I was once wedged into an elevator at the Marriott Marquis with someone holding a nylon bag roughly the size of a Great Dane. Eyeing it, I asked, “Collapsible sling?”
“Foldable Saint Andrew’s cross,” he smiled back.
“Ah!” (For those not up on 16th-century martyrdom, that’s the one shaped like an X.)
Just like for tech workers, real estate agents, or lobbyists, there are conventions for fetishists and leather daddies, all taking place in the very same corporate hotels. I was there for a kink gathering, as were hundreds of other guys in shiny latex and dog collars on leashes, black leather silhouetted by the same generic taupe and gray surroundings. That contrast never stops being funny—even, in its own way, hot.
I love seeing how everyone styles the same nondescript hotel furnishings to fit their customized needs: beds are flipped on their sides or wrapped in rubber, tubular equipment is assembled, curtains are redraped, and lots of LED bulbs are strategically placed in fixtures or snaking in coils on stands—room after room temporarily transformed into a living wet dream, only to be packed up and hauled away at the end of the weekend and repeated somewhere else. (“The endless metonymy of desire,” the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called it, but also, fuck him.)
What happens when the erotic imagination laps against the non-sexy stuff we live amongst?
For me, it’s like encountering imagination in its purest form: evidence that things can always be weirder and wilder than they appear, that our relationships with interiors are dizzyingly malleable, and that all kinds of activity can unfold in spaces that never envisioned them. Nothing about the Marriott Marquis seems conducive to fisting, and yet…
When considering decor for sexual fantasy, it is important to remember, as one dom recently told me, “You can be anywhere when you’re blindfolded.”
The axiom brings us to the somewhat contradictory intersection of design and desire. The problems of interior decoration must answer to different criteria when catering to the erotic imagination, which lies somewhere between the surface of the body and the depths of the mind. It’s more a question of what you “think” you see—and what you actually feel—the setup playing to an individual’s own fantasies, with the agility to change based on the players or the scene, which are themselves changing all the time.
The anonymity of a hotel room is perfect for this kind of experimental shape-shifting. But what happens when the erotic imagination laps against the non-sexy stuff we live amongst? At home, the pictures on the walls and books on the shelves inscribe an “identity” shored up by everything from rugs and sentimental tchotchkes to highly functional coffee makers and ceiling fans. Then again, sexy is a state of mind…
It’s the incredible permeability of the erotic imagination that interests me, bringing it in line with my feelings about art as a transformational force in the world. So I visited a handful of kinksters across Brooklyn who have created their own dungeons and sex spaces in their homes, to glimpse how they make room for the fantasy, setting their personal stages for ever-new scenes.
1. The Top Floor of a Large Apartment Building in Bushwick
A small landing at the top of a spiral staircase has been enclosed to create a tiny room that opens onto the roof. M. uses it every day as his home office, complete with a standing desk. It also does double duty as a guest bedroom with a hulking Murphy bed—where Mom stays when she visits. It triples as the site for rope bondage, with metal hardware punctuating the baseboards. A hole had to be cut into the ceiling and a laminated beam added to the building’s structure in order to install metal mounts capable of bearing the weight of the large hanging bamboo pole and a suspended human body. M.’s partner, T., a Brooklyn native and an engineer who works on construction sites, does the tying.
The floral wallpaper is a cream and sage pattern with rabbits and birds and curling vines; the dark wood furniture is mostly culled from estate sales and relatives’ homes. Rope bondage is highly aesthetic, guided in part by the elegance of each line and knot, how the lengths of rope are used in their entirety, or else their excesses hidden. When T. photographs his ties, curtains are pulled along a track that circles the perimeter in alternating black or white fabric to mask the wallpaper, windows, et cetera. He’s found that “art looks good on white; porn looks good on black.” The curtains separate the scene visually from the room’s multifunctional domestic touches and physically intensify the experience of bondage. “It’s just different from being blindfolded—being in a space where you can’t see anything.”
