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There will be nudity, the workshop’s online description makes clear. Also touching—consensual, of course. And there will be information designed to enhance not only human pleasure, but connection. A sensual seminar with soulful intent.
Not surprisingly, the workshop billed as “Oral Grad School” is among the most buzzed about at the first ever Bliss Boogie festival, three days of music and interactive classes on everything from yoga and inner peace to the erotic uses of ropes, paddles, and kitchen utensils. All snuggled down a dirt lane in the swaying woods of a private campground in Chatham County.
As a thumping dance band wraps up its concert on the event’s second night, smiling seekers stream into the 2,000 square foot tent for said master’s workshop. It’s unseasonably shivery for April, but these revelers tend to run hot.
“Can you imagine a sex-positive event like this happening here 10 years ago?,” marvels volunteer Chris Holt, 46, of Durham. “Or not even 10 years?”
By most reckonings, North Carolina has never seen anything quite like the Bliss Boogie. It may never again, depending on how the debut fares. While sex-positive events and kink happenings—think bondage, polyamory, etc.—are available in most major metros, they generally are not as carefully curated, publicized, or accessible to lay people as this one was meant to be.
Organizers have arranged for glamping tents, food trucks and vendors hawking flowing frocks, charms, and adult toys. They’ve set up guardrails (like forbidding alcohol) to ensure a safe, supportive zone for exploring. And they’ve booked 45 workshop leaders, some jetting in from the West Coast.
With its mix of fresh air, consciousness-raising, and pleasure-seeking, the festival feels like a burst of California sunshine peeking over Cackalacky’s horizon.
Into the tent sweeps Reid Mihalko, Oral Grad School’s instructor, outfitted in Care Bears boxers and fur boots. The Oregon-based relationship counselor, presenter, and vlogger completes his distinctly non-professorial look with a T-shirt bearing his catchphrase: “Sex Geek.”
He is followed by a lean and limber woman wearing a crown of snake-like dreadlocks. With a lupine gaze, Kai Baylis—the festival’s Raleigh-based founder, avatar, and cosmic mother—assesses the capacity crowd of about 125 before folding onto the floor with everyone else.
Near her, a middle-aged former state employee in neon tangerine leans into the sturdy frame of a 50+ horticulturalist she only recently met. Across the tent, a tangle of twenty-something couples sporting loose, earth-toned gear and manicured facial hair chat and laugh loudly.
Corralling the mixed and mirthful throng’s attention, Holt opens with ground rules: “If you take out your mobile phones, you’ll be spanked … OR, depending on what you’re into, you won’t be spanked.”
The crowd cheers. For the workshop that’s about to unfurl, yes. But also for the festival that many hope will peel back the so-called “Magnolia Curtain.”
Behind the Magnolia Curtain
Even for a seasoned therapeutic massage practitioner, the stretch of putting together a multi-day festival hurts. Far from feeling transcendent, Baylis, 44, finds herself herding logistics.
“I’m striving to be fully alive, and at the same time dealing with porta potties,” she says in her cheery quick clip. “Did I get the right licenses for them? Are they coming to clean the porta potties often enough?”
Assisting Baylis is an eclectic core team that includes gray-bearded Georg Kluzniok, an events veteran from Santa Cruz; Wayne Hall, a burly former Army special operations officer; and marketing maven Tobi Bowen. They have also signed up around 75 volunteers.
When the universe first tapped Baylis on the shoulder about Bliss Boogie, it didn’t mention the myriad management details. Or the approximately $90,000 dollars of Baylis’ own money it would take to pull off the event. She didn’t know how many people would show up, though at one point she hoped to sell as many as 600 tickets.
Two years earlier, she’d had an epiphany at SoulPlay, a northern California festival that invites revelers to “get grounded in our bodies and feel the immense love that is all around us … filled with transformational workshops, celebration, dancing, connection, and play.”
After 20 years of building the “body work and holistic wellness” practice The Living Room Raleigh, Baylis envisioned bringing together not just her wide variety of clients, but the array of communities pursuing wellness, desire, and pleasure in North Carolina, free of shame and disdain. Everything from communication skills and stress reduction to tantric sex practices (breathing, touching, and other techniques designed to increase connection and sexual energy) and BDSM (bondage and discipline, sadism, and masochism).
