by Dan Savage
And it’s not as if America’s married heterosexuals are hanging back waiting for gay marriage to be legalized before they cheat. To take one famous example, gay marriage was illegal in the United States when Bill Clinton ejaculated on Monica Lewinsky—gay marriage is illegal in the United States thanks to Clinton, who signed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. Clinton isn’t the only married man in America who has ejaculated on someone to whom he isn’t married. Peggy Vaughan, author of The Monogamy Myth, estimates that 60 percent of married men and 40 percent of married women will have an extramarital affair at some point in their marriage. Since these people are not always married to each other, Vaughan believes that 80 percent of heterosexual marriages are “touched” by adultery.
If Bennett is truly worried about the bad example of nonmonogamous married couples—if that’s not just his excuse for denying gay couples the right to wed—one would expect that Bennett is more concerned about the gatherings like the Lifestyles 2001 convention at the Tropicana Hotel than the “outlets” gay men in couples permit each other.
Let’s crunch some numbers:
There are 60.7 million American men between the ages of eighteen and fifty. The best estimate of the percentage of American men who identify as gay is 3.7 percent, which means there are only 2.2 million gay men between the ages of eighteen and fifty, the years men are likeliest to marry or remarry. If gay marriage were legalized, the maximum number of gay married couples in the United States would be 1.1 million—provided, of course, that every one of those 2.2 million American gay men could find a husband in one day. (And even if gay marriage were legalized there would still be gay men who didn’t want to marry, gay men no other gay men would want to marry, and gay men who didn’t want to leave the priesthood in order to marry.) So keep in mind that the 1.1-million-gay-marriages estimate is probably high.
Now consider that there are currently 1.1 million straight couples involved in the swinging movement, according to researcher Richard Jenks, a professor of sociology at Indiana University Southeast who researches alternative sexualities. These aren’t potential nonmonogamous married couples Jenks is talking about, but actual nonmonogamous heterosexual married couples who are, if we agree with Bennett, setting a very bad example for other heterosexual couples. That 1.1 million figure represents 2 percent of the 54.4 million married couples in the United States, which means the number of swinger couples in the United States has doubled since the 1970s. There are currently as many actively swinging, nonmonogamous straight couples as there are potential gay married couples.
The average heterosexual couple is likelier to socialize with other heterosexual couples; they’re likelier to look to other heterosexual couples as role models and for advice; and they’re likelier to look to other heterosexual marriages for an idea of what’s possible in their own marriage. Considering these facts, it seems clear that if anyone is setting a bad example for monogamous heterosexual couples, it’s the growing number of married, nonmonogamous, heterosexual “playcouples” who crowded into the Tropicana Hotel and Resort for Lifestyles 2001.
What’s more, unlike homosexuality, swinging is a learned behavior. Homosexuality is not a choice—I don’t care how many “ex-gay” Christian conservatives can trot out for the cameras. My proof that homosexuality is not a choice? A question for my straight male readers: Is there anything I could do or say or write that would convince you to willingly, happily, eagerly, anxiously, deliriously, lustfully put my dick in your mouth and leave it there until I had an orgasm? I rest my case.
Monogamous straight couples, however, can be talked into swinging. During the Lifestyles 2001 convention, the Tropicana was crawling with formerly monogamous married straight couples who either read about the lifestyle on the Web or met someone involved in the lifestyle and decided to check out a party for themselves. Swingers define fidelity differently, they pursue “extramarital outlets,” they call it a lifestyle—and they recruit. A straight couple I know were invited to dinner by their new next-door neighbors, who wined them, dined them, and hit on them. Their new neighbors were swingers, they announced, and they invited my friends to join them at the next party they attended. My friends went, and now they’re swingers. A lawyer I know was approached by a senior partner in his law firm about attending a swingers’ party at the senior partner’s home. The offer put my friend in an awkward spot: Could he refuse the invitation without jeopardizing his position with the firm? (He declined the invitation, and the feared retaliation never materialized—my friend is a partner in his firm now.) Swingers organizations advertise themselves and their conventions, local clubs put up Web sites, individual couples have home pages and take out personal ads—all in an effort to attract new, previously monogamous couples into the lifestyle.
