Original subtitles

Some people are using methamphetamine to enhance sexual pleasure.

Chemsex is when people, often gay men, take libido-enhancing drugs.

I mean, all you have to do is hop online, 12, 1am, and the people that are

online there tend to be awake because they're on it.

It took us less than 48 hours to be invited to a Chemsex party using an

online hookup app.

I don't have sober sex anymore. I only have sex when I'm using pee.

School was... I don't want to say rough, but it was being called, like, gay,

homo, faker, every day.

Every day.

Every day. Every day.

I kept telling myself that when I moved to London, I was going to go find myself

all that very cliche stuff.

In reality, I think I was just running away from life, life in general.

Well, in my teenage years, I was in the closet quite heavily from the age of

about 12.

Hated the fact that I was gay and didn't know how to deal with it, didn't know

who to talk to about it.

I just wanted to have lots of friends, be successful, be closer to my family.

Yeah, that didn't quite turn out the way it wanted to.

My name is Liam McElhenney, formerly known as Liam Martin, or to a majority

of the public, Waverider on Instagram.

I never really came out to anyone until I was about 19. I grew up kind

of just being called a girl and a faggot.

from the get-go, you know, even though I had no actual sense of myself.

Kept things hidden for about seven years until I came out when I was 19.

Friends would say to me, like, your hands have gone a bit loose.

You know, they've gone a bit limp.

You're crossing your legs a bit more.

Everyone I'd met that was gay was through Grindr.

I mean, I was never really into the big sex scene. It was just I wanted to have

relationships with people.

When I was younger, obviously, I had no confidence.

Meeting guys sober was always very difficult, and I'd always be very coy.

And even if a friend was perhaps trying to set me up with a guy, I'd pretend I

wasn't interested.

But then, being high, it was very easy.

My first Instagram post was back in 2011, which is when the app had first

been founded.

I would say my big breakthrough was after posting a photo of Ariel the

Little Mermaid, and I found that people really resonated with the art of

imitating celebrity photo shoot culture in a more cheap and humorous manner.

At one point, my peak had 2 million followers. That's a lot of people.

Well, do you want to give them the studio?

Liam Martin, hello.

Hey, lovely to be here.

AKA Wave Rider.

When you get a good response to what you're doing, and I think a lot of

people continuously crave that. I believe that that was one of my first

addictions, you know, was social media.

I felt like I was under so much pressure to consistently provide these photos for

people. It put a lot of strain and pressure on me and my relationship with

my mum especially.

I would have like these massive meltdowns before every photo.

I started drinking a lot to feel more comfortable.

Have a bit of confidence juice, a bit of Dutch courage.

Became reliant on it up until the age of about 23, where I sort of stopped and

moved on to meth.

Cocaine just seemed very exciting, and everyone's doing it in London.

At the end of the night, when I was really high, the euphoria would be

rushing, and I would be feeling frisky.

Of course, I had Griner.

Sex makes you feel good and drugs make you feel good.

So putting the two together was just a happy little marriage.

My mum told me to leave the house and I left and I lived down in my car for a

bit and on the street. But I kind of kept it a secret from most of my friends

because I didn't want them to know that situation I was going through.

I guess it's always that idea of trying to live like this double life.

I kind of...

was getting into massage to try to earn some extra money.

I became a nanny.

It was an amazing family as well.

They really welcomed me in and I had good money.

On a bit of a night out, I would stay up until about four in the morning.

Sometimes later, some days I wouldn't sleep.

I'd just turn up.

feed the kids breakfast, take them to school, and then I'd nap during the day.

Nobody talks about it.

Even within the gay scene, nobody really talks about it. It's just not a spoken

thing. It's just a taboo topic.

Chemsex is fairly big in the gay community.

It's where people are taking drugs with sex.

Say you're not comfortable with your sexuality, which being a gay man,

usually you're taught to feel bad about who you are.

Chemsex can take that away.

So you can just enjoy yourself without worrying about those inhibitions.

My partner at the time offered it to me and noticed a euphoric high, noticed an

energy level boost, and I really went, oh, wow, I get it now. I see.

I see what this is about.

I met this dude, and he offered me meth, and I just kind of surrendered to it. I

thought, okay, like, if I do it, it'll just make this easier for me to do. But

that moment that I indulged with it, it just bring out something in me that made

me feel so amazing, you know?

I feel absolutely bloody brilliant. I feel out the gate. I feel like my ideas

are stemming from a higher consciousness. Like, I'm in touch with

aliens. I'm hearing voices. I'm schizophrenic.

The thing with gay guys is that they like drugs that bring around affection

and connection.

So your MDMA, your ecstasy, all those kinds of things are very much kind of

lovey connecting drugs.

