Versatile Ladies: the bisexual option (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  • • •

  One thing I’ve come to see is that the very people who most want to see me again are apt to be the ones I least want to get involved with. Not because of physical appearance or sexual preferences or anything but because the sort of people I fantasize a long-term thing with are exactly the people who are trying to avoid involvement of that sort.

  There’s a great deal of variety in the types of couples who want to swing with a bi-girl and the type of swinging they want to do. Some of them are acting out a fantasy very close to mine and others are in a whole different part of the world.

  For example, I’ve met quite a few couples who use a session with a bi-girl as a prelude to couple-to-couple swinging. They want to swing with other couples but either the wife can’t admit to herself or to her husband that she would like to fuck another man, or the husband is a little uptight on the subject himself, or else there’s a feeling that I can’t exactly describe that the wife isn’t really committing adultery if she balls a girl, but she would be if she balled a guy. Maybe she has had lesbian experiences in the past and maybe not. Most of the time the wife says she hasn’t, but I think a certain number of them lie about it.

  In most threesomes, one of the three is the center of attraction. Sometimes it’s the husband and he’s the sultan of the harem, with his wife and the odd girl making love to him simultaneously. When the two girls make love to each other, he’s inclined to think of it as a performance put on for his benefit. I’m generally turned off by this scene, not so much because the sex is not enjoyable as because the people themselves turn me off. The men are real male chauvinists who really believe in the whole double standard and think they ought to be able to have extra women but their wives shouldn’t have extra men. And they think lesbian lovemaking doesn’t count, that it’s just cute, something to get hot watching and then fuck both girls to show what a sexual superman you are.

  In other situations the wife is the center of attraction. The husband and I will both make love to her. We may make love to each other, too, and everybody may do everything to everybody else, but she will be the focal point.

  What I most prefer, which will be no surprise considering my basic attitudes, is when I am the center of attraction. It sounds as though the point of it is sexual greed. It’s not that at all. As a matter of fact I get more joy from giving sexual pleasure than from receiving it. But I prefer to be a girl—me—relating to a couple, rather than one of two women relating to a man or a man’s partner relating to another woman. It all comes back to wanting to be the child in bed with Mommy and Daddy.

  Even with a couple oriented this way, there are differences. Sometimes I meet a couple who approach the whole thing in terms of a trade, an exchange, a quid pro quo. They take turns with me, and the husband permits his wife to make love to me in return for the privilege of fucking me himself. I don’t like this because they stop being a couple, a unit, and they’re like a brother and sister taking turns using the family car. It’s an ego trip for me anyway—both of them wanting little old me—but it’s not the ideal.

  I’m describing all these things that I don’t like and it may sound as though I have more disappointment than enjoyment. That’s not true at all. It’s just that the right couple looking for the right sort of thing is so much better.

  The best couples are very much in love and very honest and open with each other. And they want to make love to me as a couple, and each one takes delight in the other’s pleasure, and the two of them work together to give me pleasure and take pleasure from me.

  These are the couples I am most anxious to see again, and even get a little involved with, and they’re also the couples who will want not to get involved because they are so close to each other that they could never let a third person in as an equal partner. And as a matter of fact I think what it amounts to is that the more anxious they are to exclude me from ultimate intimacy, the more strongly attracted I am. This is neurotic, this business of wanting something only if it’s something you can’t have. Because I can’t get in bed with Mommy and Daddy, and if they let me in completely it will only prove that they really weren’t Mommy and Daddy after all. But I’ve been getting less and less hung up with this sort of thing as time passes, which means either that I’m getting a little less neurotic or that I’m getting to be able to anticipate myself, which may be nothing more than two ways of saying the same thing.

  I’ve been getting more at ease generally lately, and it’s interesting that the more I find myself relaxing and enjoying myself in threesomes, the more I’m beginning to wonder if I wouldn’t like to try some other combinations, if only to test my own reactions to them. I’ve been thinking about a threesome with two men, for example. Bisexual men in particular. I watched men together at a group thing once and I found it exciting. I also think a foursome might be good if all four of us were bi and everyone really related to everyone else. At least I would like to try it.

  So it seems as though I may be building up to a period of experimentation again.

  You know, I probably sound more at ease about everything than I am. Or than I always am. One of the difficulties about the sexual underground is that it is an underground and there’s another world outside where you have to keep part of yourself always hidden. The need to hide this way affects the way you feel about yourself and what you do. I can talk to you, Jack, and I can talk about all sorts of weird sex and know that I’m not going to blow your mind, which makes me not only relaxed in this conversation but relaxed in my feelings about myself and my actions. And when I’m with swingers who act the way I do and think the way I do I’m similarly relaxed.

