Dead End of the Rainbow: How Environmental and Spatial Factors Create a Necropolis for Gay Sex Workers in China

Abstract

In China, the correlation between environmental space and drug use by gay male sex workers remains an under-researched public health concern. Drugs are commonly used to enhance sexual performance as well as provide feelings of euphoria but they also increase the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and HIV. The spatial and environmental factors that create synergies between drug consumption and sex work are explored through qualitative data obtained from 16 HIV-positive male sex workers. Alienation and instability are markers which encourage drug use in the sale of sex. The concept of necropolitics explains how environmental and spatial factors expose them to death conditions where they survive without help from the state and subsist only through the support of their own insular communities.