The "love thugs": Ecstasy, homosociality, and the decline of football-related violence in 1990s England

Can two wrongs make a right? Perhaps this was a question that passed through the minds of the arbiters of public morals in England in the early 1990s, as two contemporary folk devils of the previous decade came together in an unexpectedly 'positive' way. The football "hooligan" – young men who committed violence before, after, and during matches, usually but not always at pre-arranged meets with rival groups of fans or "firms" – had made himself internationally infamous through the 1970s and into the 1980s.1 "Hooliganism" was "the English disease," and had contributed – indirectly through the Heysel Stadium tragedy of May 1985 – to the expulsion of all English football clubs from European competitions for five years.2 The "raver" meanwhile had their own deviant and disruptive behaviours – dancing all night at illegal "pay parties" in fields, warehouses, or anywhere else which could be broken into and have a sound-system installed.3 These raves were sound-tracked by acid house, hard and relentless dance music derived from Chicago house and Detroit techno. But more significantly, at least for any self-appointed guardians of public morality, they were fuelled by another import of American origin: Ecstasy. MDMA, or 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, had arrived in Britain in the mid-1980s and had quickly attracted the attention of both tabloid sub-editors and medical authorities who warned of the Class A drug's "evil" that turned raves into "dances of death." 4 Such admonishments, however, belied the excitement and euphoria that rave and its attendant intoxicant offered its consumers, and these communal pleasures did not exclude those who had previously engaged in getting their (literal) kicks out of football-related violence. The progeny of this unholy marriage of eighties’ moral panics was a new figure and the topic of this chapter: the "love thug."