A history of New York's hottest sex party for New York's hottest men....

The commercial sex industry was once a thriving part of New York, and a major attraction for both tourists and residents. And for a few years, Trouble was the hottest sex party in New York.

More or less stealing the name from a party in Miami, and adding the tag line, "Get off with NYC's hottest men," we took the plunge with an advertisement in H/X magazine, founded by Marc Berkley and Matthew Camp as a way to promote their nightclub events. That newsletter became a weekly magazine, the go-to resource to find out what was happening. With our listing and our ad, we knew our target audience of “in-shape, well-groomed men” would be aware of our existence. We used a series of illustrated images for the ads and, as we quickly added members to our mailing list, for invitations (which apparently became collectibles) that went out before each monthly event.

We also promoted our party in person, never short on invitations to distribute at porn theatres or sex clubs, on the piers in the summer, or even to hand out to hot guys we encountered on the street. A surprising number of those recipients showed up.

We chose Sundays at 8:00 as our regular time, once a month. We decided limiting the opportunities to every four weeks made the events something to plan for and look forward to, and the day and time offered a last-chance opportunity to get off that weekend, while allowing our members to get up on Monday (since many of them actually held down regular jobs). We closed the doors at 9:30, which was a successful way of guaranteeing a full house early on, though we also reopened the doors at midnight for late nite snacking.

Hundreds of horny men would attend each month, assuming they had what it took to gain entrance. We advertised our "strict, discretionary door policy," and this was one reason for our success. We understood that most men are someone’s type, and that the most beautiful are rarely the hottest sex, but a man who couldn’t be bothered to take care of his body or his appearance to some degree was not the right person for our party. We sometimes directed certain aspiring guests to nearby bear clubs where they might find happiness.

The primary objective of our velvet rope was to bar admission to the lurkers and gropers who, for those of us who were regular visitors to the theatres and clubs, were easy to spot as a type and, in some cases, individually known by sight. You can carry on all you want about fat-shaming and body fascism, but the economic fact of the matter was that, as with Studio 54, the thwarting of the masses was crucial to success. (We were actually sued in small claims court by a disgruntled would-be patron, whose case was laughed out of court because, while he may have suffered the indignity of being turned away, he had no monetary damages to claim.)

We otherwise had a diverse and very horny group, who became members by filling out an application that became the basis for our mailings. Membership allowed the guest a discount, and we knew that being greedy would be detrimental to success. We courted hot young guys, and for many of them, a high admission fee would deter their attendance. We also began taking note of particularly hot guys and offering them the opportunity to become part of our "A List," eligible for smaller, more exclusive parties at local hotels like the Paramount. These were more like private orgies than full-scale sex club events.

We also had several members who were granted free admission, either because they promoted our events among their friends and fuckbuddies, or because, as in the case of two boyfriends we referred to as “the Blonds,” we knew they would get the action going as soon as they got their clothes off. This duo, one a strapping muscle man and the other a hot little twink, more than earned their admission.

The cream of the New York crop did, in fact, attend. At our peak, we hosted over 600 men at one party, which followed a blizzard that kept everyone home Friday and Saturday. We feared the weather would kill our event and were overjoyed to see a crowd of hot men literally climbing over the banks of snow on the sidewalk to get to our door. Even our smallest event had 125 guests.

We welcomed well-known go-go boys, horny hookers in search of recreation, and a few porn stars, including Rick Bolton and, astonishingly, legendary superbottom Kevin Williams. We saw one of the owners of the biggest gay club in New York sitting on the ground sucking one cock after another. We once featured a special appearance by porn superstar Spike, who stroked his enormous cock before getting on his knees to service multiple members’ members, culminating in one of his explosive six-foot cumshots.

Our only financial failure was a chartered cruise. Not only was the weather uncooperative, but our licentious members were skeptical that they could get off on a boat. Indeed, those who attended found they could, and the crew of the boat (who had been forewarned) found themselves stepping over men fucking on the carpet.

Finding suitable spaces became the primary challenge for us.

Certainly, AIDS put a damper on some sex businesses, notably the St. Mark’s Baths, which was demonized by the press and by certain overzealous activists within the gay community. The naysayers neglected a few pertinent facts. First, HIV could just as easily be contracted in the privacy of one’s own bedroom. And, second, bath houses and sex parties became a crucial source of information and prevention. At Trouble, we made regular visits to GMHC for condoms and printed information for our members. The notion of peer pressure at porn theatres and sex clubs may have been instrumental in educating gay men and modifying behavior in a pre-PREP culture.

This meant nothing to closet case mayor Ed Koch. When activists criticized his poor response to the problem, he reacted in a typically vindictive manner by targeting the porn theatres most likely to be attended by activists, like the Jewel in the East Village. His successor, David Dinkins, had more serious issues to deal with and, by and large, after the first wave of closures occurred, gay sex continued apace in theatres and clubs and back rooms.

This was the heyday of Trouble.

We began our events at a large, two-story bar owned by an unusual woman named Haine, who was surrounded at all times by an oddball entourage. She had bought the building that had previously been Club Baths’ New York location. There was still a jacuzzi in the basement (filled with suspicious-looking water). We hung black fabric partitions, as we had witnessed the odd tendency of the best-looking men to seek out the darkest recesses of a space before they would get down to business. Haine took a percentage of our proceeds; while she rarely seemed concern about financial oversight, we were more or less honest.

