, and solidarity. It is about recognising that bodies under the influence are not just medically vulnerable - they are socially and politically vulnerable too. They are vulnerable to coercion, manipulation, and abuse.
We need spaces where survivors can speak without fear of blame. Too often, those who experience harm in chemsex are met with silence, disbelief, or worse, judgement. That silence does not just wound the individual; it corrodes entire communities, teaching others that speaking up is unsafe. Breaking that silence means building spaces where testimony is met with care, where survival is honoured, and where responsibility is shifted back onto those who caused harm.
We need health services that treat sexual assault within chemsex not as an anomaly, but as part of the reality. This means training clinicians to recognise the signs of drug-facilitated assault, building protocols that do not dismiss survivors simply because drugs were involved, and ensuring that care is not tainted by stigma. A survivor should never fear that disclosing chemsex will mean being refused compassion.
We also need communities that are willing to look at harm without collapsing into shame. Too often, discussions about chemsex and abuse are silenced by fear: fear of feeding stigma, fear of confirming stereotypes, fear of undermining liberation. But refusing to talk about harm does not protect our community - it protects abusers. A culture of care requires that we can name both the beauty and the brutality of chemsex without losing sight of dignity.
My survival has shaped who I am. It has made me cautious, yes - slower to trust, sharper to notice patterns of harm. But it has also made me determined. Determined to make sure others don’t have to carry the same silence. Determined to show that even in the darkest spaces, naming harm is an act of defiance. Determined to build futures where survival is not the only option, but where safety, consent, and care are possible.
Chemsex is not only a story of villains and victims. It is a story of cycles: of pleasure and harm, of silence and survival. By telling my story, I do not claim to speak for everyone - but I do claim space for survivors. I claim space for complexity. And I claim space for change.
My hope is that by speaking, I can help us shift that cycle - from shame to care, from silence to solidarity, from survival alone to the possibility of thriving.
By Clyne Hamilton-Daniels