Deep Sniff by Adam Zmith

Author:Adam Zmith [Zmith, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781913462604
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2021-09-14T05:00:00+00:00

Until I had sex I hadn’t realised that many gay men divide their bodies into “being” either a top or a bottom.

I was twenty-nine, discovering that my body was what they call versatile.

6. A Guilty Pleasure

Mother Superior Mary Regina peers into a bag that one of her sisters has found in a school bathroom. She pulls out a small glass bottle, reads the word “Rush” from the label, and says, “It must be for people in a hurry.” Of course she takes a whiff of the poppers, and within seconds the nun’s body is flushed with the holy spirit. “Ooooh, is it hot in here?” she asks her audience, who are already laughing. As her rush builds and she sniffs again, the scene gets even more ridiculous. The other sisters appear, and they start to tap dance and sing a song called “Tackle That Temptation with a Time Step”.

It’s always funny to watch a nun experience a little pleasure. It is a physical joke as old as a face full of cream pie – and funny for the same reason. Dignity is lost. Respectability, inverted. Propriety, interrupted. The mother superior sniffing poppers is the climax to act one of the musical Nunsense. The scene requires some excellent face work from the main performer, with her eyes crossed and mouth ajar in an exaggerated high. Played well, the joke is a riot and the audience returns after the interval jeered up and wanting more.

The portrayal of poppers in Nunsense places pleasure at the service of humour. In fact, if you take a trip through the many representations of poppers in Western culture in the English language, you will see that pleasure is never primary and is often not included at all. Just like a lot of sex education, pleasure is the bottom priority after all the talk about mechanics, pregnancy and disease. Things like sex toys and poppers are excluded from sex education even though they are aids to pleasure, except perhaps where they are mentioned as a warning. Poppers are linked to shame and death always before they are linked to pleasure, which is intriguing given that pleasure is the number one reason they are used. If your eyes and ears are open for poppers, you’ll have your own cultural references rather than relying on the ones in this chapter. And they are almost certainly going to place poppers only as a guilty pleasure.

That is, at least, a successful storytelling device. Since its first performance in 1985, Nunsense has become one of the most successful off-Broadway musicals in history. It is a global franchise, with more than five thousand productions in many countries, eight sequels, merchandise for sale and even a line of nun’s habits available for rent via FedEx. This means that hundreds of performers on different nights in different theatres have pulled on a habit, sniffed poppers and made thousands of people laugh. Fake nuns with fake rushes have aroused real joy all around the world.

Nunsense is probably not the first piece of entertainment to play poppers for laughs.

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