by Dan Savage
LSO is the granddaddy of swingers’ organizations, and remains the largest swingers’ organization in the country, with twelve full-time employees, an in-house travel agency (Lifestyles Tours & Travel), and a clubhouse in California. A large chunk of LSO’s Web site is dedicated to answering questions and demystifying the lifestyle, a term the group embraces as passionately as they reject the term wife-swapping. According to its Web site, LSO speaks out “in public and private forums” to advance the “playcouple” philosophy: “Sex between consenting couples is natural, wholesome behavior and to pretend it is not is to encourage physical and mental disorder.” A large chunk of the site is dedicated to Q&A-style fact sheets that seek to reassure couples who might be curious about attending a swing club or a Lifestyles Convention:
“But we’ve never been to anything like this before. . . .”
“You won’t be alone. . . . What you’ll find are a lot of people—everyday people just like you—who are only interested in an open and friendly atmosphere where people are not afraid to talk about fantasies. . . . No one gets attacked. No one is pressured to do anything they don’t want to. There’s no rituals, no initiations. There are, however, a lot of people having fun.”
“For me the question was, could I be a good Jew and a swinger?” David paused, looked across the table, and opened his hands, palms up, as if he had nothing to hide.
“There are a lot of ‘shall nots’ in the Torah,” he says. “But it seemed to us that if we were honest with each other, then we weren’t committing adultery.”
“If you’re lying to your partner, that’s adultery,” says Bridget, David’s wife, nodding.
We’re eating hot, salty pretzels with yellow mustard in the Tropicana’s coffee shop, a dingy hole in the wall that wouldn’t be out of place in a Trailways bus depot. Tall and muscular, David is an impressive example of Jewish manhood—picture a slightly younger version of former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a head full of dark hair. David has muscular arms and shoulders and was wearing a tank top and a pair of running shorts when we met. Bridget was a red-haired, green-eyed woman of Irish descent wearing blue-jean overalls and a small star of David on a chain around her neck. Bridget’s mother was Jewish and her father was Irish-Catholic; her mom got to pick the faith her children were raised in, while her dad got to pick their names. Bridget has two older brothers, Sean and Patrick, both practicing Jews.
David and Bridget are in their early forties, but neither looks a day over thirty-five. They’ve been married for ten years but “in the lifestyle,” as they call it, for four. They attend at least two parties a month and sometimes more at one of the nine swingers clubs in the suburbs of Chicago. They have three children, all boys under the age of ten. They keep kosher, attend services at least once a week, and are giddy with anticipation about their boys’ impending bar mitzvahs. Before meeting me in the Tropicana’s lobby, David and Bridget spent an hour in their hotel room reading the Torah.
“The Torah talks about deception being part of the offense when someone commits adultery,” says David, when I ask how they reconcile their conservative religious beliefs and their liberal attitudes towards sex. “So is adultery having sex with someone who isn’t your spouse? Or is it hiding that sex from your spouse?”
“We realize we’re doing something that would be frowned upon in our moral community,” says Bridget, “and that it may be a contradiction. But people are complex.” Bridget feels the Torah is on their side. “This is something we feel helps our bond as husband and wife. Torah says a man should leave his parents and cleave to his wife,” and David and Bridget feel that swinging brought them closer together, that is, it helps them cleave.
God forbids adultery in the Sixth Commandment. In the Jewish tradition, sin requires an action. “Judaism doesn’t legislate thought,” says Bridget. “Even coveting requires an act in furtherance of the desire.” In the Christian tradition, however, adultery isn’t just a sin in deed alone but also in thought. Wanting to commit adultery, according to the Christian God, is every bit as bad as actually committing adultery. It may seem harsh that God would condemn millions of straight American men to eternal torment for, say, wanting to fuck Jennifer Aniston, the actress married to Brad Pitt, but, hey, who are we to question God? (As God points out to Job, we weren’t around when he was hanging the stars, so who the fuck are we and what do we know about anything?)
Early Christians believed that the act of lusting after someone was not only a sin on the part of the luster but also potentially the lustee. “Someone who consciously seeks to induce lustful thoughts (or actions) in another is guilty of sinning,” according to Mícéal Vaughan, a professor of English at the University of Washington and an expert on the liturgy of the Catholic Church. “Sin in Catholic tradition is only the result of one’s personal thoughts, actions, and consent to them, so a person who is the object of lust is not thereby guilty of sin. It’s on other grounds entirely that the object of lust becomes guilty of sin,” such as behaving or dressing in ways that they know make others lust after them. Which means, of course, that Brad Pitt, Heath Ledger, and Tom Cruise—all three appeared shirtless on the cover of Vanity Fair—have sinned grievously, as their actions inspired lust in my heart and the hearts of millions of other straight women and gay men. When someone’s dress (or lack thereof), actions, or words tempt others to sinful thoughts or deeds (or both), “[that is] what is called making one’s self an ‘occasion of sin,’ and there is potentially some guilt incurred by that,” added Vaughan.
Since Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt make themselves the “occasion of sin” about as often as I make myself toast, Jennifer can expect to roast in hell for prancing around on Friends in her underwear, and Brad will burn right beside her for splashing his abs all over the cover of Vanity Fair.
