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Of Keggers and Sex Parties

December 9, 2007 3:50 AM

n college, a lot of my friends moved in to this six-bedroom house just off campus. I didn't live there, but I might as well have moved into their living room. I don't know if this happens everywhere else, but there was this trend in Flagstaff where houses would have names. For example, my friends lived in The Mothership for a while. And there was also the Pryor House. And a few others that I never went to or that I went to so few times that I can't remember their names. Still, there were a lot of discussions about what to call this particular house. One of the suggestions was something like The Slaughterhouse. I don't really understand why. In the end, though, none of the names stuck, and the house simply became The House.

For the last three of the five years I spent in college, The House dominated my social life. Although not all of my friends lived there, they were almost all directly related to The House and the various inhabitants.

Like I said, The House was just off of the NAU campus, which meant that it was within walking distance of a lot of the dorms but also that it wasn't subject to campus police. Its only neighbors were a frat house and some sort of clinic, which was closed at night. There were some apartments behind the house, but the people that lived in those apartments were always either cool or really, really strange. The result was that The House soon became one of the biggest party houses in the area. We partied much harder and more often than the frat boys next door, who were a bunch of fucking douchebags. It was fine, though, they never, ever came to our parties, and we didn't want to go to theirs. And they never called the cops because they knew that if they did, we'd have the cops over there for even the smallest noise infraction.

It was an ideal situation, and one that we exploited. There were keggers there every single weekend for a semester. We had bands play. We had theme parties. We had hundreds of people over in a single night. I mean, maybe that's a stretch, but maybe it's not. The point is, we had a hell of a lot of fun. And we were absolutely, completely, totally immune to any sort of police intervention. That is, until the pirate party at which I sort of beat up a dwarf that looked like Scott Weiland (he walked on top of our already fragile beer-pong table during a game--he had it coming). After that, a few of our parties got broken up.

And I totally understand why. As it was, we probably weren't bothering too many people. But we were still violating some ordinances. And those ordinances are good things. The level of noise and debris created by the kinds of parties we had would have been completely unacceptable. If my neighbors--then or now--tried to throw that kind of party and have it go to 4am, I'd call the cops, too. Generally, residential neighborhoods aren't a good place for keggers if you don't want to get busted, and that's the way it should be.

I'm bringing all of this up because of this story. Apparently, a man in a small Texas town has been having what can only be described as, well, orgies. Big orgies--some with as many as 100 people, apparently. And all those people in the neighborhood means noise and traffic congestion in an otherwise quiet area. So the city understandably wants to outlaw the whole thing. And I think that they damned well should be able to.

I've always thought that the general rule for what should be legal and what shouldn't should be that you can do whatever you want as long as it doesn't hurt some other nonconsenting person. So if you want to smoke pot or shoot up heroin, go right ahead, but you'd better not drive while you're high. Similarly, if you want to get together with your friends and play drinking games or, you know, have orgies, that's cool, too. But don't bother your neighbors with it.

I'm all about protecting the freedom to do whatever the fuck you want in your house, again assuming that everyone knows what's happening and consents. But the orgy host's lawyer's argument that outlawing what they're doing is an invasion of privacy is vaguely ridiculous. While I think that live-sex shows should be completely legal, that's a different question from whether they should be legal in a residential neighborhood. The issue here isn't about legislating morality, it's about zoning.

So there you go.


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