Were it not for the fact that it was 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning and were it not for the blaring house music, one might have seen what was going on at HK Hall, an event space in Midtown, and at first glance said, “Is this a jock strap convention?”
There were men in jock straps by Nike, there were men in jock straps by the fetishwear brand Nasty Pig, and there were men in jock straps by Bike, which was the kind Garrett Magee wore along with a fanny-pack-like contraption that went around his thigh and gave a butch garter belt effect.
He was attending the Black Party, a yearly bacchanal that has been a mainstay of the gay social scene for more than four decades.
As it happened, Mr. Magee — an influencer whose profile derives from his ability to pair shirtlessness with landscape work — was not under the influence of any mind benders, although he did have a little brown bottle of poppers in his fanny pack, the use for which he made clear was to seize the moment should he encounter a person of interest.
Popular since at least the early 1970s, poppers were thought to enhance pleasure in the bedroom and while bogeying on disco dance floors to anthems by the likes of Donna Summer and Loleatta Holloway.
For the last several years, bottles of the substance could readily be purchased at most sex shops as well as at scores of bodegas in New York, where they tend to sit behind glass cases next to energy-shot drinks at prices that range from $10 to $30.
Sometimes they were described as being nail polish remover on the bottle. (A reporter who tried them out for this purpose discovered they worked perfectly well.) Other times, they were described as being DVD cleaners, though prevailing evidence suggests their main selling point is their ability to temporarily relax the sphincter muscle.
The writer Paul Rudnick recalled the ease with which people bought a bottle as being comparable to buying Tic Tacs. “It was right there, it wasn’t very expensive and it wasn’t technically illegal,” he said. “It was off brand, like Ozempic.”
So enthusiasts took it mostly for granted that they’d be able to scoop them up when, on March 13, a company called Double Scorpio, a purveyor of poppers, announced it was suspending operations after a search and seizure from the Food and Drug Administration.
The exact reason for the raid is not entirely clear. A spokeswoman for the F.D.A. said in an email that the agency would not comment on a potential investigation. Emails to Double Scorpio received no response.
Efforts to crack down on the use of poppers, citing possible health risks, precede President Trump’s return to office in January. But Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who oversees the Food and Drug Administration as the secretary of health and human services, has made it pretty clear that he is no fan of these products.
Regulators in the United States and Britain have often banned the specific formulations contained in poppers, but the brands that make them have largely remained one step ahead, tweaking the formula to keep the product in a legal gray area and on store shelves. Or, as a tour of Manhattan’s most distinguished sex shops would indicate, in glass cases by the cash register.
Rush is essentially the Coca-Cola of poppers. The label on the 3-inch-tall bottle at the Blue Store in Times Square is bright yellow. A bright red logo sits in the center of the bottle between a pair of bright red lightning bolts. In small letters at the bottom, the product is called a cleaning solution.
Other bottles with names such as Jungle Juice, Everest Premium and Double Scorpio are also commonly sold alongside Rush. This may be an inflection point for the Jungle Juices and the Double Scorpios of this world; so it’s worth understanding how the market evolved to where it is now.
According to “Deep Sniff,” an exhaustive biography of poppers by Adam Zmith, their origin dates to 1844, when a French chemist named Antoine Jerome Balard passed nitrogen fumes through amyl alcohol.
The result was a substance with a pungent smell — an odorizer that wiped out an offending odor by creating one that was arguably even worse (think: chlorine, but several times stronger).
As far as Mr. Balard knew, inhaling the compound did nothing more than produce a bit of a rush, but other doctors began to study it. One was Thomas Lauder Brunton, a physician who, in the 1860s, discovered amyl nitrate’s ability to lower blood pressure upon inhalation, and began prescribing it to angina patients as a pain reliever.
By the mid-20th century, the substance was sold over the counter in a number of pharmacies in Britain and the United States, according to Mr. Zmith.
Word spread that, in addition to being a remedy for heart pain, amyl nitrate produced a nice high that lasted generally more than 30 seconds, and generally less than a few minutes.
After the Stonewall revolt, poppers proliferated in newly opened gay clubs around the United States. They were largely made by the Pacific West Distributing Corporation, which was owned by a gay man named W. Jay Freezer, according to “Deep Sniff.” (The colloquialism “poppers” owes to the sound the bottle sometimes made when opened.)
Jim Morrison, the frontman for the Doors, was described in the book “Break on Through: The Life and Death of Jim Morrison” as popping “amyl nitrates right onstage” and then collapsing on the piano. Patti Smith, in the book “Just Kids,” describes visiting the piers on the West Side Highway in the 1970s with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and “the smell of patchouli oil, poppers and ammonia” in the air.
The onslaught of AIDS in the 1980s created a stigma around poppers.
This was partly because, during the first years of the epidemic, the precise cause of the disease was unknown, said the AIDS activist Peter Staley. But, given the patient base, it stood to reason that sex was somehow involved in its transmission.
The theory that poppers could be a cause gained some popularity, despite the fact that there turned out to be no scientific basis for it, said Dr. Jerome Groopman, a veteran oncologist and a professor at Harvard Medical School who spent much of the 1980s and ’90s caring for patients with H.I.V. And during the next two decades, they remained easily available, though Mr. Zmith believes their popularity waned, at least somewhat. (“There aren’t a lot of studies,” he said in a phone interview.)
A cultural resurgence in the 2010s coincided with the advent of Prep, an H.I.V.-prevention protocol for people who are H.I.V.-negative but in high-risk groups.
As Prep was widely adopted in cities like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, sex parties began to abound again. Poppers did, too.
In 2017, the clothing line Nasty Pig made swimsuits emblazoned with bottles of poppers. In 2021, Mr. Zmith completed “Deep Sniff,” his book about amyl nitrate’s place in the history of gay culture.
By then, the Covid-19 pandemic was in full swing. Mr. Kennedy published “The Real Anthony Fauci,” a book full of baseless claims about Anthony Fauci, an immunologist who became the director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 1984 and whose life and identity had been shaped by his research into H.I.V.
The book contained 45 references to poppers, slyly connecting them to AIDS without outright blaming them for it.
Last summer, Louisiana instituted a statewide ban on poppers and whippets.
In February, David Lauterstein, the co-designer and co-founder of Nasty Pig, received an email from a vendor named Clint Taylor.
Mr. Taylor owns a gay bar in New Orleans called the Phoenix, which operates a store that previously sold poppers, along with fetish gear and various sex toys. Stores like Mr. Taylor’s have suffered over the past few decades, a result of the declining DVD business and consumers’ ability to buy lube and sex toys over Amazon. That made poppers one of their last remaining points of distinction.
In a phone interview, Mr. Taylor recounted what he said to Mr. Lauterstein: After the statewide ban on poppers, foot traffic at the Phoenix dropped by more than 60 percent.
But in an age when Viagra and anabolic steroids can be purchased online in minutes without a prescription, Kevin Aviance, the well-known drag performer, said at the Black Party that he thought there was little possibility poppers would really be going away, raids or no raids.
Gay people, he said, using a more colorful term, “are resourceful.”
Mr. Aviance was standing by the bar in a nude-and-black bustier that he had paired with thigh-high boots that looked a lot like the Balenciaga pair that sells for $8,700 but that really came from China and cost what he said was about $8,600 less. He said he did not want to get overly worked up about the possibility that the Trump administration was “coming at us about the little things,” not when it was also doing things far more serious to trample the rights of trans people.
Still, it grated at him that Mr. Kennedy had such a high-profile platform, especially when he had made false claims about the link between poppers and AIDS.
“Girl, are you serious with that? he said. “Come on.”
