Three years ago in Paris a staid looking gentleman escorted into my room at the barely visible bottom of my nightstand asked, “Why do you flaunt your poppers like that?” Not wanting to offend, particularly in a foreign city, I hid the bottle under my pillow, but it was not until an hour later that I understood what he meant. A man whom I had rejected earlier appeared again before my door but now, sedately dangling a similar bottle between his fingers, he announced like a street merchant’s song, “But I have POP-PERS!” Long after their triumph in America the nitrites were new and big in Paris!
The French were in fact engaged in a heated debate over the merits of such drugs, and of le style macho that was already overwhelming their more elegant traditions of dress. While some argued that this lifestyle was debilitating or crass, and others welcomed it as a sign of liberating pluralism, most agreed that it was decidedly American. In order to experience the pleasures at their source, thousands of Frenchmen were traveling to New York, with the de rigueur visits to the Mineshaft, the Saint Marks Baths, and when it opened, the Saint. The stories they brought back created an equally new and highly erotic image of gay America in which many saw a model of their own rapidly emerging future. After having entertained for so many decades a romantic myth about the French, it was startling for an American to learn that just being from New York or San Francisco could make one hot in Paris.
Since then the French have reacted with their usual skepticism to the ever newer ideas from America that poppers and promiscuity were dangerous to one’s health. When they haven’t accused us of paranoia, some Frenchmen have seen in any efforts to curtail their use of poppers another indication of a medical-political conspiracy to take back the freedoms so recently won. But poppers like the AID disease are still rare and exotic in Paris as witnessed by personal ads in which men continue to reveal their taste for “aroma.” And they are still a Frenchman say what an American said to me at a recent GMHC benefit: “How can they ask us to give up poppers. Why it’s as common as salt!”
No doubt the French will modify their habits as we have begun to modify ours. Their fascination with America has already diminished somewhat less because of any association with disease than because Paris itself has become a thriving gay capital with a full spectrum of sexual, social, and political activities. Yet I find myself recalling with some nostalgia an incident which occurred during a subsequent trip just before the current health crisis, when I still basked in my art and creative freedom. Once again in the baths I was spotted by a handsome young Frenchman for whom my short hair, mustache, and developed (albeit modest) pectorals were signs of American. Standing outside my door he took on a pose which seemed like a cross between a cowboy and a musketeer, but assumed with such charm that I invited him in. Unfortunately, it was all too quickly obvious on his part that I thought he might apologize when he got up for leaving me still unsatisfied. Instead he embraced me and exclaimed with the greatest conviction, “Ah, you Americans have real poppers, and only Americans know how to make love!” ❡
