feature image by Sarah Sarwar
What’s more annoying than meeting a “straight girl” who ends up leading you on? How many Tinder profiles have to say, “I don’t want a threesome with your boyfriend”? No one wants to be someone else’s experiment.
Unless you’re being paid.
There’s a new party on the scene, specifically catering to the straight-but-curious woman: Skirt Club, an international circuit of underground parties for “girls who play with girls.” According to The Hollywood Reporter, “Most of the women who come for an evening of unabashed sapphism with Skirt Club identify as straight,” and “60 percent identify between a 0 and a 2 on the Kinsey scale (which goes up to 6), meaning that they see themselves as anywhere from exclusively straight to ‘predominantly straight, but more than incidentally homosexual.’”
Skirt Club promoters hired me, a queer woman and professional Dominatrix, to attend and bring my submissive, Chloe, who is also my girlfriend. To undress her, tie her up, and spank her. To put on a show for their “predominantly straight” clientele. As a pro Domme, I’m accustomed to satisfying the kinky desires of straight people. While I’m a queer woman in my personal life and in my advertisements, the majority of my clients are straight men and heterosexual-appearing married couples.
I may be accustomed to doing straight-for-pay sex work, but like other queer women who’ve gotten their hearts broken by a curious straight girl or two, I have a chip on my shoulder when it comes to entertaining women with boyfriends. In college, I crushed hard on a girl who professed her love for me in private while walking hand-in-hand with her blissfully unaware boyfriend across campus. From Tinder profiles of girls looking for play dates with women — “my boyfriend doesn’t have to be involved, he can just watch” — to the cliché porn scene featuring two lesbians fucking until a delivery boy brings a side of dick with that pizza they ordered, queer women are keenly aware that our sexuality is often not only invalidated, but also made into a performance.
So, despite the lesbian sex show I was hired to put on for a bunch of straight (or perhaps closeted) women, I was determined to have a good time for myself.
With these scenarios in mind, I was determined not to perform at Skirt Club. I was determined, instead, to have a scene. In her rope bondage workshops, kink and sex educator Midori explains, “Demo, performance, and scene: these three are different.” Between Dominant and submissive, a demo is meant to teach. A performance is meant to titillate. And a scene is meant for pleasure — ours. So, despite the lesbian sex show I was hired to put on for a bunch of straight (or perhaps closeted) women, I was determined to have a good time for myself.
Sex work is always work, but it feels most rewarding when you’re getting paid to do something you also find hot. Parties, couples, and individuals hire me to fulfill their kinky fantasies. Often, my fantasies overlap with those of my clients. Blindfold a dude, tie him up, and make out with his gorgeous wife? Sounds great. Dress as Rachel Maddow, turn on the news to Trump destroying America, and kick a guy in the balls? Better workday than sitting behind a desk. Since I checked “catering to straight girls” off my bucket list in college, I concentrated on my submissive: on getting her wet, rather than those women encircling us like teenaged girls, salivating over an impending cat fight in a high school parking lot. I instructed Chloe to keep her eyes closed. I tied her hands to a spreader bar hung from the ceiling, watched her breathing get shallow, felt her pulse quicken. I flogged her, choked her, teased her. And the intimacy of that power exchange got everyone’s attention. You could almost hear the panties drop.
It’s popular to talk about how women’s sexuality is fluid; but admittedly, before hearing the sound of those panties dropping, I found the concept of this straight-but-curious all-female sex soirée verging upon the ridiculous. That’s half the reason I wanted to attend: I was as curious about them as they were about lesbian sex. The price of curiosity is steep: at Skirt Club, $180 gets you an evening of free-flowing booze and attention from the gorgeous hostesses in a swank downtown Los Angeles loft. It’s also highly selective. (Cis) women submit profiles for vetting before they are permitted to purchase a ticket. That vetting process includes sexual orientation. After an hour at the party, I wondered if I would have been invited if I were not for hire. I am, to be sure, a Kinsey 5.