Every evil action that conservatives accuse gays of—recruiting, cheating, living a “lifestyle”—these married heterosexual couples are actually guilty of.
Bennett should be appalled. He should be frightened. Anyone who believes that the American family is threatened by nonmonogamous gay male couples should be apoplectic about the growth of the swinging movement. Make no mistake, Mr. Bennett, these radical swingers are on the march. Terry Gould writes, “. . . swinging has grown substantially. The annual Lifestyles convention is a megaevent. Miniconventions are taking place every Saturday night in the smallest towns, and new clubs are opening all the time . . . [and] we are entering an era in which the playcouple lifestyle is going to take a big jump in popularity.” Swingers clubs, like the ones David and Bridget attend in the suburbs of Chicago, send out newsletters and maintain Web sites. “It is inevitable that more and more straight people will run across these ads,” Gould writes. “[Thanks to the Internet], thousands will certainly find their way to clubs no one suspected of being up and running within a fifteen-minute drive from home.”
For someone who regards fidelity as the “essential” to marriage, Bennett seems strangely incurious about organized, nonmonogamous heterosexual couples committing adultery en masse. Modern swinger conventions, playcouple parties, and contact magazines and Web sites are nowhere to be found in Bennett’s book. But Bennett has time to round up all the usual gay suspects: Anne Heche, Ellen DeGeneres, Julie Cypher, Melissa Etheridge, Bruce Bower, Andrew Sullivan, Jonathan Rauch, Elizabeth Birch, John Boswell, Rosie O’Donnell, Robert Mapplethorpe. Gays come up seventy-one times in The Broken Hearth’s index, but there’s just one mention—one!—of heterosexual swinging. It’s on page 22, and it’s in the past tense. Bennett ridicules a book on “open marriages” published in 1972, and then blandly states that, “wife-swapping and ‘open marriage’ did not become the rage in American life.”
Surely Bennett is aware that swinging wasn’t canceled in 1974 along with Love, American Style. Roger Stone, an adviser to Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign, was forced to resign after reporters discovered that he and his wife were regulars at various swing clubs and conventions. Mr. and Mrs. Stone also advertised in swingers’ magazines looking for younger men, preferably military types, to have sex with Mrs. Stone while Mr. Stone watched. Bennett was an adviser to the Dole campaign, so he must have known Roger Stone—Stone was active in Republican politics for years—and Bennett had to have been aware of the scandal. But Bennett would have us believe swinging is something a few loopy straight people experimented with in the early seventies—did Bennett’s research assistant rent Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm and call it a day?—and Stone doesn’t rate a single mention in a book about the “moral collapse” of the American family.
In August of 2002, the Lifestyles convention was held in Reno, Nevada. For three days in August of 2003, Lifestyles Organization will transform yet another big American metropolis into the swingers’ Vatican City, playcouples’ temporal and spiritual capital. Lifestyle conventions aren’t held in secret; they’re heavily advertised on the Web, hotels and resorts compete to host them, and with each passing year, the conventions earn increasingly favorable coverage in local and national
media. If Bennett doesn’t believe that heterosexual couples are passionate about nonmonogamy—some are eager to proselytize about it—I’ll buy Bennett a ticket to the Lifestyles 2003 Convention and introduce him to thousands and thousands of straight couples for whom wife-swapping and open marriage are indeed the rage.
Bennett doesn’t have to trek to Reno or Las Vegas to find married, nonmonogamous heterosexuals committing adultery. Bennett lives with his wife in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Two miles up the road in Silver Springs, Maryland, the Hartford County Swing Club hosts regular parties and social events for heterosexual couples. According to their Web site, “HCSC is a group of couples . . . who come together to have fun and make new friends.” Hosted by Cookie and Ron, the Hartford County Swing Club sponsors gatherings year-round, including winter holiday parties with “gift exchange supervised by ‘The Nekkid Elf.’ ”
The Hartford County Swing Club has been helping Bill Bennett’s married, heterosexual neighbors commit adultery since 1999. But while Bennett’s married, heterosexual neighbors seek extramarital outlets right under his nose, Bennett is more concerned with how gay men might behave if we could get married. (If Bennett is interested in meeting some of his swinging neighbors, he can e-mail The Hartford County Swing Club at [email protected] for directions to its next party. But you’ll have to bring the wife, Bill, as single men are not allowed.)
