Seeking Pleasure with Camille Sojit Pejcha

It’s 6 p.m. at the Hotel Chelsea and Camille Sojit Pejcha is catching up with the doorman. Admittedly, it’s not often the 30-year-old sex writer and creator of the Substack newsletter Pleasure-Seeking is around at such a civilized hour. She’s wearing black eyeliner and layered black garments of varying textures, a signature look for Camille, whose outfits can seamlessly traverse a spectrum of events: from corporate meetings to urine-soaked sex dungeons. Her headlining accessory is navel-length auburn hair that cascades from under a gothic, wool beret.

Camille leads me through the crowd of German tourists and swanky New York City diners to the quiet of the sixth floor, where her friend and collaborator, Tony Notarberardino, lives as one of the remaining permanent residents. While the hotel underwent an 11-year renovation, turning the shabby Victorian sanctuary for the bohemia into hip, luxury accommodations, Tony’s apartment remains blissfully untouched.

Camille has the key to the front door and a bottle of wine that she opens as we settle into his bedroom. Empty antique frames, gold mirrors, boas, and vintage gowns on wire hangers festoon the amber walls. An unmounted taxidermy elk head stares up at the crystal chandelier. Tony is an admirer of beautiful things, I am reminded, as Camille crawls onto the bed in a strapless corset dress. “Okay, let’s kiki,” she says.

Before becoming a “modern day Carrie Bradshaw,” as cultural critic Rayne Fisher-Quann dubbed her, Camille learned from an early age that risk and discomfort were necessary evils in order to succeed. She moved constantly as a child, living and attending schools in Massachusetts, Colorado, Oregon, and two different cities in California. “I learned that everything is contextual,” Camille says. “I never really internalized the norms of one place.”

As a sex writer, there are certain assumptions that come with an interest in sex—a childhood perversion of rubbing up on pillows and stealing porno VHS from your neighborhood adult video store. But Camille explains that while her parents were pretty open about sex (slipping the classic “changing bodies” books into her room), she was in many ways quite sheltered and a late bloomer.

It wasn’t until her first sexual experience that her curiosity for the subject was unleashed. “Not because the sex was good,” Camille says. “But because there was this secret, I suddenly understood.” She felt tapped into something unspoken. “Desire shapes everything,” Camille says. “What we wear, how we act, how we see ourselves. I didn’t understand why we weren’t talking about this.” There was even a ridiculousness to it all, she felt. “People have these secret alter egos. We pretend to be civilized and then go behind closed doors and do the most insane shit,” Camille says. “I really got a kick out of it!”

When Camille moved to Brooklyn in 2018, her interests in philosophy, art, sexuality, and desire clicked into place as she began writing. She bartended at night, spending her earnings on classes at the Brooklyn Institute of Social Research. For $300 a class, she studied topics on sexuality like: Bataille: Eroticism, Economy, and Excess

and the philosophy of Melancholy. “It was Camille’s summer of self-actualization,” she says. She eventually landed an assistant gig at Document Journal, an arts and culture print magazine. Over the next five years, she would work in nearly every facet of the indie mag’s operations: in print distribution, marketing, digital, as the Managing Editor, sex columnist, and eventually as Features Director.

At Document, she developed a beat quickly. “It was the running joke in the office that I was ‘sex girl,’” she says. Camille’s eclectic social circles allowed her to tap into networks often out of reach of online audiences. “Many of my friends are sex workers. And I had a platform where I could talk about the things affecting them,” Camille explains. “It’s often said that sex workers are the canary in the coal mine, particularly around online censorship,” she says. Interviewing lawyers, academics, policy makers, and artists, Camille reported on problems facing the sex industry that would eventually trickle down to us all.

