The Lifestyle

by Terry Gould

  The tour was for straight agents, nine out of ten of whom were females. McGinley had eyes for none of them, until a lean, attractive Japanese-American woman named Jan Moriuchi Queen walked in and sat at his table. She was going through her own divorce from an Air Force pilot—although, despite what had gone on all around her and her husband near the Strategic Air Command base, she had never been involved in the lifestyle. “I was immediately attracted to Jan,” McGinley said. “It was not returned on her part. I questioned her in Japanese. No answer, because she doesn’t speak Japanese. Anyway, we got up to dance and started telling each other our stories. When we got home I started dating her—just a straight dating relationship, and she kept saying, ‘This won’t work.’ She’s a very conservative woman and she wasn’t very comfortable at the time with the whole concept of the lifestyle, particularly swinging. Not that I even brought the subject up as an option for us.”

  While Jan could not accept swinging for herself, as a fifteen-year-veteran travel agent she could see the potential of couples going on civilized holidays to glamorous destinations where resort owners might be convinced that discreet swinging would be acceptable. The more she thought about it, the more she realized the enormous business possibilities of making swinging part of the allure of a tour package. And so, a nonswinger to this day, she accepted McGinley’s offer to take over Lifestyles Tours and Travel in 1987, a responsibility Bob Hartman was glad to give her since he had his hands full dealing with the growth of the company in other areas.

  With Jan in full-time charge of LTT (and in a full-time relationship with McGinley), the business took off. Swinging became the subtly unspoken subtext of the tours rather than the main event as it was on the Houseboat Getaway. Jan brought glamour to the travel side of the operation, throwing a gold silk sheet over the old image of debauchery. Code-word phrases such as “for open-minded, adventurous couples” and “adults-only holiday” were used in ads for Lifestyles’ holiday spots. The word swinging was never used at all, in the same way it would not be used in the playcouple philosophy. Indeed, the Lifestyles holiday gave birth to the concept of the playcouple. Playcouples played, and you did not have to swing to be one yourself. As McGinley would phrase it in his codified philosophy: “Playcouples believe that romance is one of life’s greatest adventures just as love is one of life’s greatest joys.”

  It was an amazingly effective tack. The travel end of the business skyrocketed. When Jan had first started, there had been only the biannual Houseboat Getaway, and only herself as an agent. Within a few years there were four agents working full time, then overtime. Rather than booking couples on tours arranged by others, LTT ran its tours the way Lifestyles put on its conventions. It booked, transported, and accompanied couples to its destination resorts on all-inclusive packages, and it often took over entire resorts with hundreds of couples, even in the off-season—to the point where many four-star spots started becoming dependent on its business. In Jamaica, LTT destinations included such electric blue ocean paradises as Hedonism II, Bracco, and Club Lido; in Mexico, LTT booked couples to the Caribbean Reef Club, the Eden Resort, Pepi’s Retreat, and the Qualton; in the South Pacific they patronized a private island called the Paradise Club and Fiji’s Treasure Island. Like Club Med, LTT rented tall-masted vessels and sent dozens of couples on its windjammer cruises throughout the Caribbean, and organized twice-yearly tours of Europe, with stopovers in the big clubs in France, the Netherlands, and Germany. By 1996, LTT was running twenty tours, pulling in $1 million, and booking thousands of couples. In 1998, bookings were up by 25 percent and Air Jamaica and the Jamaican Tourist Board signed on as paying sponsors of the Lifestyles convention.