Cultural conservatives like Bennett are always complaining about people who profit from violent movies and music, accusing this music label or that movie studio of making money by promoting immoral behavior. At the Lifestyles Convention, I picked up brochures for more than a dozen resorts that cater to playcouples or described themselves as “lifestyle-friendly” places with names like Blue Bay Resorts, Hedonism, Caribbean Reef Club, Solare Resorts, and Plato’s Repeat. They’re all making money off organized mass adultery, and yet Bennett has no comment. Swinging is even making inroads into popular culture. In How the Grinch Stole Christmas —one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen—the adult Whos down in Whoville are shown at a drunken party tossing keys into a bowl by a window, echoing the infamous “key party” scene in The Ice Storm. Director Ron Howard portrayed the Whos in Whoville as swingers—and this is a movie marketed to our children!
Excuse me, but where the fuck is Bill Bennett’s outrage? Why hasn’t Bennett called for Opie’s head?
Buffalo Grove, Illinois, isn’t anyone’s idea of Gomorrah (or Whoville, for that matter). A conservative, largely Jewish bedroom community in the northern suburbs of Chicago, Buffalo Grove is a few square miles of ranch and old farm houses. Most of the homes in Buffalo Grove are a short walk from at least one synagogue. During the week, Buffalo Grove’s lawyers and office workers make their way to downtown Chicago on commuter trains and express buses, in minivans and SUVs.
Buffalo Grove is one of those places that isn’t. There’s no downtown, no town square. To quote a famous Jewish dyke, “when you’re there, there’s no there there.” (Gertrude Stein was speaking of Oakland, California.) With the exception of a few depressing malls filled with the same three dozen stores you’ll find in every other mall in North America, there’s nothing much in Buffalo Grove. But the place is, as the saying goes, a fine place to raise a family; there are good schools, quiet neighborhoods, and few gangs. Buffalo Grove is a place where young children get a good education, and teenagers just want to get the hell out.
David and Bridget invited me to drop by for dinner whenever I was in Buffalo Grove. Since I couldn’t imagine a circumstance that would ever bring me to Buffalo Grove, I had to make a special trip. Their house was a split-level ranch on a dark street one block away from one of those eight-lane arterials that slice through the Chicago suburbs. Their house is about forty years old, solid and squat, built with the dark orange and khaki-yellow bricks. It’s the kind of house that drives urbanists nuts—the driveway and the garage dominate the front of the house, there’s no porch, no front stoop, and the front door faces the driveway, not the street.
Bridget meets me at the door, takes my coat, and asks me if I’d like a glass of wine. I grew up a few miles away from Buffalo Grove, in a Chicago neighborhood that was half Jewish and half Irish Catholic—just like David’s and Bridget’s three boys, who come running up the steps from the basement. David is putting the finishing touches on dinner, so Bridget asks the boys—aged nine, seven, and four—to show me some of their toys. The boys lead me down a flight of carpeted stairs into a huge basement rec room. An enormous television sits at one end of the room with three couches arranged around it; a cocktail bar built by the home’s previous owners sits at the other end. And the half acre of beige carpeting that stretches between the couches and the cocktail bar is covered with toys.
Noah, the oldest, plops down on one of the couches by the television set and plays with his Game Boy. The two younger boys, Joshua and Aaron, show off their awesome collection of Rescue Heroes, a popular line of action figures. My son is obsessed with Rescue Heroes, too, so I’m familiar with most of the plastic cops, firemen, and paramedics Joshua and Adam hold out for me to inspect. Rescue Heroes have ridiculously broad shoulders, huge lats, enormous pecs, Popeye forearms, and massive thighs. Most have mustaches, and they all have enormous feet. They look like porn-star action figures.
