I’ve been a human research subject for Phase I clinical trials since 2011, and my guinea pigging has taken me to CROs in Texas, Kansas, Utah, Florida, Washington, and elsewhere. I’ve screened for over 40 studies, and taken investigational drugs to treat conditions like HIV, Covid, constipation, Parkinson’s disease, blood clotting, and chronic pain.

For a long time, it was just something I did.

I began writing about clinical research in 2019. I was enrolled in a memoir class at my local community college, and was interested in the fact that a drug I tested—apomorphine—was once used for gay conversion therapy. I paired my experiences in the study with taking PreP for the first time. I found it curious that both caused extreme nausea, and wondered if there was a connection between queerness and disgust.

In grad school at Louisiana State University, I revisited the lab in a fiction class, but my story engendered more questions than answers. My classmates couldn’t understand why anyone would do a clinical trial of their own volition, and my professor thought the story was too dystopian to be realistic. My failure to articulate the lab came from my inability to understand it as an outsider. The testing lab was like a secret I kept, even from me.

The following summer, I enrolled in my longest-ever study for an investigational drug to treat cirrhosis of the liver. I hoped to spend my time inside writing my thesis (an essay collection about cohabitation), but instead I kept a frenzied journal.

I have been writing about drugs ever since.