Like most ridiculous anti-drug propaganda myths, the notion of marijuana making you gay all started with the Reagan administration. It was October 21, 1986, and a Newsweek article broke news that was probably inevitable to appear in the height of Drug Abuse Resistance Education era under President Ronald Reagan. After a decade-and-a-half of right-wing presidents pushing ineffective anti-drug agendas throughout everything from legislation to education, one of the weirdest little blips to come out of this campaign came on this crisp October morning when Reagan’s drug czar allegedly made the very powerful declaration: pot can make you gay.
While this immediately made tons of people upset, this belief has never completely subsided (and became mainstream once again in recent years). Part of that is because he’s not completely wrong (but he’s about 99.99% wrong). This is the weird history of people believing that pot makes you gay.
It Started With Nixon:
First, let’s set the scene:
It was June 1971, and the witch-nosed WaterGOAT Richard Nixon declared a War On Drugs, famously deeming illicit substances “Public enemy number one.” During this time, he began cracking down on drug use, with actions such as creating the Drug Enforcement Administration and signing the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), which classifies drugs into various schedules. Since the CSA was signed, marijuana has been a Schedule I drug, which means that, according to the law, it falls into the category of “substances, or chemicals are defined as drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” For over 50 years, marijuana has legally been placed in the same category as heroin, ecstasy, and LSD.
Minorities at the Forefront:
Though this is about weed and sexuality (I promise we’ll get there), I cannot move on without pointing out this essential factor in Nixon’s actions: Drugs have always been more accessible in lower income and minority communities, which means that they will perpetually be the prime targets for drug enforcement (60% of all Hispanic prisoners are currently incarcerated for a drug-related crime). Activist groups and experts alike have been pointing out this purposeful biased disparity for years. Still, the most important voice in this discussion is John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon’s closest aides. In 2016, after being questioned by a Harper News journalist who tracked him down, Ehrlichman blatantly admitted and confirmed the long-standing speculation of the War on Drugs’ grim intentions:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
So yes, the War on Drugs has always been very racially and politically charged, based more on lies and fear tactics than it ever was on science. You can learn more about the raging war on minority communities shielded by a drug issue — and all of the harsh actions politicians took during this time, in the February 2025 Green Eugene article D.A.R.E And the Black Community: The Insidious history.
Reagan’s “Drug Free” America and his Wacky Drug Czar:
In the 1980s, with a failing new economic system that’s responsible for a ton of the class disparities we see today, and America’s participation in a bloody yet undeclared war in support of Saddam Hussein, president Ronald Reagan announced that the United States was faced with a rampant and violent enemy whose destruction would take top priority: drugs.
(Positively notttt a distraction from the chaos.)
He implemented several programs to clamp down on the issue, expanding heavily on Nixon’s actions. He increased the minimum sentence for a marijuana charge, doubled funding for the DEA, and, of course, tasked his wife with the “Just Say No” public education program. For the most part, his efforts were successful (If the ‘success’ metric here is based on the 173% uptick in adult arrests and 73% rise in juvenile arrests in the 1980s, then yeah, it was successful. If we’re measuring success by whether it actually curbed drug use, then no. No, it was a complete failure).
While all of these efforts detrimentally affected minority communities, Reagan’s drug czar, Carlton E. Turner (which is the informal, yet widely accepted title for Deputy Assistant to the President for Drug Abuse Policy), made sure to include another vital minority community. Just for reference: Turner determined that marijuana is a “dirty drug,” and a catalyst for laziness, while stating in his 2016 essay, “’Medical’ Marijuana is a Con” that suggesting one take medical marijuana to aid nausea and minor pain is equivalent to “telling a mother whose child is suffering from a bacterial infection that she should offer her child moldy bread instead of penicillin.” So that’s who we’re working with here.
The Statements About Being Gay and Smoking Pot:
To finally come back around, in October 1986, Newsweek published an article titled: Reagan Aide: Pot Can Make You Gay. It begins with a beautiful sentence that has aged wonderfully in the age of Gen-Z slang:
“Senior presidential aides looked on White House drug adviser Carlton E. Turner as a nattily dressed functionary with zero clout. He spent his time grinding out reports that nobody in the White House, save Nancy Reagan, cared much about.”