  But with other people, in the office, say, I’ll have conversations where I’m required to pretend to be somebody other than the person I really am. And then I often find myself absorbing values from the person I’m talking to, maybe even absorbing values from the role I’m playing, and I start wondering if maybe I’m not sick and disgusting and evil and unnatural and abnormal. I’m not going to call it guilt feelings. I don’t feel any real guilt over the way I’m living at the present time. It’s more a case of wondering why everyone else is out of step, and having to face the possibility that I’m the one who’s out of step.

  Not that this happens all the time. As a matter of fact, I’m more likely to look at the straight people in my office and feel sorry for them. Some of them don’t know what they’re missing. And others—you catch bits of this in conversation—they do know what they’re missing, they have certain things they want very much to try, and they just won’t let themselves let go and do it. And those are the ones I feel sorriest for. The ones who have an itch and can’t get up the courage to scratch it.

  FIVE:

  “All Of A Sudden I Was A Lesbian”

  September 15, 1970

  Dear Mr. Wells:

  My husband and I have read several of your books on sex. Most recently we picked up a copy of The New Sexual Underground which we missed when it was first issued. I found it most interesting. Especially I was impressed by your last chapter. (She refers to an impressionistic subjective report of my own reactions to a large-scale orgy—JWW.) While neither my husband nor I have ever been involved in that sort of “mob scene,” our own experience being limited to groups of four couples at the most, your feelings are much as I would expect ours to be in those circumstances.

  There is something I have not seen mention of in books by yourself or others and I think it should be brought out to the public’s attention. I am referring to the dangers of experimenting with homosexuality. Specifically female homosexuality. You know how prevalent this is among swingers. I guess it’s the “in” thing because almost everybody does it these days.

  There is a danger though that you will go overboard. A woman will have a bisexual experience without even wanting to do it and before she knows it she is in over her head. The effects of this can be very hard to handle.

  My own case is living proof of this. After thirty-seven
years of never even thinking about relations with my own sex, I up and left my husband of fifteen years and my children to live with another woman. I was sure this was the “real me” and that I would never want a man again. I went from woman to woman thinking this until I finally came to my senses. Blessed with an understanding husband I was able to return to my family. But it might have been otherwise. I had everything and threw it all away. It seems crazy now but how sure I was at the time.

  I have known other women who have been disturbed in this way but not to the extent I was. And I think you might want to let people who might be considering this know that it can be dangerous if they are not prepared in advance. In my case, I was the last person on earth that anything like this could possibly happen to. And one day all of a sudden I was a lesbian out of the clear blue sky.

  You may use this letter as it is or work up a story out of my experiences, or if you are ever out this way I would be glad to discuss it with you, or anything else you might care to discuss. The only request is that you change my name of course, and also not use the name of the town. Just say Southern California or Greater Los Angeles and let it go at that . . .

  Sincerely,

  Evelyn

  I replied to Evelyn, telling her that I found her experiences quite interesting and felt they made an important point. I added that I had known of cases in which women who became involved in bisexual experiences in swinging had had trouble dealing with their new view of their own sexuality, and that Sheila in The Wife-Swap Report had been deeply troubled at one point by the thought that homosexual relations were playing a disproportionate part in her sex life. (Sheila and her husband were introduced to swinging by close friends, who quite literally seduced them. The wife later seduced Sheila into lesbian relations, and the two women began seeing each other not only when their husbands were present but in secretive afternoon meetings as well. Sheila was disturbed by the secrecy, disturbed by her own increasing emotional dependence upon the woman. The problem solved itself when the other couple moved out of state.)

  Since the West Coast is out of my normal interviewing range, I suggested to Evelyn that she consider being interviewed via correspondence. I asked a variety of questions and told her to write at length about any aspects of her attitudes and experiences that she felt like discussing. I reassured her that her identity would be fully protected.

  Several weeks passed, and I suspected that once again a very interesting initial letter would not be followed up. This often happens, and while it’s always disappointing one gets to expect it. Then I received a neatly typed letter from Evelyn. It was followed by several more letters, all of which appear below. My replies were brief and uninteresting, containing little more than acknowledgement that each letter in turn had been received and encouraging further correspondence.

  I’ve found correspondence to be both better and worse than interviews conducted in person. Certainly letters simplify an author’s task—it is easier to sit here copying someone else’s words verbatim than to work at the recreation of a conversation. I prefer interviews because I myself can surely come to know a person far better through a face-to-face meeting. On the other hand, there may be an advantage to the reader when correspondence is reproduced verbatim. Then the reader is receiving precisely the impression of the person that I myself received; we are both confronted solely with words on a page. When I report an in-person interview, the reader is inevitably getting a portrait of the subject colored by my own personal perceptions.

  Letter-writing ability constitutes a further variable. Some people, articulate enough in person, have never learned to think on paper and cannot express themselves effectively in letters. Others are articulate enough but hide from the page what they would willingly reveal orally. (Just as others will write frank and perceptive letters but freeze in conversation.)