“I’m striving to be fully alive, and at the same time dealing with porta potties.”
Kai Baylis, Bliss Boogie founder
“These things are in people’s heads and hearts,” Baylis says. “It’s better for them to explore with integrity and in safety, so they don’t flounder at home. So they don’t have to go to a shady space. So they don’t have to deal with negativity.”
While such events thrive on the West Coast and in Europe among other hot spots, they are less common in the South.
“The ‘Magnolia Curtain’ describes a mentality below the Mason-Dixon line,” says Richmond-based author and sexologist Eric Marlowe Garrison. “If you bring up sex, the reaction is to clutch the pearls and say, ‘Lord, child, we don’t talk about these things!’ Not necessarily because of religion, but because it’s our culture. You could be a southern Christian, Jew, Muslim, or atheist behind the Magnolia Curtain.”
Which is not to say people don’t get their kink on in the Bible Belt. Founded around 2011, Durham-based PUSH hosts hundreds at its spring and fall extravaganzas billed as the “ultimate fetish party … the largest multipurpose kink/BDSM event in North Carolina.”
In Black Mountain, the Dancing Shiva Tantra Monastery debuted a two-day intimate and instructive retreat dubbed The Pleasure of Conscious Kink in the fall for 15 customers, and will reprise the event May 3 to 5. Asheville is likewise home to get-togethers, tantric experts, cuddle parties, and other opportunities to explore. Some in the Triangle prefer to get kinky in Asheville, a Bliss Boogie attendee named Kate told me, because it’s a couple of hours drive and “they just feel more comfortable away from home.” (She declined to give a last name, presumably for similar reasons.)
Nev also requested a degree of anonymity, despite playing an outsize role in festivities at Bliss Boogie, where she presided over an Impact Play workshop, cracking whips and smacking kitchen spoons on the mostly naked body of a live model. “People have lives, careers, custody issues, family situations,” says the Sanford resident. “This is all still a coming-out story. We’re working on it, but there’s a lot of people who aren’t yet out.”
Because many of these events are not widely advertised or are held in private homes, it can be hard for the curious to investigate. So Nev, 58, discreetly publicizes and hosts small gatherings in public places throughout central and eastern North Carolina for people to ask questions and network.
“We saw a big influx right after COVID-19,” she said. “It was like what happened after 50 Shades of Gray hit. People had more time to search things on the internet and refocus on what they really want in life.”
Still, many remain in the dark. Nev and other attendees see Bliss Boogie as a potential answer: a brightly lit lifestyle-sampler and all-embracing celebration.
“The thing about this festival is it’s well-publicized,” says Garrison. “It has an inviting website, volunteers, online registration, sponsors, food, music stages. All at a sex-positive event. To some it may seem like Sodom and Gomorrah. To others it will be as comfortable as Dorothy going back home.”
Find Your Bliss
For those arriving on opening day, Bliss Boogie begins with a proposition. “Would you like to be saged?” asks a volunteer greeter in a purple poncho. “It clears your energy.”
Consent received, the young woman swings a smoldering bundle of herbs around willing bodies of festival-goers one by one. The frosty forest air now flavored with notes of musk and pepper, another volunteer lays out the rules.
“Your ‘no’ is as sexy as your ‘yes,’” she announces. A “sanctuary tent” complete with therapists is available for anyone feeling triggered. As for those feeling frisky, “no oral or penetrative sex is allowed in public, but is fine in private tents.”
Wristbands offer insight on how approachable others might be. Red indicates someone who’d rather not be bothered—no thanks, on a private journey. Yellow means the bearer might want to engage, but please approach with tact and sensitivity. Green means, yep, let’s talk. In each public tent, bowls brim with free samples proffered by event sponsors Champ condoms and Überlube.
Ryan Taylor, 26, caught an ad for the festival on Instagram and rumbled up from Myrtle Beach solo in his used Mazda 6—grabbing a tiny pup tent from WalMart along the way. “I’d like to find someone on my wavelength,” he says, the breeze tugging at his long dark hair. “Someone sexually confident, not judgmental.”
“To some it may seem like Sodom and Gomorrah. To others it will be as comfortable as Dorothy going back home.”
