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.
