KEN: Again, just the usual kind of joking. But we got to talking around that general idea, how with the four of us being good friends we should have a cooperative system where a man could ball with the other man’s wife when his own wife was having her menstrual period. It started out as a wouldn’t-it-be-convenient-if conversation, and we talked about whether or not we would be jealous. The conversation started off as a gag, became a serious theoretical discussion, and eventually turned a corner when I admitted that I’d always thought wife-swapping made perfect sense and that I had no objection to Jeff and Claire having a go of it. Jeff said that was great with him, and he took Claire by the hand and led her into the bedroom.
I wasn’t sure whether it was still part of the gag or not. Either way was fine as far as I was concerned. But when they didn’t come out, I knew they were going through with it, and I was extremely excited at the thought.
CLAIRE: The minute we were alone in the bedroom I knew we would do it. I wanted to, and Ken had obviously meant what he said, and whether Jeff thought it was part of the joke or not I was determined to make love to him. So I gave him a very passionate kiss, and then the two of us stood and looked at each other for a moment, and then I began undressing.
KEN: I sat down next to Lili and told her we had better make the best of it. She seemed very detached. Then I kissed her and everything changed; all of a sudden she was turned on all the way. She stuck her tongue halfway down my throat and pressed herself against me. Before I could say boo she had my pants open and my cock in her hand.
CLAIRE: If this is going to wind up in a book, maybe you ought to watch your language.
JWW: No, speak as you wish, it’s all right.
KEN: You sure? Well, whatever you call it, she had it in her hand. She played with it while we kissed. Then she began to apologize for the fact that she was having her period, but she assured me that there were still a lot of things we could do and that she would make sure I didn’t get frustrated. I wasn’t really worried. I had the kind of lazy sexy high where I wanted to make slow gentle love forever. We both got undressed. I took off all my clothes and Lili took off everything but her panties, and we stretched out on the couch and necked and petted and kissed each other. I must have spent half an hour just kissing her little breasts, licking and sucking all over. She had an orgasm that way.
When that happened she got this wild dreamy look on her face and told me to lie down on my back. She said, “Ken, this is something I’ve been wanting to do since the first time we met,” and the next minute she was on her knees with my cock in her mouth.
CLAIRE: At which point Jeff and I walked in on them. It was really wild because it never occurred to me that they would do anything, if only because of what Jeff had said about Lili having her period. He and I had plunged right into it with virtually no preliminaries. It was a special sort of excitement and I came the minute he got inside me. I must have come four more times before he had his orgasm. When it was over, the edge was gone from our pot high and we felt very strange, as though we didn’t know exactly how to feel about what had happened. We got dressed and went back to the living room and there was Ken on his back and Lili going down on him.
JWW: How did the sight make you feel?
CLAIRE: I was very happy because I knew he loved it, and he was certainly enjoying himself now. And I was glad, too, because I had been worried at how he would react—well, not him so much, because I knew he had really meant it when he offered me to Jeff. But I really didn’t know how Lili would react. So I was relieved. And also excited, naturally, since it’s pretty exciting to watch anybody make love.
KEN: She had an extraordinary technique. She was able to relax her throat muscles so that she could take my penis all the way to the hilt, and with her hand she massaged my balls.
CLAIRE: At any rate, that’s how the evening went. Jeff and I just watched until Lili brought Ken to orgasm. Then those two got dressed, and we all four sat around talking about what we had done. We decided that we had no regrets and that we felt closer now than earlier, so why not let our relationship continue that way? They had never swung before either, although they had discussed it from time to time. It was a perfect initiation for us all. From that time on, we were swingers all the way.
• • •
The Whitlaws’ progression through the swinging society followed a fairly standard pattern, although their initial experience, with a pair of first-timers, was atypical. They continued to swing with the Steiners and gradually participated in group sex with them, the activity including the observation of one couple by the other and threesomes involving two women and a man or two men and a woman. At this stage, no homosexual relations were engaged in.
Subsequently, the Steiners began making other contacts through a correspondence club, and the Whitlaws followed suit. Exchanges with several other California couples led them into the swinging society. They were invited to parties and got involved in more and more orgiastic activity.
• • •
KEN: We found out that we really had a hell of an appetite for the far-out stuff. We weren’t moved by bondage and discipline, but all of the forms of straight sex really got to us. It’s my theory that the capacity for enjoying the more outré sexual practices is better developed with imaginative, artistic people. The clods and dullards just want to make do with straightforward copulation, and they think they’re really going into orbit if they try a new position once every six months. But with creative types, different forms of sex have different appeals, and it gets more interesting the more varied it is.
CLAIRE: We went to a lot of parties that weren’t exactly orgies, but they came close. They would have swinging party games, for example. These were originally designed to break the ice, but a lot of the time they became an end in themselves. Some, like strip poker, were exciting during the early days but went stale in a hurry. Others were wild.
JWW: What sort of games did you play?
KEN: A large number of them were types of guessing games. For example, a man would be blindfolded and every girl at the party would give him a turn at eating her, and he would have to see how many of them he could identify by taste, or he would try to guess which one was his wife, and there are any number of variations on that basic game, and you can imagine them for yourself. There was also a swinging version of Spin-The-Bottle; I think you can guess how it worked without an explanation.