The article continues, “He believes that pot smoking may lead to homosexuality; at the very least, he says, gays who use marijuana are risking damage to their immune system and vulnerability to AIDS.” Then it says that when Turner visits drug-treatment centers, “he finds that roughly 40 percent of them have also engaged in homosexual activity.”
“’It seems to be something that follows along from their marijuana use,” says Turner, who is convinced that the drugs come first, the homosexuality second. “My concern is, how is the biological system affected by heavy marijuana use? The public needs to be thinking about how drugs alter people’s lifestyles.”
The article then highlights marijuana’s alleged (provably false) connections to AIDS. “No one is saying that marijuana will cause AIDS,’ [Turner] says,” (which really sounds like something you’d say if you think marijuana causes AIDS). The article continues, “but he argues that marijuana suppresses the immune system and ‘if you’re in a high-risk category, you certainly don’t want to use something that will impair your immunological system.’”
The article concludes that “Turner’s assertions befuddle drug experts and gay rights activists alike,” before citing a psychologist who confirmed there is no causal connection between homosexuality and weed (this is important later). The final sentence reads, “When asked about Turner’s assertions concerning pot and homosexuality, however, one aide groaned and said the White House didn’t want to get involved.”
The article is not online, but it is available in print at the UO Library.
Drug Denial:
The next day, The Washington Post published an article responding to this (and its subsequent outrage), interviewing Turner, who denied ever making these statements. He’s quoted as saying, “I have never said marijuana will make you homosexual,” while doubling down that most youths in drug centers have “engaged” in “homosexual activity.”
“That’s the point I made — that we [should] accept this fact and help the kids and the parents deal with it…when you talk to young people who use drugs, you find their inhibitions against everything are gone. This is one of the things that goes along with it. That was the context under which it was discussed.”
The initial article was met with disdain, but for the most part, this myth died down, and many people have distanced themselves from Turner’s ideologies and misinformation. Mostly.
Fast Forward to 2015 of All Years:
Perhaps it was because gay marriage legalization was a hot topic at the time, but from the end of 2014, Reddit exploded with discussions about whether there is a correlation between smoking pot and being gay. Many men took to Reddit, explaining that they are typically straight in their normal life, but when they are high, they want nothing more than some sweet, sweaty guy lovin’. The original thread, from Reddit User throwaway15935745625 said:
“I feel very attracted to girls and not at all to men when sober, but when I get high I just want a big cock to suck and a man who fucks the shit out of me.
Anyone else happen to have the same effects? Just curiosity, not that it really bothers me since I’m still attracted to girls while high, but I sometimes feel weirded by male friends with whom I don’t usually feel attracted to.”
Over 100 commenters responded to this thread, many of whom agreed that they experience similar thoughts too, calling this phenomenon “Highsexuality,” a term that has been in the Urban Dictionary since 2009. After this, many other Reddit threads appeared pondering the same question. The term became so widespread that everyone from news outlets to SNL began covering the viral idea.
While science has known since at least Turner’s statements that smoking weed does not make you gay (even then, both articles had numerous quotes from psychologists and scientists disproving his claims), these ideas persist today. A simple Google or Reddit search of any keywords relating to smoking weed making people gay will bring up numerous threads of people asking these same questions, dating back anywhere from a few years to just a few weeks.
Here’s What We Know About Pot and Homosexuality:
In 1984, a study proved that marijuana lowers sexual inhibitions, and a 2023 study found that smoking weed makes sex better for a lot of people. We also know that sexual minorities smoke more weed than heterosexual people. There are also (for some reason — and this is crazy) several peer-reviewed studies that have found a correlation between marijuana and “condomless anal sex among adolescent and emerging adult sexual minority men.” That being said, there is also a study out there from 2003 titled “Homosexual Sex as Harmful as Drug Abuse, Prostitution, or Smoking,” and that’s so utterly bogus that it would almost be hilarious if that statement wasn’t such a problem. So basically, there are a lot of studies out there.
Long story long, despite what the old straight men of the Reagan administration and the waspy, sexually confused Reddit dudes have to say, smoking weed won’t make you gay if you weren’t already. Regardless of the studies, the correlations, and the scientific nothing-burgers out there, if smoking weed is something you like to do, all it will do (generally) is make you have a good time. However you feel when you smoke weed is okay, so long as it involves being safe and happy. This Pride Month, just smoke weed and be gay or whatever, and don’t overthink it.
