by Terry Gould
“Playcouples are mainstream, of course,” McGinley said now, “but most people don’t know that. Millions of honest citizens—doctors, lawyers, teachers—they’ve got to stay in the closet because of how they’re perceived.”
“They’re different-colored chickens and they’re afraid they’ll be pecked to death by the other chickens,” Alexander said.
“That’s got to stop,” McGinley replied. “That’s what my life has been about for thirty years. That’s what the playcouple philosophy is about.”
The two-paragraph playcouple philosophy, posted on McGinley’s Playcouple Website, opened with the suggestion that people were naturally non-monogamous: “Adult men and women are sexual beings and they have relationships.” Unfortunately, McGinley pointed out, “the religious and political right wing proselytize that open sexual expression is sinful and worthy of condemnation, while the political left wing seeks to inhibit and restrict sincere and honest expression.” Defying both political wings, however, playcouples shared erotic fantasies, traveled exotic paths, and placed “the highest value on the intimacy they share with each other and those around them.” The word swinging was not mentioned in the play-couple philosophy, although a click of the mouse on the Website gave you a tour of swing clubs on five continents, including McGinley’s Club WideWorld, the most successful and longest-running swing club in North America. It was just down the sun-scorched suburban block from us, and every weekend it hosted dozens of playcouples in a Japanese-style mansion featuring a California-size pool and patio, a hot tub, a glass-walled bedroom that bordered the living room, and numerous mini-boudoirs down the hall. “We want to raise the consciousness level of people so that playcouples can come out of the closet if they so choose,” McGinley said. “There is no reason anyone should feel they have to be ashamed or afraid, or that they risk anything. These are men and women who are fully enjoying their life and sexuality,” he went on, paraphrasing more of the playcouple philosophy in the emphatic manner he’d used in hundreds of TV and radio interviews over the years. “We have every right to the enjoyment that this lifestyle affords us—without interference from religion or neighbors or the boss or government or the media.”
A voice paged him on the intercom: “Bob McGinley! Cosmopolitan’s on line three.” As usual at this time of year, he was receiving a flood of calls from editors, TV producers, and reporters wanting to attend his convention.
“Excuse me, guys, that’s their British edition, I gotta take it,” McGinley said. “I’m not paying thirty bucks to return an editor’s call to England just so she can shaft me. The Brits are as bad as our guys.” He was referring to a British edition of Elle that had published an article the previous year amply illustrated with bikinied playcouples whom the writer had appraised as society’s “walking wounded.” A couple of years before that the British edition of Marie Claire had featured five large photos of naked swingers, and then scolded them for using “their bodies as sex objects, toys to enjoy.” GQ—“our guys”—labeled McGinley’s conventioneers “sweaty, smelly and uncivilized.” One Florida TV station had even played McGinley’s jovial comments about swinging over shots of a graveyard.
McGinley headed out of the board room to his adjoining office, which was decorated not with Marie Claire’s portraits of naked swingers but with framed photographs of fighter aircraft cruising through clouds. In fact, from the front door facing the busy corner of La Palma and Magnolia to the back door where McGinley sometimes parked his beat-up 1979 Mercedes, there was almost nothing in the modern offices that indicated LSO catered to the needs of couples who practiced open eroticism. McGinley always expected cameras, and he wanted any reporter coming through the door to be shocked that there was nothing pornographic about the business end of the lifestyle—it reflected the nonsalacious everyday lives of the people LSO served. That was the reason why the swinging employees McGinley hired for the front office were all white-collar folks both in their straight world credentials and in their conservative dress and demeanor. Jenny Friend, director of research, had one master’s degree in education and another in science; seeing her in her business suit, you wouldn’t have had a clue what she did on weekends. Dr. Steve Mason, LSO’s director of publicity, was the Southern California program chair of Mensa and a onetime psychology professor at Penn State. Joyce, the company’s iron-willed operations manager (affectionately called General Joyce by the LSO staff), was a high-profile activist for various civic enterprises throughout Southern California (although, because of this, she never gave TV interviews and never used her last name around reporters). One swinging travel agent for Lifestyles Tours and Travel was the wife of an Orange County police detective, another was a churchgoing Christian. Like Frank and Jennifer Lomas, who had recently left the company to resume their career tracks in the straight business world, they all fit McGinley’s belief that most swingers were ordinary people. And now that so many millions of these garden-variety folks were in the lifestyle, McGinley expected an official backlash. He had a sense that his “mainstreaming” of the playcouple lifestyle had reached the trigger point as far as the government was concerned. Ultimately, that was why he wanted help from Alexander, who had recently devoted an entire issue of The Humanist to documenting the threats posed to the U.S. Bill of Rights by both the angry folks on the religious right and the kindly inquisitors on the politically correct left.
McGinley came back in the boardroom laughing. “Every year they tear us apart and every year they phone me up all nice and sweet to ask if they can come back and tear us apart again. Funny thing is, a few of them wind up having a fabulous time at the convention and still write the story they decided to write before they showed up.”
“I’m personally having a little difficulty differentiating between the New York Times and the National Enquirer these days,” Alexander commented dryly.
