Words by Fopé Ajanaku
Design by Yosef Phelan

Despite having the supposedly voracious appetite of a gay man, I’m not actually a gay man. But I’m no stranger to having sex with strangers in a badly lit room. I’ve sucked and fucked in enough of them to have a fairly informed opinion. My naked thigh has been pressed against a strangers sweaty naked back while I made out with someone else, and the euphoria that coursed through my veins was better than any of the dodgy drugs running rampant in the Hackney marshes. I’ve even gone back after the night was over, with the lights on, to help my best friend find his phone. The darkroom, it turns out, is significantly less sexy when you can see the walls in daylight.

So I reckon I’ve got enough experience to ask some questions about the state of darkrooms in the UK right now. Like, who are they for? What is the etiquette? And most importantly, can they be dark and ‘woke?’

There comes a point in every young queer person’s life when one must simply Google things, but I shall do it here for you. A darkroom is a designated, usually dimly or completely unlit space within a club, bar or sex-positive event where people can have anonymous sexual encounters. Cruising has long offered queer people a way of finding each other outside the structures designed to keep us apart. There can be safety in anonymity, particularly for gay men whose sexual lives have historically been policed, criminalised and exposed.

A gay man with a “real passion for penis on a night out” tells me that darkrooms are spaces where he feels safe to “completely let yourself go feral.” He continues: “I love being a slut in the club. It’s almost exactly what you’re conditioned to believe the worst version of gay culture is: drugs, orgies and sucking dicks in the dark. And I think a part of me likes that. The filth, the sounds, the stereotype. I’m also a married corporate gay, so the darkroom is a tiny break from being the good gay every day.”

“I love being a slut in the club. It’s almost exactly what you’re conditioned to believe the worst version of gay culture is: drugs, orgies and sucking dicks in the dark. And I think a part of me likes that. The filth, the sounds, the stereotype."