  Evelyn is a good letter-writer, and her tone is such that I expect her conversation would not be much different from her writing style.

  November 2, 1970

  Dear Mr. Wells,

  I have been meaning to write you for some time but just have not gotten around to it. Perhaps I have been making excuses for myself.

  I am not even sure what I wrote in my last letter to you as I did not make a copy. So if some of this is just repetition you can always edit it accordingly. I am typing this letter and am making a carbon so we will not have that problem in the future.

  I am forty years old and my husband Leonard is forty-seven. We will be married eighteen years in March. Leonard is a sound technician in television and motion picture production. I was in nurse’s training but gave it up to get married and have not worked since. We have three children, a girl almost fifteen and two boys ages eight and ten.

  I don’t know if any of this is of interest but will just put in what comes to mind.

  We have lived in the Greater Los Angeles area ever since we were married and have been in our present home for a little over eight years. It is a pleasant house in the suburbs and while we are by no means well off we have always been able to live comfortably, and in recent years have had all the luxuries a person would want.

  In sex we were well suited to one another. I had never went “all the way” with anyone before Leonard but dated throughout high school and as the saying goes I “spent a lot of hours in parked cars.” Leonard and I did not have intercourse until we were engaged, and were married within two months of our first intercourse.

  Our marriage was always good and very good sexually or at least I thought so. Like most people we were very active when first married and gradually the activity dropped off with the passage of time. By the time I was pregnant with my older son there were weeks that went by without sex between us. My feelings were that the “honeymoon was over” but I felt this was to be expected. Also I always had orgasm now when we did have sex and this was not so at the beginning of marriage, when I had orgasm some of the time but by no means always. So as far as I was concerned our sex life was fine and I had never had an affair or even given it serious thought, believing that marriage was supposed to mean sex with one person and one person only.

  The shock of my life was shortly after my first son was born when I discovered Leonard was seeing another woman. There were phone calls and various signs that I would have to have been a moron to miss. I was so hurt and frightened that I confronted him with it and forced him to admit it, although he insisted on lying for some time. Finally he admitted it and insisted she meant nothing to him and he had never meant to get involved with her at all. He agreed that he would stop seeing her. Gradually it came out that this was not his first affair by any means. But before this they were one-night stands with girls picked up in bars. I could not understand why he would do this when he had me at home waiting for him, especially because he still went on insisting that he found me more attractive and loving than the women he went with, and that there was nothing he wanted that I refused to do in bed. He finally made me realize that he wanted variety for the sake of variety. I could not understand this but came to believe that men were inclined to be like this while women wanted one man and one man only. Which I then believed completely, and was sure of in my own case.

  He promised he would not see this girl, and I asked him if that meant he would have no more affairs. He said yes, and I asked how he could be so sure of it, whereupon he did an “about face” and said he could make no promises in that regard because it would depend on how he felt and what opportunities came up, and that it should not matter to me if I did not know about it. Because it would not change the way he felt about me.

  This conversation gave me a lot to think about. Also it cleared the air. It was less than a month afterwards that the subject of swinging first came up and this conversation was responsible. Later I found out Leonard had been interested in swinging for a matter of years but had not felt free to bring it up even in a roundabout way.

  We discussed swinging in a very general way without me dreaming that this was somethin
g he wanted to do. I kept saying how I thought it was a terrible way for people to live, and he kept defending the swingers and countering my arguments, and finally I said words to the effect that the way he talked you would almost believe that he wanted to do that sort of thing himself.

  He said, “Well, maybe I’m interested.”

  I couldn’t believe it. That he would want me to have sex with another man and not be his and his alone. Once again I had all the arguments and he had all the answers. We left it that it might be all right for some people but it was not for me, and then we went to bed and both of us were so much more excited than usual that I couldn’t believe it. We had great sex and afterward I teased him that he didn’t need other women when we were so good together.

  He said, “Well, why do you think we were both so hot just now? Don’t you think the conversation put ideas in our heads? And turned us both on?”

  I said maybe it turned him on but I was just excited by him, and he said he didn’t believe me.

  Well, thinking about it, over the next few days I had to realize he was right. Also he brought books home for me to read, and also magazines of the club bulletin type. Finally I said I would swing but could make no guarantees.

  We met another couple through correspondence and went to their house for cocktails. We sat around with the three of them more or less talking me into it, until I had enough drinks to see I was being ridiculous. I went over and kissed the husband and asked him to show me where the bedroom was. He took me to the bedroom while Leonard and the other wife used the couch.

  I was excited by what was happening but not physically excited. The excitement was all in my mind. But he ate my pussy for what seemed like hours and got me hot as hell and fucked me like a stallion and finally shot a load of piping hot come into my cunt.