The transformative power of the fetish club

Words Anastasiia Fedorova

Three words ran through my mind when I entered my first-ever fetish club night: I am home. It took place in Bow, in East London, in a nondescript building surrounded by storage warehouses. Boxy shadows, a car park. The usual experience of attending a fetish club night: being somewhere cold and unfamiliar, your fishnets, rubber, lace hidden under your coat. I would likely never be in this location again; even if I tried to find it now, I probably couldn’t, despite living a ten-minute Uber ride away. It occupied a unique time and place: it was the first Klub Verboten party after the COVID-19 pandemic regulations eased in spring 2021. We didn’t know whether there would be more restrictions on social gatherings, nor when they might arrive; we didn’t know for how long we’d be able to have the thrilling possibility of touching a stranger. The excitement of being near one another was palpable.

Something I’ve gleaned from several years of writing about kink is just how often the pandemic played a central role in people’s origin stories. Having to spend days in a confined space, in isolation, with the fear of death and sickness, pushed a lot of kinksters, fetishists and queer people towards self-exploration, testing their personal preferences and the social taboos they’d inherited. Add some extra disposable income saved up from not going out, and the ability to purchase your first-ever piece of latex, and the fetish community was suddenly within reach. This was my story too. And so I stood there in fishnet tights, a PVC corset from Etsy and latex gloves. The world is burning; I may as well come out as a pervert, I thought.

Inside, the corridor and dance floor were flooded with dim red light. I felt a vague sense of familiarity as I looked around, a déjà vu possibly evoked by the outfits on display: leather trousers, fishnets,PVC pencil skirts, rubbery latex bras. It was as if I’d walked into a depiction of a fetish night in a 1990s film. The aesthetic of these spaces is usually harsh, a little intimidating. You walk into the unfamiliar space like plunging in cold water, pushing yourself past timidity and self-consciousness. But oddly, as I entered, I felt the opposite – a sense of warmth. It wasn’t just that the heating system was set to account for the skimpy get-ups, nor the warmth gleaned from the other bodies in close proximity. The mood was warm: people were happy and giddy and shy to be so close to others, to be able to touch and smell one another, to co-exist in a shared sexual space.

Someone was dressed as an other-worldly latex doll in eight-inch heels, their hooded head floating high over everyone else’s on the dance floor. Two friends invited me to pour some of my drink into a funnel fitted in the mouth of a third friend, kneeling below. When it got crowded later in the night, someone was cracking their long whip at the ass of someone chained to a St Andrew’s cross. I’ve never, before or after, heard a whip tear through the humid air of the dance floor so loudly. That night, the sex freaks were truly out, and, in that moment, I knew that I was one of them – that I’d always been one. It just took me a while to find the right place.

It was a space to which people brought their complicated sexuality and laid it bare (even if every inch of their skin was covered by rubber). And in some ways, the overwhelming and intoxicating space of the fetish club has inspired the shape of this book. Both are packed with diverse perspectives on sex. Both bring together a multitude of voices and visions. Both create a sense of (sometimes unlikely) communion. Both, hopefully, can be a stepping stone for more exploration.

Klub Verboten became my go-to fetish club for a while. Memories of different nights merge in my mind. Heavy rubber curtains forming paths to explore. Walking through the play area slowly, hoping to steal a few more glances at a tableau unfolding like a Renaissance painting: bodies in the soft red glow, on all manner of surfaces, touching, kissing, fucking, moaning, their movement like waves. Playing with a red light beam with my latex glove: lights streaming from the ceiling, looking almost solid, catching particles of dust, designed to create ethereal accents in the space.

Klub Verboten is hosted in several locations around London and adapts to the different spaces. At Fire Club, they turned one of the smaller rooms into a porn cinema with sofas dotted around the room. They showed the Four Chambers film Blood Milk, which was banned from all online platforms for featuring blood play – yet in this small space within a sprawling South London club, it was OK. I kept getting lost between all the rooms, and the floor seemed uneven. They sold poppers at the bar, and the toilet smelt so strongly of piss that it was almost sexy in its disgusting seediness. They’ve since stopped hosting nights at the venue, but these memories remain. I’ve come to terms with how ephemeral these moments are. A night at a fetish club is almost overwhelmingly textured, full of sounds, sensations, bodies, possibilities. They are imprinted in the mind like flashes in the darkness, but you can never truly recall them in their full intensity. There are some parts of the experience you have to accept that you’ll lose. All the more reason to embrace the moment.

