Last night, we had the house warming for Manifest house, and had an opportunity to welcome the community we found to our space. We were nervous as party o’clock rolled around: what if no one showed up.

Our friends came through; with their time, their joy and their gifts they showed us the community we found was real. We had people from all over: neighbors, people who helped us manifest our house, coworkers, and people we’ve found in the leather community. Several things really brought it home how much we’ve been welcomed and how wonderful our community is:

• People who came in spite of deep personal loss, there to support us because “we are their people”

• People who spent significant time making things for us to show we were welcome

• How when we asked people got out their tools and helped us make last-minute modifications

• People who shared things important to them—the things they liked

• People who carefully looked for things that they thought would be meaningful to us and shared what they found and what it meant

• People appreciating what we did for the party

• People taking the time to view our space and help us think about how we can use it for the community

• People who connected with new people there, taking the time to appreciate what others had to share

• And so much more

It was one of the best parties I’ve ever hosted. To everyone who came, thank you so much!

Using Manifest House

People last night confirmed our belief that Manifest House is a great space. It needs to be used; we need to welcome people to our space to fuck, to worship, to play, and of course for continued socialization and connection. I don’t entirely know how to make that happen, but it is important to us. The community was a part of helping us manifest this space; for that and other reasons, we want to use it together.

Some of it will be finding the right niche. There are a lot of good spaces in the community, and so some of the question will be finding what sort of things benefit from a private space and what we have to offer. Some of it is developing skills: we haven’t hosted play parties or rituals before. Some of it will be finding what works for people we know and what they need.

For now, the important thing is that we’re open to finding ways to use the space, and we are interested in ideas from people we know regardless of whether you made it to the party. If we could help you by holding space four your ritual or activity, reach out. If you’d like to be part of our ongoing ritual work, reach out and we can talk about it.

It’s likely our next party will be leather friendly, sex positive. Likely not much play would happen. In practice the only difference from this party might be that we and our guests could feel free to use more protocol and be a bit more themselves. That kind of permissive space has value even if the permissive nature of the space ends up not being needed at a particular event.