Alex and I decided to get the lay of the land. But the real action goes down in smaller rooms throughout. Men stood around in the main room bar in various degrees of undress, laughing and talking, while others fucked and sucked in the corners. It felt like an orgy in an abandoned warehouse, dirty and dangerous. The space inside is cavernous and utilitarian, with cement walls and floors, punctuated by industrial steel beams. We were nervous-we'd been to sex parties and bathhouses in America, but nothing like this. The theme that night was simple: two drinks for the price of one, clothing optional. If you were wearing deodorant or cologne, you were turned away in an instant, which makes sense, because the smell of men is part and parcel of the eroticism of gay sex. We learned that entrance came with a strict no perfume policy. While Berghain is famous for its hours-long line, Lab.Oratory has its own entrance, with its own door criteria. Food kiosks shared curb space with limos and exotic sports cars old ladies sold trinkets on the street. Once we approached the club, as if from nowhere, young, diverse hipsters in expensive club wear began to appear, walking down the middle of the street.
To get there, our taxi drove us down a long, isolated boulevard. That's why, when we found out about Lab.Oratory, a sex club in the basement of Berlin's internationally renowned Berghain nightclub, we knew we had to go-that taking part in a bacchanal 300-man orgy was the perfect way to celebrate our bond.īerghain is part of an old power station in an industrial and remote neighborhood of East Berlin. We wanted all the adventures we could handle like our marriage, we decided our honeymoon didn't have to follow any rules. Watching them expanded something inside of me, and with time, I learned that I could fall in love with both of them, and that we could love each other, and others, without limit.Īlex and I got married this February, and we decided our honeymoon would be a five week trip to Europe. Yet there was something beautiful to be found in the way they would hold hands or kiss. When we met our boyfriend, Jon, watching Alex fall in love with someone new challenged me in ways I never could have anticipated. I have walked out of threesomes in a fit, pulling Alex out with me, because he kissed a guy too long or looked at him in a way I felt should be reserved only for me.
It took years of conversations and fights to finally find comfort in the arrangement.