The man standing in front of me on the dance floor of the sprawling 24-hour queer sex club was wearing nothing but flip-flops and a white towel wrapped around his waist. He looked 40s-ish, a little chubby, a few inches shorter than me in my platform Crocs. He was cis and straightseeming, with a short, conservative haircut and neatly trimmed mustache that gave “boring cybersecurity analyst,” although his presence at a trans-centric noise show in a queer sex club—as well as the tall, beautiful woman beside him, also wearing only a towel—made me wonder how boring he really was.

I was fully clothed, or close to it, but my girlfriend had my tight black stretch miniskirt pulled up almost to my waist as I ground my ass into her crotch, and my tits were starting to work their way out of my corset top. An artist I’d never heard before named wOOdy was playing a live set of transcendent, clubby breakcore that constantly modulated between complex time signatures like a race-car driver shifting through a series of tight, hilly curves. But behind the fractal rhythms there was a steady bounce that you could shake ass to, so we were. All around us, topless neurodivergent trans puppygirls leaned into the chaos, twitching around in arrhythmic ecstasy.