I get so much love from my fuck buddies and friends that I feel like I can have just as meaningful an experience hooking up with someone in my room that I just met as I can with somebody that I’m dating
“I love having a space where I can facilitate other people realizing their fantasies,” said Simon, whose parties’ themes and target demographics range widely, including one that mixes LGBT+ people of all stripes (queer guys, queer girls, trans folk). “Here’s a guy 
Hawke and a man I’ll call “Luke” host their parties in Simon’s space. Both Hawke and Luke grew their parties from their own interests. Hawke got into piss in the early aughts and started gathering young guys in private apartments and the like before moving his party to Simon’s space about 10 years ago. The piss component, however, is now less of a defining feature (Hawke says piss play is so mainstream now, his party is no longer the exclusive outlet for it that it once was), though when I visited Golden Boys earlier this year, I did notice the faint scent of ammonia in the air. Luke, an artist in his 30s, started throwing his in Simon’s space in late 2016 as an extension of the parties he was already hosting in his apartment, which grew until swelling to a robust 25 guys-too many for his apartment to accommodate comfortably.
“I made a Facebook event, I invited the max I could-500-and I reached out to the people who had been coming to my private parties at my place and encouraged them to invite their slutty friends and their slutty friends and their slutty friends. By the time the party rolled around, 1,100 people were invited on Facebook,” said Luke, whose parties are perhaps a functional expression of where his heart is. Luke’s monthly parties now regularly attract more than 200 guys a night.
They are marketed as especially inclusive when it comes to age, body size, race, and even sexuality/gender identity and also has a philanthropic bent (a portion of proceeds are donated to a new charity every month)
“I’ve never had much luck with romantic relationships,” he said. “I’m at this place in my life where I’m not sure if I’ll ever have a long-term, solid boyfriend or whatever. ”
While the internet facilitates the demand, success, and ultimate proliferation of sex parties (the vast majority of the invites are sent through Facebook or private email lists), cruising IRL is seen by some sex-party attendees as a direct alternative to the annoyances of geolocation hook-up apps like Grindr, which can suck up hours of your time without ever providing a fuck. The result is a sort of app fatigue you’ll hear guys complaining about as they come to realize that what was once promised as an antidote to the annoyances of traditional cruising comes with its own set of annoyances.
“I find apps to be fundamentally dehumanizing,” said “Mark,” who’s 32 and had an experience he called “liberating” when attending the party Luke throws, where he sucked some dick, fucked a guy, and got fucked by another. “On an app it’s much easier to tune someone out because they’re not a person, they’re a square. They’re several pixels.”
“I suck at online,” says “Matthew,” not his real name, a black man in his late 30s whom I met at another of Hawke’s parties, called Play, which is held in Manhattan. “I’m terrible at it. I don’t want to sit there and go on all the bogus meetings. That’s the thing about a fuck party, like, look: We can get right to it. We can see it, decide, and then make our choice right there.”