A Darklands Diary 2025

Darklands is an annual gay fetish community festival taking place in Antwerp, Belgium, in its 15th year as of 2025. This is an account of my second visit to Darklands with my partner. We went for the first time in 2024. We did a lot of first-timer events that time, such as the bus tour by Ivana the drag queen, beginner classes and dinners. This year, we feel better prepared to make the most of our time.

Thursday 27th Feb

We arrive on the train at Antwerp Central station and check in to our hotel near the station, the Hampton by Hilton, one of the Darklands-affiliated hotels. The receptionist doesn't ask if we're there for Darklands and seems a bit judgmental. We go up to the room. I realise we're supposed to collect a goody bag with a card that lets us use the shuttle bus to the Darklands venue (Waagnatie Expo). I go down to the front desk and collect it from a different receptionist. An awkward exchange; he tells me to have fun at Darklands and stay safe.

I rush through a workout in the hotel's basement gym. After a shower we head out to the Beyond Classic concert. It's held in AMUZ, a deconsecrated church on Kammenstraat. We dress in basic black kink-lite outfits and walk through Antwerp's shopping streets to get there. My Doc Martens cut into the back of my right heel as we walk.

Darklands has abolished its drinks token system from last year. You used to buy little plastic tokens with the black Darklands eagle logo for about €4 each which you exchanged for food and drinks. Last year we couldn't use them all up and donated our extra tokens to some random kinksters in our hotel. This year our wristbands act as virtual wallets which we top up using our phones. Except for this venue, where tokens are required. We buy some tokens and exchange them for drinks before the concert.

The theme of the concert is 'Poly Amore' but it's printed rather reductively as 'Poly Amory' in the programme booklet. There are some speeches before the concert including one by the mayor of Antwerp. He has the air of a practised orator and gives a rousing speech about the far right encroaching on liberal values and freedoms. It's hard not to agree and he gets a big round of applause. He's wearing a tweed suit and at his feet is Superpup, a twink pup who wears a black leather pup mask and PVC trackies.

The concert begins - Vivaldi's Spring, Mozart, some opera, a few modern works. The performers and many of the audience are dressed in full leathers and kinky outfits. On stage, the keyboard player is bare-chested with a distractingly chiselled gym bod. The operatic pieces are gender swapped with a male soprano, Philipp Mathmann, and female mezzosoprano, Iris Vermillion, singing the roles. Superpup gets in on the stage action. There are also some newer works sung by a glamorous Jaouad Alloul. It's a lot of fun and the performances are top-notch.

We stop for a late night KFC dinner on the way back to the hotel. There's a first night party on at the Darklands venue (the Mayhem party) but we decide to skip it and have an earlier night.

Friday

We get up early and enjoy a buffet breakfast at the hotel. We go down to the dining area in civvies but many of the other guys staying at the hotel are Darklands attendees wearing their leather or rubber outfits. Lots of piercings, nose rings, sneakers.

We take an Uber to the venue, which is a convention centre in the docks surrounded by distinctive metal cranes that look like robot squids. Kinksters like to pose in front of the cranes in their outfits and take selfies for their social media profiles. Inside, we collect our Madness wristbands which let us attend all the parties without having to buy separate party tickets. Then we go to the locker area and put our civilian clothes away. This routine when we get to the venue becomes very familiar as the weekend goes on. I wear comfortable shoes in order to avoid aggravating the blister on my heel from the Doc Martens, but no-one seems to mind.

We explore the Gear Market, which is already bustling with stalls selling jockstraps, toys, chastity cages, restraints. I spot Pup Amp from the Watt's the Safeword YouTube channel. We pass by a stall where a Dutch board games company is selling two of their games, Dicksits and a Gay Sauna board game. A grey bearded daddy in a leather harness offers to play a demo round of Dicksits with us.

Dicksits is a game in which you are given a cardboard butt that starts at a gape level of 1. You roll a die, add the value to your gape level, and compare it to a card with a dick of a certain size. If your total is the same or higher than the card, it fits, you sits and you gain the card as a victory point, and your butt's gape level increases. You get to play cards from your hand to boost your chances or sabotage your opponents. It's fun, but I find it a bit one-dimensional and we decide to come back later.

On the main stage there's a competition to decide who will be Mr Superhero Fetish this year. Standing before me are five spandex-clad men in various costumes. The contestants have prepared a video which is shown on the big screens behind them, followed by each contestant's stage act. One involves dripping hot wax onto themselves. Another devolves into a dance routine to a pop song. I end up voting for the Handler, whose comedy video has decent production values, and the passable stage act just clinches my online vote.