Camille’s writing became more personal when she was given a column at Document. “As a journalist, you're like, Who am I to insert myself in this piece?” she explains. “But writing a column gave me permission to center my own thoughts.” Her first confessional essay was about the confusing—and ultimately queer, she discovers—experience of obsessing over your exes’ exes. It was one of those “I’m not the only one” essays that caught fire on the internet, with women reaching out to her over Instagram DMs, sharing their queer obsessions. “Vulnerability gets rewarded if you do it right,” Camille says. “So many women related to that piece, and I wanted to continue the dialogue with them.”

After five years at Document, Camille made the calculated risk to start writing for herself, launching Pleasure-Seeking on Substack this past October. Camille uses her and her readers’ experiences as entry points into broader conversations around sex, desire, and modern culture. Her most recent posts have investigated the neighborly etiquette of loud sex in New York City apartments, critiqued the 4B movement as false empowerment, and ruminated on using one’s love life for content.

Although several Substack users have labeled her a “pervert” or “satanist,” the newsletter was a fast success. Six months after launching, Pleasure-Seeking is read over 55,000 times a month by subscribers across 100 countries. “Sex is the only thing that’s recession-proof,” she says, laughing.

“Substack is important because I don’t need to adhere to the incentive structure of mainstream outlets,” Camille says. Internet trend pieces—the bread and butter of online media—are optimized to succeed on digital platforms because they are leveraging viral moments to drive traffic. Unlike her posts, these niche, attention-grabbing stories are rarely able to capture the nuanced realities of our culture’s relationship to sex.

“We've been robbed of a place to talk about sex and its role in our lives,” Camille explains. “You’re either an anonymous click on a porn site, in a seedy back alley where you can get your fix, or you’re on [Instagram] where you can’t have a nipple.” Sex has been segmented away from our lives. Our social lives are online, we’re increasingly isolated, and unable to unpack our sexual experiences with friends. “We deserve better and more interesting conversations about what we want,” Camille says. “That’s why I’m out in the streets.”

Whether it’s waking up early for eight am vaginal Pilates, attending invitation-only sex parties for horny investment bankers, interviewing frustrated virgins at a singles event, or being suspended from ropes by shibari experts, Camille’s boots-on-the-ground reporting invites her readers into worlds they have little access to otherwise. “I’m not always dying to go to sex parties, like, Oh, that would really hit the spot right now,” Camille says, laughing. “But I feel like I owe it to myself and my readers to see what’s going on.”

“What’s going on,” she found, was happening at the Chelsea. There’s a clink at the door and a white, 14-year-old cat leaps up from the bed and greets Tony, who’s returned from his day at the studio. Camille met the photographer in 2019 when she attended a late-night performance at his apartment. “I understood instantly that what he was doing was special and that I was very lucky to be there,” she says.

We move over to the living room’s gold velvet tufted sofa. On most nights, this couch is the spectator section of Tony’s home theater, where guests enjoy late-night sets from burlesque performers, sideshow acts, and drag queens returning from their evening gigs. Staring at us from across the room is an empty stage and microphone where the “performers perform for other performers,” Tony says, with a wink. “There’s nothing like it in town.”

“Underground culture is the only place we can actually find culture now,” Camille says, nodding at Tony. “So, if people are looking for that, I want to take them with me.” Camille is expanding the Pleasure-Seeking universe with a new podcast and events project. When she announced last month that she’d be throwing an event with Substack—a literary reading on desire at the Wall Street Bathhouse, Spa 88—she was curious to see if her community of online subscribers would actually show up for a ten pm Tuesday reading in their swim gear. The event — touted as the “hottest spot in town” by Page Six—sold out in minutes with a 300+ waitlist. It was clear to Camille that the digital avatars in her subscriber list were eager to leave their apartment for the right event.

“I started my career writing about the wild rooms I ended up in,” she says. “And now I’m throwing those parties so you can come too.” Camille and Tony are currently working on a salon-style reading series that will be hosted at his apartment, infusing the experimental ethos of Pleasure-Seeking with the magic of Tony’s legendary parties at the Chelsea. “I want to make Pleasure-Seeking more ‘real’ for people,” Camille explains. “And turn their desires into reality.”