TOO MUCH, TOO SOON

I Visited Amsterdam’s Gay Sex Club as an 18-Year-Old Virgin

Safe to say I bit off more than I could chew

I had many questionable firsts during my four-year stay in Amsterdam — and going to a gay sex club as an 18-year-old virgin was definitely one of them.

During my first year of university, I grew close with an Italian gay student called Angelo. Angelo was fiery, funny, intelligent, and always up for a good time. So when he invited me to a gay club (without specifying it was a sex club), I agreed without hesitation. With him, it would undoubtedly be a blast.

And it was — with the blast coming from both seen and unseen angles.

Dress code? Bondage. Did I think anything of it at 18? Absolutely not. God forbid I question anything at that age.

So I strapped on my leather corset, threw on some long black gloves from my Halloween costume, rolled on my knee-high boots, and pedaled off to the club like a bright-eyed prostitute.

Once I got in, I was struck by men getting naked at the entrance. I’m talking cock and balls hanging loose.

Angelo was unphased. I, on the other hand, was taken by utter surprise. I couldn’t show it, though. It’d be a dead giveaway to my virginity.

And that would be perceived as lame.

Or homophobic.

At the time, I didn’t know which one was worse.

So in I went with a herd of naked men and fully clothed Angelo by my side.

If you were to take a bird’s eye snapshot of the scene, we resembled the sex club version of a Japanese flag — Angelo and I being the black, clothed center surrounded by nude, fleshy appendages.

As soon as we got in, dungeon techno blasted everywhere; naked contemporary dancers covered in streaks of white paint flailing their limbs atop the bar.

On the floor above, men wore bondage straps, leather bunny masks, and other sex party attire. Some were touching themselves; others resorted to plain old voyeurism — like me.

I thought this was a bit extreme, but I chucked it up to my lack of open-mindedness as an Eastern European. We don’t have this sort of venue where I’m from. Not out in the public, at least.

Two rounds of shots later, I was atop the bar alongside a puffy American man with an eagle tatted on his shoulder. As I clicked and clacked my boots to the offbeat tunes, he nudged me and said, “This is crazy, right?”

Only then did I realize Angelo had been nowhere to be seen for the past 30 minutes.

When he returned, he had a jubilant demeanor and a somewhat glossy appearance.

“I was in the dark room!” he exclaimed.

The dark room? What could that be?

Naively, I assumed it to be a separate dance room for shy gays. So, I ventured into the unknown.

Behind a seemingly innocuous black curtain was a room full of shadows. I couldn’t see anything besides vague outlines of a sex swing and figures that huffed and puffed in the distance.

Knowing I was out of my depths, I bolted out of the club, hurrying home after feigning tiredness.

After telling my similarly virginal flatmate about my ordeal, she was alarmed.

But curiosity didn’t kill her cat.

Coming from a repressed background herself, she, too, had a taste for the forbidden.

One month later, after some much-needed drinks, we entered the club in our DIY bondage attire.

Ten minutes in, a 50-something-year-old man donning a blonde wig and sexy fairy costume approached my flatmate — adequately dressed as a schoolgirl dominatrix — and handed her a strapon.

He ever-so-kindly asked her if she could penetrate him with it.

She apologized profusely, telling him she wasn’t drunk enough for such an endeavor but was working on it.

He nodded in acceptance and tied the strap-on to a banister, proceeding to pleasure himself in a carefully engineered and quite genius way if I do say so myself.

Several meditative inhales and exhales later, we headed for the dark room.

Our innovative way of spectating without partaking was to pretend we were enamored lovers who needed to release some tension.

Knowing shadows and figures were all anyone could see, we nested ourselves in a corner, hoping everyone accepted our monogamous embrace.

It was the perfect plan.

Until it wasn’t.

We hadn’t realized a dark room was essentially an orgy with no boundaries. We were getting squeezed, stroked, and caressed from every direction. This defied the law of physics since we’d effectively shielded ourselves using two walls.

Clearly, there was a will. So they found a way.

“I think I touched something wet.”

And with that, we were out.

The next few days were spent locked away in our rooms, trying to digest what had happened in solitude.

We hadn’t, and couldn’t, speak about what we experienced — our shared unease made evident by the sheepish glances we exchanged in the hallway.

After individually navigating the five stages of grief, mourning the loss of our innocence, we reconvened on our kitchen stools to debrief. Several what-the-fuck and what-the-actual-fucks later, we had finally made peace with our little escapade.

We vowed to close our chapter on voyeuristic perversion. Or at least delay it until we’d covered the basics ourselves.