  “We’ve actually invented and proved profitable a whole new concept in the travel business,” McGinley told me in his office. “Playcouple travel is the playcouple lifestyle. We’re not talking swinging anymore. We’re talking people who accept open eroticism and sensuality. At every swing-club party you find a certain percentage of couples who aren’t swingers.” That included McGinley and the nonswinging Jan: they were a playcouple and Bob hadn’t swung for years. “I never argued for a minute that every couple should adopt the lifestyle,” he said, tapping the edge of his Ping-Pong table-sized desk piled high with page proofs for the latest booklets on NASCA and the convention. “It was always the possibility I fought for, the freedom of thought and expression—so that if it was for you, and you wanted the experience in your relationship, it was a dignified option, a mainstream option. My message is: you can be responsibly married and free to responsibly enjoy your dreams with your partner, if that’s what you want; and here’s where you could do that and be safe. Just look how we’ve grown. Just look how we can grow. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

  As he made his case, I reflected that McGinley now had a local base of several thousand regulars who patronized his year-round activities at which many, like David Alexander, just wanted to dance. I knew that every Saturday night Club WideWorld drew couples from Santa Barbara to Long Beach. McGinley ran big, Friday night theme dances at hotels like the Holiday Inn and Day’s Inn, plus two giant bashes at Halloween and Mardi Gras that attracted about five hundred lifestylers, most of whom stayed over at the hotels he’d booked. He had an international PlayCouples Club, with thirty-two thousand member-couples who received all his mailings as well as a pin to advertise that they were in the lifestyle, and which was growing by about two thousand couples a year. And McGinley had the most sophisticated Web site in the swing world, with eight separate home pages for all the various arms of his corporation—each page providing links to thousands of browsing opportunities, including PlayCouples On-Line, Lifestyles-America Mall (a shopping center for erotic businesses), Lifestyles Tours and Travel, and NASCA International. He was even planning to open a Lifestyles clothing boutique on the floor above his office.

  “You put all this together,” he said, spreading his arms, “and that’s what I mean when I say we’re mainstreaming the lifestyle. What we’re about now, and have been about since we branched out from the club and started this whole concept in big events and travel, is that a playcouple just accepts that they’re a sensual and erotic couple—and accepts that acting openly erotic can help them feel that way, too, whether they swing or not.”

  That, McGinley suspected, would sound dangerous to some, considering its mass appeal to the suburban middle class. “I don’t know which Cronin-type is going to pop up out of the woodwork, or what my next pebble’s going to be,” he said. “But I know the future of this lifestyle is going to be damned close to what you experienced in Mexico last month, and what you’ll experience at this convention next month. And nothing’s going to stop it. We’re organized.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Unmentionable

  Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?

  GENESIS 3:11

  Humanity has been playing a little game and its cardinal rule is: Do it if you have to, but make sure you feel bad about it and make sure you don’t tell anyone.

  LIFESTYLES ORGANIZATION EROTIC ARTS EXHIBITION BROCHURE

  My experience in Mexico in June of 1996 marked the beginning of my year in the lifestyle, or what a writing colleague called my “year of living flagrantly.” I joined thirty married pairs on a long weekend to the Lifestyles Organization’s “newest, all-inclusive, adults only travel destination!”—the Eden Resort in the Lower Baja. The Eden sat by itself on the blue-green Sea of Cortes, five miles south of the colonial town of Loreto. It was a Club Med-style, twenty-five-acre development of pools, palms, and pink adobe buildings, surrounded by desert and walled on the west by the towering Sierra de la Giganta mountains. Over ninety tourists were on Aero California’s DC-9 flying above the emerald square on that scorching off-season weekend, and, as the plane landed, the outnumbered straights still had no idea they’d just spent two hours sitting beside spouse sharers and open eroticists.

  That, of course, was th
e playcouple point. Not until all the gringos had plodded patiently through the customs hut in the killing heat and then taken the airport mini-buses to register in the Eden’s lobby did the crowd separate into identifiable groups. The straight couples on their vacation packages were given blue wristbands and assigned to rooms that fronted the part of the beach where bathing suits were required. The Lifestyles Tours and Travel tourists were fitted with pink bands, and headed off in a different direction.

  In age the LTT tourists ranged from early thirties to late fifties and in physique they spanned the spectrum from the aerobically fit to the droopy—though there were none you would call portly. They wore golf shirts and halter tops, tennis shoes and sandals, and chatted with unexpected reserve in their drawled Western vowels and nasalized Eastern diphthongs as they followed tour leaders General Joyce and her husband Richard to the Optional Clothing Club—the nude beach—where McGinley had reserved a three-storey block of rooms for their exclusive use. Almost all were white-collar professionals, including a nuclear-power-plant manager and a third-grade teacher; a school principal and a counselor; an advertising executive and a physician. The group was, according to Joyce, “exactly typical of who take our tours these days.”

