The Taboo Breakers: Shock Troops of the Sexual Revolution (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  Inconsistencies abound in their position. This would bother more cerebral individuals, but the Kreinhauser’s have exceedingly simple minds—and I use the adjective not pejoratively but purely as description. They do not think deeply. They do not analyze or contemplate. They act and react and indulge in remarkably little true thought.

  As swingers, they fall somewhere between radicalism and conservatism, as one might suspect such devoutly ordinary people would do. They quickly passed from the tame swaps in which the partners repaired to separate rooms to sociable couplings, and before long added three-way and four-way tricks to their stock.

  At the same time they have carefully eschewed the more bizarre activities of the swinging world. They will have no truck with sadomasochism and do not participate in orgies—interestingly, they have never met with more than one couple at a time. They are unimaginative in sexual matters, although they would resent bitterly such a label. Lee has never had any sort of sexual contact with another male. When he and the other husband share the sexual favors of one of the women, he is always careful to manage things so that he does not come into physical contact with any portion of the other man’s body. That there is an unconscious homosexual element present in the entire situation is a concept which perhaps has not ever occurred to him.

  June’s attitude toward homosexuality seems confusing at first. She has stated that she does not enjoy it but tolerates it for her husband’s benefit. Since she seems otherwise uninterested in his satisfaction, this does not make much apparent sense. I have since concluded that she is lying. She does enjoy playing the active or the passive role in cunnilingus with the other wife but feels it would be indecent to admit as much. Evidently it is “normal” for a swinging wife to participate in lesbian activity in the context of a group sex session, while it is not “normal”—and hence not allowable or admissible—to derive real pleasure from the proceedings.

  • • •

  The Kreinhauser’s version of swinging has another interesting side to it, and it too is quite common. They are collectors. They file all their correspondence, June keeps a brief coded diary and enters notes on each trade, and Lee has filled a cabinet with pornographic photos taken at their swap parties, each picture labeled with the names of the participants and the date the picture was taken. The original Polaroid, purchased to photograph his growing sons and hardly ever used for that purpose, has long since been traded in on a deluxe model with a Rube Goldberg assortment of attachments and accessories.

  LEE: We make contacts strictly by mail, through false names and post office boxes. We use the correspondence clubs almost exclusively. The tabloids are considered old stuff nowadays, and the word is out that most of them fill their columns with fake ads because of the buck they take in for every letter they forward. The clubs, the good ones, are supposed to be run honest. You won’t necessarily keep from meeting the creeps and kooks in the clubs, but you stand a better chance of coming out all right. A few contacts we’ll get through other people, folks we’ve swung with in the past who pass our names on and recommend us. But I’ll say 95 percent of it is through the correspondence clubs.

  JUNE: It’s not the easiest thing in the world meeting new people all the time, especially when you consider that we don’t swing with more than one out of every five or six couples we exchange letters with. Of course as the kids get older it’s easier for us to travel, but now with the two stores it’s going to be that much harder for Lee to get away.

  JWW: And you feel a need for new people?

  LEE: That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? New people means new thrills.

  JWW: I know that some swingers just trade partners in a small circle, and this may go on for years. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I get the impression that you two rarely meet more than once with the same couple. Is that true?

  JUNE: I wouldn’t put it that way. Every once in a while we still get together with Cliff and Miriam, for instance. And any time we get along particularly well with another couple we may make a point of seeing them a second time.

  LEE: No, he’s right, what he’s getting at. We’ll do a repeat once in awhile, but the great majority of times, most of the couples, once is enough. Not that we don’t enjoy the once, but why swing with them again when there’s a whole world full of strangers? There’s only so much sex a person can handle and only so many years to do it in, so what the hell, why not spread it around?

  JWW: I can understand your reasoning, but don’t you frequently think back on certain persons with whom you’ve especially enjoyed yourselves and want to get more intimately involved with them?

  LEE: What do you know that’s more intimate than screwing? Answer me that. And as for thinking back, that’s what the photos are for, to help you look back and remember.

  JUNE: And to look at when we’re too old for anything better.

  LEE: That’s a joke we’ve got, mainly because we file all the pictures and hardly ever even look through them. But when you’re busy doing things all the time who in the hell has got time to think? And as for this routine about the same people year after year, hell, that’s like one big happy family. Where’s the variety, for Christ’s sake? I want a change, that’s the whole point. The same stuff year after year, hell, I get enough of that at home.

  What Are You Doing After The Orgy?

  CLAIRE: One problem with swinging is the way it tends to become your entire life. We found just that happening to us. It was kicks in a lot of ways, but as a matter of fact there really is such a thing as having too much of a good thing. It got so that the only people we ever saw socially were swingers, and we never did go for the idea of a close circle of friends. Instead we would party it up with new people all of the time, and that meant that all we did socially was either talk about sex or do it or watch movies of other people doing it.

  KEN: It got terribly one-sided and left us feeling hung up a lot of the time, not for moral reasons as much as with a sense of frustration, as though our lives were one dimensional and empty.

