Laid Bare Newsletter

Good morning. For this week’s newsletter, I’m sharing an unpublished essay on my most CONTROVERSIAL dating take. LAID BARE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Everyone in London was getting sick — a heady, woozy, brain-curdling flu. In mid October, I came down with it, too. I spent four days stewing and sweating in bed, binging on demented Instagram reels. Then, bored and restless, I decided to redownload Hinge.

Sauna Raving at The Sanctuary for i-D by Arielle Domb Hey lovers!I hope you had a cute Valentine’s. I spent mine eating Tarte Tatin at my uncle’s house in Buckinghamshire, then trawling through the kink archives at Bishopsgate Institute in east London. I also popped by French artist Monique Fei’s 24-hour performance art show on my way home, featuring a performer close to suffocation under cream latex bedsheets. It was overall a pretty sexy day.

Is it just me or is this post-Christmas pre-New Year’s netherworld feeling particularly loose and lawless?? So much juicy stuff has happened recently and I want to tell you EVERYTHING. Of course, being a journalist, I am always mining my life for material, ossifying off-kilter interactions into article fodder, weaving intimate nights and weird mornings into stories.

Andrew Tate thinks that a lot of things are gay. The self-proclaimed misogynist edgelord, who is banned from YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, is frequently yapping to his 10.9 million followers on X about things he feels are homosexually-coded: BDSM. Being a Democrat. Wanting to be at the birth of your own child. Sleeping. Dolphins. Couscous. But the most peculiar take? Tate thinks that straight sex can be gay.