A trip into some dark rooms, as we venture into the capital’s sex clubs.
Parties that allow sex to happen on the premises have been edging towards the mainstream for a little while now. Britain’s nightlife may be in a fragile state, but this once-hidden subculture appears to be thriving. My own experience of sex clubs has been confined to the DJ booth. Snax is a notorious twice-yearly party at Berlin’s Berghain. ‘Man Meat in Action’ reads the flyer. When I played there, I remember a cheer rippling across the dancefloor. Looking down from the raised DJ booth, I realised that the celebration was in response to someone getting fisted on the bar, and had nothing to do with me mixing two records together. I left the club through a corridor lined by men fucking, the undulating arses on either side of me made my exit feel like a Marina Abramović installation.
Klub Verboten is a ‘provider of contemporary pro-pervert spaces’. Founded in 2016, it is now a serious business with parties in London, Berlin and Amsterdam. The events often have a capacity of more than 1,000 people and generally sell out in advance. There is a strict dress code and cotton is forbidden. I meet the founder, Karl, in a Dalston basement bar out of hours. He is wearing an off-duty kink ensemble of boots, jeans, bomber and a beanie. He’s in all black, of course.
Karl grew up in East Berlin. He was seven when the Wall came down, and his adolescence was spent exploring new freedoms in the city’s abundance of empty industrial space. At 17, Karl was a DJ and club promoter. He first encountered the world of kink when he DJed at a club divided into two sections: half dancefloor, half BDSM. He says he was half-frightened, half-curious. Karl is driven by the idea of connection – he talks about it a lot. ‘Human connection is what makes us, what gives you and me purpose, what shapes and makes our character, it’s at the core of everything. It’s the one thing that undeniably all of us want: to wake up next to someone in one capacity or another.’ I tell him that’s a romantic sentiment coming from the promoter of an international sex party. ‘You can rail someone at Berghain and it can be romantic. I’ve done that, and it was really romantic.’
Karl moved to London in 2004 and found his way to London’s kink scene. ‘I was participating in events in a fairly uneducated way and would just come along and consume. Consume others, consume myself,’ he says. He started Klub Verboten because he wanted to fuck. But when the doors opened at that inaugural party, it became clear to him that the liberation he sought depended on a foundation of safety. He wrote down a set of rules based on long-standing principles that have been finessed over decades.
For a party to host your most vulnerable moments, safety is paramount. Klub Verboten’s membership form asks the simple question, ‘in your own words: what is consent?’ Attendees are quizzed on the door about their understanding of the rules. There is a safeguarding team working at every event. Over the course of a night, they respond to incidents and log them. Complaints about rule breaches are often resolved by the target of the complaint being removed from the club.
At the end of the night, the team debriefs about all the incidents, and the following week, the community manager reviews the reports and follows up with those involved if it is appropriate. There is a lot of admin. ‘We could have made so much more money,’ says Karl, ‘you’re surrounded by people having sex, and all these complexities. People are not free of error, but we need to have those systems in order not to have a naive and curious person become a predator.’ It had not occurred to me that the rules might be there to protect people from their own worst instincts.
Klub Verboten holds a database of 3,500 people who have been barred, overwhelmingly men. Perhaps it is unsurprising that some of those who breach the rules on consent do not take kindly to being excluded; there have been multiple instances of banned people making physical and legal threats to regain access to the club. On top of that are draining disputes with local authorities and the police.
Consent is fundamental to sex spaces. It underpins everything. ‘Do Not Solo Wank’ is one of the rules. ‘Having a wank is great,’ says Karl, ‘it’s natural, and you should have one every morning. But in a public space, it’s unlikely that your gaze is not directed at someone when you do that. At a very early stage, we decided it’s just not inclusive. So that was very important.’ Karl believes that some contemporary thinking around public safety has been informed by the BDSM culture, and he draws a direct line from rules about wanking in sex clubs to a recent Transport for London campaign. Sure enough, I later spot a big red poster at Shoreditch High Street overground station. ‘INTRUSIVE STARING OF A SEXUAL NATURE IS SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND IS NOT TOLERATED’, it says.
