A scenario about intimacy, community, mortality, and kink, set in the gay men’s leather scene during the 80s AIDS crisis. Players use embodied meta-techniques to stand in for BDSM play, experiencing first-hand the sensations and emotions their characters do.

Long Description

"I walked in there and I was absolutely terrified because everyone was in leather, head to toe. And I was the only one who was wearing Levis and a regular shirt. []…I was terrified, visually, at what I was seeing, excited at the same time–tremendously excited…"

How to Touch in an Epidemic is a larp about intimacy and community connection through kink, set in the underground gay men’s leather scene in the 1980s under the shadow of the AIDS epidemic.

When your most-familiar forms of sexual expression have become dangerous, alienating, unfamiliar can you learn to share your heart’s deepest fears and desires? At this bar the music’s pulsing beat and the burning heat of other men’s bodies call to you. Beautiful boy, when the clock strikes midnight are you going hard or going home?

In this larp players use a variety of embodied meta-techniques to stand in for BDSM play, experiencing first-hand the sensations and emotions their characters do. Play is an emotional mix of discovery and anxiety as characters decide how to re-enter BDSM while forsaking the exchange of body fluids.

You might like this larp if:

• You are open to a sandbox game experience themed around kink, relationships, and community.
• You interested in queer history, leather subculture, or the AIDS crisis.
• You enjoy other kinds of improvised sensory play such as fidget toys, contact improv, interplay, etc.
• You are intrigued by Crossroads Space Station Swingers Club or Carnival of Glories, the leading mechanical inspirations for this larp.

Story

It’s the mid-1980s, and the gay leather club Inferno is preparing to re-open after some time shuttered by public health authorities. Tonight has a hopeful tone, though – bar staff and volunteers have put in a lot of work to reopen both Inferno’s bar and The Pit, the hottest, sweatiest, most free and wild zone of the club, and the ribbon will be cut in a few hours time. New to the club is an added awareness of the safety needs brought up by the AIDS epidemic. Leathermen arrive tentatively, awkwardly, and hopefully to figure out the future of The Pit together.

Characters range from old hands in the leather scene, earnest and socially messy community organizers, baby gays working up the nerve to enter the club for the first time. Play begins during the event setup “technically the party has started, but no one is ever on time” phase of the night, and ends as the club finally begins to draw a crowd.

As the space opens, early birds are encouraged to practice their rusty BDSM skills with one another to warm up the space. The middle of the scenario is largely unstructured cruising and playtime, though pausing for a poignant toast to remember the dead. Players can freely visit different parts of the club marked such as the bar, bathroom, cruising maze, or dance floor.

The larp ends just before a crush of new patrons arrive, when staff make a dramatic showing of opening The Pit, a dedicated playspace in the basement of the club. During the final song players decide where their character chooses to end their night now and in the future: will they go home alone, leave with one or a few, find solace socializing at the bar, or descend into the crowded heat and complex intimacy of The Pit?

Techniques

This larp offers players a party experience with negotiation, gossip, and feelings that players act out. For the party’s kink and cruising, real activities are all replaced with abstract techniques to invoke similar feelings. Techniques use experiences like engrossing sensations, intentional vulnerability, or trust-building to gesture at what they represent. The techniques are abstract rather than representative so players can feel like manly, sexy leathermen regardless of their relationship to masculinity or sex in real life.

To support the themes of discovery and communication in this scenario, each player learns only a few of the kink replacement techniques thoroughly. In order to experience the rest of the kink techniques, they have to find someone to teach it to them during play, in character. Furthermore, we invite players to let their personal reaction about any technique bleed into their character’s opinion of the kink. If a player tries a technique and dislikes it, their character might decide it’s not for them any more. Conversely, a character might be surprised by a new kinky interest, simply because the player finds the technique fun.

Here are some things represented by techniques: pain play, restraint, power exchange, bootblacking, sex, and more. Players will learn a constellation of techniques based around ars amandi, a technique that focuses on touch between hands and arms, with variations to represent different behaviors. As examples: self touch as masturbation, sensual ribbon on hands and arms for restraint, gentle squeezing pressure on hands for pain play, and signaling condoms use by wearing gloves. Having one underlying framework for the techniques supports our goal that they be easy to learn so players can teach them to one another during play.

Calibration and Consent Tools

Before the in-character portions of the workshop we take out of character time to help participants set default touch boundaries, practice negotiation, and try out cruising so that players have a shared vocabulary of in-character non-verbal signals to opt in or out. The workshop’s intention is to provide players with tools and scripts to use as they flirt and negotiate encounters.

Following play, we will debrief our experiences and shed the roles we assumed for the game. The debrief is encouraged, but not required.

Costuming

A white t shirt, jeans, and whatever boots you already own was considered spot-on leather bar wardrobe at the time. Since this event is held in a public building, keep any costuming street-legal. Don't worry about flagging with your costume, the bar owners have asked patrons to avoid flagging in order to encourage more mixing at this newbie-oriented night.

Other Information

Who is this larp for?

In this larp people of all genders, sexualities, and bodies are invited to act butch and be handsome. Furthermore, it’s open for people who have only experienced pop culture depictions of BDSM. It’s open for ace or aro people who are up for playing in a story where many characters are pursuing sex or romance.

Why Make a larp about the AIDS Crisis?

As two sex educators we want to offer players an experience of empathy for a formative moment in the sexual, cultural, political history of the US. We think that the interactive art of roleplaying can do just that. We ourselves have been deeply moved by some artistic depictions of the AIDS Crisis such as Just a Little Lovin’, I Say a Little Prayer, Angels in America), and more.

Even if we write an excellent larp it will fail to adequately and accurately express the spirit of the leather community during the AIDS crisis, because it is just one work of art. As a work, it cannot represent the whole of anything, least of all these complex issues of identity and history. This larp is one statement, one position on the setting material actively co-created by the designers, organizers, and players. We all benefit when more people release creative work addressing this subject matter.

Origin

This scenario premieres at The Smoke in January 2026. At The Smoke and elsewhere this larp is known as Cruising for Sex in a Burning Building, the title is different for Intercon to avoid what could be mistaken for an allusion to the 2003 Station nightclub fire in West Warwick, RI.

Photo Credits

Photographs by Another Believer and Omar Al-Ghosson