The Lifestyle

by Terry Gould

“I hate when jerks call the lifestyle wife swapping,” Jim averred. “I hate that term and what it implies. By that I mean a woman being forced into something because her husband says, ‘Look honey, let’s go.’ To me that’s abuse. That’s opposite to what the lifestyle is all about.”

  In fact, there was no single lifestyle, Jim and Linda told me, and they were particularly resentful of the received wisdom that their subculture was populated only by groping orgiasts. A certain percentage of their clients came to parties merely to express the usual voyeuristic and exhibitionist fantasies that are part and parcel of erotic parades. Others practiced “soft swinging,” which only permitted nudity, massage, and some sexual touching. Some drew the line at having “side-by-side” sex with another couple, with no spouse exchange. “Open swingers” practiced spouse exchange with a couple in the same room. “Closed swingers” enjoyed the circumscribed thrill of adjourning to separate rooms to make love with exchanged partners. None of which is to say that on a roaring night I might not see wives involved in lesbian daisy chains three links long, and other couples group-chambering the way I had seen the busy bodies at Vancouver Circles enjoying themselves. Basically, it seemed from their rundown, couples set their own parameters and accepted and respected the parameters of others.

  The lifestyle was also not about dying of a dark disease, Jim said, a pointed concern given the number of different people to which some couples made love. While Jim didn’t patrol the many bedrooms on his premises with a flashlight, he did have a safe-sex rule, and his PR brochure stated, “Complimentary condoms are available and placed in several convenient locations in the house and we encourage you to practice safe sex at all times.”

  Jim gave me permission to attend parties so long as I kept things on a first-name basis. (Couples at lifestyle gatherings generally identify themselves as, say, “Jack and Jill;” in these pages I’ve sometimes modified that to “John and Jody.”) A few weeks later, New Faces New Friends held a “Ladies’ Lingerie Night” in a ballroom at a suburban hotel that was quite posh. I showed up to find middle-aged career women wearing practically nothing. There was one woman in a fishnet outfit and no underwear, another in underwear and no outfit, yet another dressed as a bikinied version of Dracula. At ten o’clock many of the ladies lined up for a beauty contest. One by one these executives, teachers, and real-estate agents strode across the dance floor, stopped in the spotlight and assumed grandly self-parodying poses, then ran off to embrace their laughing husbands and friends. Dracula won a gift certificate from a lingerie shop.

  I watched this amazing display from a table where I was sitting beside a stunning woman anomalously attired in jeans and an old sweat shirt. I turned to her and told her I was a writer and that I was thinking of exploring the lifestyle in depth. Maybe I would make a documentary. Maybe I would write a serious book.

  “Oh I think that is marvelous,” Ellie said, in accented English. “It is time. Now is the time.” When I asked her why she was a lifestyler, she replied: “The reason is simple. I do not like to lie.”

  “One thing in life that is lied about most is sex,” her husband Jerard said. “You look around here. What do you notice? Very many women almost naked—better than naked, very sexy, no?” He gestured at the dance floor, now packed with intermingling couples. “These men, they are acting very civilized. No groping, even when they dance close. See? Now, imagine if any of these ladies, they go to a disco dressed like this?”

  “There’s no understanding, no matter what you wear—none,” added Ellie. “Just young brutes, old brutes. Men proving themselves. Sex and anger—sex and jealousy.”

  Another couple, Murray and Cara, pulled back chairs and sat down at our table. “You do find a percentage of bi-women,” Murray said when I asked him about the lesbian component in the lifestyle. “It’s a mode of expression.”

  I then posed what in my own mind was The Big Question: How did they handle jealousy? Why were they not plagued with stabs of hate and angry recriminations that a single way-ward kiss at a normal party would elicit from a spouse? I told them I was married for twenty-two years and that if I ever caught my wife cheating on me my entire world would be upended.

  “Who’s talking about cheating?” Murray laughed. “Watching her is one of my biggest pleasures in this lifestyle.”

  “I enjoy the pleasure of Murray when he’s enjoying sex with a woman,” Cara said. “I do get a vicarious thrill. But that doesn’t violate our devotion. And Murray knows that my pleasure with someone—be it a man or a woman—doesn’t lessen my devotion to him.”