And that's where crystal meth kind of fits really nicely in with that space.

It was really sad leaving London.

More or less built a family there.

Instead of coming home straight away, I moved to Melbourne.

I had those urges to replicate what I had in London.

And I still had no social skills in the way of talking to other gay men sober.

So it wasn't actually the drugs that I wanted. It was just that connection on

an intimate level.

I was, I suppose the word is an escort.

I didn't pull myself through anything I didn't want to do.

I knew other people had known, and I didn't know what the perception of it

might be.

What were you worried about?

That people said I was a prostitute, you know?

One time, I had had drinks with some friends, jumped on Grindr when my

friends left.

I had messaged a guy who said he was high and that he had cocaine.

I went over to his place and he offered me a drink.

The next thing I knew, I was waking up in a bed and I couldn't

move. I was incapacitated.

Yeah, he raped me several times.

I remember him just screaming at me like I was doing something wrong.

but I don't know what.

In the moment, I did think he was going to kill me.

I'd come to, I'm not sure how long I had been there, but he was outside on the

balcony. I grabbed my things and went out the door.

While I was waiting for the lift, it was just the longest wait of my life.

I just kept looking at the door because I thought he was going to kill me.

I remember scrubbing my skin raw afterwards because I felt like no amount

of cleaning could just rid me of how disgusting I felt.

I didn't tell anybody what had happened and I didn't think I could.

I didn't want to.

The minute I indulged in that drug, it's like I was getting messages from

different people and crying and saying, hey, do you want some? Do you want some?

I walked in the city one time and I looked down straight at the ground and I

see a bag of meth on the ground. So I pick it up, I take it home and I smoke

it. Was meth expensive?

How did you... I never paid for it. I was doing other things to get it, but I

never... Like what?

Just sexual acts with people.

Pee is kind of the drug of choice in New Zealand because it's easy to get and

it's fairly cheap.

The way it works is it gives you the best sex that you've ever had, or that's

the way you perceive it, because crystal meth dumps a huge amount of dopamine

into your brain.

The risk is that you might really like it and then decide that you want to do

it again and again.

You know, people don't usually go out seeking it. It kind of finds them.

I got messages from a young guy who said, come around and leave some gear,

and we just have to hook up with this old, ugly man.

I thought, oh God, okay, what are we getting paid?

It's a hundred bucks.

Yeah, okay.

You know, why not?

I hadn't come back to New Zealand to heal.

I wish I had have.

That's when I turned to methamphetamine, the drug that I had kind of always said

that I would never touch.

I was...

jump on Grindr and go smoke methamphetamine with random guys here

in Auckland.

And the problem in a chemsex space is that because you've dropped your

inhibitions and your ability to assess risk, you may not be using condoms all

the time.

Condoms just aren't thought about.

It's almost a given that you won't use them.

And every time that I would go and have chemsex, the next day I would think, oh,

fucking hell, like, I've got HIV.

But then, of course, the following weekend, it would repeat itself.

On the grind, scrolling away, come across someone that says PNP on their

profile or looking for puff or looking for chuff, message them.

Go to their house and just start smoking and then horn on the television.

There's, like, a little bit of sex and then... More drugs and then sex and more

drugs. I would personally try and get it out of the way, the sexual side. I'm

just there for the drugs.

A lot of the time spent on Grindr, looking for other people to join.

And what sort of people are you meeting there? Younger guys in the same position

as I am, who are relatively weak and can't support themselves.

There were some people I could feel was uncomfortable, didn't want to be there.

Having to get naked when they might not want to get naked, they might just want

the drugs.

It was just a moment of pain from thinking about my rape every day.

Because when I was sober, that is all I would think about, wanting to kill

myself, ways I could do so.

So it was pleasurable to indulge in not having to think.

I started to realise that...

It is eating away at my self-esteem. It is making me feel like, shit, this is

what I'm going to be associated with and people will figure out that this is who

I am and this is what I'm doing.

I noticed I was susceptible to psychosis.

I was doing 400 push-ups a day, 400 squats, 400 sit-ups. I was under the

impression I was taking the best care of myself possible.

I went three days without sleep one time.

And by that point, I genuinely started seeing objects morph into people and

then back into objects again.

I went onto my public platforms, and at first I was, like, bragging on

livestreams that, like, meth was the best thing ever and everybody needed to

try it.

Fuck. I need meth.

I've had my friends fucking shit on me.

Fucking nothing.

When all I've done is been my best fucking self to them. Fuck you all. I've

done more for this fucking community than any of you cunts have. So get

fucked.

I remember scrolling through my phone and going through Grindr and trying to

find my ex-partner. Thinking that each profile I came across was him trying to

reach out a message to me to let me know that he still loved me. That's what I

was hoping to find.

