Creative Non-Fiction
What It’s Like to Go to a Swinger Party While on the Asexual Spectrum
Diary of a sex positive demisexual dude
CW: The title should cover most of the speed bumps, but racism and mental health (suicidal ideation) is mentioned in passing.
How did someone on the asexual spectrum find himself at an orgy?
Well, it all started with an existential crisis of sorts, as these things often do. About 5 years ago, it felt like the world was probably ending anyway. Friends tell me that it was just another day that showed us with a little more honesty where we had always been going.
They tell me we’d been heading in this direction for hundreds of years. That makes sense, but this was the day that I finally saw what was coming. I saw clearly that things were not going to end well for anyone, much less for people like us. I felt certain that we didn’t have much time and that there was no real future.
Of course, I also felt suicidal because I was a closeted trans man, but that was nothing new. I figured that I had that whole situation under control between therapists and occasional calls to one hotline or another. I didn’t know I was trans yet, but I did know that I had mental health issues that I was working very hard to control.
Feeling like your life is going to end soon for a long enough time will do some strange things to you.
I guess this little political event 5 years ago was the last straw for me. Shortly after, I broke bad, in a manner of speaking.
If I wasn’t going to be accepted as “one of the good ones”, why try to conform? If we were all going to die anyway, we might as well live our lives exactly the way we wanted to live them. Carpe diem, or something.
I’m not sure who spoke first.
It wasn’t originally love that we were interested in experiencing with other people. It was sex. We wanted to experience new things, and this seemed like a logical enough way to live like there was no tomorrow.
With shame and fear out of the way, in the wake of an existential crisis, we decided to go to our first orgy.
Why? Well, why not! Honestly, we didn’t think to call it that, at the time, but that’s what was happening all around us by the end of the evening. We called it a “Swinger Party”.
Like the couple of nerds we were, we googled “promiscuity”. We purchased, printed out, and actually read a 250+ paged manual on how to behave at a Swinger Party, before finding one. We wanted to make sure that we were culturally acclimated to debauchery, so we highlighted what stood out to us in different colors and discussed hedonism from every possible angle for about 6 months.
When the time came, my wife did the research.
There was a private home that required a picture in exchange for an address. They talked to us on the phone first to verify that we were a couple, that we both wanted to do sexy things with strangers, were comfortable being naked, etc... They seemed nice enough.
We were given the address, a date, and a time for a Swinger Party.
When we arrived, I was surprised to see a very ordinary looking house in the suburbs. There were no neon lights, nothing flashy.
We had arrived 20 minutes late, so we were the first ones at the sex party, offering up Godiva chocolates and a little “thank you” card to be polite.
A woman who could be your next-door neighbor took us on a tour of the cleanest house you’ve ever seen. Seriously, anyone who thinks an orgy is dirty has clearly never been to this place. There were scrub marks on every wall and door, containers of Clorox wipes and a basket of condoms sitting in every room, alongside lovely wedding pictures of a “nice” family Sarah Palin probably would have invited to dinner without a second thought.
Fruits and light snacks were arranged on a table in the kitchen. A television screen was playing silent heterosexual porn in every room the same way that a sports bar would be playing a football game. Mainstream pop music you would expect to hear on the radio was playing at mid-level over speakers throughout the house. It wasn’t loud enough to cause anyone to call the police, but loud enough to make conversation unnecessary.
The hostess took us to the pool where something I’m not going to write about would happen. She assured us that no “drama” has ever occurred in this place.
She then said that we could come to her if anything at all went wrong. My best advice for anyone new to hedonism, other than to go very slowly and carefully vet places and potential partners, is to avoid all places that claim to have “no drama”. I missed the subtext that no one reports what goes wrong because no one had ever reported it before. When something did go wrong, I would remember this moment and realize it was better to just go home.
It turns out that the early hours of an orgy are extremely awkward.
Most people in this lifestyle want to be very drunk before doing what we were prepared to do dead sober thanks to the aforementioned existential crisis. We sat by the pool and stared at each other for a bit. Nothing in our manual had prepared us for the quiet before the debauchery.
Finally, a very outgoing couple, who like us passed as heterosexual to the untrained eye, came in and took over the scene. In an underground culture created in the 1940’s by heterosexual military couples, you could count on us queer people to show up early and be the loudest.
An hour or two later, another pattern in the population emerged.
We were one of exactly 3 interracial couples who happened to be at the party. Everyone was white except for 3 people who represented exactly 1 token Asian, Latinx, and Black person.
We would tell ourselves this was a coincidence, until we noticed the Confederate flag on their refrigerator much later. That’s when we knew for sure that my wife was invited to fulfill a fetish. Years later, we would learn that many of our future friends were mysteriously turned down for this party and put together that it was because of race.
Drinks flowed. We sipped ours as slowly as possible and observed.
We were quickly expected to be some degree of naked. Perhaps my complete comfort with going shirtless by the pool was a tiny hint that I was a closeted trans man who had no reason to need to hide his chest among those who wouldn’t complain about it.
Finally, sometime after midnight, several drunken orgies began happening quietly all around us. I’m not sure what I expected, but this wasn’t it. I didn’t know before that moment that I was demisexual. A demisexual can only feel sexual interest in situations of deep emotional intimacy. It would be a few years before I added that word to my vocabulary, but this experience would teach me that sex with a bunch of strangers wasn’t for me. All I knew was that I felt a little bored. None of the porn or the sex had had any effect on me because I didn’t love anyone there except my wife.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a very sex positive person, despite being on the asexual spectrum.
I enthusiastically support consensual hedonism of any kind. I just felt kind of meh about everything that was going on around me. We would eventually find a workaround for this: polyamory and relationship anarchy allowed us both to get whatever we wanted out of the free love lifestyle.
In the meantime, I was easily distracted. I learned that one of the people watching the orgy happening by the pool in front of us had also read Voltaire’s Candide recently. I felt so relieved to have anything other than sex to talk about that I got excited. I hadn’t noticed that I was talking too loud about satire for the orgy, until the six people having sex in front of us all stopped in tandem and gave me a dirty look. I had committed a serious faux pas in the world of hedonism. Mea culpa.
My most shameful moment at our first orgy was an overly excited literary discussion that interrupted the proceedings.
Want to support me and other writers by purchasing access to all Medium articles for just $5/month? Click on the link below: