How does Smut Slam work?
Through an elaborate system of levers and pulleys, Smut Slam…
Haha, just kidding. A Smut Slam is a community dirty-storytelling open mic. Let’s break that down:
COMMUNITY means that storytellers are mostly members of the audience who have put their name in a hat for a chance to tell. Sometimes those people have performance or public-speaking experience, and occasionally a judge or crew member will be invited to tell a story too, but mostly the tellers are just regular people drawn from the audience. We do not recruit performers to tell at Smut Slam open mics. (Curated Smut Slam events are different.)
DIRTY STORYTELLING means true, first-person stories about sex or kink or sexuality. No actual sex or kink acts have to have occurred or be described for the story to count–“epic fail” remains a popular theme for Smut Slam stories!–but an incident around sex or kink is the organizing principle.
OPEN MIC means we don’t program the slam in any way, or try to craft any sort of trajectory for the evening. Names are drawn at random. As a result, Smut Slams are tricky to predict, and they are inevitably a bit of a roller coaster ride. Who knows what’s going to happen? We sure don’t!
However, we do have a pretty comprehensive Code of Conduct for both tellers and audiences, ground rules that are mentioned in every event listing and read out loud at the beginning of every slam. The Code of Conduct also states how we enforce the Code of Conduct, which means the emotional container for Smut Slam “safer space” is strong, and we take active steps to keep it that way.
As for the flow of the slam itself, we draw names one at a time, and people get up to tell their stories when called (five minutes, with a one-minute grace period). Our judge panels consist of performers, activists, educators, and other local celebrities, who asses the stories on a simple rubric. At the end of the night, there are three top tellers, who receive prizes and all the glory appropriate to the win.
Throughout the night, anyone who doesn’t want to tell a story from the microphone is invited to submit an anonymous question or confession to the Fuckbucket. The host reads Fuckbucket submissions out loud over the course of the evening, answers any questions or enlists judges or audience members to answer them, and then at the end of the night, one submission form is drawn from all the entries and that person receives a door prize from our Fuckbucket sponsor, Njoy.