We go to the House of Riegillio stage for drinks and watch some cabaret performances: a whip-cracking leather cowboy, a contortionist, a reverse striptease which ends with the performer fully leathered up in a military outfit. The bar staff serve us free snacks. Then I realise the snacks are for the upcoming leather social.

We move on to the Mr S Leather stage and watch a lean muscled pup singing for a while. This is followed by a game of Deal or No Deal. The top prize is tickets to next year's event. The first contestant, another pup, picks bag number 8. He turns down the banker's offer and then plays a simple trivia quiz minigame. The bag contains the top prize. The pup leaves the stage happy, taking with him all the dramatic tension and suspense from the game.

We have two Masterclasses scheduled today. These are add-on tickets to attend knowledge sharing sessions and workshops. This year the classes are branded by Recon, the kink meetup app. We do a class on rope, taught by a Dutch shibari practitioner. He takes us through tying a chest harness with an unusual braiding pattern in the front.

Afterwards I go to a class on Power Exchange, by Master Phil. Unfortunately, Master Phil has had flu and was advised by his doctor not to attend Darklands this year. Instead, he's presenting his class remotely over Zoom from Berlin. English Leather Master, a middle-aged leatherman who organises a lot of the classes with his submissive ELM's sub, is sitting on a desk in front, operating the laptop and making sure the portable amplifier works. Master Phil struggles to be heard over the noisy ventilation system. He talks us through his model of male archetypes - the King, Warrior, Magician and Lover - and their dark sides, the Tyrant, Predator and Manipulator. It's all very much like a Myers-Briggs framework for D/S play, and he illustrates it with selected quotes from films. Maybe it'll come in handy for my next game, I think, as I take notes.

We watch some more cabaret and then change back into civvies before having dinner with friends at the upscale restaurant just north of the venue. Then we return for tonight's party, called Fusion. We stand around in our leather harnesses and shorts drinking expensive drinks, occasionally dancing to EDM. Then we go exploring in the big darkroom beyond the main stage. Compared to darkrooms in other European gay bars, it's relatively well lit, and very busy indeed. There are staircases and corridors and partitioned off areas, and a constant stream of scantily clad men moving around the space. They have dedicated areas for watersports and bondage. They also have a slut wall where you can be fucked by someone on the other side of the wall, who you can't see. Mostly though, it's slings in various corners, or arranged in a circle, with guys getting fucked or fisted. (The fisting tops can buy removable wristbands. Quite sensible, really.)

We go to the bondage area, which is upstairs and to the right of the entrance way. I get blindfolded and tied up on a rimming chair and edged, but then I get slightly hurt during a genital tie and we don't manage to recapture the mood, so we head back to the main stage.

A mixture of tiredness and slight food poisoning catches up with us and we head back to our hotel. The shuttle bus to the hotel doesn't run until 2am, and we don't want to wait around, so we agree to a passing taxi driver's €25 fare. He doesn't have small euro notes, so he gets to keep a €30 fare in the end. C'est la vie.

Saturday 1st March

My partner gets to sleep in today but I signed up to an erotic hypnosis Masterclass at 11am, lucky me. I don't want to miss it as it's a class I wanted to attend last year but couldn't, because it was on the last day and we had to leave Antwerp by then.

I make my way to the Darklands venue via the number 24 tram. The class is by the Hairy Hypnotist, a tall and buff bear who's bare-chested and wearing a glorious Bear Pride leather skirt. He talks through the general framework and possibilities of erotic hypnosis. Reassuringly, everything he says is consistent with my own research into hypnosis. I ask a question about how long suggestions can last. Our hypnotist host then does a brief demo with his slave, where he instructs the slave that he is unable to move from his position and exposes the slave for some mutual enjoyment.

I have a couple of hours to kill before our next class. This early in the day, most of the venue isn't open yet, so I return to the hotel for a few hours. We go for lunch at a little sandwich shop called Broodjeszaak Te Peca that does one of the best baguette sandwiches I've ever had. We don't really do touristy things or do sightseeing in Antwerp while Darklands is on. Let's hope nobody at work asks me why we've been to Antwerp twice and yet have only a vague recollection of what we did there...