  It was Joyce’s job to ease these staid souls into the holiday frame of mind and so, at the hot tub patio in front of their adobe quarters, she festively announced that the orientation would begin in half an hour beside the thatch-roofed beach bar, ten steps away. “Don’t miss it, guys! We’ve got a surprise for you!”

  The surprise was sixty “oral sex drinks”—a thick white -rum-and-punch concoction with a banana stuck in it and a pink straw barely rising above the tip. To draw the drink, you had to mouth the banana sculpted in the shape of a penis. “Well, I’ve been sexually active since eighteen and eatingly active since conception,” said one woman, laughing, to Joyce by the bar. “Might as well put them together.”

  A handsome man in sporty whites, Pascal Pellegrino, the resort’s Italian general manager, moved to the edge of the cabana to face the crowd. Before I’d left Vancouver McGinley had told me that he’d become good friends with Pascal on an LTT tour to the Eden. “He’s totally accepting of the lifestyle, to the point where he wants our tours every month—every week if we could get the customers.”

  “Welcome to the Eden and we wish you happy days and most romantic nights—surrender to the experience,” Pascal greeted his guests. “Here you can lose or find yourself,” Pascal went on. “Whether you want to relax or stimulate your senses is up to you. But, as the sun sets,” he pointed west with an elegantly ringed hand, “the evening air is filled with romance and excitement.”

  “Sure like his turns of phrase,” said a big-boned Oklahoman named Carla.

  The school principal, a New Yorker named Chuck, toasted Carla with an approximate line from Montaigne: “The beautiful souls are they that are open and ready for all things.”

  Carla curtsied, then clinked his glass.

  Pascal passed his orientation over to the activities director, Ricco, who ran through the hours of operation of the facilities and how to arrange for horseback riding, golf, and whale watching—then concluded with a request. “We ask something of you, por favor,” Ricco said, smiling. “We know you will appreciate that for the sake of our other guests you are not permitted to engage in any romantic activities of a public nature that might cause discomfort to those who do not wish to observe those activities. Thank-you—and enjoy your stay in Eden!”

  “Shoot,” Carla said. “And I come all this way so I could discomfort little old ladies in the hot tub.”

  I noticed a pair of couples who seemed to be showing affectionate signs of linking up. They headed down to the water, undressed and waded in, not exactly arm in arm, but close enough to distinguish them from nonswinging couples at a regular nude beach. They swam around the area protected by the breakers for a half-hour, sometimes gliding up against each other in laughter, and then they came into shore and sat in the shallows, holding their knees against their chests with their arms. From the water’s edge I heard the four of them talking about how wonderful it was to be away from home and work and in the bath-warm sea in the middle of a spectacular desert. They pointed to the mountain peaks, now glowing bright orange beyond the tall, dark date palms, and marveled at the quiet. There was nothing but raw coastline for miles in either direction, a wilderness of rock and saguaro cactus. I took off my shorts and walked into the sea up to my thighs. Even in the fading light the water was so clear I could see the yellow minnows nibbling at my body.

  “Nice night,” I said to the four.

  We exchanged the usual intros—name, home, occupation—with handshakes all around. One couple consisted of a petite court stenographer by the name of Phyllis and her mustachioed husband, Jay, an executive-type with rebelliously long hair, both in their mid-thirties. The other couple were a bit older but were actually physically more glamorous—a muscular gym teacher named Neal and his honey-blond wife, Corrie, who was a parole officer.

  After I’d explained why I was on the tour, Jay asked if I was going to be describing any graphic swinging sex in my book.

  “Actually, I don’t know how I’ll handle that part,” I replied. “Right now I’m just basically asking why everybody here is into the erotosexual lifestyle.”

