On Saturday, October 22, your favorite flame-haired adult industry journalist, the fearless Miss Lagsalot (that’’ me!), slapped on a magenta-feathered wig, got into a skimpy little outfit, grabbed some trusty friends to run cameras, grabbed two lucky San Franciscan ticket-winners (lucky and lecherous WHACK! readers Amanda Bansgopaul and Cary Kaufman, and headed into the great unknown of the first-ever Masquerotica soiree, an evening of costumed and carnal delights at the San Francisco Concourse Exhibition Center. The night was a sinful festival of sensual entertainment, with nine sexy stages featuring everything from electronica-fueled dance parties to leather men in go-go cages to zombie strippers to pole dancing contests to an altar to the sacred sexual. Like something out of all your grandmother’s most paranoid nightmares of sexual sin and drug-induced inhibitionless lasciviousness, Masquerotica was everything I could have hoped for.
Despite my years of sex-perience in the world of sinful parties, I must report that Masquerotica truly was something new and different. I’ve been to a lot of sexy parties — and a lot of sex parties — but I have never been to an erotic event so utterly enormous before. I ran into queer porn star James Darling entirely by accident after he’d performed in a bondage demonstration, was nearly
crushed by a massive pair of breasts in a towering latex fishtail ballgown, befriended a feisty faun named Thadius, and danced my ass off — almost literally — to the soulful sound of the Afrolicious All-Stars. I got drunk on the stairs of a huge pop dance party, met a Teletubby, almost got knocked on the head by Jesus’s cross, saw an alien breakdance invasion… in short, I was not un-entertained for even a second throughout the course of the night.
Let it be said that the night was a long and somewhat fuzzily-remembered affair for me — and, I assume, most of the other attendees — but the highlight, by a long shot, was Unkle Paul’s Dark Kabaret on the main stage. Not only was every person on the stage — including the all-male band — wearing a corset, but the entertainment followed a truly old-school cabaret program, featuring everything from scintillating burlesque in astoundingly beautiful, custom-made vinyl and corsets to world-class pole-dancing feats of strength to merpeople to… I don’t know how to describe this… metal music played on a xylophone using ping-pong balls launched from a male stripper’s mouth. I swear to god, that really happened. And a display of skill in bubble-blowing so mesmerizing I’m no wondering why every variety show doesn’t have one. Unkle Paul’s operates in and around San Francisco, entertaining the slightly-creepy masses there with jaw-dropping acts of exhibitionism and talent. I recommend it highly if you’re in the Bay Area.
In short, the takeaway message here is that the Masquerotica party itself was fantastic, entertaining, sexy, and stimulating, but the one piece of criticism I must, out of a desire to do good, offer is this: the Concourse Exhibition Center is entirely too large for this party. Even though tickets were sold out and there must have been hundreds of
people in the venue, the space was simply too large to be filled sufficiently with costumed revelers. And while it was fun to have some space on the dance floor and to be able to wiggle up to the front of any stage with ease, the unfortunate side-effect was a lack of cohesion among the attendees. I saw some truly astonishing sights, witnessed some excellent burlesque, and danced to some fantastic tunes, but even at the best of performances, the crowd seemed only able to muster up a lukewarm reaction. We were all too spaced out to whip ourselves into the kind of fanatical frenzy that this type of event should have inspired. I’d recommend to the Masquerotica organizers that next year they limit the space just a tad — maybe cut it back by a third and sell a hundred or two more tickets — next year for an even more successful night of overstimulation. A sexy party is far sexier when the guests are piled upon one another in a legally-acceptable and not-entirely-nude orgy of enjoyment and sensory exploration, which was nearly impossible this year. Since it was the event’s first-ever outing, however, hiccups are to be expected, and I would say without hesitation that this was one hiccup in a night of mostly fabulous breathing.
—Miss Lagsalot