The start of the night at Klub Verboten is social and relatively sober. Like successful parties everywhere, there are intersecting communities at its heart. Extended friendship circles catch up and compare outfits. As the night progresses, things escalate. ‘It just turns highly physical. I mean, there’s a point where everyone in this building fucks’, adds Karl.
I ask Karl: ‘What’s new in sex?’ He tells me that it’s not as good as it used to be. ‘There was a time where people were highly skilled, and it was most interesting. Before, you had very complex play scenarios. These days people just fuck, very simply. They just fuck. Everyone just fucks.’
Not so long ago, the kink scene quietly existed out of the spotlight. The influx of a younger audience has shaken up the scene and, in some cases, has put more seasoned members of the community off going altogether.
Eden Topall-Rabanes is integral to east London’s queer scene – he is the promoter of Riposte and Howl. Both parties have playrooms, dedicated spaces in the venue for people to have sex. Eden arrived in London in 2016 from Paris via Beijing, where he was finishing the second of his two master’s degrees. He thought London’s queer nightlife was missing something. He found traditional male-dominated ‘gay’ clubs hypersexual, aggressive even. The more alternative ‘queer’ scene was less oppressively masculine and more diverse but was often missing the frisson of a possible hookup. ‘In France, people kiss, people touch, people fuck in the corners of the dance floor. It’s really not a rare sight. But in London that would have been seen as really shocking,’ he says.
Eden founded Riposte back in Paris and restarted it in London at his house in Stoke Newington. He put a DJ in the kitchen and turned the garden shed into a playroom with a mattress on the floor. A few parties deep and there were queues down the street, visible from Stoke Newington police station. After an objection from his landlord, Riposte moved out of the house and to licensed nightclubs like Electrowerks and The Cause.
Like Karl, Eden found London a lonely city when he arrived. The Riposte team creates installations designed to bring people together. At one rave, they booked a clown with a bag of cable ties who linked unsuspecting pairs together; at another, a treasure hunt began with attendees getting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, working together to solve an elaborate treasure hunt.
Howl is Eden’s other party, a rowdy queer rave with its own brand of CBD lube. Eden runs its social media alongside co-promoter Sam Douek, and a 14-second glimpse of the playroom equipment clocked more than two million views. Eden’s success has made him an unwilling recipient of unsolicited scandals. ‘Every week, if not two times a week, I will get a DM or an email saying: ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have this DJ play, or you shouldn’t have this person.’ I created the ‘Holy Bible of All Drama’, where I enter the name, a copy of the message, all the information. I have hundreds and hundreds of entries. I think a lot about like, everyone does shit and does bad stuff. Literally every famous DJ, every famous performer I’ve heard stuff about. No one has access to this, not even people from the welfare team.’
Both Karl and Eden are witnesses to the darker sides of human behaviour and are there to clean up the mess when the lights go up. It took Karl years to find a company prepared to clean up after his parties. In the early days, once everyone was finally out of the venue, he would pick up every condom himself.
Nightlife is a chaotic business. The complexities that make us human are played out in its spaces. There is an idea that a focus on safety can dampen the spirit of freedom that is so intrinsic to club culture. But Karl believes that freedom can exist because of the safeguards in place and not in spite of them. He is as passionate about safety as he is about complex play scenarios. And as keeper of the Holy Bible of All Drama, Eden has found himself in a powerful position at the heart of London’s queer nightlife, knowing things he would perhaps rather forget.
Each of them is driven by a powerful search for connection, and they have built rich communities in the process of finding it. ‘Sometimes people don’t quite know why they come,’ says Karl, ‘but some get lucky, right? Sometimes people are able to discover themselves.’
