The Asian lady appears to be in her mid-40s, possibly 50s. She has short, styled hair, wears make-up, high heels, and a lot of black lace. In the winter months, she is a fixture at the mixed sex parties I host. Her boyfriend is a distinguished looking white guy in a suit, around the same age. The pattern for him seems to be: bring her in, and then just sort of hang out all blasé while she engages in sex with literally dozens of guys. At one of the earlier parties both of them joined a line-up of men on the stage — he fell asleep while getting a handjob. Sometimes I imagine that she is so insatiable that our sex parties serve the purpose of giving him a break from keeping her satisfied. I quite like both of them — they are sweet and genuine and unapologetic about their lifestyle.
One week, still notorious and talked about by the regulars, the Asian lady went straight up to the orgy room, lifted her skirt, and laid down on her stomach on a “fuck-bench.” (Her boyfriend rested on a couch nearby). A group of guys formed around her, and one by one they took turns fucking her. (I believe the final count was 18.) What was more interesting to me than the relentless fucking was the row of gay guys sitting on a church pew that faces the fuck bench, watching. Some of them were groping each other, but surreptitiously, on eggshells, not wanting to risk freaking out the straight guys.
I know a couple of the gay guys, and asked them about the experience afterwards. One of them said, “Todd, I have never even seen a straight porno, but that was so hot to see — for the men! They were all animal-like and shit.” As the night progressed, the homos became bolder: they offered up their mouths to “fluff” some of the guys waiting to fuck the nympho lady. As inhibitions lowered, a gay orgy formed on the periphery of what was essentially a straight gang-bang.
This is yet another example of why I find the labels “gay” and “straight” hard to accept as truths. I’m seeing a lot of “straight” guys getting into male-on-male action, which is great. Creating a mixed sex party has been organic, and evolved over years. It started as a T-Girl night at a west end bathhouse on a Tuesday night. The party went from monthly, to biweekly, and finally weekly. It was always busy, and it lasted for two-and-a-half years. There were ups and downs, but the main issue was about how blatant the T-Girl sex workers were. It resulted in complaints on message boards by a couple of bitter gay guys who accidentally attended the party one week. And that caused problems with the spa owner, so we discouraged working girls from coming. That turned out to be a good thing — it made the party evolve into a more bisexual type of party with guys doing each other in the sauna and cross-dresser-centric orgies. We then opened our own club, Goodhandy’s, and stopped doing the spa nights so we could focus on our own business.
As time passed, former spa clientele found us at Goodhandy’s, and kept coming up to me and lamenting the loss of the spa, saying they’d do anything for us to start something up again with a similar vibe. Goodhandy’s does not have rooms, a steam room, showers or lockers, but we do have curtained booths and dark corners, so we decided to try “Naughty Nights” on Tuesdays. It worked well, but people were confused — was it a trannie hooker night? A swingers party? A gay sex romp?
My business partner Mandy Goodhandy, queen of campy titles and slogans, came up with the idea to change the name to “I Love Sex Parties.” Just changing the name created a different vibe. We started seeing swingers and gay guys, not our usual mix of trannies and the men who love them. And while we are very supportive of sex work, we discouraged sex work during these parties by removing most of the curtains from our private booths. This was one of our best moves — there are many other opportunities in life for people to meet T-Girl sex workers. By removing the curtains, and therefore the opportunity for privacy, it helped to define the purpose of the party.
As the party became more successful, we had a chance to move it to Saturday nights. That was the tipping point, the point at which the party truly started becoming interesting. Mainly because more people can go out and have fun on a Saturday night. We started out by having a women- and trans-only area backstage because we wanted the party to be inclusive. I am not very fond of the notion of segregated clubs, and it was good to experiment, to give options. We found that the area was not being used very much, that the women attending the mixed sex party were more interested in wandering around and cruising with the rest of the crowd. That freed up the stage area, allowing us to encourage live sex performances instead.
My partner Mandy is a visionary, and very intense about creating the right atmosphere. She used to almost panic if there was nothing happening on stage. I shared her concern — the club set-up consists of balconies overlooking a stage, and since the party gets a fair number of single men attending, it is natural for them to lean on the balcony looking down, as if they are waiting to be entertained. We used to “plant” some of our porn models in the crowd, who would go up on stage and have sex. Their performance would break the ice, and cause people to relax and start enjoying themselves. Not wanting to always rely on models, I recently created “Exhibitionist Zone.” It sounds cutsie, and I was hesitant to do it, but I found that putting up big colourful signs and soliciting exhibitionists on internet message boards made people more comfortable about getting up and “performing” in front of a full nightclub. After creating the zone, I got an adorable email from a guy: “Dear Todd, I have always wanted to get up in front of a crowd and shove dildos up my ass, but I’m in my late 50s, and not sure if I’m the right type of person for you.” I immediately replied and said “You are perfect — exactly who I’d love to see up on stage having fun — please come in, and enjoy yourself.”
It was fascinating — a crowd of single guys on the railing, many of whom would describe themselves as straight, watched the old guy with the dildos as intensely as they had watched previous encounters involving females, trannies, and guys. It was the newness of it, and it was almost like the older guy inspired the rest of the people to say, “Fuck it” and try to have fun. Clusters and orgies and groups formed within minutes, and there was almost competition between people to get time on the stage.
Because we are one of only a few mixed sex environments that permits single men to attend (single men are the armpit of the swingers community, for example), it’s hard for women to adapt to the environment. We try to educate the men about different types of cruising (ie: in male-to-male cruising it’s totally okay for men to grab each other’s ass as a way of expressing interest, but it’s not okay to do that to ladies without asking first). But of course we can’t control that all the time. So some women come in and are intimidated by the testosterone.
One of my fears used to be that our party is going to evolve into being an exclusively gay sex party. While I no longer am concerned about that, I think that we kinky gays need to get over our fear of the female (or trannie) essence, and I love seeing gay guys stumble into this party and try to figure it out. It’s exciting for me to see young gay guys that have only ever been to mainstream bathhouses try to navigate this new world. They might giggle too much, and behave inappropriately at first, but a lot of the time they relax a bit and learn that it’s okay to go outside their limited boxes of acceptable environments and narrow definitions of hotness. One of our best and most fun parties was the time the bartender Fausto looked at me and said, “Dude, this is like totally the ugliest sex party I’ve ever seen, but it’s got the best vibe.” I agreed and crassly added, “Well ugly people deserve to fuck too.”
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