Svetlana moves through a room with grace and almost shy charisma worthy of a young princess. Her features are chiselled and developed; she is a strong woman, but a smile broadens her face with a delicate softness that washes away any hint of menace.
You won’t be fooled, however, when you stand for a minute and look into her eyes. It’s those piercing orbs, which light up with menacing excitement against the lasers beaming through a club at 4am, that arouse the indecent tendencies within you.
Svetlana has been described as “the Queen”, but no word can really encapsulate who she is and what she does. The former remains a mystery to most, the latter an obsession. Her true passion and friends, gay men in Europe and around the world, gained her her notoriety from Barcelona to Mykonos, London to Milan. She is the 5am shepherd, the queen of high(er) brow sex parties and London’s intrepid party scene.
Social stigma seems often to be a foreign concept to Svetlana. Beyond the reasonableness of self-preservation, she wastes no time with stigma or with those who espouse it. Watching her operate, limitless and always with the excitement of a teenage girl, is liberating.
My first encounter with Svetlana was at a mansion in central London that she had rented out one evening to host a private party for a select number of gay men. The space was sprawling, the champagne flowing, and with 40+ men anxious for the grand 2am finale (that is, when our hostess kindly instructs us to remove our clothing and join her in the lower den of iniquity) it was electric. And when the hour of reckoning arrived, no build-up could have really done the climax any justice.
Skin on skin, limbs in every direction, intertwined, tanned, glistening against the soft lights and amidst the locked lips and moaning. Personalities, faces, names were not important. You delved into the web of torsos, cocks, and fingers and gorged so indiscriminately, it was truly sex for the sake of sex alone. In that I found immense pleasure, not because how many times I ejaculated or how many men I enjoyed, but because it was, for once, all about me. It was about what I wanted, with no compromises or awkward conversations. No commitment or pseudo infatuation.
Perhaps the only thing more intriguing than the sexual activity in these parties is the voyeurism exhibited by the hostess. She thrives on watching masculinity rip itself apart, the shifts of power from top to bottom, master to slave, and man to boy. Perhaps the reason Svetlana reigns the gay underworld is because of the lack of inhibition it allows her, and the lack of judgment in the eyes of these men (both for each other and for her). Perhaps it’s the thrill of anticipation, as often times a gentlemen steps out of the tangled mass of flesh and decides to penetrate her body instead.
Svetlana was married once upon a time, and lived in many capitals around the world. She’s generous, funny and outgoing. It’s easy for the prudish around us to judge her life and choices – she leaves a trail of lustful, spent and intoxicated men in her absence – but before the monotheisms of the world instilled their values into our cultures, in the times of Rome and Babylon, she would have not been anything out of the ordinary.
