to casual and meetups that are sexually explicit especially prominent right here within the Bay region where underground sites of gloryholes and fetish groups work as a type of shadow market towards the more formal online dating sites scene. A cavernous room filled with dozens of couples in bondage gear, the women moaning in ecstasy as older men had at them with paddles, whips, and assorted accoutrement too medieval for my own, comparatively vanilla, sexual practices out with some friends at a karaoke bar in downtown San Francisco one night, I stumbled down a long hallway, climbed some dark, circuitous staircase and parted a set of red velvet curtains—it’s almost too Freudian to make up—to discover beyond the curtains.