Dirty Mag exported a bit of Bushwick to Crown Heights’ Friends and Lovers (641 Classon Ave.) for their fifth anniversary and twelfth issue release, which features a softcore spread of Yung Gravy handler Ari Kytsya. Event organizer and Bushwick local Cyan Rivera, now organizing events for Dirty, opened the party with a sequel to her famous Hole Contest at Rash I saw in February.

Pornography and dating apps present an abundance of options to explore sexuality with the luxury of discretion. Rivera stages contests for “throat goat,” “foot job” and “stroke game” that aimed to render sexuality public while doing the same to the witnessing of it.

Foreplay came from 89 the Brainchild, who defined the night in opposition to the entire American experience: if your life is lonely (“You can’t trust your friends”), solipsistic (“Sharing fake news”), penniless (“One-bedrooms cost how much in Brooklyn?”), and generally shit (“You can’t even spell Prague”), you can always get a bag and open it to find hedonism, a quick dollar, a quicker nut. 

According to Rivera, the night was about normalizing sex and sex work. Sexual freedom “means something different to everybody at different stages of life,” she said. Short of an orgy, it’s hard for me to define a gathering that truly celebrates sexuality. I know it when I see it.

Easy access to sex and its derivative entertainments are usually associated with and afforded to artists and white-collar professionals. Transplants typically enter New York as part of this strata. Everyone else is a self-excluding prude, or was never invited to get in on the action. For us, New York is a destination, an indicator of our progress, either the destination or a stepping stone to being the third-coolest person in Little Rock. 

And so an anonymous man, the lone stroke game contestant, fucked a blow-up doll in front of all of us, and he fucked it with a rigor far beyond what was necessary to win unopposed. During 89’s set, I saw him huddled in a corner, snorting viagra. After the contest, he said the viagra hadn’t worked in time, otherwise he would’ve shown the world what earned him a pack of pre-rolls and a dildo delivered in a bag bedazzled “Dirty.” 

“I was under a lot of pressure on my right big toe,” he said after the contest. “If there was cushioning, I could’ve gotten more in the flow.”

I confirmed Rivera had attracted approximately 8-10 contestants, but only 4 showed up. Were  they afraid to be made a mockery of, or afraid of making a mockery of sex? On the turnover, Rivera said, “I think people just get in their own heads… If you haven’t been to an event like this, you’re not going to realize how silly and funny it is and how very, like—honestly, not wholesome, but almost wholesome.”

But people still lined up to at least say they’d give it a shot: “It really is at the whim of whoever’s going to show up. We had a girl coming in from states away, and I was like, ‘Girl, we’ve got a time slot for the contest. You’re going to miss it.’” Every contestant got the same bedazzled gift bag because at least they showed up.

The only throat GOAT hopeful demonstrated impressive finesse and oral command of a heavy cucumber. Choosing her cucumber from a half-dozen in a produce bag, she found one that wasn’t so small as to seem overly cautious, but not so large as to present medical risk. After, she rolled a condom onto it, unhinged her jaw, then made it briefly disappear, first into her mouth, then between her breasts.

To simulate completion, she bit off the head and spat it out. The crowd cheered; all along, they had wanted a succubus, someone unafraid of small violences that justified the power and distance given by a place on stage.

This performance, its own kind of work, felt distinct from sex itself. When sex is eyes-wide-open, the witnessing is mutual. The parameters for participation—taking the stage or simply witnessing—were called into question by two people I overheard, who critiqued the presence of straight people. It’s a dick sucking competition: who did they expect to come? I tattled on them to Rivera, who said, “If there were straight people there, they bought a ticket. Everyone in that room deserved to be in that room.”

I talked about cock to another attendee (a transplant in bisexual dormancy), who said, “I miss it, man… it’s like holding a sweet potato.” His girlfriend danced beside him. This social urge to exclude, largely separate from the American body politic, is runoff from lives spent terminally online, as if a bar can be made into a Discord chat, its host and security turned into Reddit moderators. We were all there because it’s New York and it’s the thing to do here.

Finally, the most physically impressive show: the footjob contest. The contestants showcased the urge for intensity hardwired into our brains, and had distinct but impressive methods: Miss Maia, in stockings, exhibited a bipedal stroke with orangutan dexterity; while competitor Aurora opted for a lubed, barefoot procedure. “Queer people are not tender, they’re not sensitive, they’re not fucking weak,” Rivera said. “Queer people deserve a radical space, and they deserve a violent space to get rid of that rage.” The work on stage would’ve broken any real dick.

Rather than the act in its holistic sense, on display was the performance under the collective (judgment-free!) judgment of judges and attendees. Sex should retain its mystique and sanctity without the shame that forces sex workers into the shadows, though all of that is pretty much impossible in a world that still forbids frank discussion and observation. This event defangs our world’s sexual expectations through parody-as-vulnerability.

A sex show seems out of place in Crown Heights, a neighborhood whose transplant culture is better defined by Clorox speakeasy Tooker Alley (793 Washington Ave.) or the New American Arden (788 Franklin Ave.). It’s the type of place that, upon arriving to town, you choose for its nearness to the effete, inoffensive Park Slope liberality that you can’t actually afford (no offense, of course: I bet you go to Prospect Park thirteen times a week). Any walk around town will verify that, among its 2,735 residents from Crystal Lake, none of them have ever popped pussy.

South Brooklyn would drum up witch trials if they’d seen what happened at Rash. What Grime Square editor-in-chief and notable UChicago reject Andrew Karpan neglected to mention in his obscenity correspondence was that the Hole Contest on Valentine’s Day felt like hell’s waiting room: an overcapacity crowd in winter gear emanating and sharing in thick tropical heat, so loud and united in their frustration that I couldn’t even Shazam the music playing. 

When Karpan had moved in front of a short woman, blocking her view, she said, “It’s always six-foot-fucking-five guys with moustaches.” He seemed happy to be overestimated by two inches.  The tall are chronically too forgiving of this world.

A repeat of Rash would’ve sent me packing to Staten Island. Friends & Lovers lacked the energy of a truly lewd peep show, was more talent show than live pornography. There was enough space in the air for people to excuse themselves. It was an actual event this time: there was a reason (a broadsheet magazine release) and varied programming. Sex acts, as in our lives outside, were only one facet of it all. 

Talking about events like these—showing hole, strokemaxxing—is like talking about a podcast, or the porn stars you jerk your shit crazystyle to: they don’t want to hear about the hangout they weren’t invited to. Like a film studies minor going into his junior year math class to tell everyone about the YouTube clip of Salo he totally didn’t touch himself to, no one was there watching with you and they would never admit to wanting to. You receive only feigned disgust or the trained-in-a-mirror ambivalence from those who practice cool as a hobby.

We’ve evolved into foreplay. You do it to stay alive. In Brooklyn, things move south to chase maturity. Ketamine culture is very, proudly hyperlocal. 

You know smut when you see it, and I didn’t see it this time, and for that I’m glad. It had replaced so much obscenity with an equal amount of air conditioning and fun. Joy was in the air, inside what’s left of our holes at the end of every week.

Photos courtesy of Jade Green.

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