Émile Durkheim described this kind of ritual intensity as collective effervescence: moments where the individual dissolves into the group and briefly feels transcendent. For many gay men, this ritual would be chills. Chills stretch across entire weekends. Gay men meet to have (often) substance-induced orgies; people rotate in and out, time loses coherence, bodies move between rooms, music loops endlessly, party favours circulate quietly, someone is always arriving, someone is always leaving. As soon as you enter the room, you belong instantly and for men who grew up feeling peripheral, that immediacy can feel corrective, community without responsibility - collective effervescence,
José Esteban Muñoz described queerness as a horizon: something always visible but never fully reached. After a few chills, that’s exactly how they feel. Loneliness appears solved, desire circulates freely. The unachievable feels achieved.
I was never a devoted chill person. I started going on Sunday mornings, sober, maybe sometimes still high from the night before. Always horny and alone. Meeting one person felt unpredictable so a chill seemed efficient; more options equals better odds. What I encountered was men operating on a shared delayed frequency, conversations drifting, attention fragmented. I couldn’t reach the collective effervescence but visually it still all looked so good. So I adjusted, and got high too. Tune yourself to the room, I told myself — that’s often where it becomes dangerous, not through collapse but through adaptation. Once you squint (or sedate), it starts to look and feel like you actually are in the horizon.
In reality, the same scene usually repeats itself: sucking a guy while he is discussing a TV show with someone else, watching someone scroll Grindr mid-fuck looking for someone new to invite, even though ten perfectly attractive naked men are already present. The abundance promises transcendence, but in most cases it feels like a pig in a dress — a sexy pig, but a pig nonetheless. Many of us leave with more intimacy issues than the ones we came in with. For example, I have friends who can no longer have sex without drugs, not because desire disappeared, but because intimacy without amplification feels insufficient. What we actually crave begins to feel mundane.
Straight masculinity has long displaced emotional articulacy with ritualized excess i.e. sport, aggression, intoxication — proximity without responsibility, fleeting intimacy without endurance. Chills might appear softer, but in practice they mimic the exact mechanism these heteronormative rituals do; They allow closeness without confession and belonging without vulnerability.
I signed up for liberation freedom from heteronormative scripts! only to learn that we rarely invent rituals; we often simply repeat patterns. Slipping into a utopia is seductive, even if it lasts only one weekend.
The beautiful men look so good as a thumbnail in the room, exactly like in my fantasies, but once you press play, it’s a completely different story. How did we not learn from Ted Schmidt in the American Queer as Folk?
John Yonatan Jacoby