  Again and again I would hear that refrain in the ballroom. In the lifestyle, they all said, veteran playcouples become connoisseurs at transforming their own spouse into an alluring fantasy figure. Once they learned that their relationship was not threatened by comarital sex acts—acts that very rarely became extramarital affairs—a husband or wife found observing their partner with another was an enormous aphrodisiac. And they often watched each other with their eyes locked in love. After parties they had sex as if they’d just met.

  “You see,” Ellie said, “straight people, they cheat on each other all the time. Tremendous percentages. They lie. They sneak. But the erotic act is part of our marriage. It is not an act of cheating, but play. Flirtation, it’s between us—as a couple—and someone else. Jerry is always there, he is there. We do not cheat, we do not lie.”

  Cara kissed Murray’s forehead. “I always save the last dance for him.”

  None of this is to say that after expanding my circle of acquaintances in New Faces New Friends I did not encounter marriages that had rearranged themselves in the club, that people were not hurt, or that I didn’t learn of swinging “dropouts.” I tracked down one such exile from the subculture, a Vancouver professional who told me that he regretted the day he introduced his common-law wife to the erotic exchanges at Jim and Linda’s. He said they were not part of any “depressing, anonymous, look-for-a-space-and-jump-in crowd.” They had in fact set up a series of sensitive, lasting friendships with intellectual couples in which several dinner dates or camping trips would go by without sex. The difference, of course, was that if sex did come up, it was not forbidden. He and his partner had an understanding whereby they “shared the excitement as part of our relationship.” But after a year of pick-and-choose fun at the club, his woman experienced a flaming session with the mythical man of her dreams, and was lost to him for good. “It was a devastating shock,” he told me, pointing out that he had somehow deluded himself regarding the possibility of an unexpected, heartfelt detonation occurring during sex. “It would be wrong to say that this is not a charged and dangerous atmosphere to become involved in. I’d hate to see you advocating it.”

  Not long after he offered me this warning, however, he was back on the margins of the lifestyle, attending parties on special occasions. And not long after that I learned that his former common-law wife had dumped her swinging lover and then taken up with a straight married man.

  Was the lifestyle delusional, then? Compulsive? A fetish? How much of my previous thinking about it was accurate? Were swingers—as I’d claimed in “A Dangerous State of Affairs”—risking their health while distracting themselves from lives they cannot endure?

  When my 1989 magazine article first appeared, Dr. Frank Darknell, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Sacramento, phoned me up to tell me that he was troubled by the same things about the lifestyle that troubled me. The year before, this austere, strait-laced Ph.D. had begun a study of swingers and the historical and prehistorical background of open sexuality and spouse sharing out of which the modern lifestyle was born. He’d found that this sexual culture was actually old hat in aboriginal North America until the missionaries arrived and put an end to it. In the nineteenth century, partner sharing was picked up by communards and free-love radicals. Artists and secret societies embraced it in the 1920s, and eventually it evolved into the open sexuality of the left-wing beatniks and the swing
parties of otherwise conservative suburbanites. But his preliminary research confirmed that there had never been a time when the practice had not been assessed as grossly outlandish by the vast majority of North Americans, some of whom now saw AIDS as a divine justification for their condemnations.

  When Darknell and I said good-bye on the phone in 1989 we agreed that I’d probably hit the nail on the head with my article: modern swingers could be involved in a risky and never-satisfied search for sensation. Then, after setting up a database of swinger publications, Darknell attended the August ’89 Lifestyles convention in Las Vegas where he met and interviewed many participants. After this sojourn among thousands of suburbanite swingers Darknell arrived at an opinion at variance to the one he had expressed in our first conversation, and similar to the self-conscious caution and confusion I now had about leaping to eviscerating judgments. From what he could see, he told me years later, swingers were not maladjusted perverts hellbent on self-destruction. “They were well-mannered and decent to each other,” he said. “Really, they’re folks you wouldn’t question, except that they seemed to enjoy behaving that way with one another, running around to all these seminars on swinging and going to the parties. They didn’t rob banks, their fantasies don’t include anything that’s illegal—like involving children and that sort of thing—and it looked very consensual.”