We return for a 'Bondage for Sex' workshop at 14:45. It turns out there's no sex during the session, just bondage - taught by a Dutch shibari practitioner. We go through single and double column ties and get a little confused about the particular variant of the single column tie that he's teaching, until he mentions that there are some variants. The class is a useful refresher for me. We have to stop just before I can finish tying my partner to a chair.

Afterwards we return to the Gear Market. We visit the Kink3D stand where I buy a Viper cage in classic matte black and get the right fit with some help from the guys at the stall. I decide not to wear it there and then, though, and balk slightly at the total price, but I have to know if this cage is going to be the one that finally fits well. It's done, and now I'm ready for Locktober six months early. We also return to the board game stall and pick up the Gay Sauna game, including the NSFW expansion pack with the fully nude cards. The guy selling the game to us is one of the models depicted in-game, I notice. He gives us a free Dicksits colouring book. Probably best not to bring that one on a long train journey.

We head back to the hotel to drop off our purchases and after a pizza dinner, we return to the venue for the Saturday night party, Rage. A straining penis in a cage puts all Darklands in a rage? The light show on the main stage is accompanied by timed jets of water on the stage and wings. I make a joke about the twinks backstage into synchronised watersports.

We enter the big darkroom, heading to the bondage area. It's my turn to be the rigger and we make use of a large cage-like space for a tie and tease session. Afterwards we spend some more time drinking and dancing, then we take the shuttle bus back to the hotel.

Sunday

It's the last full day of Darklands. I'm caged today, as is proper. We arrive relatively early to attend a class on Impact Play. The instructor is a real pro and talks through techniques and implements. It's a great refresher course. Right afterwards, we sit through an Exposure and Rope for Sex class. This one though is more of a demo. A young French rigger called YankeePup demonstrates a simple upper body tie briefly, then puts his lean twinky sub (wearing just boxer briefs and sneakers) into a full rope suspension from a metal girder in the classroom space. This kind of advanced rope work is beyond the safe capability of most of the audience here, including us. We take pictures. A lot of pictures.

I take some time to watch the bondage display at the Demo Zone, which is run by kinksters from Amsterdam. They let people try out mummification, a vac cube, a leather sleepsack that can be suspended, and full suspension in rope. Last year I got a bad case of FOMO after missing out on this experience. I wait while watching Pup Yankee from the earlier class, suspending a tall blond jock with a near-perfect physique who is completely naked apart from a black chastity cage. Unfortunately, once again I miss out on experiencing the demo zone myself.

Afterwards we catch up with a friend of ours who's also here from London. We hang out at the Mr S Leather stage for a while. Letitia Delish, the latex-loving drag queen from Manchester, is cohosting Fisting Bingo with another drag queen. Eight or so guys get on stage on all fours and bare their holes to Letitia, who proceeds to stuff four ping pong balls with numbers on into each of their holes, her red fisting gloves slathered in sticky trails of lube. I go up and collect a bingo card, take a photo of it and mark off the numbers as they're called. A bird's eye camera view captures the action on stage, although the guys face away from the audience so you only see the row of holes lined up.

I fail to hear the third number called and worry that I'll miss out on a win. There are prizes for getting one line, two lines and then a full board, mostly goody bags with items and gear from the vendor market. A young pup makes a false bingo call and is shamed publicly by the audience. The asses are filled with a new round of balls to a chorus of "Reload the machines!" Finally, with a cry of "Fuckholes", someone claims the top prize. We leave before the second round of Fisting Bingo starts.

We return in the evening for the final Fury party. It's a bit quieter tonight since some of the Darklands attendees have already departed for home. The main stage and darkroom is closed. We venture through darkrooms that are in a covered walkway above the Mr S Leather stage. All around are guys having sex, thrusting, bucking, moaning and gasping.

We find a section of metal fencing that's unoccupied and I get tied to the fencing. My cage is removed. Someone tries to touch me while I'm blindfolded but my partner tells them to move on. The fence shakes from some guy on the other side of it being fucked. I finally get to cum, after two weeks of abstaining. It's loud and messy. I wonder if the men standing around enjoyed the spectacle.

On the way out, we stop by the merchandise shop to check out the discounted clothes. Tomorrow, we return to London.

Darklands 2025 in numbers:

* 3 out of 4 parties attended

* 1 head rub given to a friendly pup

* 7 classes attended

* 1 naughty board game purchased

* €264 spent on a Kink3D Viper cage kit

* 33 Fisting Bingo numbers checked