Eric Marlowe Garrison, author and sexologist
Down a wooded slope from Taylor is an amiable young married couple from Germany by way of Raleigh—self-described “vanillas” who nonetheless are “curious.” They smile in a slightly embarrassed way, as if they’ve shown up to a sneaker convention in wingtips.
Fresh-faced enthusiasts of Ecstatic Dance—a playful, unrestrained, improvisational musical movement—ease through the hills in a grinning gaggle, collapsing into what one amused observer describes as a “cuddle puddle” on the plush rugs of the communal Chill Tent.
Perched outside her campsite, Stacey Carachure, glitter streaked across her cheeks, takes it all in—here at last. As a life coach, she advises clients on achieving their goals. “Watching them find happiness,” she says, “I realized it was time I find my own happiness.”
North Raleigh-based Carachure had long wanted to attend some kind of retreat, a place to learn and explore. At 47, she wondered, “When? With who? Will I have to go out of state? Am I too old?” Then a friend mentioned the Boogie; coming up soon, right around the corner and chock full of classes from the sensual to the spiritual.
Carachure invited her longtime boyfriend, who couldn’t make it. So she lit out with a pal as well as her son, Seth. The 19-year-old identifies as LGBTQ and explains he “just kind of woke up one day and realized I don’t want to be scared of the world anymore.”
Over the weekend, he eagerly masters the mechanics of knots in the ropes class and grooves in the grass to the bands.
“Honestly, I didn’t realize there were so many other people who share the same interests and culture as me,” he says, awed there’s a place where everyone “is so authentic and unapologetic.”
‘We May Still Feel Weird, But Not So Alone’
The online description promised nudity, and it did deliver. In the Saturday night session of Oral Grad School, Mihalko demonstrates how breathing techniques and judiciously applied pressure to the upper body enhance the experience of April, his live model (and fellow educator).
But most of the workshop’s information—including a move known as The Inverted Vulcan—is delivered through larger-than-life props representing male and female parts.
And, as advertised, there is touching. Consenting partners practice applying the aforementioned pressure to each other’s clothed bodies.
Carachure, who came into the workshop unsure she’d like it, is satisfied. “Talking about the body mechanics, engaging the pelvic floor, that was so interesting,” she says. “I learned so much about myself.”
Sitting in the crowd, Baylis reclines against her wife, real estate agent Mechelle Fuquay. The two married six years ago and share a suburban home in East Raleigh with a trio of canines, one of whom hobbles gamely on only three legs. In the broader kink and sex positive community, Baylis describes herself as “conservative.” Some of what she sees isn’t for her.
Which, she says, is exactly the point of the Boogie: “What works for you?”
The following day, the finale of the festival dawns with a camper inadvertently tripping her car alarm and a groggy voice from a nearby tent grousing, “Not sexy!”
The weekend drew fewer than Baylis and the team had hoped. The count on ticket-buyers stalled at 299. There’s talk of a GoFundMe campaign to help Baylis recoup costs, but she says she’d rather figure out how to sell more tickets next time. No one raises a peep about abandoning Boogie. The vibe is victorious.
“The baby is born!” proclaims Kluzniok, stretching out his arms as if bestowing a benediction.
More important than ticket sales or other typical measures, Baylis says, is the event’s impact on participants. On that count, she notches the inaugural Bliss Boogie a success. She, too, has at moments known the gloom of feeling “alone and isolated” behind the Magnolia Curtain. After making “juicy connections” with Bliss-goers, she feels “1,000% differently.”
Chatting with admirers, Mihalko pauses to assess the festival from the perspective of a well-traveled pro. “An act of creation like this is brave … and what’s happening here feels very important,” he says, wrapped in a rainbow-striped pajama onesie with his “Sex Geek” logo embroidered across the rear end.
“We may still feel weird, but not so alone. Being weird and alone is very different from being weird, loved, and with friends.”
Perhaps a step closer to something like bliss.
Billy Warden is a writer, journalist, TV producer, and marketing executive as well as two-time TEDx speaker. His work has been recognized with a Muse Creative Arts award, Telly awards, and a regional Emmy nomination. He is an avid swimmer and mixologist—though he never imbibes before doing laps.