But here we were, hired lesbians at the straight girl party like foxes in the hen house, and after our scene we took the chance to explore. The room, a dark and low-lit, red and black adorned loft space turned high-end dungeon, was packed with scantily clad women dressed to impress. Black garters, leather skirts, Cuban-heeled stockings, and some well-placed electrical tape. Stilettos sat neatly at the foot of a couch while their owners lined up barefoot to do body shots off a new friend’s bare abdomen. A group sat in a circle on the floor around an empty bottle of Veuve Clicquot, playing spin the bottle. I carefully stepped my own stilettos over them, traversing the space, looking for a bathroom, a quick lipstick retouch necessary after the heat of my scene left me dripping in more ways than one. Lipstick is a touchstone of Skirt Club. There was not a butch in sight.
Spin-the-bottle is the perfect activity for women exploring their sexualities, and a crutch for those who aren’t yet able to name and verbalize their desires. They don’t get kissed because they want it; they get kissed because those are the rules. A friend of mine, writer and sex educator Vanessa Carlisle, also attended the party, and later told me that she was ready to leave when the bottle started spinning: the game operates according to breaches of consent. As I watched, an eager brunette spun and the uncorked remains of the bottle that got everyone onto the floor in the first place. It landed on a timid blonde, who rose to acquiesce, although it’s clear that she had to kiss this same woman on the last round and wasn’t really interested in round two. The group squealed at the closed-mouth encounter like a drunken bachelorette party.
If you open a conversation at Skirt Club, you can bet it’s not going to end with a U-Haul rental and a new pet.
Straight women just do lesbian differently. In some ways, it’s refreshing. They were so eager to compliment each other, it felt like 2 am in a nightclub women’s room: “Oh my god, I love your outfit!” “You’re so beautiful.” My self-esteem through the roof from their adoring praise, I was warming up to them. Chloe took my flogger and started going at them herself: the line to have a first try at Sapphic BDSM was more than I could handle alone. The stakes were lower than approaching a woman in a gay bar or at a queer party. If you open a conversation at Skirt Club, you can bet it’s not going to end with a U-Haul rental and a new pet. The encounters work differently. In some ways it felt like they worked without consequence.
They also worked without the typical markers of any queer bar on a Wednesday. Queer masculinity isn’t privileged at Skirt Club because it doesn’t exist at Skirt Club. But neither does femme invisibility, sort of: it’s hard to feel invisible as a femme woman in a party full of other feminine-presenting women who are there because they want to flirt with you, but there was femininity present by default, a product of the club’s “Night Temptress” Pinterest board. There was not femme present on purpose or principle or for resistance.
Inclusion is not a priority here: trans people and low-income people also faced erasure. The party was ethnically and racially diverse, surprising given that the promotion and media coverage have been overwhelmingly white. But the body types were overwhelmingly similar in size, ability, and age. As a queer woman in that space, albeit also white and femme, I felt like I was in hetero territory, no matter how many times women approached me to play. A queer space lends itself to openness to different expressions, however successful that is in practice, and this space was gendered in monochrome.
When I asked what brought them to Skirt Club, most of the women told me that they wanted a girlfriend in addition to their boyfriends or husbands: someone just for them. A few said that they were looking for a unicorn, slang for a woman down for a threesome with a straight couple — so hard to find that she’s basically mythical. Some wanted to find a unicorn to bring home to a boyfriend that very night: male desire is present at Skirt Club, even without men. One woman went into detail about her recent break-up, after she discovered her famous boyfriend was cheating: the proof was on p.6 of the tabloids. Others claimed curiosity, plain and simple.
Could we, by example, have lured these women away from their husbands, many of whom were standing by, waiting for their wives to return with a new guest-starlet in their bedroom?
No matter their intentions for the evening, woman after woman came up to Chloe and I to say: “You two are an incredible couple. You are clearly in a real relationship with each other.” “You have such chemistry.” “I strive to be like you.” And my favorite: “I’ve never seen a woman dominate another woman. Well, only when a guy told her to do it.” The partygoers were shocked to find that we had no boyfriends, no husbands, that we came together and would leave together. It was as if they had never considered the option. That’s why I was afraid that I was too high on the Kinsey scale for the party. Could we, by example, have lured these women away from their husbands, many of whom were standing by, waiting for their wives to return with a new guest-starlet in their bedroom? I feared accidental lesbian home wrecking, and how pissed the hostesses might be to lose their into-lesbian-sex-but-definitely-totally-straight clientele to the dyke Dominatrix. But I secretly hope to get an email one day recounting that seeing me and my girlfriend at Skirt Club inspired an opening of the closet door.