And here’s some more bad news for Brad and Jennifer: Man and wife, according to early church fathers, were asked to love each other like brother and sister. Lust even within marriage was considered a form of adultery, believe it or not, which means it’s not okay for Brad and Jennifer to lust after each other. The remedy for lust, marital or casual, was chastity—with some kinds of chastity considered better than others. Virginity was the best kind of chastity, according to church fathers, which led some early Christians to castrate themselves. If you couldn’t be a virgin, the second-best chastity was widowhood. If you weren’t disciplined enough to be chaste or lucky enough to be widowed and too horny to go without sex, “it’s better to marry than to burn,” Saint Paul said. Hardly a ringing endorsement of the institution of marriage.
But despite all the compliments the “ancient” and “sacred” institution of marriage gets from American clerics and candidates (who ignore the many ways in which the “unchanging institution of marriage” has evolved and changed over the centuries), early Christians regarded marriage as vastly inferior to celibacy. Which is still the Catholic Church’s position. Unlike the Jews—an embattled tribe trying to make as many babies as possible—early Christians believed the world was coming to an end. Jesus said as much: “And he said unto them, ‘Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the Kingdom of God has come with power (Mark 9.1, Matthew 16.28).’ ” With the world coming to an end, the early Church discouraged its members from bringing more children into the world. With the Kingdom of God at hand, Jesus H. Christ, who had time to arrange for child care?
Judaism isn’t so insanely antisex, according to David and Bridget.
“In the Jewish tradition, sin is ‘missing the mark,’ ” Bridget explained to me in Las Vegas. “Being damned isn’t a Jewish concept. King David was very promiscuous, but he is still seen as the greatest king and a Jewish hero, so maybe missing the mark sexually isn’t so serious a sin.”
David and Bridget got into swinging the same way most swinging couples get into the lifestyle; David asked his wife is she might want to attend a party. He’d gone to a few with his previous lon
g-term girlfriend, enjoyed them, and thought Bridget would like them just as much as he did. Bridget was afraid the parties would be sleazy.
“I told her we could leave at any point,” says David, “and that we didn’t have to do anything. She would be in charge. I told her that going to a club is like going to the most fun bar you’ve ever been to.”
It only took one visit to convince Bridget that David was right.
“People let loose and were really free,” says Bridget. “And unlike most bars, it’s completely safe for women. Nothing is going to happen that you don’t want to have happen. None of the men are obnoxious or drunk, since they know they’ll be asked to leave if they make any of the women feel uncomfortable.”
Women can do just about anything they like at a swingers’ dance or in a swingers’ club—they can be aggressive, demanding, passive, and casually bisexual. The same isn’t true for men. Men who touch women without permission are shown the door, as are drunk or obnoxious men, and there’s a taboo against casual same-sex play among men. “I doubt that all the men in this hotel or at parties are straight,” admitted David, tearing apart another pretzel, “that just doesn’t seem likely, not with so many of the women being bisexual. Male bisexuality is seen as a threat by a lot of straight men, and male bisexuality is seen as a threat to women, since bisexual husbands are likelier to have HIV than husbands who only want to watch their wives and other men’s wives.”
The swinging movement would collapse if women felt unsafe or threatened, David explained, so clubs have to create an environment where women feel safe and free to lose themselves in the moment. “Men, on the other hand, can’t cut loose,” said David. “We have to be on our best behavior at all times.” Single men are not allowed at swing clubs, so that men don’t outnumber women, and clubs refuse admittance to men suspected of hiring prostitutes to accompany them to parties. “We’re constantly monitoring how our actions are being perceived by the women, to make sure we’re not doing anything that might make any woman uncomfortable.”
In his book The Lifestyle: A Look at the Erotic Rites of Swingers, investigative journalist Terry Gould describes the swinging scene as a matriarchy. David agreed with that description.
“Women have all the power. If a woman says, ‘He touched me when I asked him not to,’ then you’re warned. Do it again, and you’re out. So you’re careful and respectful because you don’t want to be asked to leave. It’s too much fun in there; it’s a man’s fantasy come true. All the women, all that sexual energy, all that fun and possibility—and I get to share all of it with the woman I love. It’s paradise, and any sane man would do whatever he had to in order to stay in paradise. It’s wonderful.”
It’s also illegal.
Illinois, where David and Bridget keep kosher and attend swingers’ parties, is one of the twenty-seven states that still have adultery laws on the books. While no one has been prosecuted by the state of Illinois for “open and notorious” adultery in the last forty years, adultery laws in other states are still enforced—and more recently than you might think. In October of 2001, Jerry Ward of Taylersville, North Carolina, was found guilty of having sex with his live-in girlfriend, who was estranged from her husband. (Ward was fined ninety dollars plus court costs.) In New York State, there have been twenty-five arrests and convictions for adultery in the ten years before Bill Clinton moved to the state. Ironically, the U.S. military, where modern swinging got its start, is the most aggressive prosecutor of known adulterers. In 1997, the year the U.S. Air Force famously charged Lt. Kelly Flinn, the first female B-52 bomber pilot, with adultery, sixty men and seven other women were also prosecuted by military courts for adultery. One of the women, Lt. Col. Karen Dwyer (U.S. Air Force) committed suicide five days after she was convicted.
