It’s Baudelaire in swimwear. It’s Heaney in a bikini. It’s Rimbaud in a Speedo, Talese in a onepiece.
On Tuesday night the hottest spot in town was a sauna, as the darlings of the literary scene gave midnight readings on the subject of desire at the Wall Street Baths.
The “Night of Desire” was hosted by Camille Sojit Pejcha who writes the Pleasure Seeking newsletter about sex and culture on Substack.
Mary H.K. Choi tackled Luigi Mangione fantasies, venturing that the alleged United Health killer is so fetishized because of the quasi-orgasmic thrill of finding in-network coverage. Meanwhile, Jaboukie — in nothing but a pair of Lycra briefs — gave an unforgiveably graphic account of his (one assumes) imaginary polyamorous fling with Mitch McConnell (“Mitchell,” as he called him in the piece) and Elaine Chao.
While the audience lazed in a hottub or bobbed in the pool, J Wortham of the New York Times talked acid trips, “Whore of New York” writer Liara Roux read an affectionate essay on Robert Mapplethorpe, author Brontez Purnell recalled a near-death Uber trip, Old Jewish Men detailed a personal crisis brought on by the price of an ice cream, comic Cat Cohen brought the house down with her poetry and Sherry Ning addressed the fantasy of beauty itself.
Sojit Pejcha told us that the idea of the event was to “bring sex back to the city’s literary scene.”
“We wanted to bring back what’s missing in today’s literary world: the in-person, hedonistic element that used to drive creative scenes in New York, where the city’s thinkers and makers rubbed shoulders in a real-world setting instead of discoursing about it online,” she told us, “When the city’s creative culture was at its peak, writers weren’t just tweeting at each other—they were drinking, partying, hooking up. And these experiences informed some of the greatest works of art and literature. That’s the energy we’re bringing back.”
She said that the choice of venue was “a nod to the history of bathhouses as a site for queer cruising” (we don’t think she means that bathhouse in particular) and that the tickets sold out within minutes, leaving a 300-person wait list.
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