The Birth of Poppers

The History & Mystery of a Gay Icon

The history of “poppers” from 1860-1960. Part one of The Bottom Molecule series. Researched and written by Leo Herrera over the course of two years. Support this work by subscribing. Podcast & historical sources for paid members only.

You shuffle past a group of scholars walking into the conference. Only geologists walk this slow. The 1864 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. You’ve been waiting for this since you graduated. Your interest is in the functions of the human heart. You are hoping for a whiff of the future here. You’re also more than a little hungover from the pub, where an astronomer talked your ear off about the surface of the moon. Then there was the botanist who bought you a drink, who showed you the ruins of the Roman bathhouses this city is named after, who kindly walked you to the inn when you were too drunk to stand, rambling on the similarities of flowers and reproductive organs. You had felt braver in a different city. Bath, England had given you a warm welcome and a comfortable bed.

You make your way to a presentation by an anesthetist named Benjamin Ward Richardson. He’s a smart but odd fellow. He writes about sanitation, the virtues of bicycles, the humane slaughter of animals. He writes poems and plays too. Odd fellow. Today he’ll be speaking about the chemical amyl nitrite, which has effects on our most miraculous organ. 

The presentation is dull. He drones on about amyl nitrite’s effects on tomatoes and frogs and just when you feel about to leave, a commotion. Assistants are passing handkerchiefs to the audience and a sweet smell fills the room. One is placed under your nose and you’re encouraged to inhale gently. Almonds and cherries, a biological, intoxicating smell. You inhale deeper than you meant to. You don’t feel anything until…boom. Your entire body tingles, your face is burning. Your muscles feel limp and every orifice feels loosened. You feel a surge of joy. What a wondrous trick! The song of your heartbeat thumps in your ears. Then the euphoria dissipates. When it’s over, you stifle a giggle, looking at the flushed faces of your colleagues. You catch the eye of a man across the room, he’s so red you barely recognize him. Your face flushes even more when you do. It’s the botanist. Your heart is pounding again. It has to be the chemical, you tell yourself. You wonder when and where you shall have it again. 

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To study Queer history is to scavenge and read between the lines. To compensate for a lack of records by finding cracks where Queer light might come in, to look for…irregularities. What we lack in historical data we have to make up in imagination. Here, the meeting is real, the town is real, the bathhouse ruins are real, Dr. Richardson passing out amyl nitrite is real, so was the presentation on the surface of the moon. Thousands of mostly men did descend on Bath, England, away from their homes and in the company of strangers. We’re in there somewhere.

It’s curious we have found no official record of sexual or recreational use of amyl nitrite in its first 100 years. Our first record is in 1964, in a complaint to the FDA. By then “poppers” were already an open secret among Gay men and the counterculture. Even their nickname was decades old. The homophobia and sex shame of those hundred years, means we will never develop the full picture because the history we are missing is what Queer people still do without: health data, government attention and interest in our stories. So we do our best with context clues. 

The late nineteenth century is a time of voracious scientific appetites and experimentation. The study of the viscera, of germ theory, the discovery of aspirin and antiseptics. It is in this era of magnificent curiosity that amyl nitrite becomes a medicine. 

“When about five drops are inhaled from a handkerchief, a vivid redness suddenly bursts out on the cheeks, and rushes over the brow, in from thirty to sixty seconds…whenever the flushing came out the patients grew stupid and confused and bewildered.” - James Crichton-Browne in a letter to Charles Darwin in 1871.

Browne, a leading psychiatrist, was relaying the effects of amyl nitrite, a new medicine approved to treat chest pains. Darwin was writing The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals and researching why we blush. Darwin would become very familiar with amyl nitrite in the next decade, using it for the heart issues which plagued him until his death. 

The Industrial Revolution resulted in a sharp increase of heart disease. The deadly wave, referred to as “angina pectoris,” was attributed to changes in environment and diet. For most of the nineteenth century, common (and ineffective) treatments included brandy and bleeding. It affected mostly middle and upper class white men so considerable resources were poured into studying the malady and making amyl nitrite widely available once its medicinal uses were discovered.  

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Poppers as we know them today were not a singular invention, but a tiny, amber-colored baton passed down from chemists to physicians. 

Amyl nitrite was first synthesized in France in 1844 when chemist Antoine Jérôme Balard passed nitrogen through amyl alcohol and produced a brown liquid whose vapor made his cheeks flush and gave him a severe headache. Fifteen years later, British physicist Frederick Guthrie noted its effect on arteries. This got the attention of anesthetist Benjamin Ward Richardson, an expert on chloroform, who researched its broader biological effects and presented his findings to The British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1864.

