Word went out all over the bay area sex community. Nothing like this multi-gendered, omni-persuasional, and safe had ever been tried. It wasn't a jack-off party -- women would be there. Not a swing party -- gay men would be included, fucking would not. Not a freewheeling '70s orgy -- those hadn't been run by strict safe sex rules. It wasn't like anything, except maybe the future. It was a new forum for radical sex in uncertain times.
Negotiation can improve any kind of sex, even solo. The night of the world's first mixed-gender safe sex party I made a deal with myself: I could go and just watch, leave if I felt too uncomfortable, or stay and play to my hearts content if my anxiety ebbed. Two hours later I was perched on a woman's knee, stroking one of her breasts while her male partner played with the other, her right hand on his cock and her left on someone else's who had one of his hands on another guy's dick and the other hand on me. Welcome to the wonderful world of Jack and Jill.
Guess I liked it enough to stay.
Liked it? It was transcendent. Later I sprawled on a sofa, jilling-off furiously. Men and women gathered around me, their hands everywhere. You know that masturbation fantasy where every erotic zone is tended to? This was it! All the while a gay man was whispering nasty things in my ear. I came eight times in 10 minutes, and mind you, up until then I'd been a one-per-session girl. When I opened my eyes and started to float back to earth, I saw a group of gay men standing in a semi-circle, jacking off and marvelling, ``look, women really can do that!"
Any phenomenon that resulted in my becoming multiply orgasmic certainly deserved further attention. I decided to stay on as an organiser.
JJO's were my entree into organised group sex. They provided a unique environment, the only place where men, women, and others (gay, straight and every degree of bi, s/m, and vanilla) all met and played together or next to each other, equally and relatively phobia-free. Later I'd run parties myself, and still later a new venue arose for mixed sex play: Club Eros, the successor to that first warehouse South of Market. When it closed, its proprietor Buzz Bense looked forward to retiring from sex club managing, but within weeks another club fell into lap and is now the only place in the country devoted equally to learning about safe sex and doing it.
Mixed-gender and -orientation parties are safe sex playpens of the highest order. Rules are few but strictly enforced: no fucking without condoms (at JJO's no fucking is allowed, period), no oral-genital/- anal contact without a barrier, no rude behaviour. Rude behaviour at a party is defined as nosing around where you've not been invited to play, and a couple of parties down the line the JJO planners decided to get a little more explicit about it: Ask before touching. A corollary -- and harder to enforce -- is Say No when you don't want a particular kind of attention. Full consensuality is the ideal. It's a way of providing an atmosphere of emotional safety for all participants, reserved and outgoing alike. Not everyone with group sex fantasies has evolved social skills, and these rules make the parties accessible to as wide a range of people as possible -- perhaps even gently teaching them skills they can use when sex is one-on-one.
Where else can you see men in drag -- dicks hard and poking forth from spandex or ruffles -- stroking-off while they watch a merry-faced lesbian paddle her rhinestone-collared girlfriend's ass until it's pink? Or a woman get her fantasy-come-true: suspended in the air by a dozen men's hands, all jacking off and coming on her as she giggles and wriggles and squeals her pleasure? Where else can you jack-and- jill-off to Ringling Brothers circus music? Where else could you even find this collection of characters, sometimes between 50 and 100 at a time, together in one room?
Something like it is available at LINKS, the Bay Area s/m community's foremost safe sex mixed play party, but the ambiance there, of course, is leather-heavy, fetish and s/m scenes far outnumbering those which center around genital sex.
What else do mixed parties have to offer? A new group of buddies who are long on warm, short on judgement. A chance to confront sexual/social bugbears: is it really ok to watch/be watched? Am I really desirable? Can I really say no and be heard? A chance to watch others who do things differently, to learn from and appreciate others' erotic variety.
One night my partner and I played together with half the room watching us. Nearby stood a woman with a strap-on dildo which rubbed against her clit whenever she touched it. She was gazing into the eyes of a man with tattoos and body rings, jacking off the dildo while he stroked his own cock. As they went faster you could hear the rings in his cock jungle. The synchronicity of the party worked its magic -- hips thrusting and hands flying, they both came at the same time.
Not everyone is content to let the safe sex party enthusiasts peacefully conduct the sexual revolution behind the closed doors of private clubs and warehouses. More than once in the last three years safe sex clubs have been raided and closed by the local police. If club-goers didn't feel like members of a stigmatised minority before these incidents, many certainly did thereafter.
Several safe sex clubs operate in the city today; most serve primarily gay and bisexual men, and at least one, The Ecstacy Lounge, is for women. Women, men and others can found playing together at private Queen of Heaven Pagan Parties, at Club Eros' mixed nights (the only mixed party which is open to the public), and of course, at the monthly Jack-and-Jill-Offs sponsored by Mother Goose Productions. All of these are polymorphous gatherings for which the term ``bisexual" provides only a limited description. While many party-goers are bisexual, that's just the beginning. Mother Goose, responding to an extremely high male-to-female ratio at its parties, has just instituted the newest innovation in the safe sex party world, the ``New School for Social Masturbation." It seeks to instruct its participants in being the kind of people anyone would want to meet at a safe sex party; from now on, people desiring to go to a JJO will have to attend class first. The male-to-female ratio at Club Eros is also very high, and many of the men who attend are straight -- though in the absence of lots of women to pursue, who knows how the guys will be identifying by the parties end?
I know I'm in San Francisco when I look around at a party and see revellers representing just about every entry in the sexual lexicon, all dressed up in sexy clothes (or none at all) and growing more proficient with condoms and gloves by the minute. The safe sex hosts continue to give parties for two reasons: for the sheer joy of facilitating the coming together of such real, live, pulsing diversity, and for the high-minded purpose of proving to rooms full of people that sex can be plentiful, promiscuous, hot and safe.
Group sex experiences are not for everyone. To have fun at a group event a person must not be too shy, must be as willing to hear a `no' in response to popping the question as a `yes', must be willing to say `no' in response to someone else's request to play, and most importantly, they must want to be there. Their partner, if they've brought him/her along, must want to be there, too. For some of us, group experiences are the whipped cream on the hot cocoa of a sex life that would still be perfectly tasty without it. To others the advent of the safe sex parties is a lifesaver. Group sex has become an important part of my erotic life, and I love it as much for the way it continually helps me to undo my ``good-girl" conditioning and remake myself as for the sights, sounds and smells.
Perhaps most of all I love the safe sex parties for their insistence that sex can be as precious (and as safe) in threes, fours, and dozens as in twosomes!