  “Well, it’s not everybody with everybody,” Neal said. “It’s the law of thirds. One third you like, one third you can take or leave, and one third you don’t like at all.”

  “You want to know what I always find, the bottom line, the root of it all?” Phyllis said. “It’s that everybody wants that family connection. They want that feeling of being desired, wanted—and not just in a sexual way—socially and otherwise.”

  “I think it’s because we all kind of revert back to our school days for a bit,” explained her husband, Jay. “You can socially interact, be wild and crazy, but yet you can still feel accepted, that it’s cool if you’re wild and crazy.”

  “Then, of course, we all go home and live our responsible anal lives,” Neal told me. He drifted over to Jay’s wife, Phyllis, then turned in the water and moved back against her body. Phyllis slipped her arms around Neal’s waist and ran her palms up through his chest hair.

  “Well, you know, from a woman’s point of view,” said Neal’s wife, Corrie, “my personal opinion is that this is the best thing to come to without fear of being raped, mugged, or misunderstood.” Corrie moved forward along the sandy bottom to sit beside her husband Neal. She stroked his hand, which was stroking Phyllis’s knee.

  “And feel sensual,” said Phyllis, tracing circles on Neal’s chest hair. “Feel fun, because most women—I should speak for myself—but I think we all are very inhibited.”

  “Just as men are,” commented Neal, leaning his head back to Phyllis.

  “But men have a—I don’t know,” Phyllis said. “Either they’ve been trained better than women to supersede their inhibitions and they’re not so intimidated by the idea of someone’s thoughts or looks or whatever. The internal stuff. Whereas here, it’s great; you can be in denial of your upbringing for a little.”

  Jay, Phyllis’s husband, moved behind Corrie and ran his hands up over her tanned back. Corrie lifted her wet blond hair off her shoulders and inclined her neck forward. “That’s nice,” she said, responding to Jay’s firm neck massage.

  There it was, I thought. Phyllis and Jay, Neal and Corrie, had now become Phyllis and Jay and Neal and Corrie. The law of thirds had dealt four-of-a-kind. We all waved to a few other naked couples wading into the water.

  “In the lifestyle I’ve also enjoyed the conversations with women,” Phyllis told me. You could see in her face that she was trying to remember all the pertinent points she appreciated about swinging. “We’re sitting here talking like this—like this; where else do you get to talk about what we’re talking about? I never get to talk about sexuality except with Jay and our friends. Sexuality is way more important than sex. It’s men
tal. It’s heart. I’ve appreciated this kind of honesty of sharing with people, struggles with sexuality as well as triumphs with sexuality.”

  “Which isn’t to say there are times you would never do this,” Corrie said to me. “When you first fall in love you wouldn’t. Also when you’ve got very little ones this isn’t what you’re after. Or when you’re dealing with something like illness. It really is a recreational lifestyle. Don’t say it’s serious business.”

  “I wouldn’t argue with that,” Phyllis agreed. “You should tell people it’s got to be balanced. It’s got to be fun or it’s no fun.”

  “Boy,” said Jay, lifting his foot around Corrie and shoving water my way, “I don’t know how you’ll ever explain this to normal society.”

  “Hey, we are normal society!” a fast-food distributor by the name of Mark called from where he’d been listening in with his wife, Julia. “They’re all weird.” He meant that the real world was weird.

  “Weird in secret,” Neal said, twisting around and putting his arm around Phyllis’s slight shoulder.

  Mark drifted over with Julia in his arms. “No, seriously,” he said, “I think like everything, you got the bell-shaped curve—the majority of people would never do it. But then there are those who are freer thinkers, freer spirits, and who are really very secure in their relationships, which is absolutely vital.”

  Mark was about forty-five and he thought he looked a little like Burt Reynolds, which you couldn’t deny once he’d mentioned it. He sat back in the shallows of the beach with Julia, his wife of twenty-five years on his lap, her full breasts clear of the water and her arms around his neck. “There is no question that you gotta be secure. When Julia and I first started this thing, I said, ‘Do you really wanna have another guy?’”