Debauchery in the desert: Wife-swapping. Orgy tents. Drugs on tap. How billionaires and Hollywood stars are flocking to a festival that makes Glasto look SO tame

Annual Burning Man festival attracts upwards of 70,000 people each year for a week-long party binge in the desert

Public nudity, especially by women, is actively encouraged, and orgies, partner swapping, and threesomes is rife

The festival in the Nevada desert is a free-for-all of art, music, fancy dress and outrageous behaviour


The free love message starts the moment you walk into the Burning Man festival. First-time visitors, known for good reason as ‘virgins’, are asked to ring a bell at the gate and then roll around in the Nevada desert.

Or, as they’re told by greeters to this extraordinary annual week-long bacchanal, ‘to make love with the dust’, so you’ll become one with the landscape.

You may also get your bottom spanked just to ram home the point about what really draws tens of thousands to return each year to this free-for-all of art, music, fancy dress and outrageous behaviour.

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City in the desert: An aerial view of the Burning Man festival reveals the true scope of the event. Up to 70,000 people from all over the world have gathered at the sold out festival to spend a week in the remote desert cut off from much of the outside world to experience art, music, and the unique community that develops

Tuesday morning: Tens of thousands were stranded in the desert at the gates of Burning Man after the enormous festival was postponed following rains that turned the playa into a quagmire

Sun rising: Revelers at the festival greet the new morning on Wednesday and prepare for another day of bartering and trading that distinguishes the money-free festival Unique: People gather around the art installation Embrace during the Burning Man 2014 arts and music festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada for the annual hedonistic celebration

This 28-year-old celebration of free expression in a tent city in the desert is often billed as America's answer to Glastonbury

It’s often billed as America’s answer to Glastonbury. But this 28-year-old celebration of free expression in a tent city in the desert makes Somerset’s annual orgy of mud, booze and bands look as tame as a Scout jamboree.

At Burning Man, the hallucinogenic drugs are on tap as people strip down to virtually nothing and dance late into the night on top of weird ‘mutant’ vehicles done up to look like everything from alligators or space ships.

Vast constructions in the shape of fantastical buildings rise from the sand to complete the impression that you have landed on another planet.

But it’s the casual sex that is the chief attraction to a festival that last year drew 68,000 people to the remote Black Rock Desert, and which this week is being attended by tens of thousands more.

The desert is like an ocean: A pirate ship cruises the Playa during the Burning Man 2014 festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada which draws hundreds of thousands of people from all around the world each year

Different: Those who attend the event are known as 'burners' and their eccentricities are encourage by all those who join them at the Burning Man festival which is now in its 28th year

Roller girls: The festival takes up an area the size of a small city - so revelers employ time-saving means of transportation

Clown posse: This group's eclectic attire is given a common theme, while one of them dons a Harry Potter vest (right)

Sex between ‘Burners’, as festival-goers are known, is known variously as ‘dust love’ or ‘tent trysts’, and old hands suggest it is simply ‘selfish’ to stick to monogamy. Public nudity, especially by women, is actively encouraged, while orgies — or at the very least partner swapping, if not threesomes — have become just as much a feature of Burning Man as the ceremonial torching of a huge wooden effigy of a man to celebrate the summer solstice.

Group sex is actively encouraged at so-called ‘theme camps’ — giant tent complexes where free bars encourage visitors to loosen up and participate. A popular venue is the so-called ‘Orgy Dome’, run by a group calling itself And Then There’s Only Love, though conventional notions of love are hardly what’s fostered inside its giant dome tent.

It bills itself as a 24-hour ‘sex positive consensual space where all can love and be loved’. Helpfully, the Orgy Dome offers free towels and sheets, but asks visitors to clear up after themselves in line with the festival’s ‘no waste’ eco-credentials.

As well as old-fashioned orgies, it offers classes on sadomasochism and group erotic massage. Thursdays are Unicorn Night, for couples seeking a threesome, while Saturdays are Scream, which invites the courageous to ‘join a room of moans — prizes to the loudest’.

The Orgy Dome is hardly alone. There is also a ‘Group Sex Bus’, the ‘Sex Libido Lounge’, and a Canadian-run club with an unprintable name where judges give points to amorous couples for ‘style’ and ‘inventive poses’.

Party bus: A flamboyant bus to rival Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

Sleeping it off: Burners take a communal nap before the next party

While this list of jaw-droppingly open-minded possibilities is familiar to regular Burners, what’s fascinating is that the loved-up hippies who’ve been gathering here for years are now being joined by Silicon Valley billionaires, Hollywood actors and New York models flocking here to lose their inhibitions.

If the festival didn’t already have plenty of critics, it has attracted many more in recent years — even from its own diehard attendees. They complain that Burning Man has been hijacked by a growing army of the slumming rich.

Despite the festival’s claims to be scrupulously anti-materialistic — money is practically outlawed on the site so you theoretically have to barter for the free-flowing drugs — it is now patronised by some of the world’s biggest capitalists. And they tend to emerge from its sexually liberated atmosphere talking as if they have found Nirvana.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos and Google mastermind Sergey Brin have all attended Burning Man for years. Some, like Zuckerberg, can retreat to their own company’s dedicated campgrounds within the site.