2. A Duplex on the Other Side of Bushwick
The ground-floor apartment connects with a partly subterranean garden-level space that has been fully transformed into a secret dungeon. (Allegedly, the other six units don’t know about it.) C.J.—a former menswear designer from Dallas—constructed the space around the narrative of the fallen angel. “I love the contrast of two opposing elements,” he says, referring to remnants of a Catholic upbringing, fetish ritual, and a touch of goth. The walls and furniture are either matte black or silver metal with the exception of the high-sheen latex curtains snaking across a wall and one corner. The slightly dimpled surface scatters the light with bouncing folds; panels of it can be pulled back to reveal a small sunken patio outside and several mirrors. The recessed lights in the ceiling are usually kept blood-red. He has a nine-hour playlist labeled “SENSUAL MUSIC TO FUCK HIM.”
A serious researcher with an exacting eye for detail, C.J. uses some equipment that is prefab (the metal sling), while other pieces are carefully sourced: “I had to get the human-sized dog cage in Lithuania because I wanted openings for the head and hands here and here,” he says, gesturing to the top and side. The glory of the room is a wardrobe-like structure of his own design dubbed the “breeding wall,” a multifunctional plywood box with padded openings. Inside, you can either lie on your back, ass and ankles sticking out, or have your entire lower body on the outside of the box, ready to be hooked to a grid of D-rings. It’s painted black, with the screws, joints, and rough plywood texture still visible. He instructed his carpenter to “make it look like I’m a sicko and I made it myself.”
3. The Partially Unfinished Basement of a Brownstone in Bed-Stuy
Stone walls with exposed PVC pipes periodically trickle and rush with the sounds of water. The ceilings are low, just over six feet, and foam tiles cover the dirt floor that slants slightly upward toward the back wall. D. is an especially handy and visual person, a designer specializing in product and display who studied sculpture in art school. “What is a basement for? Storage and hobbies—and my hobby is sex.”
He started envisioning this as a sex space when he moved in with his husband in 2021: “Why not have kinky sex in a kinky room instead of the bed you sleep in all the time?” Flat cutouts of green-and-white-painted Corinthian columns he made for their wedding ceremony are propped around for a touch of drama. D. built a lot of the intentionally rough furniture himself: the low platform bed with multiple hooks on the sides for restraints and an overhead metal spreader bar; the A-frame “fuck bench”—a low sawhorse with padded red vinyl across the top and low matching cross beams along the bottom.
A glossy red tool chest filled with sex toys sits in front of a red-and-black weight bench, with dumbbells resting nearby. (The space also doubles as their home gym—D. claims it makes working out feel hotter.) Narrow horizontal mirrors track sight lines around the square room at genital height, like ribbon windows in a house by Le Corbusier. They catch soft reflections in dim red lights—the muted gleam of the stone, the vinyl, the metal, the skin. Even with a box fan, the air just hangs there, an atmosphere.
4. A Sunny Fifth-Floor Condo on the Border of Prospect Heights
Floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides of the main space open onto the kitchen. As a day job, T. runs tech services for a finance corporation. He is also a well-known rope artist and kink photographer. For his scenes, the couch is usually moved out of the room into the foyer, and gray foam tiles are laid across the floor. A display of collars, ball gags, restraints, and hoods is always on view behind the television, while an assortment of dildos and chastity cages lives on display in the bathroom. To get the proper focal length, the rigging and anchors—which are drilled right into the concrete ceiling—are at an angle facing the opposite corner.
During the day, and especially while photographing or tying, the shades are drawn as much for privacy as to help cut the heat—the fan is essential, especially in the summer. A strip of Velcro runs along the edge of the ceiling for attaching more curtains, creating a black fabric room within a room that visually isolates the figure, as though it is dangling in outer space. The experience is a claustrophobic emptiness, the psychic extension of the erotics of physical constraint. These curtains also screen out domestic life: a marble-topped kitchen island with a grocery store orchid, an electric kettle, and a blue plastic pitcher that glows in the sun.
High on the wall, in the corner over the refrigerator, are two identical, inexpensive black-and-white clocks, synchronized—a homemade bootleg of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s conceptual sculpture “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers), 1987–90. That artwork, and the freedom to make and remake it for oneself, unites the creative possibilities of both kinky sex and great art. Our imagination will find a way to evade strictures and normalcy, to find freedom even within constraint, appearing, connecting, and shifting for moments at a time.
in your life?
