The various non-vanilla sexual stuff we might engage in, alone or with a lover (or maybe with more than one lover...you lucky bugger!) and what we come to define as kink, can easily come down to a "You say potato I say, shut up about potatoes already and pass me that whip” kind of consideration. And then there are the play parties, either private group affairs where like-minded friends of a certain geographical region come together to explore their naughty needs or full-on kink conventions hosted by organizations representing specific Fetlife groups gathering the faithful at liberal-minded hotels or clubs. Added into this mix are the one-night-only or limited-run fetish-themed performances from groups or individuals who are masters of some lost naughty art or looking to present a new sexy twist on theatre. And let’s not forget the munch, a simple ‘hang’ of the lusciously like-minded happening at a local restaurant or bar, where no play at all occurs (people just give good conversation), and then the convention that as much hosts writers and makers of adult content, where sometimes attendees can prance around nude and enjoy themselves in delineated play spaces.
Producers, performers, participants, even hosts, club owners, toy manufacturers, writers and musicians, and retail shop sellers setting up for a weekend in a hotel ballroom; the kinkdom is wide open for anyone who wants to participate or simply have a peek.
Where Covid left us
It would be hard to take a true ‘where are we now’ assessment without considering where we have been…mainly, where we have been in the past few years during that little thing called a global pandemic.
Surely, there was a scare across the land, no matter what land you happened to live in, when the VID struck. Even though kinksters can never forget what’s bubbling at the forefront of their fantasies, fetish events, with every other type of socializing, pretty much stopped across the globe. As restrictions were lifted some groups resumed their parties (with a good many restrictions), but sad to say some never recovered or their members scattered in the ensuing years. And then there was the drop-off of clubs no longer open to host a party.
But, as they always do, those hoping for sexual chills and thrills shouldered on.
Megan A. an event producer for the naughty and fun Liquid Latex Las Vegas events weighs in positively on where she thinks things are presently:
“I think that things have gotten 100% back to normal since COVID when it comes to kink events. People have enthusiastically returned to in-person kink events and more and more events are popping up since 2020. I think events that have a good reputation do better than unknown events in general.”
Megan consistently produces a round of events in Sin City (a calendar listing of her events and more appears at the end of part two of this posting).
Mistress Ianna Justice, a pro domme working and living in France who runs an innovative support get-together for dominatrixes there, sees private clients and has authored a book of mistress interviews adds her feelings about what she is seeing at kink get-togethers post the pandemic:
“After being relegated to only online interactions, people were starving for IRL events, and the market has adapted. For a couple of years, there was mandatory testing, and masks were encouraged at parties, but that seems to be a thing of the past.”
Says Andy Markenson, photographer and Editor in Chief of Kink Queens Magazine, “The pandemic showed that people had to become quite creative to keep themselves entertained or simply just to survive given that everyone's world was flipped upside down. Times weren't normal and that is when the most abnormal people, in the eyes of vanillas, had to step up to the plate. I think many people took a step back and looked at the kink community and realized it was time to accept and embrace lifestyles.”
And embrace them, they seem to be.
The U.S. scene
Given how wide a geographic space America occupies, it’s no wonder that there are kink events coast-to-coast, and everywhere in between. From the leather-clad environs of San Francisco, a city that once hosted the infamous Kink.com armory (where yours truly partook in two parties two years in a row that featured pretty much every kink imaginable…and a few I never imagined) to a range of upcoming New York City events listed here, to kink weekend camping, and performances and parties held in big cities to small towns, the US is kinky to be sure.
Ironic as it might seem, those big cities events are sometimes harder to find given all that one can usually avail themselves of in a city like a Las Vegas or a New York; pretty much there are a ton of alternate diversions happening all the time in these places. Smaller cities sometimes only have their one kink event per year, populated by a closer-knit scene. Wherever you happen to roam with your particular buffalo, American kink events are alive and well (again, see the larger calendar listing at the end of this article).
END OF PART 1