  I told him that the swingers I had met claimed that women drove the lifestyle movement.

  “Well, you know,” he replied, “there’s a point at which that becomes true, once they become involved. Their husbands get them into it, of course, but then they find things about it they really like—being the glamorous queen bee and that sort of thing. The women were on all these committees arranging events and the like—they were quite enthusiastic.”

  I reminded him that back in 1989 we had both been concerned that HIV/AIDS could explode in the swinging community the way it had in the gay community but that, despite the million or so couples who had been going to clubs for years, I’d heard of very few cases of HIV-infected swingers in North America. Darknell had also heard of only a few cases and attributed the lack of an outbreak of the disease in the subculture to various “co-factors.” His opinion was that while HIV/AIDS could spread in swing clubs, the co-factors were probable explanations for why it hadn’t.

  Contrary to the lifestyle’s “anything goes” attitude toward adult sexual fantasies, bisexual contact between men is taboo behavior in swing clubs, as is drug use. In 1986, after the Centers for Disease Control reported in its journal that two female members of swing clubs in Minnesota tested positive for HIV after having anal intercourse with bisexual men, “Greek” between swinging men and women became frowned upon as well. These days, statistically, we know that the rate of transmission of HIV is roughly one in two thousand per act of unprotected vaginal intercourse if neither partner has another STD, and ten times that if one partner does have a venereal disease. One poll of attendees at the Lifestyles ’96 convention would eventually show that 92 percent of 312 respondents believed swingers “should” be using condoms, and that 77 percent had had HIV tests. Thus, many lifestylers (not all) probably use condoms. In addition, the screening process at almost all clubs helps keep members to middle-class couples who probably maintain their health in typically bourgeois fashion, running to the doctor at the slightest sign of venereal disease. To say the least, the statistics regarding the heterosexual transmission of HIV are not a sanction of freewheeling partner exchange, and almost all health experts agree that people should be using protection when having sex outside of marriage, straight or swinger. (I concur with this view.) That has not kept millions of straights—nor, I can tell you, some lifestylers—from going ahead and having unprotected sex anyway.*

  When Darknell returned from the 1989 Lifestyles Convention he collated his preliminary findings and submitted them to his university for a research grant that would enable him to complete his study. He was turned down, for reasons he felt in part could have had to do with the general distaste in officialdom for what they saw as “wife swapping.” “I talked to John Money,” Darknell told me, referring to the Johns Hopkins University sexologist, “and he predicted I’d never get the grant, not for an ethological study on the sex practices of swingers. So be it.

  “Basically,” he went on, “what I found was that the main concern of swingers wasn’t health but whether to come out of the closet. Swingers justify themselves in exactly the same way homosexuals do, and I suppose we have to respect their right to do so. They don’t want to get fired from their jobs if they’re exposed, or have their clubs shut down. But if they come out they risk that.”

  In May 1993, when I got in touch with the Lifestyles Organization in Anaheim, I learned that eliminating the threat of a backlash was one of the main concerns of the lifestyle’s international overseeing body. Lifestylers in California were now declaring themselves a political force, and LSO formed campaign central. It was headed by a goateed, former aerospace engineer, Dr. Robert McGinley, a sixty-year-old counseling psychologist who was at the time almost universally described in the media as a reckless libertarian and shrewd businessman.

  McGinley invited me to attend his annual convention at Las Vegas’s Riviera Hotel in August and I decided to spend the $350 for the three-day gathering. It coincided nicely with my research for a story I was working on at the time. I was looking for a Vancouver gangleader named Steven Wong whom the RCMP heroin squad believed had staged his own death and cremation in order to escape drug trafficking charges. I appreciated the irony that, in his own criminal way, Wong considered himself a swinger. Though short and dumpy, he had many gorgeous girlfriends who were attracted by his flashy and dangerous lifestyle. The number one woman in Wong’s harem happened to have been connected through marriage to a couple of big shareholders in a luxury Las Vegas casino. The marble tower constantly entertained a mix of high-rolling racketeers who looked out for one another. I thought it might be possible to attend the swing convention and also discover some rounder who had seen the disappeared desperado after his supposed death.

