So for my 31st birthday I decided I wanted to set up a queer key party. I spent months setting up food, trying cocktails, getting the right vintage clothes, picking music, choosing the people, figuring out the dynamics... 

...and spent the evening having panic attacks and throwing up. I eventually was able to manage to crawl into the living room to make snarky comments about 70s porn, but that took several hours and most people had already either started fucking or left by then.

I learned something, though. I learned that yes, as I get older big sex parties are no longer sources of pleasure for me, but places of fear and sadness and microaggressions. I keep trying, thinking maybe this outfit, maybe I just need to be more open and friendly... but it doesn't make much of a difference.  They're just not spaces I feel safe, anymore, even when they're made specifically for me.

I feel a bit of loss, saying that out loud. I mean, I've suspected it for a while, but I thought it was a funk I'd escape. Instead each time is like reopening a wound, and rather than it healing, it's just getting infected. I am not as naive as I once was, back when I enjoyed feeling like submissive meat thrown to hungry wolves. Now that feeling leaves me tense and frustrated, suspicious and uncertain.

It's time to just walk away. And yet there's still something about that group dynamic that I crave. Honestly, it all goes back to wanting not to be last picked for the team... a very real terror that I'll be the one person at the sex party sitting on the sidelines. It doesn't matter that I'm 31, and should be old enough by now to let that roll off my back. I still want to be wanted.

There were a lot of complications around the key party, one main one being my inability to hold my shit together to move things along. There's also going to be issues when some people at the party are a Kinsey 6, limiting their options. And of course if, in your anxiety, you drink too much, which is common, you're going to have a pretty shit time. Bless my lovers, who managed to salvage the evening for many of the guests and who took incredible care of me.

I realized that the moment I was happiest about was sitting around playing Scrabble, or drinking wine, with my sweeties around me laughing and getting along. That's what I want, now, more than threesomes and moresomes, at least most of the time! I just wish it didn't feel like I can't have the group sex my lovers can, like I'm undesirable and in the way. Or worse, that I'm holding them back.

So, no more key parties for me. I'll stick to one on one sex, at least for now.