This week we're taking a look at queer books that focus on drugs, sex and addiction. From explicit East London chemsex parties to a deep-dive into the history of poppers, dark murder mysteries and first experiences with BDSM, here are 15 LGBTQ+ books with a focus on chemsex, drugs, addiction and screwing:

Note: All of these books are explicit and tackle difficult themes - please check trigger warnings before reading these books.

Tweakerworld - Jason Yamas

Memoir - Non-Fiction

Queer Rep: Queer Men

Reading Age: 18+

Meet Jason: a college-educated documentary film producer, cat parent of two, and one of San Francisco’s top drug dealers.

After Jason’s world falls apart in LA, he moves to Berkeley for a fresh start with his kid brother. Just one problem: his long-closeted Adderall addiction has exploded into an out-of-control crystal meth binge. Within weeks, Jason plunges into the sprawling ParTy n’ ’Play subculture of the Bay Area’s gay community. It is a wildly decadent scene of drugs, group sex, and criminals, and yet it is also filled with surprising characters, people who are continually subverting Jason’s own presumptions of the stereotypical tweaker.

Soon Jason becomes a dealer on the pretense of researching this tweaker world for a project that will carry him, like a life raft, back to the shores of a normal life. But his friendly entrepreneurial spirit and trusting disposition disarm clients and rival dealers alike.

100 boyfriends - Brontez Purnell

Fictional Memoir - Fiction

Queer Rep: Queer Men

Reading Age: 18+

Transgressive, foulmouthed, and wildly funny, Brontez Purnell's 100 Boyfriends is a filthy, unforgettable, and brutally profound ode to queer love in its most messy of variations.

From one-night stands to recurring lovers, Purnell's characters sleep with their co-worker's husbands, expose themselves to racist neighbours, date Satanists, and drink their way out of trouble, all the while fighting - and often losing - the urge to self-sabotage. A horny, punk love song full of imperfect intimacies, 100 Boyfriends takes readers on a riotous journey through dirty warehouses and gentrified bars, from dysfunctional houseshares to desolate farming towns in Alabama.

Drawing us into a community of glorious misfits living on the margins of a white supremacist, heteronormative society, iconoclastic storyteller Brontez Purnell gives us an uncompromising vision of desire, desperation, race, loneliness, and queerness that will devastate as much as it entertains.

Horny & High Vol. 1 - Ed Firth

Contemporary Fiction - Graphic Novel

Queer Rep: Queer Men

Reading Age: 18+

Do you enjoy graphic nudity and the firm seductive grip of self-annihilation? Horny & High is a dark, raw and moving collection of stories from breakout artist Ed Firth, including The Nightbus (printed in WIP's Success 2020 anthology), and Chillout, shortlisted by Myriad Editions' First Graphic Novel Prize 2020.

The Chillout story continues, in the second volume of Horny & High, the adults-only graphic novel series prising the lid off the London chemsex scene in the 2010s. Stu hooks up with a group of horny guys just trying to get high on a long wet weekend. But he soon finds he's getting in over his head again... Prepare yourself for chemsex, cruising and heartbreak in these adults-only hand-inked stories.

Something For The Weekend - James Wharton

Gay Studies & Drug Abuse - Non-Fiction

Queer Rep: Queer Men

Reading Age: 18+

When James Wharton leaves the army, he finds himself with more opportunities than most to begin a successful civilian life – he has a husband, two dogs, two cars, a nice house in the countryside and a book deal. A year later he finds himself single, living in a room and trying to adjust to single gay life back in the capital.

In his search for new friends and potential lovers, he becomes sucked into London’s gay drug culture, soon becoming addicted to partying and the phenomenon that is ‘chemsex’.

Exploring his own journey through this dark but popular world, James looks at the motivating factors that led him to the culture, as well as examining the paths taken by others. He reveals the real goings-on at the weekends for thousands of people after most have gone to bed, and how modern technology allows them to arrange, congregate, furnish themselves with drugs and spend hours, often days, behind closed curtains, with strangers and in states of heightened sexual desire.

Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger - Brontez Purnell

Contemporary Fiction - Fiction

Queer Rep: Queer Men

Reading Age: 18+

A raw, dirty, hilarious, and often poignant cult classic, Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger paved the way for a new kind of queer writing that changed how we talk about sex, relationships, drugs, identity, race, HIV, and what it means to be gay in the 21st Century. Recounting the life of an artist and 'old school homosexual' who bears more than a small resemblance to author Brontez Purnell, Johnny Would You Love Me takes us cruising in late night parks and bath houses, searching for sex and intimacy in a newly gentrified city where even the gays are getting fancy. A collection of short, hilarious, profound, and filthy vignettes, Johnny Would You Love Me is a radical thrill ride through the nuances of queer sex and queer love that shows truly what it means to live on the fringes of a conservative society as a black, working-class gay man.

Sedating Elaine - Dawn Winter

Contemporary Fiction - Fiction

Queer Rep: Queer Women

Reading Age: 18+

Frances was not looking for a relationship when she met Elaine in a bar. She was, in fact, looking to drown her sorrows in a pint or twelve and nurse a broken heart, shattered by the gorgeous, electric Adrienne.

But somehow (it involved a steady stream of beer and weed, as things often did with Frances) Elaine ended up in Frances's bed and never left. Now, faced with mounting pressure from her drug dealer, Dom (and his goon, Betty), Frances comes up with a terrible idea: She asks Elaine to move in with her for real. Unfortunately, this seemingly romantic overture makes Elaine even more sex-crazed and maniacal with love. Frances fears she may never escape the relationship, so, given no choice, she makes the obvious decision: She will sedate Elaine.

A story as enthusiastically madcap and funny as it is smart and emotionally surprising, Sedating Elaine introduces a roster of unforgettable characters and an indelible, wildly exciting new voice in fiction.

Deep Sniff: A History Of Poppers and Queer Futures - Adam Zmith

Cultural Studies - Non-Fiction

Queer Rep: Queer Men

Reading Age: 18+

3, 2, 1... inhale, deep. From the Victorian infirmary and the sex clubs of the 1970s, poppers vap