Forget New York, forget Berlin. Los Angeles is where the glory holes are at.
I’ve been to gay sex clubs or bathhouses in Rome, Berlin, Vancouver, Miami, Orlando, and Fort Lauderdale, but I’ve never seen an orgy as pretty as the one I attended a few weeks ago in Los Angeles.
Orgies get a bad rap. Thanks to HIV propaganda and VH1 documentaries about the sex revolution, I have always assumed orgies only attract obese married dads on the DL. My exploratory visits to sex dens have confirmed this. With the exception of occasionally exchanging dick pics with British strangers via Snapchat, I’m a sexual basic bitch. I like rim jobs and missionary, but a few times my boner has taken over, and I’ve ended up in public sex spaces, where I saw stereotypes come to life. A tear fell down an old dude’s face after I refused to jack him off at the gay bathhouse next to the Vatican, and the time my friend Diva D and I got into a sex club in high school, a fat dude threw Diva D in a locker when he refused to fuck him.
When I moved to Los Angeles from Brooklyn in May, I had no intentions of going to an orgy ever. I wasn’t sure what I wanted in my sex life (I still don’t), but it definitely wasn’t a glory hole. For the most part, I have only hung out with straight people in California. Here, the gay people tend to love weightlifting and plastic surgery, and both sexually and friends-wise, I prefer slightly feminine alt twinks or Jewish real estate agents. West Hollywood makes me anxious about my slender body.
The night before the blood moon, I ended up at a bar with heterosexuals I only knew on Twitter. They were the good kind of straight people who understand Cher’s discography but also never ask you to take them shopping. They’re a rare breed, even in the “Love Wins” era, and I appreciate them a lot. We sat outside at a bar in Silverlake, the hipster part of Los Angeles which can best be described as Bushwick on a hill, watching young Hollywood types hit on each other and talk loudly about their auditions. They all lacked body mass. An actress on a hit TV show flattered a manorexic Christian Slater-type in a leather jacket, but ultimately chose a guy with a man bun as her conquest for the night. Throughout the night, a twinky actor stumbled around the patio wearing a cowboy hat.
At one point, him and one of his bros (who seemed to want to fuck each other) put lines of paint on their faces. They loved attention. They were very musical theatre, but they thought they looked sexy. Few people lack awareness in LA. Everything is subtext; problems go unacknowledged. How do you think Kim Kardashian kept Caitlyn Jenner’s gender identity a secret for ten years, while also broadcasting her life on reality TV and social media?
Once we grew bored of watching their performances, one of the girls suggested we go to a gay glory hole in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale. I’m a basic bitch when it comes to sex, but I’m still a boy, driven by my dick more than my brain, so I’ve never said no to a glory hole. I agreed to go.
We piled into a car and cruised to Glendale. The suburb smells like piss, but houses my favorite Los Angeles mall: The Americana, a Mainstreet USA-style outdoor mall that has a huge fountain, fake grass, and condos. (Yes, you can live in malls in Southern California.) The glory hole was actually a huge gay warehouse rave, which happened to have a glory hole behind a black curtain. The warehouse district looked and smelled like Brooklyn’s Gowanus canal: Large grey buildings, against a navy blue sky that reeked of pollution.
After we paid $20 each, we crossed through a chainlink fence into a large alley filled with hundreds of men. Their bodies ranged from skeletal to Hulk Hogan-like, but they all exhibited their bodies in the same way: shirtless or with Andrew Christian underwear hanging out of their jeans to let you know they were bottoms, offering their asses for the taking. In a Von Dutch hat and cut offs, I felt overdressed.
The crowd varied. An elderly movie producer of an iconic 1990s romantic comedy stood against the wall, while both a shirtless YouTube celebrity and a skinny skater-type model with lengthy Kurt Cobain-style hair danced alone. I never thought I’d seen a dreamy possibly heroin-addicted gay model at a rave, with an orgy behind a black curtain. Even at the exclusive Berghain in Berlin, the guys look seedy in their rubber jumpsuits and ass chaps. People wore white tees at the Glendale rave. They looked normal.
Inside, the rave was hot, both figuratively and literally. What looked like a thousand people booty shaked in a poorly air-conditioned space against industrial beats. I pretty much only listen to pop music and Tracy Chapman, so I got in line for drinks with my internet friends instead of dancing with strangers, although I’m sober. Waiting in line, I saw a few guys walk behind a black curtain. I followed them.
The giant robe hid a much darker space. Behind black walls, with glory holes drilled into them, and more fabric, guys stood in the dark, sucking, rimming, and fucking in daisy chains and in one-on-one pairs. Only a strobe light’s flash lit the space—guys fucked in the dark, leaving their beauty or hideousness a secret—but at one point the gasp of light lit a man’s face. It was the long-haired skater model. He had just finished fucking and pulled his white T-shirt over his face. It was the opposite of the judgmental attitudes that plague LA.
Hot guys participated in the orgy. Three Abercrombie types walked in and started blowing each other behind the glory hole, but rejected my and other guy’s offers to blow them through the hole. They just wanted each other’s identical bodies. In the same room, hot Hollywood types blew average dudes. Los Angeles rules still applied, but people still wavered from them. It was impossible not to whip out your dick and start jacking off with everyone, and when a guy started sucking my dick, I just let him and then returned the favor. Who cares what he looks like? I thought. I’m at a glory hole.
Once I came, I returned to my friends. As we walked out of the warehouse, we smelt sewage. The night before the blood moon, the sky already lightly glowed red. “It smells like sewage outside this gay orgy during the blood moon,” I tweeted. A celebrity favorited the tweet. I smiled. I could get used to Los Angeles.