No One Was Getting Handsy at the Feeld Magazine Party

Partygoers getting their fucking magazines. Photo: Chanel Moye

It’s a little after 8 p.m. Wednesday night, and a long line has already formed outside of Public Records in Gowanus. I get my wristband and head down the stone path to an outdoor patio tinged with pink accents, where I catch my first glimpse of the decor. “PUSSY IN THE FACE,” reads one fluorescent poster. “COCK IN THE ASS.”

Tonight, the popular alternative dating app Feeld debuts its very own lit mag, called A Fucking Magazine (or AFM for short). The app, which launched in 2014 to help facilitate threesomes, has since evolved into the go-to for people interested in alternative connections, from polyamory to kink and even celibacy. In other words, it’s the last bastion of actually fun sex. The app got an elegant rebrand as a space for “self-discovery” as opposed to a thing you endlessly swipe through and eventually delete. And like so many brands before it — Hinge released a zine called “No Ordinary Love” in August — the app is now angling for prestige with its own publication. Co-edited by former Hairpin editor Haley Mlotek and longtime Feeld employee Maria Dimitrova, who already created a London-based lit mag for Feeld back in 2018 called Mal, the issue is stacked with contributions from Feeld users and heavyweights like Daphne Merkin, Rejection author Tony Tulathimutte, and New York Magazine’s own Allison P. Davis. There’s a guide to making your own latex, a short story about a woman who fantasizes about breaking up with her lover by throwing the strap-on he got her for Christmas into the ocean, a personal essay about a sexual awakening in Palm Springs, and a philosophical meditation on houses. The issue has some poignant moments and beautiful writing, but it can also feel overly broad and abstract, even a little safe. There are tasteful ass shots but few fucks and fewer orgasms; in one poem, even the cheeseboard the narrator prepares “forever goes untouched.” Flipping through, it’s hard to find the mystique and pleasure of the app. It’s hard to make sex feel sexy on the page — maybe even harder to make it feel sexy at a branded event.

In the dim, club-like lighting of the downstairs bar, a DJ plays monotonous beats as a mix of media people, Feeld users, and miscellaneous PR invitees stand around awkwardly, yoked to their phones and free drinks. “The girls and the gays have come out,” a woman at the bar whispers to her friend. Meanwhile, my friend tells me she feels like a Sim: “I feel like we’re in a simulation,” she says, looking around suspiciously. “We’ve been put here, we don’t know what to do or who’s pulling the strings.” Though the magazine’s cover star, Juliana Huxtable, is set to perform a DJ set later, there aren’t any readings, and the event feels pretty freeform. Feeld has clearly spent a lot of money on this party: Tickets were free, and out on the patio, a woman in a pink hat mans a Pepto-Bismol-colored newsstand and doles out free issues packed in thick, soft pink totes. She encourages guests to take the complimentary fuchsia fortune cookies. “You will receive an orgasm from an unexpected source,” a colleague’s reads. The condoms and pregnancy tests, we are told, are just for display. (Though some guests pocketed them anyway.)

Totes, magazines, condoms, and pregnancy tests. Photo: Chanel Moye

But no one’s getting pregnant here; there’s hardly any flirting. “We’ve gone to Feeld mixers before,” a 28-year-old IT worker tells me. She’s been using Feeld for a year and has come out with her friend, a 27-year-old who works in advertising, who also swears by it. Past events, they say, are usually more casual and sapphic; this is much swankier. “Usually people aren’t dressed as nice,” the IT worker says into the sea of tight black outfits. Are they excited to read the magazine? They nod; like most people here, neither has a magazine on hand.

While most attendees mingle downstairs, contributors and literary bigwigs hung out together in the invite-only lounge on the second floor, where waiters served little arancini and crab cakes. I hear a rumor an orgy is happening here, but it’s mostly just a throng of millennials drinking wine. (Woody Allen and Soon-Yi reportedly attended a party for contributors that Daphne Merkin hosted at her Upper East Side home the night before — and where I’m told Allen was studiously avoided — but they don’t seem to be at this party.) Jia Tolentino and Doreen St. Félix are in the lounge. Juliana Huxtable is deep in conversation with a Best Buy bag in her hand. One table over, the director James Ivory sips a martini under the shade of a large floor plant. When the arancini comes around, Tulathimutte turns it down. “I’m trying to get over the scarcity mindset of hors d’oeuvres,” he tells me.

Back downstairs, people are now slightly more buzzed but still largely sedentary. At the bar, a married couple greets me; they’ve been on Feeld for over a year and had nothing to do on a Wednesday, so they schlepped over from Staten Island. It’s their first Feeld event and their first literary party. She’s a product manager for a finance company; her husband, while gingerly stroking her thigh, tells me he’s a mortician. “Someone’s gotta do it,” she tells me. We all swap pizza recommendations.

The music shifts from beats to Nicki Minaj’s “Chun-Li,” and a handful of guests start dancing up on the pillars, but once they get good shots on their phones even that dies out. I park myself at a candlelit table where a mid-30s-ish musician with multiple brow piercings flips through AFM in silence. He’s a diehard lover of print and used to attend more literary- and fashion-magazine parties before the pandemic. This is his first return to the scene. “People don’t read anymore,” he sighs. “People scroll on their phones.” He looks down at the issue. It’s “a lot of content,” he says. I ask him if he, too, is on Feeld. “What’s that?” he asks.

It’s my cue to Irish exit. Outside on the patio, I run into a couple who are here on their second date. They’ve only known each other since a first date the night before at Jimmy’s Corner, a Times Square bar where you can still get a $3 drink. Both of them have been on Feeld in the past: The woman says she “got what she wanted” from it — a few trysts with an older couple. The man looked for MFF scenarios that never materialized. Their date went so well that he decided to invite her to the “Feeld Party,” then worried that sounded like he was inviting her to an orgy. “It’s a Feeld magazine party,” he clarified. But neither of them are on the app anymore, anyway. They met on Hinge.