Strangers in the Nights

""Have you ever fallen for someone you weren't initially attracted to?" asks a large laminated flashcard in the center of a tastefully distressed wood table. The table is in the back corner of the "music room" of the SoHo House member's club, itself located in a fashionably distressed brick building hidden away in Southeast Portland. Half a dozen fashionable socialites gather around the card and consider its implications."

"I'm at The Group Chat, a sort of roving social club operated by a duo of Portland-based sex educators on a quest to get people out of the house and into thought-provoking discussions. The duo, Kelsey Peake and Tessah Joseph, operate as Squirm, an umbrella organization for their Porn Nerds podcast, a calendar of meetup events, and card deck of sexy conversation starters, which includes many of the prompts adorning the tables at their events."

"Peake and Joseph started Squirm four years ago. "It was a pandemic project for us," Peake says, with the aim to produce some online resources "de-stigmatizing the topic of sex and sexuality." That took the form of virtual workshops and audio sex ed guides. When the pair reunited in Portland after the lockdown years, they decided to get physical: "We were like, 'oh we can do events now. We can get people in the same room,'" Joseph explains."

A roving social club called The Group Chat brings people together around provocative conversation prompts at bars, members' clubs, and occasional sex clubs in Portland. Two Portland-based sex educators, Kelsey Peake and Tessah Joseph, founded Squirm to produce online sexual-health resources during the pandemic and later shifted to in-person events. Squirm produces a podcast, meetup calendar, and a card deck of conversation starters used at events. Events prioritize candid discussions about sex and relationships over matchmaking, sometimes experimenting with speed dating while aiming to de-stigmatize sexuality and encourage thoughtful, communal conversation.

Read at Portland Mercury