  The convention was a couples-only affair and so I asked my wife to come along. Not being a stranger to people who inhabited subcultures Leslie agreed to join me. By day she may have been an executive director of a communications firm, but by night she sketched nudes at a bohemian studio where many of her companions were in the gay or lesbian lifestyle. She is, in all facets of her life, no shrinking violet. When I first met Leslie in 1970 she worked as New York City’s only female cab driver. Twenty years later columnist Allan Fotheringham, Leslie’s friend and client, nicknamed her “Ms. Giotti,” partly because she has the same accent as the New York Mafia boss, partly because she possesses what he calls “da attitude.” Overall, Leslie and I weren’t just husband and wife: we were best friends, cooperative colleagues, business partners, and good lovers. On the morning of August 17, 1993, when I told her in the airport that I was a pretty lucky guy, she punnishly summed up her willingness to travel where perhaps other wives wouldn’t: “If you wrote about cannibals and needed me for cover, I’d go—just so long as I didn’t have to eat anybody.”

  That afternoon Leslie and I entered a social whirl of three thousand wheatfield North Americans dressed like the stars who all expressed their relief at being in a virtual city-state ruled by the norms of playcouples. Throughout the event the throngs of middle-class swingers were reassured that they weren’t aberrant by nonswingers sanctioned by straight society. Luis De La Cruz, for instance, headed the Erotic Arts Exhibit at the convention and was the facilities director of the Music Center of Los Angeles County and the curator of the Newport Harbor Art Museum. The convention’s keynote speaker was Stan Dale, winner of the Mahatma Gandhi Peace Medallion. Forty seminars were delivered by ten Ph.D.s and other experts on everything from “Sexuality and Spirituality” and “Exotic Play couple Travel” to an “AIDS Update” by Dr. Norman Scherzer, the Rutgers University expert on STDs.

  Most
fascinating of all, I encountered a whole clutch of people who were living their lives as out-of-the-closet swingers. Their parents knew, their friends knew, in some cases their kids and grandkids knew. One couple, Frank and Jennifer Lomas, a former bank broker and a business manager, had left high-paying positions to work at LSO because they wanted to be surrounded all the time by people like themselves. They were a gentle, interracial couple in their late thirties, unabashed advocates of partner sharing, and they had not been treated kindly by studio audiences on TV talk shows, who’d shouted them down with catcalls such as “We hope you die of AIDS!”

  “Most swingers will tell you they’re not in it for an orgy,” said Frank, son of an Air Force sergeant-major, after he and Jennifer had delivered a convention seminar called “Social Games for Fun, Laughter and Intimacy.” “Some are like that, but everyone else is in it for the social interaction and the erotic acceptance. You wind up with a trusting fellowship,” he added, using a phrase that perhaps came from his occasional attendance at his local black Baptist Church.

  I had been reading about some of the economic origins of spouse exchange, and so I asked Jennifer about her relationships with swingers outside of parties. It turned out she and Frank were part of a tight-knit group of thirty couples who cooperated in every way, like a tribe. They had an investment club, a camping club, and a ski club. “When people stop the sexual control, it’s such a relief to them,” Jennifer told me. “You can be married twenty or thirty years, and you can go to a lifestyle party with your partner and have the security of your relationship throughout. You can do that right into old age. I think that holds a lot of appeal for women—it’s why you see them running the show here.”

  Whether or not women actually “ran the show,” there is no question that at the theme dances Leslie and I attended hundreds of middle-aged ladies displayed their sexuality to men in a way that made us both wonder how the world had gone on as it had for five thousand years. By the night of the grand finale Erotic Costume Ball I understood that these people had tilted their lives 23 degrees sideways and believed they were now properly aligned with the natural axis of the earth. I heard people say things like: “The minority knows more about the majority than the majority knows about the minority.” And this, from a European woman dressed as Marlene Dietrich: “When you’re forty the lifestyle is permitted; when you’re sixty it’s recommended; and when you’re eighty it’s compulsory.”