That work was picked up by Arthur Gamgee, a medical graduate from the University of Edinburgh, who confirmed it reduced arterial tension in animals and man. He passed the final baton to his younger colleague, an eager and determined physician named Thomas Lauder Brunton. Brunton used amyl nitrite to successfully treat patients suffering with angina pectoris at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. He published his findings in The Lancet, the influential medical journal. The peculiar chemical officially became medicine in 1867.

In the 1930s, amyl nitrite began moonlighting as an antidote to cyanide poisoning. Not from a cloak-and-dagger cyanide pill, but mundane, common causes like inhaling smoke from a house fire. Amyl nitrite changes the blood’s hemoglobin, allowing the body to clear cyanide out through urine. Amyl made its way into soldiers’ first-aid kits in World War 2 (and used in EMT kits until 2018.) Another lesser publicized use was the alleviation of menstrual cramps.

Amyl nitrite was packaged by the pharmaceutical company Burroughs-Wellcome, sold in glass ampoules in a tin box until the 1960s. The tiny vials were sheathed in cotton and the dose was administered by breaking the vial and inhaling. This made a satisfying POP! sound. 

Poppers were born. 

So who christened poppers for their Queer use? 

Was it a horny chemist? A frisky doctor? A horny chemist with a frisky doctor? Antoine, jerking off alone in his lab? A nurse in Thomas’s hospital? WW2 soldiers fucking in an army barrack? A Queer boy from the 1920s or 1950s, stealing ampoules from his father’s medicine cabinet, sharing them with “friends” at secret flapper, beatnik, hippie, fae parties in Harlem or North Beach or the French Quarter? Maybe there was no first, maybe it was a simultaneous, silent group effort. 

It was in 1864 that I found…an irregularity. A moment curious for its ambiguity. We return to the science conference, when Richardson passed around amyl nitrite. The demonstration isn’t what’s noteworthy; the conference was founded to make science attainable to the masses so a flare of drama would have been expected. The odd moment is in the text of his presentation itself, in his last experiment. 

Throughout the report, Richardson is meticulous with details, measurements, heart rates, the names of his assistants and collaborators. He is a playwright and a poet, an amateur historian, he knows his way around words. But it’s how he discovers that inhaling a lot of amyl nitrite doesn’t kill you which raises…questions.

This “experiment” starts off without him even in the room. He writes:

“In one instance I was so unhappy as to see the inhalation carried to the extreme of danger. An incredulous friend seeing a bottle of the nitrite on my library mantelshelf, during a minute in which I was absent from the room, opened the bottle and commenced inhaling from the mouth.”

Richardson went on to report how he walked back in the room and his “incredulous friend” was sucking up amyl nitrite so hard his neck and face were the color of “raw beef.” When Richardson asked for the bottle, his friend refused. He then tried to forcibly take it but his friend fought him until he was so high he had no choice but to hand it over. He then became speechless, first laughing then holding himself up against a table, which shook with the beating of his heart. Richardson dragged his friend, “a stout and middle aged man” to get fresh air, looking after him until he regained his wits. 

So…Who was this unbelieving friend who had to try these out himself? Surely another scientist would understand how inappropriate and dangerous this was? Seems like a strange thing for a grown man to do. Was it standard for chemists to have their work just sitting out on their mantlepiece? According to his notes, Richardson had inhaled amyl nitrite 40 times by now. What had Richardson told his friend about their effects that would lead them to pursue the high with such fervor when Richardson apparently wasn’t looking? 

We’re in there somewhere.

When I was younger, I was having sex with an S&M Daddy, a fisting bottom who was into breath control. He took a whiff from the bottle, inhaling into his mouth then he kissed me, breathing into me then sucking the air out until I felt my lungs contract. He took his fingers and shut my nostrils so that his poppers breath was all I could take in, until we both entered another plane.

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Poppers require all Queers to be the “incredulous friend,” to not believe the official use on their label. To not heed warnings about their dangers, some disproven, like their link to AIDS or real, like their interaction with erection medications. As with the location of a speakeasy or cruising spot, the sale and use of poppers has depended on word of mouth. In their early years, their aphrodisiac uses weren’t promoted in any mainstream media, so this knowledge had to be passed down from one lover to the next to the next, from someone a little older or a little more experienced. Whether we believe in their use or not, poppers are one of our oldest forms of Queer oral history.

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Paid Subscribers: Scroll down for historical images and records of Richardson’s “experiment” and 1867 The Lancet article.