‘Welcome to Disneyland,’ said the doorman at SBN, apparently indifferent to the trademark implications of associating the House of Mouse with an event that projects fisting porn on the walls.
SBN, or Stark Bollock Naked, is a kink party that claims to attract ‘550 fun-loving individuals’ to each of its weekly entries. It was mid-afternoon on a warm summer Sunday, nine days into a new Labour administration, 17 hours after Donald Trump was shot and five hours before the men’s Euros final was due to kick off.
SBN takes place in Vauxhall in one of the rail arches across the road from MI6. For whatever reason – favourable rent and business rates, presumably – it is one of numerous icons of the gay libido located under a railway: see also Heaven, beneath Charing Cross, Lambeth’s three-decade-old sauna Pleasuredrome, and the toilets at Waterloo station.
The 550-person attendee figure SBN promises in its promotional materials is as much a fantasy as the sexual thirsts the event hopes to slake. But turnout was good: there were probably between 70 and 100 cruisers across the afternoon, many of them frighteningly well-sculpted and all of them, as advertised, stark bollock naked – until 5pm, when the ‘Nearly Bollock Naked’ portion of the afternoon kicked in, with visitors invited to change into jockstraps, singlets, Speedos and the like. In a lovely touch, one’s choice of poppers or Viagra were included in the £20 ticket fee. (Just as well it was an either/or choice: combining the two can be fatal.)
The venue that houses SBN, Union Vauxhall, is seven metres wide and 60 metres end-to-end. The tunnel is arranged analogously to a water column: after the changing room antechamber you emerge into a bar and dancefloor area where some light yet penetrates. But plunge further into the bathypelagic, high-vaulted sex sling room, and all that’s left to navigate by are the DJ booth lasers. By the time one reaches the darkroom, up some stairs at the end of the venue, all appears opaque and still – but the occasional grunt or whimper betrays that life among the geysers and trenches is abundant: you can practically taste the primordial organic matter on the air.
I do a disservice to SBN by referring to ‘the sex sling room’, by the way: there are in fact two, and unlike other venues which I’ve covered for this publication, I see both in use simultaneously.
SBN’s smoking area is located out front, on the Albert Embankment, cloistered away from the public eye by a pop-up gazebo ringed with plastic chairs. That gazebo, in turn, is surrounded by temporary fencing panels adorned with banners depicting shirtless, AI-generated hotties. But to make absolutely sure no tourists get an eyeful as they shuffle past toward the Tate Britain, SBN asks anyone heading outside to don one of a pile of ‘silk’ floral robes.
It was here, sat in communion with a dozen men all in the buff but for some flamboyant kimonos that could not be fastened shut, that I began asking what people wanted to see in the autumn budget.
