Connecting Pain and Drug Use in GLBTQ Communities

Ian Flaherty

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Connecting Pain and Drug Use in GLBTQ Communities

In: At the Edge of Being: The Aporia of Pain

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Ian Flaherty

Ian Flaherty
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 65–81

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004399228_006

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The literature suggests that the prevalence of use of both licit and illicit intoxicating substances is much higher among the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer (GLBTQ) community when compared with the non-GLBTQ community. Additionally, in qualitative studies of the GLBTQ community, incidences of trauma associated with sexual encounters figure more prominently in many ways when compared with the non-GLBTQ community. In many of these qualitative studies, the ‘self-help’ approach is presented as a mechanism through which people from GLBTQ communities might achieve both a resolution to the pain associated with traumatic sexual encounters, as well as a sense of a new identity—an identity associated with strength, resistance to pain and autonomy. This chapter seeks to unravel these interconnected narratives. I seek here to connect with the paradox that has beleaguered the GLBTQ community since the events of Stonewall. Why does a favourite Sydney establishment for the GLBTQ community align itself so closely with the assuagement of pain of belonging to a minority group through the use of licit, and probably illicit, intoxicating substances? Why is it so widely reported in the GLBTQ community that people ‘truly find themselves’ once they have had apocryphal experiences with illicit substances? At least some of the answers lie, in my chapter, in the interactions between experienced pain, of both a physical and psycho-emotional nature, the urgency to ‘discover oneself,’ and the mechanisms commonly prescribed to accomplish this process. In this chapter, an attempt is made to connect the narratives of a group of gay men in highly-modernised societies with more-widely accepted understandings of pain, and how the narratives of ‘self-help’ have influenced their decisions to use licit and illicit intoxicating substances. My hope is that an enriched understanding of the connections between the use of both licit and illicit intoxicating substances for pain, of varying sorts, for the GLBTQ community will eventuate.

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At the Edge of Being: The Aporia of Pain

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004399228

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 26 Sep 2012

Subjects
- Philosophy
  - Ethics & Moral Philosophy
- Social Sciences
  - Cultural Studies

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Connecting Pain and Drug Use in GLBTQ Communities

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At the Edge of Being: The Aporia of Pain

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