  CLAIRE: And the non-swingers we met, we always thought of them in sexual terms. If they appealed, we would try to seduce them, and while we were lucky we took the chance of running into a great deal of trouble. I would say we were within inches of having our whole life turn into one big swing session.

  KEN: There are more people who live that way than you might realize. People we’ve swung with over the years have told us about whole apartment buildings where the tenants are one hundred percent swingers. Just one permanent balling session from morning to night three hundred and sixty-five days out of the year. I understand there’s a party there every night, and the parties are something out of this world. But even without the parties, it’s just sex all the time. You meet someone in the elevator and you have a fast feely session on the way to the lobby. Or if there’s time you go to an apartment and make it. I can see living that way for a little while, but can you imagine that way of life on a permanent basis?

  CLAIRE: It would kill me within a year, I’m sure. But more than that, those people don’t have anything going for them in life but sex. It’s all they do and all they know and all they think about. I like sex as much as the next person—

  KEN: More.

  CLAIRE: —but there’s a limit. A person needs a full life, and if you swing all the way you give up everything else.

  KEN: So as far as regular swinging goes, we’ve virtually eliminated it. Oh, we have one couple we’re friendly with, and we see them a couple of times a week, but half the time we don’t even have sex, it’s just a social thing. Anyway, we don’t think of it as swinging. More like a four-way marriage.

  CLAIRE: And when we’re ready for all-out sex, we make the scene at a weekend orgy. I’d say that in the last year we went to five of them, plus a week-long swinging vacation in Puerto Rico. Those six times were the only real swinging we did all year, and they were just what the doctor ordered. By the time we went to each orgy we were really in the mood, and by the time the
party was over we were absolutely exhausted. A weekend of solid sex really lets you get a lot out of your system, and that week in Puerto Rico—my God, we just about screwed ourselves to death. I thought we would have to bury Ken.

  KEN: And it would have taken the undertaker a month to get the smile off my face—

  • • •

  While the orgy plays a very real role in the lives of a large portion of swingers, relatively few members of the swinging society make it the focal point of their sex lives. Ken and Claire Whitlaw serve as excellent examples of this variety of orgiast.

  A successful young architect who has designed some of the more notable homes in the San Francisco area, Ken Whitlaw is 32 years old. Short blonde hair and an outdoor complexion combine to make him look several years younger. He has been married for the past five years to Claire, a striking brunette of 26 with a svelte, shapely figure and a deep year-round suntan.

  Like so many people in their part of the country, the Whitlaws are extremely progressive-minded young marrieds interested in living the good life of the mid-twentieth century. They listen to avant garde rock and roll, make occasional use of marijuana, and believe both emotionally and intellectually in complete sexual freedom for all. Unlike the greater number of swingers, especially in other parts of the country, they did not turn to swinging as an escape from a marital sexual relationship which had gradually gone stale. On the contrary, they began their involvement in wife-swapping when their marriage was less than a year old.

  KEN: I’d been around quite a bit before we were married. I scored for the first time when I was fourteen, and it was a good experience for me. From what I’ve heard, I was luckier than the average young kid. I had this job after school delivering catalogs and samples for a Fuller Brush salesman. I would stuff the catalog in the door and ring the bell, and that was about it; I rarely even met anyone. But the standard bit happened one afternoon. This gal about thirty-five opened the door in a housecoat, and she went through the routine of letting the thing keep coming undone to give me quick peeks at her. She wasn’t wearing anything under the coat, and she had the kind of shape to get a kid that age horny as a bull in the rutting season. Really large breasts—and of course that’s all boys think about at that age. She asked me if I’d like some milk and cookies, and when I was inside she started talking to me, asking if I had a girl friend, hell, you can write your own dialogue for that little scene. But the upshot was that she took me to bed and showed me what to do, and I was really lucky—I got excited immediately, but I was so nervous that I couldn’t reach orgasm for the longest time. I must have screwed her for a solid hour before I came.

  She wasn’t used to that sort of thing. She told me her husband damn near came on the way to the bed. I spent the whole afternoon with her and the next day I got fired, but that was fine with me. As far as my folks were concerned, I was still working. I went to her house every afternoon and she showed me every trick in the book. It was an education. If every boy that age had an arrangement like that there would be a lot less neurotic men in the country, I’ll tell you that. On top of everything else, this gal gave me twelve bucks a week. Not as payment, exactly, but that was what I had been earning from the salesman and she didn’t want my parents to know how I was spending my afternoons. With the kind of moronic laws in this country, she was actually guilty of statutory rape.

  But the point of all this is simply that I started getting it steady at an early age and I had a good education. After she moved out of town it was never too hard to find girls who were willing to put out. I even got an introduction to group sex while I was at college, and by the time I met Claire—

  CLAIRE: Tell him about the girls at college.

  KEN: I don’t know what it has to do with swinging, but maybe you’ll think it’s interesting. I was going with this one blonde kid, sort of feather-brained but very sweet and pretty and good in the hay, and she kept telling me about her roommate, how the kid was a frustrated virgin and she worried about her. I told her jokingly that I’d be willing to service the roommate, but Helene took me seriously and was all for it.

