The Pitfalls of Play Parties

public sex isn't "radical"

I remember the night my ex-girlfriend and I decided to go to our first play party. We were nineteen and met at SUNY Purchase through a poetry club. We were in an open, “don’t ask, don’t tell,” relationship and always looking for ways to diversify our sex life. I was a sociology major and had taken enough gender/sexuality classes to understand how an oppressive and dominant culture impacts intimate aspects of human life. As a queer/trans person, default social standards indeed politicize my gender and sexual expression, and stumbling upon a sex party for queer/trans people (that was 18+ no less), for a $20.00 cover, felt like a liberating way to spend a Saturday night.

I came alive when I entered space. It was a blacked-out basement level dungeon in Brooklyn filled with people experiencing catharsis and pleasure in ways that I didn’t think were accessible. While I wanted to do more, I stuck to voyeurism, but that night opened me up to a personal and sacred journey with my sexuality and gender. Navigating my queerness, transness, non-monogamy, and kink was intertwined; play parties and sex positive spaces became containers in which I could explore and indulge in those parts of my identity all at once.

Six years and countless more play parties later, I became a producer sex positive events myself.

Fifi and I set out to create the party we didn’t have when we first found the sex-positive community. Although leather grunge dungeons were the most accessibly priced and queer/trans inclusive play spaces, they lacked the comforts of higher-end hetero-normative sex clubs. We collaborated with a venue to create GNDRFCK, hosted it four times, and created more play parties (“Neo-Tantra Night” and “Intimacy Playlab”) that we threw until Fall 2024.

2 years into hosting queer/trans centered play parties in NYC, I began to notice the dangerous pitfalls of the “sex positive community” and so called “radical” spaces:

Inaccessible Pricing

Except for my first play party, most of the popular sex parties are sold at a high ticket price, ranging anywhere between $85.00-$1000.00, which has a direct impact on who can attend.

Whiteness

Due to high ticket value, most popular play parties in NYC are filled with thin, white, able-bodied people. Play parties often have volunteer positions in exchange for comped tickets, which has created harmful optics regarding race. I’ve been in a play space during “breakdown” and watched the few black and brown people who attended stay behind for the 4-6 AM clean-up shift after the party ends, while their white peers went home.

Leadership & Power Dynamics

While many of these spaces try to preach a sense of “non-hierarchy,” there is always someone in charge, whether they own the space or produce the events, who manages how things are run. In a sex-positive community, many of the “leaders” have often engaged in kink and sex dynamics with attendees & members of their community. Without explicitly addressing those power dynamics, or even better, leaders not engaging with attendees at all, we risk creating a conflated understanding of the power dynamics between community leaders and members, which has and will continue to lead to consent violations.¹

Consent, Safety, Accountability

Sex parties are tenuous, delicate, and inherently vulnerable spaces. A community like this cannot be effectively run without a comprehensive Restorative Justice and Accountability process for those who cause harm and for those who are harmed. In our work with communities, one of the most challenging components was getting all leaders and members on the same page about the level of harm caused and its impact. This leads to long-winded and confusing processes around accountability and community access, hard & fast bans devoid of nuance + grace, or perpetrators still maintaining access to events.

Cliques + Popularity VS. Community + Collective

Many sex positive communities start with a group of friends with a shared intention. We usually choose friends who are in proximity or similar to us in some way. Expanding a friend group to create a sex-positive community with a vetting system (your friends invite their friends whom they trust- and likely think are hot) typically leads to spaces that are mostly white, hetero-normative or both, and lack diversity in identity. Sex-positive communities + play party guest lists are often curated based on who a friend group would like to f*ck, and who fits “the vibe,” not on accessibility + inclusivity.

Hedonism masked as an act of Revolution & Resistance

“Joy/pleasure/rest as an act of resistance” has been sorely taken out of context, especially within the sex-positive community. These terms and movements were coined by black activists like Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry and author of Rest is Resistance. Black people were enslaved to provide unpaid labor to their oppressors, so yes, rest is quite literally an act of resistance in that sense. It is reductive at best to believe that our individual pursuit of pleasure+hedonism is somehow a revolutionary act all on its own.

If we are living in a Colonial Empire, much of our rest + pleasure is at the expense of others outside and inside the cushy walls of our Western simulation. It's a privilege, not resistance, to have the material and emotional resources to explore intimate facets of ourselves in carefully curated and commodified spaces.

Sex, pleasure, and eroticism are components of collective liberation, and for good reason. Controlling gender, sexuality, and relationship orientation is a very effective way for the powerful to stay in power, because it reminds us that nothing is sacred, even our most interpersonal and intimate moments are under capitalistic review. BIPOC and queer revolutionaries who have come before us, emphasize that the cis-white-heterosexual patriarchy rejects different ways of knowing, doing, and being that threaten its place and power.

“The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic.”

“This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to deeply feel all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of.” Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power.

Sex-positive communities are still microcosms of the larger societies in which they exist and are built to accomplish a specific social purpose. They are not immune to the impact of societal and cultural conditioning; they are very much in response to it and are populated by people who have to navigate it daily in all of our privilege and adversity.

Note: this video was recorded pre-transition in 2020

We gave several lectures on anti-fetishization, how to curate intentional BIPOC spaces, queer/trans inclusivity, and even launched a mentorship program to give Queer/Trans and BIPOC newbies more access into exclusive sex-positive events. We consulted communities who wanted to radicalize their spaces, but our attempts through our classes and projects only went so far.

“Radical” sexuality is less about how diverse or kinky your erotic experiences have been, and more about your personal relationship to sex and the world around you. Hedonism is not radical, its actually quite self serving. Is your pleasure at the expense of or excluding the most vulnerable? How can you expand your understanding of what brings you pleasure/joy to include contributions towards a better world?

Play parties will forever hold a special place in my professional and personal journey, not because of the long nights I spent cruising for an experience, but because they inspired me to reconnect to my eroticism from a land/life honoring, queer centered perspective.

We’re pretty sure we’re done producing play parties. We did it for 2 years and although we had some fun, the original intention of our content, coaching, and facilitating got lost. Unfortunately, NYC nightlife, no matter how edgy the party is, will always fall into the pitfalls. So, we went back to creating events that center accessibility, radical pleasure, connection and collective care.

Our “Tantric Intimacy” series continues with its first Social & Speed Dating event! Join us May 4th at HitMeUp for a Sunday with conscious, soulful cuties seeking deep and meaningful connections.

Especially now, its important we remember what community means and looks like as marginalized people are being targeted under the current administration. We’re feeling the urge to protect sacredness and safe spaces, which become more and more scarce.

Contributing toward mutual aids and giving back to vulnerable populations is an integral part of our practice. Intentionality and purpose will always be our motivator in creating offerings, and we invite you to also listen to your heart and create meaning in your life. Gotta make living in this hard-knock world worth it.

In love, service, and debauchery,

BxF

1. Per our certified training in sacred sexuality, we adhere to Wilrieke Sophia’s standards for Consent, Power, and Abuse.