Warned after some months that the bar was being sold, we located the ideal space, Zone DK in Chelsea (which was just becoming the primary gayborhood in Manhattan). Although it was a primarily heterosexual BDSM club, the owner was amenable to having us there once a month, and our deal allowed us to keep all the admissions while he kept the bar proceeds. This was our peak, as the space was large and perfectly set up for vetting of the arriving guests, checking their clothes, then setting them loose to screw their brains out. Having a bar and sound system was an asset.

That bar was a target for the Giuliani storm troopers in their attempts to eliminate any version of actual fun in New York. The antique laws they (mis)used forbade serving alcohol in close proximity to nudity. Originally designed to stymie strip clubs, the law was also used to shut down sex clubs and thus Zone DK was eventually no more.

We then relocated to the Hellfire Club on 14th Street. One of NYC’s celebrated DJ’s was a member who loved our parties and he volunteered to provide us with appropriate music free of charge. But now our space was smaller and, while members could BYOB, they preferred an actual bar. And, of course, the changes in the city brought an end to the Hellfire.

Sadly, at the height of our popularity, we had to suspend operations. The environment in New York had changed and it became impossible to find a location that would accommodate hundreds of men and allow them to strip down and suck and fuck for hours.

The death knell for Trouble, and for other clubs and parties, came in the form of “America’s Mayor,” a serial adulterer whose first wife was his own cousin and whose second wife kicked him out of the mayor’s mansion for having two mistresses. Before he became infamous for standing across the street from a dildo store, sweating and spitting and screeching about nonexistent voter fraud in 2020, and before he slithered around eastern Europe colluding to keep a grifter in the White House, Rudolph Giuliani decided to remake New York as a joyless sanctuary for the pseudo-suburbanites who helped elect him-- another Cleveland, but at San Francisco prices. Although, statistically, nightlife contributed more money to the local economy than sports and the arts combined, Giuliani employed archaic “cabaret laws” to prevent clubgoers from dancing. The city cracked down on any place simultaneously serving alcohol and allowing nudity. Noisy sidewalks interrupted the sleep of the yuppies who were increasingly gentrifying neighborhoods they had previously eschewed, clearing the way for gays and other creative types to develop them as meccas for living and playing. The nail in the coffin was Disneyfication.

Real estate became too valuable as “luxury” condos overran areas where discos and sex clubs had offered a delightful demi-monde experience till the wee hours. Art galleries and boutiques moved from Madison Avenue to the Meatpacking District, and Hello, Kitty replaced the sordid wonders of Times Square. Some of us failed to see how throngs of visitors from Bugtussle were an improvement over the zany locals on 42nd Street, when those visitors no longer were interested in having a unique New York experience but, instead, preferred to patronize the exact same retail outlets found in their local midwestern mall.

Giuliani’s successor, diminutive zillionaire Mike Bloomberg, pandered exclusively to corporate and real estate interests, declaring that “New York is a luxury good.” Like a Birkin bag or a Porsche, much of New York was now economically out of reach to the very people who had made it special.

And as we at Trouble found, all this luxury supplanted the spaces previously available for consenting, sybaritic adults to come together and cum together.

We explored a few other options, including a “private” club on the Lower East Side (which meant anyone attending was required to check their clothes after displaying their dicks at the door, on the assumption that cops could not disrobe or expose themselves) and Lou Maletta’s TV studio space. Maletta, the public access legend, had a regular sex club operating there, but was shut down for violating zoning rules by living in the commercial-only space. Neither location was deemed suitable for a party like ours.

Our final location was a disaster area in midtown. The site of a regular sex party targeting urban thugs and those who lust after them, this space was in an office building and had a few rooms plus a kitchenette. One room was devoted to checking attendees’ clothes, stored in file boxes. Unfortunately, the only restroom was a shared facility in the hall. The proprietor of the space was afraid any tenants working after hours would encounter naked men in the hallway, so if a guest needed to use the bathroom, he had two choices: to retrieve his clothes, get dressed, and go out to the hallway, or (and this is for real) to pee in a cup in the kitchen and dump the contents down the sink.

The lack of amenities (you know, like an accessible restroom) combined with the proprietor’s seeming resistance to the concept of efficient operations, as well as his insistence that his regular attendees would be granted automatic access despite our usually discretionary door policy, and the fact that they were precisely the kind of men our members preferred to avoid (a/k/a grabby trolls), the inhospitable facility doomed our party, and, with the writing on the wall, we suspended operations.

This website began as a means of promoting our parties, and as long as they were published, we continued to be listed in H/X and its competitor Next, and to receive emails with photos attached as evidence of suitability to attend.

But with venues impossible to locate, we have reconceived this site more as an archive of a glorious, bacchanalian past than as a promotion of an ongoing series of sordid soirées. While we know there are still a few self-proclaimed sex parties to be found, we have our standards. We view Trouble as part of the Golden Age, along with the sex club Prism and the depraved dungeons of far west 14th Street. When our usual parties attracted hundreds of men, not only does hosting a couple dozen guests lose its lustre, but it also is not economically sustainable.

We’ll leave the sad, small-scale “all body types welcome” events to the ultimately unfulfilling evenings at Paddles or in the outskirts of the outer boroughs. Our members were fabulous and so were we, and if we can’t do it right, we won’t do it at all.