I’ve been to a lot of sex parties. And people ask me all the time, How do I go to one? They think they have to find LeMarchand’s puzzle box from Hellraiser, solve a riddle, learn a password, stumble through a portal to an alternative dimension. They think if they try to bring their friends back to the same alley on the same block, the unmarked door will be gone, vanished as if by magic.
“I swear it was right here,” they imagine themselves saying as their friends roll their eyes skeptically. They foresee devastation at allowing their one chance to enter a fairytale underworld pass them by.
Ancient orgies of the Greco-Roman world were referred to as “mysteries” because they were reserved for initiates into secret orders. The idea behind these rituals was that they allowed humans to commune with the divine through excess: feasting, intoxication, dancing and fucking. Actual mystery shrouds the idea of sex parties to this day.
I’ve certainly entered unmarked doors in alleys on strange city blocks to find community dungeon spaces filled with St Andrew’s crosses and suspension hooks and rows of whips and Ikea tables covered in condoms. But I’ve also been to parties at adult campgrounds in rural Texas and Maryland where you can cruise in the actual forest and fuck in the dirt. And I’ve helped set up pop-up dungeons in hotel ballrooms hours after skincare conferences have cleared out. Women-only parties, queer-only parties, all-gender parties.
My answer to the question “How do I find a sex party?” is pretty simple: just go. They’re everywhere. And if you can’t find one, throw one yourself. You don’t need a magical object to make it happen. The power was inside you all along!
Sex parties are governed by different rules than the rest of the world. A lot of things are bound to surprise you about your reaction to being in these liminal spaces: who you find yourself attracted to, what you’d like to watch, how it feels to be witnessed, what you’d be down to try, what your fantasies look and smell like outside of your head. But it’s still you. You don’t have to put on a fucking Venetian mask and pretend to be something you’re not. It’s transgressive enough for you to be present.
The first few times I went to sex parties, in the late 2000s at Kinky Salon (KS) in San Francisco, I found meeting compatible people to be a mixed bag. This was probably good for me, in retrospect, because I took my time acclimating to the sensory and taboo overwhelm.
Since 2003, KS has hosted parties in several venues, cultivating its signature playful atmosphere with cute themes like animals, wild west or Renaissance fair. Decorations and costumes are a great way to start conversation, to encourage confidence and a sense of imagination; they are, however, totally not my thing.
To wit, my first time attending KS was a food-themed party, in a Mission District apartment covered with cushions; I wore a free-box-scored tank top that spelled out, in sequins, an icon of an apple followed by the word CRUNCHY. Despite my lackluster look, I managed to hit it off with two friends, both named Alex, and I just couldn’t pass up the chance to fuck two Alexes at the same time.
At another KS event months later, I was so caught up in conversation that I didn’t realize the party was approaching closing time. I looked around frantically and grabbed the first person I made eye contact with. As he ground on top of me, I looked over at my friends, who were gathering their stuff to leave, and I realized that I actually wanted to go home. I wasn’t really turned on; I had no chemistry with this guy. I had just felt I needed to get my proverbial parking ticket validated, get my repeat customer card stamped.
Even then, as a working dominatrix and porn performer who was learning more and more about the lived reality of the books I’d obsessed over, I was anxious that I wasn’t sampling every single thing at the buffet, regardless of my actual appetite.
Group sex is nothing less than a prism through which to understand every single thing that sex can mean, has meant, could mean to you. Like a weird new exercise class that makes you sore in muscles you didn’t know you had, group sex shows you what you didn’t know you thought about fidelity, about jealousy and envy, about what attracts you, turns you on, gets you off, makes you feel safe, makes you feel exposed, makes you feel ashamed, makes you feel vulnerable, makes you feel adored and admired.
If your only experience with an orgy is the third act of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) – where Tom Cruise’s all-night odyssey culminates in a ritualistic masquerade featuring slender white models humping all over an opulent mansion – you might think group sex is only accessible to a secret society of wealthy people who never have to be accountable to anything. You might think only certain kinds of bodies can experience this level of excess, and that the excess will be balanced with an austere formalization.
This simply isn’t true. An orgy is just a party. There can be as many different styles of orgies as there are styles of parties. Some people are great party planners. Some people are the life of the party. Some people have social anxiety. Some people are better than others at dealing with the awkwardness of running into their ex. Some people who love a good cookout would feel alienated at a cocktail soiree, and some people who can’t stand a rave love being the center of attention at their own birthday potluck.
The best parties are the ones that balance planning with room for spontaneity, ones where the guests are a curated balance of dear longtime friends with charming new acquaintances, where the atmosphere is perfectly calibrated and the terms of engagement are clearly communicated. An orgy is no different.
Even though the term “orgiastic” means wild and unrestrained, most group sex is not as Dionysian as my fantasies inspired by the photo spreads in Madonna’s Sex book. It’s wonderful in theory – the idea of being in a writhing mass of flesh, stimulating and being stimulated with every undulation, gushing and ejaculating everywhere in unbridled ecstasy, the salty taste and rousing scents of a human crowd all around you – but challenging to orchestrate.
