Drawing on 24 interviews conducted with gay, bisexual, queer and other men who have sex with men (GBM) living in Toronto, Canada, we examined how they are making sense of the relationship between their mental health and substance use. We draw from the literature on the biopolitics of substance use to document how GBM self-regulate and use alcohol and other drugs (AODC) as technologies of the self. Despite cultural understandings of substance use as integral to GBM communities and subjectivity, GBM can be ambivalent about their AODC. Participants discussed taking substances positively as a therapeutic mental health aid and negatively as being corrosive to their mental wellbeing. A fine line was communicated between substance use being self-productive or self-destructive. Some discussed having made ‘problematic’ or ‘unhealthy’ drug-taking decisions, while others presented themselves as self-controlled, responsible neoliberal actors doing ‘what a normal gay man would do’. This ambivalence is related to the polarizing binary community and scientific discourses on substances (i.e. addiction/healthy use, irrational/rational, uncontrolled/controlled). Our findings add to the critical drug literature by demonstrating how reifying and/or dismantling the coherency of such substance use binaries can serve as a biopolitical site for some GBM to construct their identities and demonstrate healthy, ‘responsible’ subjectivity.

通过对生活在加拿大多伦多的同性恋、双性恋、酷儿和其他男男性行为者 (GBM) 进行的 24 次采访，我们研究了他们如何理解心理健康与物质使用之间的关系。我们从关于物质使用的生命政治的文献中汲取知识，以记录 GBM 如何自我调节和使用酒精和其他药物 (AODC) 作为自我技术. 尽管对物质使用的文化理解是 GBM 社区和主观性不可或缺的一部分，但 GBM 对他们的 AODC 可能是矛盾的。参与者积极讨论了将物质作为一种治疗性心理健康援助，而消极地认为它们会腐蚀他们的心理健康。物质使用是自我生产还是自我毁灭之间有一条细线。一些人讨论了做出“有问题”或“不健康”的吸毒决定，而另一些人则将自己描述为自我控制、负责任的新自由主义演员，做着“一个正常同性恋者会做的事”。这种矛盾与两极分化的社区和关于物质的科学话语（即成瘾/健康使用、非理性/理性、不受控制/控制）有关。