CLAIRE: There were also contests. The group would divide up into couples, and all of them would have sex in a specified way. The usual choice was fellatio. The man who lasted longest before coming was a winner, and so was the girl whose partner was the first to pop.
KEN: Her partner sometimes got a booby prize. One rather imaginative host gave out falsies as booby prizes.
CLAIRE: Another game was very popular. We heard it called by a few names—One For All And All For One, Happy Time, Hedonism, whatever. The rules couldn’t have been simpler. One man and one woman were selected by drawing lots, and each gets the simultaneous attention of all of the members of the opposite sex, usually for a specified period of time. Say fifteen minutes, or sometimes as long as a half hour. When I was It, for example, there were six couples at the party. One of the other men was also It and was busy in another room with the five other girls, and I had the other five men to myself. One took me Greek style from the rear, another entered my vagina from the front, a third rubbed himself between my breasts, I used my hands on the fourth man and took the fifth one in my mouth. I think every woman must have fantasies of being the object of several men’s sexual attention. I know I did, and I had always liked to take on two men at a time, but this was the end of the world. The sensation, it was almost too much.
KEN: There’s another version of the same game, where the person who is It makes it with everyone else in turn.
JWW: Everyone of the opposite sex?
KEN: That depends on the group. Usually the stipulation that the person who is It perform oral sex, and this may be
on the opposite sex members or sometimes on everyone of either sex. We aren’t that happy with this version, actually. It’s a little too close to the Sadie Mae games where they choose one person as a sort of sex slave. The way Claire described the game, it’s a cooperative venture designed to give the chosen person the ultimate in thrills. But this way is different, it makes one person the butt of a big sexual joke. We don’t care for it.
JWW: I gather that you had gotten involved in homosexual acts by this time.
KEN: Oh, yes. That got started rather early in the game. Even before we went to parties, actually. We swung with another couple. A mixed couple, a white guy and a Negro girl, and we all made it in the same room and worked in some three-way action as well. Then the girl started playing up to Claire, stroking her breasts and grabbing her snatch. I didn’t even think she was serious at first, but then she asked Claire if she swung that way.
CLAIRE: I started to say no, but something made me say I’d like to give it a try. I think the racial bit added to the excitement, and also there was the fact that she was very beautiful and I felt myself responding to her physically. She had skin the color of coffee with cream in it and her figure was magnificent, beautiful large breasts and a tiny waist. Also both she and her husband removed their pubic hair with depilatories, and we had never come across this before.
KEN: This is common, we’ve since discovered. I would say about two-thirds of the girls in our general set remove their pubic hair nowadays. The proportion of men is much lower, but some do. They even have wigs available for the girls, specially made pussy toupees.
CLAIRE: To get back to this girl, I was excited by her, and I had been thinking before about making love with another woman. I’d had urges for Lili Steiner, actually, but I repressed them. Now, though, I let this colored gal go down on me, and it was groovy. I had a wonderful sort of tingling orgasm, and the moment she stopped her husband took her place and began to fuck me, and over his shoulder I watched Ken giving the girl a dose of what she had been giving me. I wouldn’t describe myself as a lesbian, but I certainly enjoy relations with other women.
KEN: They’re a constant fixture in the party scene, of course. The other side of the same coin is a little different.
JWW: I was going to ask about that.
KEN: Well, there’s far less male homosexuality going on. With the party crowd around here, for example, I don’t think there’s one woman in twenty who doesn’t enjoy lesbian relations as a usual part of swinging. In our own case, Claire is an example of a very healthily-sexed woman who enjoys men to the hilt but still never passes up a chance with an agreeable gal. And this isn’t just true at parties, either. She and Lili go down on one another all the time.
CLAIRE: Lili’s French technique is as good with women as it is with men. She’s pretty fantastic.
KEN: But male homosexuality is something else again. There’s quite a bit of it going on, and it’s unquestionably true that certain men get involved in swinging largely because it gives them a chance to have homosexual relations. My own attitude is that I’ll go along with it at a really orgiastic party, occasionally because I want to but usually to make some other guy happy, or to give the girls something to watch. I don’t mind the passive role in fellatio with another male, for example. And I’m willing to bugger a guy if that’s what he wants, and occasionally I’ve gotten a kind of kick out of going down on a man while having coitus with a woman, that sort of thing.
The point is, I can take things like that in the context of an orgy. I’ve never done that when we’ve been with just one or two other couples, however, and I never would. Take the Steiners, for instance—it’s unthinkable that the two gals wouldn’t have sex together, and it’s equally unthinkable that Jeff and I would ever get together that way. The whole idea makes me very uncomfortable, and I’m sure Jeff feels the same way. But with total strangers at a really free-swinging orgy it’s different. All the inhibitions are off and a person is naturally more inclined to do certain things that might rub him the wrong way otherwise.