“The New York Times hasn’t phoned me yet, but if I’m right they’ll be on that line wondering what the hell has happened to society. Biggest concern I have,” McGinley added, turning to me, “is that some Cronin-type bureaucrat will come down on us because they think the press is behind them. However, I’m taking steps to deal with that.”
The LSO chief has a plan. He is moving forward on all fronts and making headway at gathering the most stable element in the world behind his playcouple philosophy: the suburban middle class. It takes only a married couple, a house, and willing friends to make a lifestyle club; it takes a businessman with a mission and an engineer’s mind to link them together.
If you asked most swingers about McGinley’s plan, they’d be unaware of it. They would tell you they were part of a populist subculture that acknowledged no leader. Indeed, most couples in the lifestyle have never even heard of Robert McGinley, or, if they have attended a Lifestyles convention, only vaguely know him as its impresario. But if you asked the owners of the clubs and resorts where swingers gathered for their opinion of McGinley, they’d speak of him deferentially. They’d explain that he’d succeeded in gathering so many hundreds of facilities under one umbrella that the lifestyle was now thriving, and that he was the subculture’s most important defender.
“If there’s one thing I’m going to work for till the day I keel it’s the freedom for couples to openly express their dreams without guilt or public backlash,” McGinley told me over a dinner of buffalo burgers across the strip from Lifestyles head-quarters. He sipped his extra-large root beer and stared out across the avenue at his two-storey office building, which, with its terra cotta eaves and sunproof windows, looked like a suburban bank. The side streets that ran perpendicular to his headquarters were all lined with small homes fronted by neatly trimmed lawns, replicas of the houses lining the block on which Club WideWorld stood, as well as the homes of its patrons. “My whole life’s message is this,” he said. “You can be a middle-class, mature couple, responsibly married yet free to responsibly enjoy your dreams.”
Middle class; responsibly married; free to enjoy a dream; and�
�by implication of the word “mature”—middle-aged. If there were four characteristics that expressed the core of suburban life in North America since World War II, McGinley had just stated them. In the articles I’d read through in McGinley’s library, most journalists disparaged swingers for fitting this suburbanite profile—for resembling “the Florida mall crowd,” in the words of Elle. For much of my life I’d shared that prejudice against suburbanites. It had been taught to me by my New York City parents, reinforced by my peers, and I’d been tested on it in college sociology courses, where I’d studied books on 1950s-era North American culture: The Lonely Crowd, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The Organization Man. Suburbanites were conformists and philistines who were doing materially well but who were always hungering for something just out of their reach. McGinley, on the other hand, is the only Ph.D. I’ve ever met who proudly professes a respect for suburbanites. He hates bourgeois bashers and values suburban values. That McGinley is so sympathetic to the mall crowd has been attributed to the fact that they form the core of his clientele, but he told me the media has him wrong. His respect for the bourgeoisie is sincere: McGinley is loyal to his kind. After all, he hadn’t just grown up in the suburbs; he’d grown up where the suburbs were invented.
A few months after Pearl Harbor, when McGinley was nine, his parents bought a plot in a brown field twenty miles south of L.A. that was then being developed into what McGinley called “the first multiple-house, suburban tract development in the country—a thirty-six-dollar-a-month decent neighborhood where working people could afford a house, a yard, a garage, and live like the rich.” The values and fantasies that were bred in those newly paved lanes of Lakewood, so close to Hollywood and so far from the stars, would be bred in ten thousand other suburban developments built after the war. In the drive-in theaters these good neighbors went to, suburban values like hard work, raising a family, and spousal loyalty were promoted side by side with fantasies of being effortlessly rich and sexually promiscuous. But it was understood by the suburbanites that it was forbidden (indeed impossible) to combine their fantasies with their values. Most suburbanites wound up in church on Sunday where preachers praised North American values and damned North American fantasies. It would become Bob McGinley’s life’s work to bring the values and the fantasies together, but not until he was past thirty. For all the years beforehand McGinley accepted the message of damnation as the true one.
His mother Mabel, step-daughter of a preacher, and his father Dan, a laborer in the Long Beach shipyards, raised Bob as a Nazarene Christian—a fundamentalist Protestant sect founded on the principle that worshippers should strive to attain the “sinless perfection” of the original Nazarene, Jesus Christ. All forms of nonprocreative sex led one away from the perfection. Nevertheless, Bob maintained he was a “sexually normal” adolescent for the years he attended Woodrow Wilson High School—the same years Kinsey began publishing his revelations about the secret ways Americans were tapping into their fantasies and the first nude pin-ups began appearing in men’s magazines. “By ‘normal’ I mean that, for then, I was acceptably prudish,” Bob told me. “Christian attitudes about sex were generally accepted across America as the right ones for a young man to have. You didn’t talk about sex and you didn’t question that the thoughts and desires that American culture provoked were naughty. You just looked at Jane Russell on a bale of hay in a movie and you wondered, Oh my God, is there anyone else in the world who wants to do with her what I want to do? I must be the only one—better not tell anyone.” The man the vice president of Penthouse International would one day call “the Christopher Columbus of sexuality” became the leader of a Boy Scout troop at fifteen, and at seventeen the leader of a Sea Scout troop. Wearing his uniform, sporting merit badges and chastely sipping soda pop after Sunday school with the girls in their tartan skirts, young McGinley would have made a good subject for a Norman Rockwell painting.
