On the evening of Valentine’s Day, I found myself sitting on a cushion on the floor of a loft in Manhattan’s Chinatown. I was within spitting distance of Glow Job, a drag queen who was twirling and lip syncing to the bridge of “Hollaback Girl” by Gwen Stefani. “This shit is bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S,” the whole room yelled along (myself included). In more ways than one, it certainly was: midway through the tropical-fruit-themed medley, Glow Job gleefully pulled a baby banana out of her thong. At the very end, she pulled a full-sized banana (yes) out of her ass, and after only a moment’s grimaced hesitation, peeled it and took a bite, to the uproarious applause of the crowd.
If you can believe it, this was not the main event of the evening, though it was certainly a personal highlight. The number took place during the afterparty for the inaugural Club Shortbus, a live immersive adaptation of the John Cameron Mitchell film. If you’re unfamiliar, Shortbus follows a crew of sexually unsatisfied New Yorkers, including Sofia Lin, a sex therapist who has never had an orgasm; her husband Rob; James and Jamie, a gay couple who open their relationship; and Severin, a dominatrix who craves deeper connections. They all find themselves at the titular Shortbus, a weekly artistic salon/orgy hosted by the drag artist Justin Vivian Bond (played by vself), seeking various answers to their sexual frustrations within themselves, with each other, and with total strangers. Notably, most of the sex in Shortbus (and there is a lot of it) is unsimulated — and yes, that held true for Club Shortbus as well.
Fempath, who created, directed, and adapted the script for Club Shortbus, was drawn to the film’s joyful approach to depicting sex and sexuality. “It was hardcore with a soft heart,” she told me one afternoon a week before the production. Fempath has been a regular in New York City’s sex party scene since she was 18, starting with the mostly anonymous environment of darkrooms. As she’s gotten older, Fempath felt a desire to cultivate a sex positive space that allows for “hardcore” fun but where “people can still get to know each other.”
“If that translates to a room full of everybody playing, that's cool,” she said. “But if it's not that and it's people coming for conversation and community and dancing, then that's great, too.” It’s an ethos very much in line with the original movie, which was itself based on actual parties Mitchell attended in the ‘90s and aughts.
Fempath started dreaming of making Shortbus a reality after Mitchell tapped her to act in Anthem: Homunculus, a podcast musical. She pitched the idea to him “a year and change ago,” and he was on board. “Finally the right people are adapting Shortbus in the true spirit of our film,” Mitchell told me via email. “They’re not afraid of the explicit sex, but more importantly they are creating a salon-like environment where sex and art are equally honored. A modern Moveable Feast indeed!”
The ultimate vision for Club Shortbus is that it will be a monthly event. While the first “fore(play)” focused mostly on Sofia’s storyline and her quest for an orgasm, the next iteration will highlight Jamie and James (“If you’re a fan of threesomes, come see that show — you’ll never hear the Star-Spangled Banner the same way again,” Fempath told me wryly). Once you’ve attended one “fore(play),” you’re considered a member of the club, meaning that you could just show up for the afterparty if you wanted to, as Fempath explained to me.
In order to create such an environment, Fempath had to shift from thinking about the project as an attempt to bring eroticism into theatrical spaces to thinking about it as an attempt to bring art into sexual spaces. She wears many hats — in addition to working in theater, Fempath is currently a sex worker, and previously worked as a rape crisis counselor, an intimate partner violence counselor, and an intimacy coordinator. “I thought this was an amazing opportunity to stretch all my muscles at the same time and bring in experts from all the different places,” she said. “I’m the only one who knows all the porn people and all the theater people and all the cabaret people.”
Those people, she said, told her that they’d been waiting for a production like Club Shortbus, one that rejects the false dichotomy between porn and art. That includes burlesque performer Darlinda Just Darlinda, playwright Justin Elizabeth Sayre, gay adult performers Jonah Wheeler and Benny Blazin, and Lola Jean, a sex educator who holds the world record for volume squirting and who Fempath cast as Sofia’s “sexual avatar.”
The “sexual avatar” was one of several concepts Fempath mentioned in our conversation that intrigued me but that I couldn’t quite visualize. What did she mean by sexual avatar? How were they going to fit a live band in the space? Sofia’s husband is going to be portrayed by… a blow-up doll?
“It's hard to describe because there's nothing quite like it,” she admitted. “There are play parties that have had cabaret acts — I haven't been to anything with this much. And then there are plays with some eroticism, but I have not seen any that go this far.” Fempath paused, then continued, “You'll understand when you see it. It's a mystery! I don’t want to give away all the secrets.”
There were two shows the first night of Club Shortbus: an early performance for those who were just there for the artistic experience of it all, and a late one that would transition into a play party afterwards until 2 a.m., interspersed with cabaret acts. I opted for the latter, bringing my friend Sammy with me as a plus one.
I had no idea what to expect of the crowd — Fempath herself had told me as much, saying, “I think no one really knows what it’s going to be or who’s going to come,” since she’d cast such a “wide range of people” who she figured would “bring a lot of different folks into the fold.” Admittedly, I was surprised for a moment at how straight, white, and (for lack of a better word) normie the line outside was. But once I had taken the elevator up to the loft and stepped into the space, it was an entirely different story.
The venue itself, decorated by set designer Dusty Childers, was breathtaking. At the door, there was a table with a bowl filled with paper slips, accompanied by a sign inviting attendees to describe their greatest orgasm on any of the blank slips strewn around. Stepping past the table, what was ordinarily a nondescript loft had been completely transformed, softly lit in pink and blue, swaths of fabric of all textures and colors draping from the ceiling, mannequin parts jutting out from the support pillars. Some of the audience sat in chairs arranged around the stage area, while others splayed out on mattresses and other soft things scattered across the floor. I breathed a sigh of relief as I spotted a group of pups cuddling on one of the mattresses, reassured that the crowd wasn’t just the aforementioned straight white normies. The circular stage was designated by an LED light strip; just beyond its bounds, three musicians sat beside a cello, a guitar, an oboe, and a saxophone.
