I don't know whose idea it was to put an old British telephone booth in the middle of the sex party, but we decided to fuck in it.

We stepped inside and closed the door, taking a moment to look around at the scene around us before we put it to good use.

Through the small rectangular panes of the phone booth, 180 degrees of latex and leather-clad people filled our vision, fucking and whipping and struggling in ecstasy against homemade restraints. Pulsing electro and dim blue-violet lights added cinema to the scene; made things move in dreamlike slow motion.

To our right, a pile of women with short hair and liberally pierced faces writhed naked on a couch, the audible buzzing of the toys they brought fading in and out with the rising swell of their moans. Center-field, a large woman was captured in a stockade, her skirt pushed up all the way to her shoulders to reveal an expanse of milky white skin that rippled with red splashes as it endured her master's whips. All the way to the left, a petite woman dangled horizontally from a series of hooks in the rafters, bound to the neck in shibari knots. Mid-suspension, she reached her long neck backwards to kiss a woman in a tight-fitting leather bodice as a lumber-esque man with an imposing beard and a metallic chest plate served her body with a thin, electrolyzed wand that made her quiver with the delicious confusion of pleasure and pain. A man with tits and angel wings strutted by.

This was Fixation, a play party held specifically in honor of L.A.'s kinky queer community.

We — my boyfriend of six years and I — were not card-carrying members of this demographic.

We were a comparatively vanilla, heterosexual couple in a monogamous relationship with a lifespan that predated the existence of Tinder.

They were a tight-knit community of BDSM-phillic gay, bi, poly and trans Los Angelenos who did this sort of thing often enough to come prepared with actual outfits.

We'd never seen live fisting.

They were lining up to pussy-punch.

We were Sally.

They were Siohban.

Resultingly, there was mutual respect, but not mutual attraction between us. As I peeled my boyfriend's blue jeans and unimposing cotton t-shirt off in the phone booth, the lack of an interested crowd confirmed definitively that we were not who they were there to see.

… And they were definitively not who we'd have have hand-picked to watch us fuck in public. For their own good, of course — subjecting these fine people to our somewhat straight-edge sexuality felt wrong, like forcing your friend who hates scary movies to watch Paranormal Activity on a silent night in an abandoned cabin.

Yet, there we were.

Us and them.

And, to our surprise, a curious symbiosis was forming.

Despite our blatant intrusion of their space, they accepted our drab abnormality with body language that read something like "Welcome, newbs."

Friendly smiles and looks of encouragement from people with completely different motives for being there glittered at us out of the crowd. We smiled back — mutual acknowledgment. 

I see what you're doing in that booth … good on you.

I see what you're doing in that latex mask … nice.

They could tell we were new here. We could tell we were in good company.

Emboldened by acceptance of group of people we didn't initially fit into, a strange electricity built between my boyfriend and I. The sheer novelty of people we weren't used to and the sight of sex we'd never seen did something different to our bodies we hadn't experienced in a long time. A familiarly unfamiliar species of arousal took over; the incomparable rush you only get from doing something new and risky. My hands felt static and tingly on his body. His kisses felt like a surge. Our bodies were magnetic and synchronized in a way they'd only been in the beginning of "us" — when every kiss felt like falling and every raking pull of fingernails on flesh made the rest of the world dissolve.

I got down on my knees and looked up at him, our eyes locking with the devious exhilaration of what we were about to do.

After we finished, an unexpected sense of relaxation and inner calm pervaded me. I had always wanted to do that. We had always wanted to do that.

Satisfaction. I'd never felt it so completely. It was radiant and encompassing. One of my eyes squished out a happy tear, although no one saw because I quickly absorbed it with my sweater.

We performed the requisite sanitization of the booth and took a tour around the party, curious about how other people's various scenes and scenarios had developed and whether their fulfillment matched ours.

We found a man whose wrists were fastened to a large metal grate by well-worn leather handcuffs. An older woman wearing a cherry red corset sucked him off, causing him to moan and squirm in delight. She told him to shut his pretty mouth if he knew what was good for him and he looked at us with playful bemusement as we passed by. He'd seen us in the booth, now we were seeing him.

In another room — much more brightly lit than the others — a group of women simulated a medical scene. The game was gynecology. A side table bearing a speculum and a Hitachi wand waited for the patient to be subdued. We caught her eye as her friends placed her legs in stirrups and told her the doctor would be in shortly. She was glowing with the satiation of fantasy. She was visibly and undeniably complete.

This effect continued to build as we continued our patrol. The more couples and groups and scenes we came across, the happier people seemed to be. By this time, the energy of the party had lightened considerably, buoyed by the elation of sexual self-expression. All around us, people were being fisted and whipped and face-fucked and pissed on, but they were doing it so damn gleefully, and with such tangible pride and gratification, that it was impossible not to smile. We were overcome with a feeling of congratulatory empathy for the people we'd initially felt so different from — we'd gotten what we wanted, now they were getting what they wanted. We might have looked different, and we certainly fucked differently, but we weren't really different after all.

For the first time, what my boyfriend and I were experiencing was a wordless mutual understanding of people whose lifestyles and expressions of sexuality differed from our own. Although we'd done it in disparate ways, all of us at the party — kinky, vanilla, queer, straight, costumed or dressed for the coffee shop — had found a safe place to fulfill our fantasies, and in that there was unity, gratitude and acceptance.

We left still tangled in the ecstatic energy of the evening, half because we'd just lived out one of our own fantasies, and half because we'd been witnesses to such happy, safe and fulfilling sexual expression for others.

In the days after, the effect lasted. We fucked constantly. We were doe-eyed and gooey with each other. I couldn't wait to see him after he left for work. Our communication improved. Talking about what happened and what we saw brought us closer.

That part's not surprising — that's just what novelty and the pushing of one's own boundaries does. In fact, that's what kinky sex has been shown to do. It's nothing more than the boost of dopamine and oxytocin you get from doing something new. These are all tiny miracles for a couple who's been together for as long as him and I have.

But to me, it's felt like more than that. It's felt like understanding, and that's not a result I expected from a party where people whip each other's assholes … especially since neither my boyfriend or I are naturally into that. That's the bigger miracle here — that both of us, as vanilla-ish, monogamous straight people — could find so much arousal and satisfaction from a situation and people that we aren't normally attracted to; that we could find a way to overcome the challenge of non-routine and put ourselves outside our comfort zones for such a fulfilling result.

Before Fixation, I intellectually — and sort of distantly — understood that doing things like that can bring you closer and infuse new life into your relationship, but it wasn't until after that I understood how or why.

I think it's that the mutual sight of fantasy in a public space— like at a play party — creates such fulfillment via the underrated magic of acknowledgement. No matter who you are, or what you're into, simply being seen for the species of sexual person you are is validating, and that very public, community-based validation of your true nature makes you feel so fucking confident. You walk out of there on cloud nine because for a moment, you were who you really are, and a handful of like minded people saw it happen. They proved you exist how you want to exist. And you proved to yourself that you're capable of finding satisfaction in other people's arousal, something that's empowering because it expands your capabilities and scope as a sexual being. You don't have to know who they are or see them again for that effect to last.

If that's not an argument to drag our partner out of the cozy bubble of routine you share and do something different, then shit — nothing is.