Some group sex happens spontaneously with results anywhere along the spectrum from wonderful to horrible, just like sex between two people. But in my experience, most group sex, and the best group sex, happens as the result of meticulous planning. It benefits from negotiation, interscene communication and aftercare.
Usually when I encounter rules and regulations, my first instinct is to get my middle fingers out. However, there are two kinds of rules I do like: street traffic rules and sex party rules. The reason I like them both is that they are social agreements that facilitate efficient and carefree flow while reducing the risk of harm. Freedom is necessary, but everyone is a lot happier when cars stay off the sidewalk and pedestrians stay out of the goddamn bicycle lane.
Buffet was a queer play party I went to a couple of times in 2018 at a legendary Brooklyn performance art space known at different times as the Spectrum and then the Dreamhouse. Their rules were printed out and posted in the foyer where you waited in line before taking off your street clothes. They explained they had dungeon monitors (DMs) wearing pink glowing bracelets. DMs are present less as rule enforcers and more as community accountability figures. The hosts were clear about what kind of play was prohibited (race, scat, guns), the kind of play that required a DM’s permission so they could keep a close eye on psychological intensity and mess (blood, piss, food, CNC [consensual non-consent], self-suspension, gags).
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Buffet had a great breakdown of what consent meant in their space: “Do not stalk, lurk, stare, follow, badger, pressure, or touch anyone without permission.” They also had a very specific anti-oppression stance: “If you perpetuate oppression based on gender identity or expression, race or ethnicity, ability, HIV or STI status, body type, sexual or BDSM orientation, religion or spiritual path, you’ll be thrown out without a refund. (However, if you come to us crying about reverse racism or misandry, we *will* laugh in your face.)”
Whatever guidelines work for you and your people, play parties can be a way to collectively dig into the philosophy of how we can practice critical respect while intentionally transgressing the laws of sexual engagement.
Roughly halfway through the process of writing Why Are People Into That?, my book about kinky sex, I heard about an all-gender bathhouse party being thrown by some of my friends in Brooklyn. I felt a rare flicker of Fomo, as I’d been in California for a few years and missed my old sex party scene.
A dear friend kindly let me stay in her apartment near Prospect Park since she was out of town – an apartment where I have attended many salons that had devolved into leather licking, spanking, piercing, rope, service, and the all-important cuddling on the couch while watching friends trample one another in combat boots.
The night of the party, a dominatrix friend generously sent a car to pick me up so we could arrive at the bathhouse as soon as it opened. We noticed several cute people descending on the place from all directions, under an overpass decorated with posters of a disco ball rubber ducky, which read, “Come rinse in sin/See you on the tiles.” We undressed in the locker room and immediately started greeting old friends and making new ones. A DJ spun house music in the lounge and all kinds of queers sweated through their outfits, on plastic lounge chairs and wooden sauna benches, writhing and screaming and cumming and bullying and cackling and watching, always watching.
Many hours later, pores gaping open, hair damp, loose street-legal clothes pulled over my drained body, I stepped out onto the same sidewalk under the same disco ducky sign, heading to the subway to catch a late-night train back to my crashpad. A very handsome person waiting for a car asked me how my party was. “I feel pulverized,” I grinned. My bruises were already starting to emerge like a Polaroid portrait. “How was yours?”
“Oh man,” they said. “Close to the end of the night, I noticed this absolutely gorgeous femme standing by herself. I went up to her and asked her what she was looking for, and then she told me, and then I gave it to her.”
“Good for you!” I congratulated them. We hugged and headed to our separate parts of the city, where we used keys to get into private homes and maybe never see each other again.
Staring out the window of the train at the 2am city, I felt in contact with everyone at that party that night, and every other sex party happening in town that night, and the legacy of every party that had happened in the past, with the parks where downlow cruising was underway, with the ghosts of porn theaters in Times Square, with the resonance of a queer future always on the verge of being made with intention and drama and love.
Orgies have become shorthand for debauchery because they tear down our limiting bedroom walls. They shake the foundation of the private home as the only appropriate place for intimate pleasure. As with sex toys, additional forms of stimulation can explode our expectations of what sex is supposed to look like and who we’re supposed to be while having it.
When most people think about orgies, they think about it as an impressive stunt rather than a scaling of all the possibilities of relations, exhibitionism and voyeurism. How can two people stimulate each other, and what is possible when a third participates? What can be touched, what can be felt, what can be seen, what can be shown off? How can bodies support one another and what multiplicities of pleasure can happen when one person enjoys another person’s enjoyment of another person’s enjoyment? All sex is a collaboration and an orgy just means more collaborators. That means more ideas and more egos, more desires and more needs, more variety and more emotions, more tension, more mistakes, more surprises.
Group sex is proof that liberation is not individual satisfaction; it’s everyone struggling to get free together. We all have the potential for satisfaction outside structures others make for us. We are in contact. We make our own design. We make them ourselves. We make them for one another.
Excerpted from Why Are People Into That?: A Cultural Investigation of Kink by Tina Horn. Copyright 2024. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group Inc.