While Sammy and I waited in line to check our phones (a mandatory step), the Mistress of ceremonies for the evening, Justin Elizabeth Sayre, was riffing, trying to stall for a production that was decidedly running on queer time. (This was absolutely fine with me, as I had also been running on queer time, and Sammy had been running on even queerer time.) But eventually, the bus started rolling.
“I’m here to inform you this is a sex party and you are all voyeurs,” Sayre said, which was only the first of many moments in which the boundaries between the play and the party were blurred. They went over some of the rules of engagement for the play: no touching the performers, watch out for the “splash zone,” look out for the consent monitors in the reflective vests, the universal safeword is screaming, “GOD DAMN DOCTOR DONUT!”
After a brief explanation and demonstration of basic play party etiquette (in brief: don’t be a creep), the play officially started. In one of the opening scenes, The Mistress gave Sofia (played by Malea Kimberly) a tour of Shortbus, which also served as a way to introduce the audience to the band, and to point out the different rooms within the space — namely, the “Sex Not Bombs” room (a darkroom) and “The Bus Stop” (a nonsexual room for decompressing, or otherwise “sensual” play). In the next scene, the bowl that held descriptions of the attendees’ greatest orgasms appeared, passed around by a circle of “lesbians” who each read a slip. (“At a sex party with a guy I just met — we’re still together 14 years later.” “Under the English channel.” “When I was in love.”)
Fempath described the production as more of a “play party with theatrical elements,” but it leaned much more toward “play” than “party” — as in, it was genuinely great theater. All of the actors were phenomenal performers, to the point where it’s only as I write this that I realize there were only three main cast members. In addition to Sayre and Kimberly, Alex Miyashiro doubled as the dominatrix Severin and as Rob (they held up a paper mustache on a stick to indicate that they were in character as the husband). As Sofia, Kimberly also sang three songs from the movie at various points throughout the play, their voice clear and bright above the accompaniment from the band.
The emotional heights of the play were broken up by three cabaret acts; first, the performance artist CuntyHam bellowed Radiohead’s “Creep” over the band’s accompaniment. (He described himself as the spawn of “my mother, John Waters, and my father, a bichon frisé.”) There was also a sensual burlesque number from Darlinda Just Darlinda, and last but not least, a hauntingly beautiful lip sync from drag artist Julie J.
And yes, as I’m sure you’re wondering, there was indeed unsimulated sex, as part of a scene demonstrating Sofia’s first experience with voyeurism. It felt as though the whole audience was collectively holding its breath as two of the night’s erotic artists, Jonah Wheeler and Benny Blazin, walked from the darkroom to the stage, accompanied by slow, simmering, ethereal music from the band. The two men kissed and shed their clothes and ran their hands tenderly over each other’s bodies, their fluid movements so simultaneous that I wondered if they were choreographed (they were not, the two just know each other’s bodies that intimately, as I later found out from a conversation with Wheeler.) Much like I had with Sofia’s musical interludes, I found myself captivated and unexpectedly moved, though not at all turned on, even as I watched Wheeler cum in the direction of the (aptly named) splash zone. They’re both gorgeous men, and they are obviously very good at having sex, as that is part of their jobs. But in this setting, I was more enraptured by their movement — and the fact that they laughed and collapsed on the floor holding each other afterwards — than the fact that they were fucking.
“What are they doing?” Sofia asked during the scene. “Isn’t it obvious? Art,” the Mistress replied. That seems like a fitting encapsulation of Club Shortbus as a whole. I won’t spoil the rest, because if you can, you really ought to experience the whole thing for yourself. But I will say that Lola Jean’s performance (remember that she holds the world record holder for largest squirt volume) absolutely ended the play on a high note.
While in a very long line for the bathroom after the play concluded and the other “play” started, I struck up conversation with the people standing in front of and behind me. The person behind me was an older gentleman wearing a blue velvet dress, who told me he had come to Club Shortbus because he had attended the original parties that inspired Mitchell’s film. Despite our age difference, we shared a brief, delightful bonding moment over the discovery that we had both attended events at a certain basement venue. Meanwhile, the person in front of me was probably my age (25) or younger, a huge fan of the original film, and had traveled from the midwest to New York just for Club Shortbus. He had just started doing drag in his small town the month prior; when I asked him why now, he said that he’d always wanted to, but didn’t feel comfortable doing so until he started transitioning. Then, a friend of his finally pushed him to start performing, and so he did.
I was genuinely thrilled to see people decades my senior out in full force, and to have heard from the man behind me about his good old days of debauchery. Simultaneously, I was in awe of the person in front of me, both because he had traveled so far and because he had just started doing drag, despite living in a conservative area.
In our prior conversation, Fempath had expressed a hope that the night would be “deeply healing.” It was absolutely that, and moreover, the night — the play, my bathroom line interactions, and all that followed — gave me genuine hope. No matter what the state does or doesn’t do to protect or suppress us, we’ll always gather clandestinely in dank basements, in alleyways, in lofts hidden within otherwise nondescript office buildings. What a gift, to be reminded that queerness (and I mean queerness) can’t truly be constrained by age, geography, or any other external factor. Now, having experienced it, I can tell you with utmost certainty that there really is nothing out there quite like Club Shortbus — and thank god it exists.
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