  CLAIRE: But first the roommate wanted to watch. Wasn’t that the way it went?

  KEN: Uh-huh. It was a new one on me, but I wasn’t about to argue. We all three went to a motel, and I took turns necking with them, and then the roommate watched while I screwed Helene. I guess she liked what she saw because then she wanted me to do the same for her. I thought Helene would leave. If nothing else, you’d figure that a virgin would want privacy the first time around. But she insisted that Helene stick around and watch, and we made it. She really was a virgin, as it turned out, but she enjoyed herself completely, even had an orgasm. By the end of this I was about ready for the wastebasket, but those two were just warming up. I went to the john and took a shower, and when I came back into the room they were going at it hot and heavy, 69ing like crazy. I suppose I should have guessed they had a lesbian scene going, but my mind didn’t work that way at the time. Still, I wasn’t the kind of guy who was going to object. We kept that little threesome operating for the rest of the semester.

  CLAIRE: I was only twenty-one when I got married, so I couldn’t come anywhere close to old Don Juan’s record. I lost my virginity at a beach party about a month after high school graduation. I didn’t sleep around during college, but if I dated a boy and liked him I had sex with him. I’ve always felt very easy about it, that it’s a normal part of living and something two people should do if they want to.

  KEN: Or three or four—

  CLAIRE: That came later, but the point is that I was always liberal as far as sex was concerned. When I first went out with Ken, he came on very strong and that put me off a little, so I didn’t make it with him until the third or fourth date.

  KEN: Note the vagueness. Third or fourth. It was the third, and I could have gotten to you before then if I really pushed it.

  CLAIRE: Maybe. We dug each other from the start. We were very good in bed, and we had a great deal in common out of it, not just a great many mutual interests but the way our personalities meshed. We lived together briefly and decided we wanted to make it permanent, and we were married.

  JWW: Did you discuss swinging before you were married?

  KEN: Not exactly.

  CLAIRE: He had told me about his experience with the two college girls, and I’m sure we both were interested in pluralistic sex, but I wasn’t sure he would want our marriage to go in that direction and he wasn’t sure of my attitude, so we didn’t really talk about it. We also discussed wife-swapping, but only in a general sense. We agreed that we could understand why people did it and that there was nothing morally reprehensible about it. We didn’t discuss how we might feel about it personally. I had little fantasies of balling two men at once, there was a passage in a Colette novel that gave me ideas, but that was as far as it went.

  KEN: For my part, I hoped we would have a swinging marriage. I thought about it even before we did get married, but it wasn’t anything I intended to force on Claire. If she wanted it, good; if not, I wouldn’t push it.

  CLAIRE: As it turned out, he didn’t have to.

  JWW: How long after you were married was it before you first got introduced to swinging?

  KEN: Four months. And I know that’s a far cry from the usual pattern. Most couples are together for as many years before they take the plunge.

  JWW: I gather you suggested it?

  KEN: No, neither of us did. We were listening to records at Jeff and Lili Steiner’s apartment. As it happens, they’re the couple we still swing with, our closest friends. I’ve known Jeff most of my life and we’ve always been fairly close. We were in the same class in high school and went through four years at Berkeley together. Jeff handles my legal work, I designed his house, Lili and Claire hit it off together from their first meeting—we were all very friendly.

  CLAIRE: Jeff and I had this heavy mock-flirtation going. It was a big joke among the four of us that Jeff and I had this great
pash, and that some day we would have a wild affair. I did have a letch for him, naturally. Those gags always have a basis in fact. He’s a beautiful man, very warm and sweet and a positively brilliant mind. But it never occurred to me that I would ever share a bed with him. After all, he was Ken’s best friend.

  KEN: Lili and I didn’t play that particular game, but I did find her very attractive. She’s the dark quiet type, a tiny girl with a slim body and a sort of brooding face. Huge eyes, detached manner. The kind of girl who doesn’t draw whistles, but whom every man secretly wonders about, what she’s like in bed and all.

  CLAIRE: Get the picture? We were all good friends, and underneath it there was this unspoken lechery going on in all directions. I suppose something would have come of it sooner or later anyway, but one night the mood was just perfect. We were at their place listening to records, as Ken said, and we were all just the slightest bit high on grass—

  KEN: Marijuana, in case your readers require a translation. You know how grass works. It’s not a stimulant or a depressant. It’s an intensifier—it makes you go whichever way you’re headed. If you feel nervous it accentuates it, or if you feel introspective it makes you withdraw completely. By the same token, when you’re in a sexy mood to begin with, it can enhance it tremendously, People call it an aphrodisiac, but that doesn’t make much sense, because if you turn on when you’re not in a sexy mood it can make sex absolutely intolerable.

  CLAIRE: We were in a sexy mood, as it happens. And Jeff made a remark to that effect, that it was a hell of a thing to feel so much like making love at a time like this. We told him he could drag Lili into the bedroom, that we certainly wouldn’t object. And he said it was the wrong time of the month to drag Lili anywhere. So I said, hamming it up, “Well, I’m available, lover man.”