Dinner is salmon steaks for the grown-ups and cheese pizza for the kids, and the conversation is all Judaism, all the time. Because it was the Friday night Shabbat dinner, there were candles on the table and prayers said in Hebrew before we ate. There was also a song, a blessing for the children, a poem, and finally a prayer for peace. I felt like I was at an open mic performance at a coffee shop for hyperobservant Jews. Like most Americans, I got something of a crash course on Judaism during the 2000 presidential campaign, thanks to Joe Lieberman, whose orthodox Jewish faith prevented him from driving on Fridays. But I must have missed the Nightline that covered Shabbat, so I asked David to explain the importance of the meal to me.
“Well, it’s the day that’s important, not just the meal,” David said. “The meal is intended to celebrate the day, which is kept holy according to the Fourth Commandment. Shabbat is the most important Jewish holiday.”
I interrupted. The most important Jewish holiday comes once a week?
“Well, Yom Kippur is the most important holiday, but it is called the Shabbat of Shabbats. But, yes, the most important Jewish holiday does come once a week. Think of food, water, and air,” David continued. The boys squirmed—they’d heard this one before. “We have plenty of all three, as God created enough air, food, and water for the whole word, provided we use it properly. You can live for weeks without food, and days without water. But you can’t live for more than a few minutes without air. So which is the most important of those three things?” David asked me.
Uh . . . air?
“That’s right, air is the most important. It’s also the most abundant. It surrounds us, it’s everywhere, all over the earth, and a mile up into the sky. And we take it for granted until we don’t have it. It’s the same with Shabbat. It’s the most important holiday and the most abundant. Once a week we pause as a family and come together and remember what family is. It surrounds us, it gives us life, and we remind ourselves not to take family for granted. Family is the air we breathe.
“God,” David continued, “breathed life into Adam, he didn’t give him a glass of water or hand him a sandwich.”
One thing runs through my mind while David talks: Bill Bennett would eat this shit up. David and Bridget are devoted to each other, committed to their children, religious, and observant in an open, moving, thoroughly genuine way. What’s for a conservative not to like about these two?
The swinging, of course. The parties, the conventions, the extramarital outlets. To Bennett and other one-size-fits-all moral scolds, David and Bridget’s faith, their well-behaved boys, the hours they spend volunteering at their synagogue, and their loving, egalitarian relationship won’t get them out of the “moral collapse” column
on Bill Bennett’s good family-bad family ledger.
After dinner ended and the boys went back to the basement, I asked David and Bridget if we could talk about swinging. Bridget got up from the table and bent to look down the stairs that lead to the basement. She called down to the boys, telling them they could put a tape in the VCR, and a small cheer went up; television is strictly rationed in this ranch house. Once she was satisfied that the boys couldn’t hear us, Bridget returned to the table and nodded.
But I somehow already know the answer to my first question: Do the boys know?
David and Bridget have decided not to tell their kids about their sex lives for the time being—now it’s their sex lives and not their “lifestyle.” They certainly weren’t going to tell them now, while the boys were so young. They probably would never tell them.
“It’s not that we don’t talk to our kids about sex,” Bridget said. “We want them to grow up to have healthy attitudes about sex, and we want them to have all the information they need. I’ve talked to my older son about masturbation. But I don’t think we would tell them about this.”
“I look at it this way,” David said. “I wouldn’t want to know all the details of my parents’ sex life. I mean, if your parents had been swingers, would you want them to tell you about it?”
That’s a big, fat no.
“Right,” said David. “So why tell our boys something they would rather not know? We can’t really see how it would ever even come up.”
But what if one of the boys heard something about swinging on TV or read something about the lifestyle—his parents’ lifestyle—on the Internet and asked them about it?
David and Bridget looked at each other, then back at me. “We would lie,” Bridget whispered—actually, all three of us were whispering. “People say very disparaging things about swingers. It’s so countercultural that people have a hard time understanding it. We wouldn’t want to tell the boys for some of the same reasons we couldn’t tell the neighbors or our rabbi. Swingers are discriminated against, and the way the media portrays swingers is hateful. The public image is that all swingers are sex-crazed lunatics whose lives revolve around sex.”