On a Friday evening in mid-July, the West Coast literati convened in the most erogenous zone of Los Angeles: the co-ed swimming pool at Spa Palace. We were in Koreatown for Substack’s Night of Desire, the first Angeleno iteration of a series of zany events sponsored by the platform (among them: a similar reading in a Wall Street bathhouse in New York City and a highly subscribed anonymous confessional in a Manhattan church). Under the effervescent guidance of Substack’s Writer Relations Producer, Matt Starr, and Head of Writer Relations Sophia Efthimiatou, a throng of bodies, clad in swimwear, clutching paletas and beer, crowded into disparate hot tubs and made pleasant conversation. Eventually, bare thighs scraped into the concrete around the perimeter of an icy pool, and we congressed around the purveyors of desire for the evening: Holly Solem, Viv Chen, Brandon Kyle Goodman, Mina Le, Liz Plank, and Paige Elkington.

It is a herculean task to persuade three hundred people in Los Angeles to attend anything. The risk-reward factor here is weighted differently than our sister cities, what with the metropolitan sprawl and the laissez-faire attitude towards, well, every part of the day-to-day. People in Los Angeles tend to want different things than the rest of the world. Actually, people in Los Angeles want differently: it’s a topic that’s been exhausted for as long as the city’s been erect, and more often than not, the general consensus is that Los Angeles is teeming with sex but not that great at having it. For all the wantonness in the city, there seems, at times, to be a latency between our interest and our willingness to participate. 

Under the right conditions though, people (hundreds of them), will jump at the opportunity to discuss, or listen to other people discuss, desire. For any member of the in-the-know literate public of Los Angeles, there is no night more worthy of maneuvering rush hour traffic and descending stairs into a subterranean spa chamber than one spent clutching a seltzer in a hot bath, listening to the most interesting people in Los Angeles talking about things they want, and letting Cobra Snake photograph you while doing so.

When listening to, say, Brandon Kyle Goodman, as they describe in graphic and poetic detail the religious experience of their first asshole (bussy) sugaring, there’s this self reflexive impulse that occurs: to hear about someone else’s body makes you suddenly, acutely aware of your own. It’s an intimacy unlike any other, a relationship more meaningful than one between a speechwriter and an audience member. You’re sitting respectfully still, your feet are dangling in a cold pool, your Maslowian needs for good company and great ice cream are met, and the reader at the helm of the bathhouse on the mic is suddenly governing the way you feel inside your own body. Brandon Kyle Goodman’s bussy has now completely overtaken your own bussy. Mina Le is speaking about the beauty of Audrey Hepburn’s neck, her coveting of that neck, her late-night evaluation of the necks of celebrities against her own, and suddenly you can’t feel the cold pool, you’re just feeling your neck, the way your neck is craned to face Mina, the small aches at the top of the back as your spine contorts to watch other people rub their own necks, subconsciously.

So, on this Friday night in a dim, wet basement of Los Angeles, a rapt crowd underwent a guided meditation through the landscapes of their own desires, gently led by the rhapsodic narratives of our leaders. Holly Solem guided us through a first sober date in Tennessee and we wanted, so badly, the story to end with his tongue down her throat. Liz Plank, and by extension, her bewitched audience, used HR speak on a recent ex. Viv Chen talked about reincarnation as a crow for her trinket addition, and I found myself pocketing a “WET FOR SUBSTACK” sticker even though I normally despise collectibles. Paige Elkington fucked her celebrity crush, and, suddenly I found myself recalling the exact shapes of my own celebrity one night stand’s back tatttoos. It’s an erotic feeling, listening to a stranger and feeling your own body fit into the contours of their logic. This is of course amplified by being nearly naked in a bathhouse.

In the end, are our desires really so different? Is eroticism not a sudden recollection of one’s own body, a sharp reminder of one’s own grotesque humanity? I don’t think Los Angeles is sexless, and I’m even less convinced of such after spending a good chunk of a summer evening immersed in the cravings of my favorite writers. It feels nice to know you’re human. As Goodman so cleverly pointed out on that evening, AI can make facsimiles of our greatest literature; it can write a script, or a book, or produce a logical examination of sex in the city, but it can’t sit in Spa Palace and listen to someone read about their desires and realize how much it desires that thing, too. And it can’t get its bussy sugared.