A place where people can have sex and other people can watch: My one enlightening night in a sex club.

We walked up the narrow stairs and my heart was pounding.

I’d never been to a sex club before. A place where people can have sex and other people can watch. And it was all quite hilarious and exciting when we were on the street, trying to find the discreet, nondescript door.

But shit was getting real.

A very perky young woman stood at the top of the stairs and talked us through how it worked there. There were lockers, towels, a bar upstairs where you could meet others blah blah blah… behind her was a dark corridor, it was red, pulsing almost, and two women in lingerie and a man wearing nothing but a smile walked past, chatting away. With an actual swinging penis, just swinging away.

My heart started thumping in my chest.

“… And you can leave your key around you wrist so you don’t lose it. So that will be $150 for you and the two girls are free entry….”

I took a big breath and blew it out slowly. She looked at me and mother-henned me. I must have had that first timers look.

“Oh don’t be nervous, honey! You can do whatever you feel comfortable with.”

Oh fuck.

My friends laughed at me and squeezed my hand. They are my friends, but we have threesomes together. And it’s a whole lot of fun at home, so we dared ourselves to go to a sex club because, why the hell not? Full disclosure – I’m recently separated and probably having a mid life crisis but I’m really enjoying it and a sex club was on my sex bucket list.

We went to the lockers, squeezing past men and women dressed in towels and into the shabby locker area. It was sort of like a gym locker, but instead of playing indoor soccer, everyone had been furiously fucking. They were all checking each other out and I felt eyeballs all over me. We were fresh meat. I kept my eyes forward, no eye contact.

There was no alcohol allowed in the area I guess should be called ‘the pit’, but I could have murdered a tequila shot.

So, down to our underwear (I was wearing a lacy one piece and heels), we started to explore. It was very dark and a bit of a rabbit warren. Lots of corridors with rooms full of sweaty, writhing bodies. There were little peephole windows where you could see people having sex on big beds with red sheets, blowing one another, playing with each other. The rooms contained multiple beds, lube and condoms. There were groups of two, three, sometimes four all going for it. And then there were people watching. There was also a swing suspended from the ceiling in one room where a woman lay with her legs spread wide in stirrups and a man pleasured her with his hands, both lost in their own world. It was so intimate. And so public.

It was all rather surreal that I got the giggles a little bit.

Men and women in their 20s, 30s and 40s, dressed in leather with all their bits hanging out, just cruising around like we were in the supermarket fruit and veg section.

After a bit we found a spare bed in a room of about twenty people really going for it. It looked like a big bunch of worms all rolling over each other. But there was a whole lot of random chat as well.

Big, sexy sex groans followed by, “Oh hi Karen! I didn’t know you were here!”

“Hi Pete! You look like you’re having fun!”

But it was hard to make out what she was saying because her mouth was full of dick.

LISTEN: What the hell is monogamish? Post continues below. 

When you’re at a sex club, you kind of should have sex, we figured, so we did.

And it was fun. And being watched was really quite a turn on.

At one point I did a mental count of how many hands my friends had and how many were actually touching me. And there were five. My friends only have four hands between them and so I looked up and sure enough a goateed man had a sneaky hand in my vagina so I politely asked him to get it away from my lady bits.

He shrugged his shoulders, like “fair enough”, and made his merry way back into the pit. I hadn’t known whether I wanted to fuck strangers or not at the sex club. But the answer was not.

This cheeky fingering set off a pretty epic fit of giggles and I really had to pee.

On my way to the loo I watched couples shagging through the little portholes and wondered; what brings people here? There seemed to be a lot of regulars, who addressed each other like they were at a P & C meeting. It was all very casual and felt very accepting, safe and welcoming. There were more women than men (because men are not allowed to go there on their own) and it was all quite quaint in a bizarre way.

You get desensitised pretty fast.

After watching straightish people have sex for an hour or so, and participating ourselves (you’ve got to be in it to win it), we stood around the water cooler, drinking water from plastic cups (orgies are thirsty work!) and chatting with nude sex buddies for a while and then decided to call it a night.

I needed a stiff drink and long shower.

Would I go back? I’m not sure. Sex club was a lot sexier in my mind.

But I did a mental tick off my sex bucket list.