“In extramarital affairs, there are victims,” William Bennett writes in The Death of Outrage, the book in which he scolded the American public for not falling in line behind Republican efforts to hound Bill Clinton from office over a few lousy blow jobs. “Adultery is a betrayal of a very high order, the betrayal of a person one has promised to honor,” according to Bennett. “It violates a solemn vow. When it is discovered, acute emotional damage almost always follows, often including the damage of divorce.”
Not to mention the occasional despairing suicide or ridiculous impeachment.
There don’t appear to be any victims at the Tropicana Hotel, though, just a lot of married men and women having a good time. Over the course of the weekend, swingers from all over the United States and the world attended the fellatio workshop, the pool parties, the Sexy Safari Jungle Party, and the Sexy Sci-Fi Party. Christian activists are famous for crashing gay events, from pride parades to private parties, and videotaping gay men being overtly sexual in public. Copies of these tapes are sent to elected officials in an effort to convince them that gay men are a threat to the American family. Walking through the Erotic Arts Exhibition at the Lifestyles 2001 Convention, an art show that features dozens of images of bondage and bestiality, I wondered where the Christian activists were. Surely an art show by and for heterosexuals that promoted bondage and bestiality—sometimes both at once!—had to be a bigger threat to American families than whatever gay men do when there aren’t any straight people around.
The Lifestyles Organization forbids “public play,” that is, sex at the workshops, pool parties, and dances. There is, however, a lot of flirting, groping, and dirty dancing. When couples decide its time to carry the flirting and groping into actual acts of adultery, they take it up to their rooms and suites, away from the eyes of nonswinging couples who happen to be at the hotel, hotel employees, and scribblers with notebooks. While there’s no public sex at the Lifestyles Convention, there is plenty of skin on display, most of it belonging to females. The only event that showed a lot of male skin was the Best Buns contest, the male beauty pageant that compliments the Miss Lifestyles contest. At both events the announcers told the crowd where each contestant was from, and most seemed to be from “red states,” places like Arkansas, South Carolina, and Georgia, all conservative states that George Bush carried in 2000. When the crowd was informed that a woman in the Miss Lifestyles contest was from Texas, a big cheer went up.
“There are lots of Texans here tonight!” the announcer shouted, and the whooping continued.
Three thousand couples attended the Lifestyles 2001 Convention, and if each of those couples managed to find one other couple to play with, that means twelve thousand separate acts of adultery were committed in one hotel on the Las Vegas strip in one weekend. That has to be some sort of record—even for Las Vegas.
In The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Moral Collapse of the American Family, Bill Bennett identifies numerous threats to the American ever-imperiled family, which he describes as being “under siege.” He frets about the rise in illegitimate births (which dropped in 1999 to 1990 levels), divorce rates (also falling), cohabitation, and single parenthood (which has leveled off). But the gravest threat to the American family, according to Bennett, is gay marriage. There are just six chapters in what is, for Bennett, a relatively slim book (189 pages). By far the largest chapter is devoted to the grave threat gay marriage poses to the American family. And why would homosexual marriages present such a threat to heterosexual ones? Bennett’s chief argument against gay marriage is the fact that so few gay men are or want to be monogamous:Advocates would have us believe that homosexuals do not want any change in the obligations that marriage entails, namely, fidelity and monogamy. . . . [But] some who claim to be more “traditional” in their views find the strictures of family life to be too much. Andrew Sullivan, in a candid admission at the end of his book Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality, writes that homosexual marriage contracts will have to entail a greater understanding of the need for “extramarital outlets (pp. 115-116).”
Marriage, Bennett argues, is not and cannot be an “open” contract. “Its essential idea is fidelity. Obviously that essential idea is not a
lways honored in practice. But it is that to which we commit ourselves.”
Bennett believes the existence of nonmonogamous, legally married gay couples would undermine heterosexual marriages. (Or that’s what he would like us to believe he believes.) And how would gay marriages undermine straight marriages? Married gay male couples—with our trendy haircuts, Phillipe Stark sofas, and extramarital outlets—would present an irresistible example to impressionable straight couples. Married straight couples might find out that their married gay neighbors weren’t monogamous and conclude that they could be legally married and nonmonogamous, too, just like the gays. And while Bennett concedes that lesbian couples are likelier to be monogamous than either gay or straight couples, he doesn’t support marriage rights for lesbians despite the good example lesbian marriages would set for everyone else.
Now I’m not going to waste anyone’s time arguing that most or even many gay male couples are monogamous. The notion that gay couples are likelier to come to an understanding about extramarital outlets is not a right-wing plot or an anti-gay stereotype. It’s a fact. Researchers who’ve studied male couples found that the vast majority did make allowances for some outside sexual contact. But even if every gay couple on earth were strictly monogamous—if gay men were as faithful as lesbians—Bennett overstates the impact gay marriage would have on impressionable straights. While some heterosexuals may turn to homosexuals for fashion tips and sex advice—more should, God knows—very few straight couples take gay couples as their role models.