Elon Musk, who founded the internet payment giant PayPal, has claimed that Burning Man ‘is Silicon Valley’, and that the creator of a new TV comedy series about America’s tech industry couldn’t possibly understand that world because he had never been to the festival.

Pony up: These two special unicorns and their stuffed-toy child make a lovely family

Meanwhile, Google chief executive Larry Page said last year he wanted to create a lawless society where inventors could test new products without consequences. He said this commune would be modelled on Burning Man.

The tech kings aren’t the only rich and famous who have embraced the festival. Other attendees in recent years have included the socialite Greek shipping heirs Stavros Niarchos and his sister Eugenie, British socialite Lady Victoria Hervey and members of the Versace and Rothschild clans.

Wall Street bankers have also joined the party, one reportedly spending $1 million on a custom-made camper van that would turn heads at Burning Man.

Not for any of these socialites and millionaires the more basic delights of other Burners, such as sleeping under canvas and hitching a lift in a clapped-out VW. Those who want to do Burning Man deluxe can now fly from Reno to the festival’s own landing strip in a six-passenger private plane and then be escorted to a huge, specially kitted-out ‘recreational vehicle’ (RV).

‘We used to have RVs and pre-cooked meals,’ a man who attends Burning Man with a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs told the New York Times. ‘Now, we have the craziest chefs in the world and people who build yurts for us that have beds and air-con.’

In deep: The Black Rock City Subway takes passengers 'to the depths of [their] imagination'

Lighting up the night sky: The Burning Man extravaganza gets underway on Tuesday night after suffering from a 24 hour postponement on Monday due to an unexpected and rare deluge on Monday morning that saw police turn revelers away



Let us in: Ticket holders turned away from the event on Monday morning wait anxiously to be allowed into the Burning Man festival that started on Sunday in Nevada

Ready to rock: A Burning Man participant's bike is surrounded by art cars that are lined up at the Black Rock DMV to be registered at Burning Man on the Black Rock Desert of Gerlach, Nevada

While a standard ticket to Burning Man costs $300, his camp was charging $25,000 a person for a weekend. Some of the female guests — fashion models naturally — are flown in for free from New York, but the rest will be forking out more than $2 million all told.

Most of these exclusive camps are serviced by ‘sherpas’, paid staff who are there to make sure guests want for nothing. Menus include boiled lobster, sushi and fillet steak.

‘Your food, your drugs, your costumes are all handled for you, so all you have to do is show up,’ said Tyler Hanson, a former sherpa. The ratio of staff to guests in some camps is 30 to 12.

A Swiss luxury concierge service includes a camp offering water, electricity, wi-fi internet via satellite, ‘cooks and fresh buffets for every meal’, and the chance to order in fresh supplies each day from Reno, 80 miles away.

Private lavatories — which would be the Holy Grail at Glastonbury — are there for Burners willing to pay.

Jodi Guber Brufsky, a yoga entrepreneur and Hollywood director’s daughter, went to a previous year’s festival in an RV with a special dome where a chef was based who specialised in raw vegan food. There was also a machine making margarita cocktails. The guests, each paying $20,000, chose from a huge wardrobe of wild outfits to wear each day. Ms Guber Brufsky says the cost is a ‘bargain’ — allowing people to be ‘anonymous and uninhibited in a safe environment’.

The only way to get around: Burning Man participants bike on the playa during the annual Burning Man event on the Black Rock Desert of Gerlach, Nevada on Monday, prior to the 24 hour rain delay



And even if they only want to observe, the festival has turned into what some say is a ‘voyeur’s paradise’. Starlets have been spotted walking around naked while, two years ago, a supermodel and her boyfriend were seen dressed in Native American tribal costumes.

At night, say veterans, the girls tend to opt for the ‘Mad Max look’ based on the classic Mel Gibson movie — ‘apocalyptic’ and revealing leather and fur outfits.

All of this opulence has come as quite a shock to the old crusties and younger festival-goers who have been loyal Burners for years.

The festival was founded in 1986 as a summer solstice ceremony on a nudist beach in San Francisco that initially attracted just 20 New Agers. It moved to Nevada in 1990.

The sight of those early Burners with their wild-coloured hair and pierced faces burning wooden effigies prompted local people to think they were Satanists. But the hippy founders described the burning of the effigy which is the festival’s climax as a ‘spontaneous act of radical self-expression’ and say it has nothing to do with paganism or Devil worship.

More than 70,000 people from all over the world gather at the sold out festival, cut off from much of the outside world to experience art, music and the unique community that develops

One of Burning Man’s founding principles is that it should ‘encourage the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources’. The Silicon Valley set has certainly put paid to that, waited on hand and foot in their motor-homes as they talk deals and ogle models in post-apocalyptic underwear.

This week, the festival had to be put off for a day after highly unseasonal torrential rain hit the 1.5-mile diameter campsite. The scenes were almost Biblical in their desolation — a sea of mud stretching in every direction and tens of thousands of people stranded in a desert that suddenly became a quagmire.

At least temporarily, the ‘worshippers’ of the wooden effigy at the centre of the festival were scattered. Though they thronged back the following day.