At Fold, another London club, I watched my friend, a professional dominatrix, ashing a cigarette into the mouth of her sub, a performance unfolding in a small separate room – her hair so long and dark, her lips deep red and her expression deeply content. The audience could peer in through a small window. I saw my friends fucking. I never wanted to watch too long, but I sometimes caught a glimpse of this other side to them, which is usually kept private. Every time, every location, I relished seeing how the architecture of the space accommodated our bodies, how it manipulated the gaze: looking, being looked at, forgetting about being looked at and remembering again, landing in your own body, surrounded by sex. The smell of Dettol spray on wipe-clean leather furniture. People with whom I locked eyes in the playroom once but never saw again, and yet whose faces linger in my mind. I always enjoy how malleable these memories are: evenings bleed into each other, locations merge and conversations evaporate. These memories aren’t recorded anywhere – photography at fetish clubs is strictly forbidden – and they’re warped by arousal.

Waiting for an Uber by a petrol station. The beautiful pale morning light. At home, falling asleep on the fresh sheets. You close your eyes, and darkness is not dark enough. You wait for your mind and body to return from the club, a place which it’s now hard to believe actually exists. I still hold on to that sense of warmth from my first time. There was a feeling of relief, too: the club looked like I imagined it would, and I felt like I could belong as my full, sexually deviant self. But as with any community built around the fragile, shifting lines of sexual identity, not everyone gets to belong. Such is the political complexity of the fetish club.

There isn’t such a thing as a singular ‘fetish club’. Quite often, it is not even a club. There are places which are purposefully designed with sex in mind, but they are rare. More frequently, the fetish club is transient, taking the shape of whichever shell it occupies, and is dependent on the people it brings together and the efforts of those setting it in motion. A leather gay bar set in a small basement, which has been there for decades. An underground space with a dancefloor underneath a local gay sauna with no phone signal and a tiled room where patrons can be pissed on. A private leatherdyke play party for a dozen people. A Sunday afternoon in a pay-by-the-hour dungeon. A foot worship gathering in a pub’s function room. A cluster of small rooms where rubberists are welcome to cruise each other (men only). A fetish club is a string of many varied, real spaces as much as it is a unifying cultural idea shaped by decades of history, enduring curiosity and a collective experience of sexual fantasy.

Kink, BDSM and fetish clubs are an integral part of cultural and queer history. The memories of them are woven into our cityscapes – Skin Two, Der Putsch, Rubber Cult and SWEAT in London, to name just a few. They have always been spaces of radical freedom and have often attracted active condemnation from conservative powers because of it. In the early 1990s, London’s leatherdyke S/M night Chain Reaction (frequented by the Rebel Dykes crew) was stormed by a group of balaclava-clad protesters who deemed sado-masochism anti-feminist. The Catacombs, the cult gay BDSM and fisting club in San Francisco, was shut down in the early 1980s, when the leather community received heavy blame for the onset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

London, where I am writing this book, has a broad range of fetish clubs to offer, including ambitious projects which merge nightlife, performance and architecture created specifically for erotic play. Torture Garden has been running since 1990, with an emphasis on performances and theatrical outfits. Klub Verboten started in 2016 as a trendier, darker, more contemporary option which centred around heavier BDSM and fetish, as well as active consent culture. Joyride and Pinky Promise emerged post-pandemic, infused with sensuality, gender experimentation and an abundance of latex and mesh in bold, bright colours. One Night creates a play space for women and non-binary people only, while Hunter London is the latest addition to heavy-play leather gay clubbing. However, this list is merely scratching the surface of the rapidly evolving fetish club culture in the city, which has absorbed the energy of its queer scene, rave underground and ever-changing style. Moreover, there are no longer strict boundaries which keep fetish clubs apart: more and more queer events feature erotic performances, playrooms or a bootblacking stand, where a local incredibly hot dyke can polish your boots in the tradition of the leather community.

In an expensive city, with complicated nightlife licensing policies and relentless forces of redevelopment and gentrification, the landscape is constantly changing. Nights close down, people move on, but the shared desires which drive them remain. Despite the preconceptions, these nights are about more than pure hedonism. 

It is a clear, cool night in May as I walk into Torture Garden. It’s hosted at Electrowerkz, a venue in Angel, North London. Three or four different rooms are connected via broad staircases, which gives it an expansive, warren-like feeling. There is a burlesque performance in one room, a drag show in another. In the room with the biggest dance floor, there is a catwalk platform at the centre. I stand close by, and as the fashion show is announced, people gradually stop dancing. I’ve come to see the work of a friend who runs a small independent brand, Primal Leather. The fetish catwalk lands somewhere between a fashion show and a ballroom performance: high-energy, expressive, placing emphasis on the people as much as the designs. Torture Garden has been hosting these shows for decades, giving the floor to latex and leather makers.

Primal Leather mostly focuses on harnesses, belts and other body-fitting creations crafted from sturdy leather straps. Tonight, it’s all equestrian: belts with fitted stirrups, metallic horse bits repurposed as belts – a playful take on a pony show. The designer, Chloé, grew up on a farm, and the local pubs were covered in equestrian memorabilia. She started collecting early on. In one of the leather sets, a belt is adorned with an old browband from a London police horse: a thick brass plate with a star in the middle. The catwalk cuts straight through the dance floor, and the crowd cheers loudly as the models walk down. I don’t know many people around me in the audience. The Torture Garden crowd comes in a variety of ages and genders, with a range of career paths and incomes left at the door. There’s little uniting us, bar the enjoyment of these creatively designed ways of being a pony for the night.