One of the girls he sat with at the fountain was an evangelical Baptist named Bonnie, a pretty seventeen-year-old too immersed in Bible study to finish high school. The bond between Bonnie and Bob was a religious one, and because of that it became permissibly romantic. They kissed under a laurel tree one evening and that was enough to convince them both they were in love. Bob married Bonnie the day he graduated from high school. That night he had a prim experience of sexual intercourse, missionary style. “When you don’t know what you’re missing, you don’t know what you’re missing,” Bob said.
The Korean War was still on and he joined the Naval Air Force Reserve, which tested his aptitude, found his IQ to be just below that of a fighter pilot’s, and enrolled him in electronics school. Watching the jets screaming above his head gave Bob a thrill and so he specialized in aerospace electronic engineering. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke, he didn’t curse, he voted for Eisenhower, and fathered five children in a row as the government trained him to be a Cold War technician. In 1957, the year MR. broke the story about swinging, Bob went to work for Bendix as a civilian organization man: he joined the lonely crowd, wore a gray suit, bought a house in Anaheim and took the wife and kids to church every Sunday and to Disneyland every season.
“Tell you a funny story that happened in 1960 on Edwards Air Force Base, show you how ignorant I was,” Bob said. “There was a tech sergeant on the base attached to my office, and he invited me and Bonnie for dinner. So he and his wife—who was a very attractive person by the way—they asked us if we’d like to join the base’s key club. I had no idea what a key club was. I thought they were talking about a club where you had to be an elite person to get the key to the door, and I’ve always been opposed to elite organizations. I was raised to treat the guy who delivered groceries the same as the doctor who delivered babies, I was dead against prejudging someone based on their station in life. So I jumped in and said, ‘Absolutely not! Who the hell do you think you guys are trying to get us to join a key club?’ And I started lecturing them both that we would never attend any key club in our life! They, in turn, thought I was talking about swinging, and that I was attacking them for being swingers. They were mortified. ‘Oops, wrong couple.’ It didn’t dawn on me what they’d been talking about until a couple of years later.”
During those two years, Bob’s Christian faith and his marriage began to collapse in tandem. He was turning thirty, a time of reassessment in most men’s lives. Bob’s belief in religion had always been based on the unquestioning acceptance of the Bible’s stories about miracles. For years, however, McGinley had been manipulating the properties of the physical world to produce machines that performed seemingly miraculous functions, but without violating the laws of physics. The miracles in the Bible violated those laws, offering no explanation of how they came to be. If the laws of physics were set by God, McGinley wondered, what was the mathematical formula God was using to violate the laws? Was it a different formula for each miracle? Rereading the Bible, Bob discovered that almost all the miracles either punished people because they were enjoying sex or rewarded people who swore off sex.
“Sex was at the heart of it. That was one of the most significant realizations of my life,” he told me. “It was not just a self-serving deduction, it was actually frightening. I basically sat bolt upright and saw the Bible as a sex manual written by people who didn’t want other people to have sex except in the way they wanted people to have it: married and in the missionary position. When you open that lid of your mind, there’s no putting it back again. It was very confusing for me. I entered a period of spiritual and emotional crisis. I had five kids, I wasn’t about to have an affair, but with my new awareness I had a great appetite for sexual experience—oral sex, whatever. At the same time, my desires were offensive to Bonnie. We began to fight, and then we had no sex at all. So much for experience.”
He was shipped to Japan as an instructor for Bendix and was assigned to train fighter pilots in the landing systems he’d helped develop. Bonnie came along with the kids and kept up her Bible study with the Chr
istian wives. For two years, Bob progressed in the other direction. “For a man casting about spiritually and sexually, Japan was like the promised land. The formal acceptance of pleasure as a part of life, God not being this angry person who hated you for wanting pleasure—all that was a revelation to me.” He experienced sex with a geisha—the first time he’d enjoyed what would later be called “total body pleasure.” He also heard lots of talk about key clubs by the pilots and now he knew what they meant. He returned home with Bonnie in 1965 to find skirts were shorter and the Pill was on the market. The music was entirely different than when he’d left, full of sexual allusion and throbbing experimentation, and the words “sexual revolution” were beginning to be used in the media. He became absolutely convinced that he’d been denying a normal part of his life, and made a 180-degree turn from his Christian faith. He read Playboy at home, grew a beard, and stopped off at strip shows with his colleagues. “Bonnie was raging against everything that was happening at that time in California, and I was totally open to it,” he said. “Not the drugs, of course, but the free thought, the freedom of thought. She began to openly hate me, accused me of having an affair, which actually I wasn’t although I was close. She’s not a bad person, but she had a temper. One day I just said, ‘This is it. The end.’” Bonnie agreed: she filed for divorce, and Bob immediately took the fateful step of answering the swinging wife’s ad.