Achieving Brotherhood and Community through Poppers

We are pleased to publish the experience report from our customer huffdad:

Back in pre-Internet days, when I was a young man struggling with being gay and nowhere near coming out, I bought Gay Times magazine in the UK every month, only to feel completely alien to almost everything it contained. Most of all, the imagery of half-naked, smooth, muscular men in London clubs, very often where all men looked identical. The thin, bookish and inexperienced me wondered how I would ever find any sort of place in gay life. But the Internet – and poppers – changed all that.

The poppers experience came to me in 2005 and the online poppers experience shortly after, as a chemical boost for my results when vacuum pumping my balls. But vacuum pumping is a long and boring process and I eventually left it to move into the poppers area with a fresh sense of exploration. Little did I know that between reading, research and many different and new ideas, that I’d come to be seen as an expert or leader in the poppers community. Not something I ever dreamt of or aspired to.

What’s especially enjoyable about the online poppers community is that it gives poppers enthusiasts the chance to get together on all levels. Young men in the early days of their poppers journeys with a bottle in hand, to experienced, mature leather-men or other fetishists enjoying deep huffs as one interest among many. Online friendships soon sort themselves out into different layers according to who we feel comfortable with, invitations to chat are made, circles grow and different male friends enter our lives. Without the diversionary use of conference calling facilities and webcams, none of this experience would ever have happened for any of us.

Brothers find connection in their shared love of bating, and popper brothers find it in riding the parallel waves of highs and declines, each knowing what the other is simultaneously experiencing, without even caring about penis. Indeed, many huffers come to enjoy a soft penis or the popper-filled penis without worrying about displaying a proud boner – and that is liberating for men. Because in the poppers community, the focus is on poppers and enjoying the shared times spent with the little brown (or aluminium) bottle.

Regular huffing brothers appear online and share the joy automatically… but sooner or later, poppers wear off and brothers disappear for a while. Then we actually start missing and asking about each other and reveal more about ourselves and our lives. What happens is that birds of a feather begin to flock together. Men at the same level keep on meeting and bumping into each other, and if you all get along amicably, why not get all your popper brothers together into a Skype group that you can add to? It doesn’t matter if you’re all polite, nice guys or all dirty, sailor-mouthed, competitive pigs, the point is we find community among our own type. Very often you’ll find you’ve dragged and dropped constellations of friendships and old friends into one place, where guys can connect and find new people on their plane to huff with.

I have experienced all of this over the last nine years on Skype and count myself fortunate to have a place among some great huffers and great men. That is the place that I wondered if I would ever find, all those years ago. And like many gay men of a certain age without children (and without parents, a common reality of middle age), these brothers start to become like family, in the way that our friends are the family we choose for ourselves. And that family is something that’s really worth having around. Who would have believed that poppers could bring so much to our lives?