Regardless of the sex these women were having elsewhere, in a room full of women who identified as straight, Chloe and I were certainly not the only women to get laid that night. When we arrived, a hot cougar spotted Chloe from across the room and sauntered over to make a move, already on the prowl. One of the only women with what I can only describe as dyke energy, I secretly hoped that she was an out and proud queer, cruising the crowd of married women for some no-strings-attached action.
As for our own hot girl-on-girl action, Chloe and I had made the grave mistake of claiming a space in the furthest corner of the pillow room, which looked like something out of a ’90s club kid ecstasy-fueled fantasy world. Black lights illuminated walls, piles of white pillows obscuring any view of the floor. The furthest corner featured the only electrical outlet, and we had a hitachi, so we set up shop. We were the only couple in the room save for two women making out in the entrance, perhaps hoping someone would trip over them and decide to stay. After a Hitachi-induced trance took us out of the room for a good thirty minutes, a return to reality meant that we were surrounded. Women had filled the space, grinding on each other, going down on each other, fucking with abandon. But as a femme top who loves to rock a cock, I immediately noticed that there was nary a strap-on in sight. The cougar from earlier locked eyes with Chloe as we made out, her mouth occupied, clearly impressing the woman she’d seduced. Another woman rested her head on my thigh without asking, her partner eagerly going down. More amused than disturbed by the intrusion, Chloe and I joked that it was just like fucking with the dog on the bed and looked for the escape route least likely to disturb the crowd.
The room had transformed into the lesbian fantasy of every straight man’s wildest dreams, the kind of fantasy no one really thinks is true. And the reality was even more of a “fantasy” than a straight cis dude’s mind could conjure. But in all honestly, I’m afraid that mind did conjure it.
I have rarely seen this kind of unabashed public sex in women’s spaces, even progressive kink spaces.
I was shocked, even thrilled, to see sex happening and women coming, but I had to wonder: why was it seemingly so easy for these women to disrobe and get down in public? I have rarely seen this kind of unabashed public sex in women’s spaces, even progressive kink spaces. Was it sexual socialization in the swinger scene, or were they so eager to find intimacy with another woman that they would fuck anywhere? Or, were they comfortable because they didn’t really consider what they were doing to be sex?
There is a strict no boys allowed policy, so the women weren’t performing for their boyfriends. But the party still felt like a performance of women’s sexuality. It was adventurous, but not too adventurous. It was lesbian, but not too lesbian. I have to wonder, was my presence as a queer woman in a straight women’s space, looking at their sex from a distance even when it’s happening literally between my legs, part of the problem? And what did they think of my sex?
At its core, even our queer culture figures sex between feminine-presenting women as performative. It feels like The L Word. It feels disingenuous. Perfectly beach-blown hair streaming down Pilates-toned backs, Agent Provocateur lingerie pulled carefully to the side, stilettos left on. While the #femme4femme movement online and in sex-positive queer communities has worked to reduce the stigma of femme-on-femme sex, many of us, myself included, are afraid that we learned lesbian sex from the male gaze and mirrored it back, even when the only bodies in front of the mirror are our own.
Skirt Club is a lesbian sex party, but it’s not for lesbians. Queer women are neither its audience nor its clientele, and it throws into sharp relief exactly why spaces for queer women are different and necessary. But it’s an erotic space in which women can explore their desires, away from the demands of boyfriends and husbands, even if just for a night. For that, it gets my lesbian Dominatrix stamp of approval, whether it wanted it or not. There are far too few spaces in the world where women feel comfortable enough to pile into a black-lit room full of pillows and go at it.
Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” column exists for individual queer ladies to tell their own personal stories and share compelling experiences. These personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.
