Crystal methamphetamine and sexual sociality in an urban gay subculture: An elective affinity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper draws on 49 qualitative interviews to explore the contextual antecedents of methamphetamine use in a sample of gay and bisexual Manhattan men. The paper distinguishes itself from the public health literature on crystal methamphetamine use in this population by shifting the analytic focus from individual-level factors of drug use to the role of social context. While individual-level factors--including self esteem and social awkwardness--are related to methamphetamine use, we argue that these factors arise in and are exacerbated by interactional pressures attendant to Manhattan's gay sexual subculture, which revolve around the expectation of peak sexual performance. Because methamphetamine is associated with increased self-esteem, increased libido, greater sexual endurance, diminished sexual inhibition, and a higher threshold for pain, the drug is used strategically by gay and bisexual men to negotiate sexual sociality and increase sexual pleasure. Hence, we suggest that there exists an elective affinity between Manhattan's gay sexual subculture and the particular pharmacological effects of methamphetamine-whereby the former strongly favours the latter as a systematic pattern of response. In turn, this relationship is linked to unsafe sexual practices or the social conditions that put gay men 'at risk of risk' of HIV infection.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".