The word ‘community’ becomes slippery when interrogated on the dance floor, in darker corners of the club. I once saw a meme floating around online: ‘I connect with my community by sharing my ass.’ Or another one which goes along the lines of: ‘They’re not your chosen family, they’re just a DJ who puts you on the list.’ Queer people have long grappled with community which emerges, woven and interlinked, around nightlife and shared places where sex, alcohol and recreational substances are explored. The gay bars and the queer clubs become the first places where the exploration of who we are and who we want is possible. It also often leaves one feeling empty come morning. Some forge lasting connections in the club; some walk back home alone; some are happy to sneak away as if it never happened. Some fetish clubs double up as queer spaces, while some remain in an undefined grey area of lusty exploration beyond labels, but most of them bring together people of all political and social stances and backgrounds. People relish being seen: as their true selves, as their alternative personas, as an embodiment of their deepest fantasies. But to what degree does this make us a community? Are we a community if we share some hot group sex? Are we a community if we share a kink? ‘I feel like these people wouldn’t say hello to me if they saw me in the daytime,’ a leatherdyke friend once remarked, nodding towards the rest of the crowd at a fetish party.

In his book Gay Bar, Jeremy Atherton Lin traces the history of San Francisco’s Castro District, which has become synonymous with the gay community. 

In 1985, a group of sociologists published the book Habits of the Heart, arguing that a real community must be a ‘community of memory’, meaning one that remembers its past, including painful stories of shared suffering. Where history is forgotten, they wrote, community degenerates into lifestyle enclaves. Lifestyle ‘celebrates the narcissism of similarity’, and elevates private concerns – namely, leisure and consumption – above the common good. The academics announced: ‘When we hear phrases such as “the gay community” or “the Japanese-American community”, we need to know a great deal before we can decide to which degree they are genuine communities and the degree to which they are lifestyle enclaves.’

I was particularly struck by the term ‘lifestyle enclave’ on first reading this passage. ‘Lifestyle’ is a word often thrown around in BDSM or kink contexts: ‘lifestyle domme’, ‘24/7 lifestyle’, ‘been in the lifestyle for twenty years’. ‘Lifestyle’ might gesture towards personal practice or a commitment, like wearing a subtle necklace which doubles up as a proxy ‘collar’, or signing a symbolic contract outlining a long-term BDSM dynamic; it might indicate that one’s fetish extends into the home, like hosting a party at your private dungeon; or it might be used to emphasise a non-commercial engagement with fetish, drawing a line between a ‘lifestyler’ and a professional. Lifestyle can sound like a trite word, something which lands between a yoga class and a Sunday brunch, when the human cage fitted in your living room goes on the same list of expenses as car maintenance. But also, it is what it is – we all fit our sexualities, however baroque, into how we spend our days.

On the other hand, leather culture has always been centred around an idea of community – shared visual codes, shared spaces, as well as a shared, painful history and continuous mutual aid. What complicates the community versus lifestyle dichotomy is the fact that everyone who identifies as a kinkster, pervert or rubberist can make their own choice about historical continuity. You can choose to engage politically with others, or you can simply fuck for pleasure. Those who you fuck for pleasure regularly might become friends, or your fetish club crew, but for them to become your community requires one taking a step over a political threshold. No means of engaging with one’s fetishes is objectively ‘better’, but it is an individual choice which you will, at some time or other, have to take responsibility for. It’s not dissimilar to thinking about queer people as one expansive, amorphous community – within it, people will have different takes on their unity and how to honour it. We can endlessly argue about how to be queer ‘correctly’, but everyone will have their own way of being, alone and with others.

I have rooted my personal exploration of fetish in memory, somehow, from the very start: rummaging through boxes in Rambooks porn store, scribbling on lending cards at the UK Leather and Fetish Archive. I didn’t find these places myself but usually heard about them from friends, picking up a thread they left me. I am obsessed with memory, partly out of fear, because I know what happens when people get persecuted for their sexuality. I like to hold on to evidence that there is not just ‘me’ but also an ‘us’. Within the fetish club, I have found both a community and a lifestyle enclave. The difference, however, is not always clear-cut. Sometimes, it is more of a feeling. I do not single out, effortlessly, who else is preoccupied with history and the intentionality of play – and I am not always this conscientious. 

Sometimes we experiment, sometimes it’s just for fun – we want something new, beyond our known boundaries – and we aren’t thinking beyond the moment. But it makes me think that saying ‘I connect with my community by sharing my ass’ is more than just a joke. If spending hours in fetish clubs has taught me anything, it is that there are always more ways of connecting with each other.

Second Skin is out now.