Names in this story have been changed.

Most gay men will have seen one: a grainy porn flick, maybe from Treasure Island Media, in which a lone bottom finds himself in a room full of tops. Whether you find the bottom lucky or not is a matter of taste. And even if the scene does inspire fantasies about being the center of a gang bang, it’s likely that inhibitions, health concerns, and logistical challenges would stop you short of the real thing. But for those in New York committed to the orgy experience, there’s a discrete event-planning startup that organizes gang bangs tailored to clients’ desires. And, contrary to what you might expect, this service isn’t operated by a party promoter or a seedy pimp. It’s helmed by Daniel, a soft-spoken young entrepreneur who met with me over tea last month to explain why he believes that gang bangs can be more than carnal adventures—for him and his clients, they can be forms of empowerment, even a kind of therapy.

I learned about Daniel’s service about a month ago, when a friend showed me the website on his iPhone at a family restaurant. At first I had no idea what I was looking at. Beneath a few suggestive images of blindfolded men, the site features vague enticements along the lines of: You know you’ve been thinking about it. It’s time to stop watching fetish flicks and become the star of your own show. I had to click deeper into the site to confirm that, yes, I was perusing a menu of gang bang packages, complete with pricing options related to the number of tops and the duration of the session.

Suddenly aware of the diners around me, I tucked the iPhone under my table. I felt overwhelmed by conflicting surges of disgust and arousal. How could such a business exist?

For Daniel, there’s an obvious answer: demand. Three years before becoming a proud American small business owner, Daniel organized a one-off group session on a lark for a friend’s birthday. But when word of the event’s success got around, he was approached by someone who wanted to try the experience, too—and they were willing to pay for it. So Daniel found his first prospective client. Then another. And another. “What surprised me more than anything is how many people have this fantasy,” Daniel told me. A waiting list developed with clients clamoring for priority, and some events overflowed with willing tops. Eventually, Daniel had to develop a business model simply to organize the chaos.

Though demand helped launch the service, business was sustained by something unexpected—a sense of purpose. As more and more people approached Daniel with their fantasies, he came to believe that he was responding to something more than a fetish particular to a few gay men. “People have asked me many times, ‘What kind of person wants to shell out all this money to do that?’ And I say, they’re you,” Daniel explained. “It’s not some freak. Each [client] has had reasons that made sense to me.” His client list, he says, is a cross-section of the gay community, ranging from regular Joes to high-power executives and celebrities, spanning the boundaries of race and class that typically divide the gay world.

And the reasons for trying a gang bang are as diverse as his clients. Some turn to Daniel’s service simply to fulfill the stereotypical fantasies one finds described on the jackets of porn DVDs—a CEO wants to be humiliated by a group of men posing as his employees; a younger man wants to bottom for older daddies. But some clients have much more complex relation to the experience. Some wanted their desirability validated by the sexual advances of multiple strangers. Others viewed a gang bang as a proving ground for their physical strength. “Over time, I’ve begun to see into people’s psyches and into their values as human beings and into the way they build their self-esteem,” Daniel told me. “All these things seemed to manifest themselves in these events in a way that I never would have thought.”

Daniel says that his clients often have ecstatic reactions to their experiences. “The first thank-you note I got—I was almost in tears—was someone who was dealing with cancer. He was in remission, but he had been feeling really weak and didn’t have a very strong self-image, though he was very good looking,” Daniel told me. “After the event, he wrote and said, ‘I realized how much strength I had. People run marathons. This was my marathon. And I realized that I’m strong.’ ”

After talking with Daniel, I reflected on how much space the gang bang, as a concept, occupies in the contemporary gay imagination. Think how often the words appear in drag queens’ punchlines, raunchy brunch conversation, or the headlines of hookup aps and Craigslist ads. I’ve heard it argued that gay men love the notion of gang bangs only because of what they’ve seen in porn videos—but why would those videos be produced en masse if there weren’t an enormous market for them? I’m fascinated by Daniel’s framing of the gang bang as an Olympic event, where both the athletes and the onlookers are somehow uplifted by the intense human striving—but this ultimately falls short as an explanation. It doesn’t account for why we spend so much time talking about gang bangs, fantasizing about them, or watching them online.

In his article “Breeding Culture: Barebacking, Bugchasing, Giftgiving,” humanities scholar and author Tim Dean discusses the deep, primal needs that might be at work in a gang bang—particularly in a bareback (i.e. condomless) context. At first, Dean’s assessment dovetails with Daniel’s in that both see the “multiply penetrated bottom as achieving an elevated status” because he alone enjoys all the men in the room, and through skin-to-skin contact establishes a corporeal connection between the tops, “a kind of bodily community.” The bottom is adored as the vessel that makes the moment work.

But then Dean goes further. Every subculture has rituals, he suggests, that build a sense of community, helping current members connect both to one another and to past generations. For the deeply divided American gay subculture, which lost an entire generation to the AIDS crisis, the gang bang might be one such ritual—invented not only to break barriers between living gay men, but also to connect them to the carnal traditions of their gay forbears, across the barriers of time and disease. This explanation may seem like sophistry at first—but then I think of the high fives and laughter among tops in gang bang porn and the nostalgia many gay men express for the good old days of the New York bath houses before AIDS. Maybe a gang bang really does provide us with a sense of connection to each other—and a sense of connection to the lasting rites of our peculiar culture—that we’re not getting any more at the bars, or theater, or wherever else we’re supposed to feel gay.

But if the gang bang is a ritual aimed at promoting healing, connection, or community, it’s undeniably a risky one. Daniel is not blind to the darker side of the gang bang experience, or to the desires that drive his clients—though he treats these subjects very lightly. He suggests that most gang bangs are bareback because condoms are dangerously rough on a bottom’s body. (While bottoms on PrEP might be protected from HIV, condomless group sex is obviously high-risk for STI transmission.) He mentions that some of his clients are interested in the service only when they have been “partying” (gay code for using meth or other drugs) and, in their altered state of mind, feel invincible. And while explaining how gang bangs build self-esteem, he notes that “there are those who have a poor self-image and feel like getting fucked is the only legitimate validation.”

This gave me pause. I asked Daniel if he thought the sessions really helped these people, provided a temporary fix, or just made things worse. “Out of three years,” Daniel says, thinking carefully, “perhaps two or three have walked away—I don’t want to say feeling worse, but having had some kind of epiphany where they realize they don’t want to do that again.”

If gang bangs do fulfill some primal need, our community hasn’t found a way to discuss it openly. Though a number of Daniel’s clients initially agreed to discuss their gang bang experience with me, most changed their minds when confronted with the idea of public exposure. Only one client spoke, sending Daniel a text-message testimony that he forwarded. But the client’s brief words spoke volumes: “That night was the worst night of my life. Couldn’t decide if you were completely insane or a total genius. Wasn’t sure if I hated you or wanted to marry you. I wasn’t prepared for the mind-fuck. But for better or for worse, I’m so glad I experienced it.”