CLAIRE: That’s generally true, incidentally; it doesn’t just apply to the male homosexual scene, Everybody has a certain sadomasochistic streak, and you’ll see a lot of people let go at an orgy who would never dream of playing Sadie Mae games in an ordinary swap situation. Lili is a good example of this. They were in Puerto Rico with us, and I remember one time she and I were both in the same room. I was involved with someone else at the time, but Lili set things up so that she was stretched out across one guy’s lap while she went down on another guy, and the guy whose lap she was on was spanking her full strength on her bare behind. I was so shocked to see Lili getting her kicks that way that it frankly turned me off and I couldn’t enjoy my scene—
KEN: Really spoiled the week for you, didn’t it?
CLAIRE: Hardly. It would have taken an awful lot to spoil that week. God, when I think of what went on! But the point of this is that Lili really had a ball that way. She had an orgasm, and the way she squealed it was obviously a good one. And when I talked to her about it later on she was embarrassed. She said she could never get a thrill that way ordinarily, but at a scene like that one she could let loose, and things that ordinarily did nothing for her were tremendously exciting.
• • •
Earlier, we saw the special role that orgies now play in the Whitlaws’ sex lives. They had progressed with swinging to the point where it was getting out of control, dominating their lives and leaving them with little else. In addition, their swinging had developed to such an extent that it constituted almost all of their sexual activity. This is a self-defeating syndrome not uncommon in the swinging society. All too often couples will employ swinging as first-aid for an ailing marital sexual relationship only to find that in the long run swinging replaces married sex, and the husband and wife almost never have relations alone and in private.
This began to be the case with the Whitlaws.
“It was really ridiculous,” Claire said. “I’ve never had a better lover than Ken, and he’s always said that I’m his favorite sex partner. But we reached a point where we almost never made it together. We were swinging five or six nights a week, either group blasts or couple sessions, and although we would frequently ball together at a session we hardly ever had anything left for when we got home. We were very close, we never felt ourselves drifting apart, but we began to realize that there was something pretty crazy about the whole scene. When swinging begins to deprive you of the most basic sexual enjoyment of husband and wife, then it’s time to take a good long look at yourselves and figure out what’s happening.”
The result of this reappraisal of swinging was a decision to confine themselves to couple dates with the Steiners and occasional all-out orgies every couple of months. This has been the pattern for almost two years, and both Ken and Claire seem quite satisfied with it. They say that they do not regret having gotten as involved in day-by-day swinging—it gave them good insight into their sexual nature and enabled them to choose their present course of action. But they can’t imagine how people can keep going at that pace year after year.
“We originally thought of eliminating the parties and orgies and sticking to couple swaps. We also considered forming a steady group of six or eight couples and limiting ourselves wholly to sex with members of that group, either swaps or parties as the occasion might demand.”
“But that wasn’t what we needed,” Claire cut in. “Because once you learn how exciting a real orgy is, once you find out the kick of cutting loose with a strange group and really saturating yourself in sex, other things tend to become tame. So we realized then what we really wanted—a scattering of real hard-core orgies just far enough apart in time, and nothing but each other and Jeff and Lili at other times.”
JWW: I wonder if you could give me a good picture of what goes on at the average orgy.
KEN: I’m not sure there is such a thing—“average orgy” is sort of a contradiction in terms.
CLAIR
E: We could describe the most recent one, if that would do.
JWW: Yes, that would be good.
KEN: It was a three-day affair. We find those about the best. The Puerto Rico vacation was great, a really wild experience, but seven days and nights of constant sex was a bit much. A weekend is much better. Even if you’re a fantastic sexual athlete, three days can drain you pretty completely.
This time we were invited down to Will and Penny Graham’s place. They have this huge monstrosity of a house, one of those imitation Spanish things that some moron of a movie producer built in the thirties. About thirty bedrooms, every conceivable architectural excess—it’s so hideously campy that they love it. Will’s an independent producer who hit it big with a couple of low-budget films a few years back and who’s been riding high ever since, and Penny did a little acting—
CLAIRE: And a lot of fucking.
KEN: She didn’t make it as an actress and was the kind of amateur hooker you find down in Hollywood. We only know them through the party scene. We were invited along with about twenty other couples and a certain number of single guys and gals. I would say there were fifty people there altogether, about half of them connected with the movie industry in one way or another. No Big Names, obviously—when prominent people swing, they don’t let the common herd know about it. But there were plenty of actors and actresses, and I recognized a few of them, mostly from television. There’s one little blonde who’s on television all the time doing detergent commercials, and I get a kick out of seeing her selling soap and remembering the time I had with her. Come to think of it, I made it with her in the shower, so maybe she’s the perfect type for detergent commercials.
CLAIRE: Jeff and Lili were invited also, so Lili got a woman to watch her kids and the four of us drove down together. We started out in the morning and got to the Grahams’ in late afternoon. There were about seven other couples already on the scene and things were already off to a fairly good start. Will met us at the door wearing nothing but a smile, as the old saying goes. We got undressed in the hallway. Lili and I each gave him a kiss and then he led us in to join the others.
The Taboo Breakers: Shock Troops of the Sexual Revolution (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 13