Are you ready for a head rush?
Well stick your nose in a book; specifically Adam Zmith’s Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures (Repeater Books. $14.95. www.adamzmith.com), an utterly unexpected history of the bottled brews originally sold at British pharmacies in the late 1800s as a legitimate treatment for ailments ranging from angina to seasickness.
According to Zmith, recreational use of the over-the-counter concoction took hold beginning in the 1930s and first peaked when GIs who discovered poppers in Vietnam brought them back to the U.S. and Britain.
In 1969, the U.S. FDA made amyl nitrate a prescription-only medication, but in the mid-1970s a slightly reformulated version—isobutyl nitrite—made its way onto the shelves of record shops, head shops and porn shops and into the atmosphere at gay dance clubs, where it was literally pumped into rooms to induce a collective euphoria.
Generations later poppers fueled the gay rave scene and once again caught on among straight partiers as well. Much more than mere history, Zmith offers readers a kaleidoscopic personal take on the symbolic meanings of poppers, full of fascinating observances about sex, stigma and social change.
