On the front door of Burger King a paper sign is fastened with blue painter’s tape. It reads, in childlike, uneven handwriting: “The Perverted Book Club is Upstairs.” 

It is 6:30pm and we are in the Financial District of Manhattan at the largest Burger King in New York City. It is three stories tall. It is a block from the 9/11 memorial pools. It serves beer in short plastic cups. Tonight it moonlights as the recurring character in Dream Baby Press’s rolodex of unexpected locales to hold their erotic literary salon: The Perverted Book Club.

Dream Baby Press is a multi-hyphenated indie press, archive of Instagram Love/Hate lists, and expectation-defying literary salon, founded by Matt Starr and Zack Roif, two quick-witted and charismatic guys in their mid-30s. They lead with an easy-going friendliness, which must aid their curating prowess to forge line-ups of actors, artists, writers, and niche internet celebrities willing to read smut for hundreds of strangers in whichever venue Dream Baby deems fit.

The Perverted Book Club has every potential to be sleazy or lean into a be-seen vapidity, but Matt Starr declares, in his religiously-worn leather jacket, “We are still figuring out what Dream Baby is, but the fact that we can get 400 people in a Burger King on a Tuesday night to listen to people read horny shit means we’re doing something right.”

The first floor of Burger King is business as usual, the general milieu of NYC orders their Spongebob Krabby Patty Meals from a kiosk and ventures back into the cold. I half-expect scalpers to be stationed inside waving Eventbrite print-outs in the air, as Dream Baby Press’s Instagram claimed they had an additional four hundred person waitlist and no extra tickets to spare. Tonight’s featured readers include: Lukas Gage (White Lotus), Carole Radziwill (Real Housewives of NYC), Jemima Kirke (Girls), Candace Bushnell (Sex & The City), Cat Cohen, James Frey (A Million Little Pieces) and a number of other writers. And as to be expected, a surprise or two.

The second floor of Burger King takes on a more sophisticated light. Familiar Christmas music is on a loop, festive decor abounds. The room is large and bi-leveled and has floor-to-ceiling windows. Garlands swoop from the rafters, hundreds of round, opaque ornaments hang from wreaths, countless jewel-toned balloons are wrapped along banisters and crawling up pillars. A dozen or so tables are peppered with miniature candy canes and ready-to-wear Burger King crowns. The most surprising decor, however, is a gargantuan 10+ foot inflatable gingerbread man waving his animatronic left arm while holding a candy cane in the right, face fixed in a permanent wink.

I ask co-founder Zack Roif about the gingerbread man and he says it’s a nod to a similar – even taller – blow-up from their second ever Perverted Book Club event at S’barro’s Pizza. At the end of the night, once deflated into submission it went home with Sbarro’s manager for their child. This gingerbread man’s fate is the same, bound for the Burger King manager’s keeping.

This is clearly not their first perverted rodeo. Dream Baby Press has held this event annually since 2022 at various surprising locations: an East Village sex shop – where an audience member fainted from the heat of the tightly-packed space, the Penn Station Sbarros – where a $1,000 deposit was needed to secure the space (aka 43 pizzas and then some, whose receipt lives framed in Zack Roif’s house), and yes, this very stately Burger King managed by a woman named Deveen, who is routinely praised with gratitude by Matt Starr.

There is a social athleticism to Matt as he swans from one low-riding particle board table to another and eventually takes the stage at 7:30pm to a completely packed out room. The attendees are sardined into the second and third floors, their sweatered shoulders nearly touching each other’s as they make a claim for the best place to hopefully catch a view.

Matt opens the night with a dedication of the reading to the late Rob Reiner, claiming, “It’ll be our own little horny romantic comedy.” He doesn’t miss a beat before adding, “There are a lot of Jews and Non-Jews here so we are gonna light the Menorah at Burger King… and we brought a Rabbi.” 

The Rabbi in question joyfully canters through the dense crowd. He has a tight grey beard and tinted aviators on. He is wearing a Burger King Crown. They proceed with the prayers and light the candles. Deveen holds a spare electronic menorah. They are then placed on a table behind the stage and the candles puddle out far before the readings come to an end.

The readings lead with writers Lili Anolik, Rob Franklin, Mel Ottenberg, Nicolaia Rips, and Karah Preis.

Don’t be fooled, there is no singular perverted book to discuss, only hand-selected fanfics, letters, and memoirs that the readers recite into a microphone for a captive audience who all seek the unique thrill of watching a person they admire say words like “creampie” and “tits” over a loud speaker.