I had a relationship.

I'd actually told him all about my past traumas, but I didn't really elaborate

on how I had been coping.

When he was there holding my hand and making me feel a little bit better, and

when I was feeling low, I resorted to the only way I knew how to numb pain or

feel a little bit better, which was chemsex.

The last instance I'm trying to think, almost two years ago now,

It was with two random guys at a hotel room in Auckland CBD from 3

in the afternoon until 5am the next day.

One of the guys who was sitting next to me, I'd asked him to give me a blowjob

and he said that he couldn't because he had no tongue.

And I found that very sobering and kind of thought, what the fuck am I doing

here?

And I ended up just leaving.

I was walking around town thinking that everybody knew who I was and that

everyone knew everything about me.

I started responding to it in a way that I thought was appropriate.

Yelling and screaming out at people in their cars saying, screw you, I know you

know who I am.

Just absolutely crazy.

He found out because he saw me on Grindr.

searching for hemseps.

He wanted an answer for why I was doing these things, and I didn't know myself,

and I was really scared because I couldn't control these urges.

The most extreme thing that ended up getting me institutionalized was that I

went onto livestream and I threatened to kill the Prime Minister.

The police came to my apartment, and they broke into it, and they picked up a

plastic thumb drive sword in my room, and they were like, is this what you're

going to use to kill her?

Put me in handcuffs, escorted me down into the police car.

That's when something in me was like, well, I need to go talk to Jacinda.

Like, I thought they were actually taking me to go have a cup of tea with

her.

I ended up being sectioned for, I believe it was over two months.

I was in ICU for the first month.

Threatened to kill myself several times in psychotic situations.

And my parents called up the police and got them to arrest me. They actually

then got the rights to section me.

I was in an institution for about two months and sent down to a private

exclusive rehab, which cost my parents a fortune to put me in through.

All the people who were around me knew that I was struggling and they'd gone

and told my family.

My family are quite traditional in the sense that mental health isn't usually

talked about.

They asked me what I needed.

And I said, I need to go see this therapist.

And had the ability to throw money at the problem, which, yeah, I'm very

thankful for.

There aren't a lot of services available.

And the services available are targeted to the general population.

Because we're dealing with a niche community, you'll reach out for support

and you won't feel comfortable talking about what you're going through. You

can't talk about the fact that you're going partying every weekend with...

Lots of different guys having random sex, and you can only do it when you're

on crystal, and they don't understand that world.

I feel fried. I feel slaughtered. I don't know how to deal with this

anymore. Okay? I don't know. I don't know the narrative of this story.

It's so hard now for the recovery, just regaining your sense of self.

I feel like I can't.

freely express my emotions. I feel that I cannot connect with the majority of

people on a conversational level.

It's not pleasant coming out of the whole experience and reflecting and

seeing different ways you were used and people were feeding someone's addiction.

People perceive me now as a drug addict.

I've lost the respect and the trust that it is that comes with doing the drug,

and that's just a natural thing. I understand that.

Looking back off what I have learned about myself through my therapist, when

I would put myself in these dangerous situations,

I really didn't care.

I think I have learned some sort of self-worth, and I know how to take care

of myself a lot better.

On the days that I am feeling low and worthless, I have healthier outlets now.

I know how to overcome those feelings.

I have to learn how to smile again and stay there and be proper and laugh, you

know. I'd love to laugh again like I did when I was a kid.

I love dancing.

I really do. It doesn't look coordinated to the majority of the people who are

watching, but to me it's just... a release of the chaos which is going on

inside me.

Starting a cleaning business, landscaping as well inside.

I've got a partner at the moment.

It definitely takes my eyes off any potential triggers.

Yeah, it keeps me happy.

It took me losing virtually everything I ever knew for something to snap in me

and go, I can't continue this life.

I...

Just, like, I want to feel a bit normal again, you know?

I don't know if I ever was fully normal or anything.

I mean, I'm much more comfortable with it, being gay and meeting other guys.

I still carry a bit of internal isomophobia, if I'm honest.

Getting, like, a greater self-esteem and looking after myself a lot more, it is

something... I'm acknowledging.

We've come a long way from where we were.

We had homosexual law reform. It used to be illegal to be gay. You could be

arrested for having sex with another man.

We've gone beyond that.

But we need to go further and empower people.

If I started using chems to deal with my sexual identity or my body image or

homophobia around being gay, I haven't dealt with it. I've put it aside in a

box.

Now that I'm not using chemicals anymore, I need to open that box and I

need to actually come to terms with what that is, then learn to love myself so I

can love others.

Once people are at that point, I think chemsex would lose its attraction.