A Load of Bollocks

Stripping down for the autumn budget.

‘Welcome to Disneyland,’ said the doorman at SBN, apparently indifferent to the trademark implications of associating the House of Mouse with an event that projects fisting porn on the walls.

SBN, or Stark Bollock Naked, is a kink party that claims to attract ‘550 fun-loving individuals’ to each of its weekly entries. It was mid-afternoon on a warm summer Sunday, nine days into a new Labour administration, 17 hours after Donald Trump was shot and five hours before the men’s Euros final was due to kick off.

SBN takes place in Vauxhall in one of the rail arches across the road from MI6. For whatever reason – favourable rent and business rates, presumably – it is one of numerous icons of the gay libido located under a railway: see also Heaven, beneath Charing Cross, Lambeth’s three-decade-old sauna Pleasuredrome, and the toilets at Waterloo station.

The 550-person attendee figure SBN promises in its promotional materials is as much a fantasy as the sexual thirsts the event hopes to slake. But turnout was good: there were probably between 70 and 100 cruisers across the afternoon, many of them frighteningly well-sculpted and all of them, as advertised, stark bollock naked – until 5pm, when the ‘Nearly Bollock Naked’ portion of the afternoon kicked in, with visitors invited to change into jockstraps, singlets, Speedos and the like. In a lovely touch, one’s choice of poppers or Viagra were included in the £20 ticket fee. (Just as well it was an either/or choice: combining the two can be fatal.)

The venue that houses SBN, Union Vauxhall, is seven metres wide and 60 metres end-to-end. The tunnel is arranged analogously to a water column: after the changing room antechamber you emerge into a bar and dancefloor area where some light yet penetrates. But plunge further into the bathypelagic, high-vaulted sex sling room, and all that’s left to navigate by are the DJ booth lasers. By the time one reaches the darkroom, up some stairs at the end of the venue, all appears opaque and still – but the occasional grunt or whimper betrays that life among the geysers and trenches is abundant: you can practically taste the primordial organic matter on the air.

I do a disservice to SBN by referring to ‘the sex sling room’, by the way: there are in fact two, and unlike other venues which I’ve covered for this publication, I see both in use simultaneously.

SBN’s smoking area is located out front, on the Albert Embankment, cloistered away from the public eye by a pop-up gazebo ringed with plastic chairs. That gazebo, in turn, is surrounded by temporary fencing panels adorned with banners depicting shirtless, AI-generated hotties. But to make absolutely sure no tourists get an eyeful as they shuffle past toward the Tate Britain, SBN asks anyone heading outside to don one of a pile of ‘silk’ floral robes.

It was here, sat in communion with a dozen men all in the buff but for some flamboyant kimonos that could not be fastened shut, that I began asking what people wanted to see in the autumn budget.

The first man I asked – let’s call him Jay* – happened to be a newly minted Labour voter, though he identified as a lifelong Liberal Democrat.

Jay was also one of the minority of people ‘nearly’ bollock naked. He was in his late twenties and – were he not wearing an assless singlet and a pink silken kimono at a kink event – could have been mistaken for straight.

‘We need to get Russia under control,’ he said.

The first thing Jay wanted from his new government was more money for the armed forces, describing them as ‘desperately’ under-staffed. He thought the first scandal of this new Labour era would be either to do with immigration or a massive data breach. He had no interest in the football later that day, and felt Clapham had lost its crown as London’s gay epicentre to Stockwell.

My next interviewee, Lionel*, was a man in his early thirties who worked in the art world. He wanted the Chancellor of the Exchequer to tax billionaires to oblivion: ‘They shouldn’t exist.’ Although he reckoned a more likely move from the new government would be to lower the tax-free ISA allowance.

Danny*, the third attendee I spoke to, removed a toffee from his mouth and placed it in mine before telling me he hated politics. Never let it be said I do not persevere for a story.

Czech, athletic, perhaps a little younger than me, with a fashionable dusting of hair all over, Danny freely chatted at those of us in his vicinity despite keeping his attention firmly on his phone screen: like a few others in the smoking area, he was busy browsing Grindr. He would occasionally lean over while I was talking to other cruisers to show me notable dick pics he’d received, which was a nice gesture, if one not entirely conducive to my journalistic endeavours.

At one point he nodded towards a very attractive man browsing his phone at the other end of the smoking area.

‘I want to try with him next,’ he told me. ‘I’ve been ignoring him all afternoon.’

‘Does that strategy really work?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes, I do it all the time,’ he said, before shifting up the circle to sit squarely on my lap and insisting that I add him on Instagram. (I discovered the next day he had not followed me back.)

From his new vantage point atop my thighs, Danny spotted something. He lunged into the shadow beneath a deserted chair a little way down the circle and pulled out two generously sized, if largely spent, baggies of powder.

Our corner of the circle drew closer.

‘Is it ketamine?’ one asked. ‘G? Coke?’

Danny held the baggies towards the light, inspecting the carat of the crystals. ‘I think it’s meth. Shall we do some?’

I saw this as a fine moment to return inside.

(Let any licence inspectors for the borough of Lambeth be under no illusion: SBN is not pro-drugs. A sign leading into the bathroom sternly informs customers that anyone caught with them will be booted from the party and slapped with a lifetime ban.)

The aesthetic at SBN is very DIY: the wooden stairs, partitions and platforms that carve up the tunnel are black-painted and chipped, the scaffold holding it all up coarse and bare. With different lighting it would make an excellent pop-up gallery. One must applaud the effort: YIMBYism is the spirit of the New Labour era. If you build it, they will cum.

I’m happy to report, returning to Chekhov’s fisting porn, that brachioproctic insertion at SBN was not limited to audiovisual depictions.

In the main sling room, upon a vinyl mattress and under a metres-wide projection of a soldier’s box getting boxed, the patrons were attempting a live-fisting play-along, like if Dance Dance Revolution had an 18+ version.

I ran into an Australian friend of Jay’s, called Connor*, about half an hour later. He was a little dazed after an involved-sounding session under the influence of what he thought might’ve been ketamine. He was also unsteady on his feet, so I accompanied him to the bathroom and then back outside, strolling naked arm-in-arm like a Victorian couple promenading in Regent’s Park.

What Connor wanted from Rachel Reeves was greater investment in the NHS and social care – and he was not alone. An Irish guy I spoke with subsequently advised the Chancellor that Labour could afford to raise taxes in her first year.

‘I don’t expect much [from the new government],’ he said, but added that he was relieved that ‘sensible people are running the country’ even if ‘they’re not my ideal’. People will pay higher taxes for better services, he said, but if they don’t improve things very quickly they’ll struggle at the next election.

SBN began emptying out at around 8pm, after the Euros final started. Only one person I’d spoken to had expressed an interest in watching the game, but several mentioned that they’d take advantage of the quiet on the Tube to travel home.

Making myself decent in the changing room, I got talking to one last outbound partygoer. A tall guy, visiting from Manchester, he had seven tally marks drawn in marker pen on his ass, each signifying an encounter seen through to completion in the prior hours. He was hoping to collect a few more via Grindr before the night was out.

Like the others I’d spoken to, his greatest priority for Reeves’ inaugural budget was the NHS, which he said ‘is my everything’. Given his fecundity, I still rue not having asked his opinion on the two-child benefit cap.

* names have been changed to protect identity