The horniness level of the selections teeter between goofy and sweet to pornographic and can instill the familiar bashful feeling of watching a sex scene with your parents in the room. Someone in the crowd jokes to a friend that this is the real life example of the “Sir, this is a Wendy’s” meme. 

The typical Burger King sounds ensue beneath us;, the flow of food service isn’t halted. Someone grabs a Whopper while Carole Radziwill – who we learn also doubles as Lukas Gage’s landlord – reads an excerpt of Jenna Jameson’s memoir. The scene involves asshole fingering. Her words boom through the restaurant.

“When my first book came out, it made the New York Times bestseller list – guess who was on top of me? Jenna Jameson was,” says Radziwill, explaining her selections, “I know there’s a joke there somewhere, but I’m not smart enough to figure that out.”

Cat Cohen enlightens us with a new verb via her piece titled: Poem I Wrote After I Crumbed. “That’s when you cry and cum at the same time.” She quips. “Everyone knows that.”

Candance Bushnell, author of Sex & the City, recites a parcel from her one-woman play, “It’s probably really cringe as young people would say, but I’m going to do it anyway.” She begins, “It’s about when I first came to New York. And how I end up having a threesome.”

When Lukas Gage is called onstage he appears with red smatterings of what appears to be dark blood around his mouth. “Everyone is giving me really worried looks. My face is okay, I just ate pussy for the first time in five years.” He stands confidently in a thick khaki puffer and white sweater. “Nah, I just died tonight. Spoiler alert [for] my movie.” He abandons his perverted story before it really begins,claiming that his phone died and he’s too hot. The crowd doesn’t seem wholly disappointed — he provided the largest laugh of the night.

When I catch up with Lukas Gage to ask if he writes erotica in his own time he replies, “I used to write an X-files fan fic that I stole from a porno I used to watch as a kid: Skinemax porn.” When asked if he’d ever read it at the Perverted Book Club in the future, Lukas said, “I should have, I was just not prepared and my phone died, but yeah, that was probably the move to do. I also have a couple things on Wattpad that are a little horny. About actors having sex. It’s called The Monarch Hotel.”

By the time crowd-favorite and Dream Baby regular Jemima Kirke has the mic the menorah’s candles have burnt out. She reads excerpts from her sex and advice column where guidance seekers request wisdom on topics such as is fucking your boss passé and answers in her signature snarky truths (the answer: not really). She then reads a few of her one-sentence poems from a stack of loose printed papers. “Baby, please let me be your sister,” she delivers in heartfelt sincerity. There is a pause that feels long before a pop of giggling breaks out, including Jemima’s own rasping and charming chuckle.

The “literary outlaw” James Frey rounds out the evening, sporting a velveteen Santa hat and walking from his corner booth to the microphone with AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” playing when a voice calls from the first floor, unseen. 

“C’mon James, let’s close it out!” Presumably the manager. It’s already 9pm.

“We’re gonna fucking close it out!” He hollers back. “I wrote this [story] this afternoon. It’s called Santa Claus is Cumming to Town.” He takes the role as a big-dicked Santa, a character who steals panties from your mother’s drawers and laundry hampers. The voice from the first floor surfaces again, “C’mon, James, c’mon.”

The night ends swiftly and sweetly, around two hours after it began. The crowd leaves a little bit more perverted, possibly a dash horny, but most definitely full on the novelty that Dream Baby brings to their ever-bending literary event sphere. Golden balloons waving, gingerbread man deflating, Carole Radziwill’s forgotten Warby Parker reading glasses sit on a table next to the electronic menorah, and Burger King begins to morph into a fast food restaurant once again.

Matt Starr lingers to say his goodbyes and offers to help a worker clean up the uneaten onion rings and discarded golden crowns. He tells me earnestly before I exit the largest Burger King in New York City: “I thought tonight was so magical. I always pinch myself when I’m looking out at a crowd and there’s 400 people in Burger King on a Tuesday night. I really am just like… this is my romantic comedy. And that’s what I want to put into the world – and it’s beautiful.”

On my walk towards home I pass the 9/11 memorial pools and instantaneously perceive them differently through my re-instated Perverted Book Club goggles. No longer just a reminder of what once was and what was lost, instead, perversely, against my own wishes, I clock these massive, fountained openings as: cavernous, wet, begging to be filled.