by Terry Gould
“It’s amazing a huge club like this sits in a little town and nobody knows about it,” I said to Jodie as I looked back through the glaring sunlight at the connected tiers of brown wood buildings that zigzagged across the lawn and into the forest. Manicured rhododendron bushes, tall, pink sprays of orchids, rosebushes, and lobelias almost completely hid the first floor.
“Well,” Jodie said. “It depends who you ask. Most weekends they have the nurse out here from the health department giving her talk on safe sex to everybody, so the health department knows. The fire department knows because they inspect the place. The town council knows because it’s legally zoned as a private recreation club and they’re always checking that it’s in compliance with business and alcohol regs. So the right people know. And there are a lot of famous people you’d never expect who come here to inspect it unofficially, so to speak.”
“Interesting,” Skala said.
“This is the yurt where couples who want economy accommodation can stay,” Jodie said, leading us into a windowed tent in a clearing beneath the trees, with about twenty sleeping bags in a circle around the walls. “Mostly the young people stay out here. There’s a shower in here too, and they tend to shower together. Actually, this area does not allow sex, just out of respect to those who want to sleep—there’s plenty of rooms I’ll take you where you can have plenty of loud and screaming sex. My opinion is a swing club is a place where a woman can be totally satisfied, if she loses all her inhibitions. And you can’t in here.”
“Interesting,” Skala said.
“Here’s the start of very romantic trails, they go all the way back, and there’s mosquito lights so you don’t get bit by bugs—but you can be bit by anything else you want. It’s very lovely back there.”
We crossed the lawn again and returned to the building complex via a cement walkway that led over another Japanese bridge. “There’s carp in there, big goldfish—see?” Jodie said. “An-n-n-d, on that platform up above, there’s a hot tub—there’s several Jacuzzis on the property.” She held a door for us and we walked up a flight of stairs into a glass-walled walk-way between the main building, with its swimming pool and banquet hall now on our left, and the mysterious club proper down the hallway to our right.
“Just come this way. One more door and—” She pulled open two heavy wooden doors, the kind used to seal saunas. “Ta dah-ah-AH!”
“Holy shit!” I said.
“My God!” my wife said.
“In-ter-esting!” Skala said.
The Annex, or, as I would hear it referred to by some astronomy-minded swingers, the “Satellite,” towered very much like an extraterrestrial craft almost three stories above us and stretched sixty feet from where we stood to the opposite wall, colorfully enlivened by a mystical, airbrushed mural of naked men and women in carnal ecstasy. The sheer breadth, height, and variety of the layout had us looking upward and turning around with our eyes and mouths agape, since, by design, any visitor could take in from the door a lot of what the club had to offer sexually and (just as certainly by design) many of the couples partaking. Yet, open to the rafters though it was, in its ranch-style construction the vast Annex strived for the warmth of a north woods lodge, built post and beam in the shape of a six-sided tower around a sunken brick hearth, with many surrounding walls containing doorless theme rooms, making for at least a dozen fantasy chambers. Some rooms glowed brightly from their mirrored ceilings and walls; others were softly lit and decorated variously like a sultan’s tent, a Victorian drawing room, a railway car with facing passenger seats, and a Harlequin Romance room replete with period couches. Rustic stairways connected the levels; banistered gangways crossed the air; and miniplayhouses—cantilevered out over space—gave guests a high vantage point from which to privately peep at the activities taking place below. Presumably there would be an array of postures worthy of a Tantric temple to peep at, since lining the walls were suggestive arrangements of swivel chairs and attached stools of different heights called “Eros Seats,” plus waterbeds, red-plush couches, massage tables, and bunk beds with translucent draw-curtains. At two of the corners on the first floor, alleys curved away beneath red lights that seemed to signal entrances to dark fun houses, and above us a wooden prison door stood slightly ajar to a chamber whose motif I could easily guess. All was cozily quiet save for the crackle and hiss of the central fireplace around which there was room for ten couples to sit below floor level on built-in couches and make love in the light of flames leaping into a black flue hung by heavy chains from log posts that also supported a wrap-around walkway. There was a big sign on the varnished log facing us: “No outside clothing. Partners only beyond this point.”
“So this entire environment will be, shall we say, ‘occupied’ with numerous people on this weekend?” Skala asked in his orotund Bohemian lecturer’s voice.
“Sure,” Jodie said, “plus the Carebears who roam around to make sure women aren’t having any problems. They’re almost never needed but it makes everyone feel safe and secure. They all have Carebear badges. Ron—you’ll meet Ron—he’s in charge of the Carebears. He’s a Vietnam vet, a terrific guy.
“But, anyway, isn’t it another world in here?” Jodie asked, twirling around by the fireplace. “There’s no limit. How can you not want to feel like this? It’s not reality, it’s just pure fun, a comfy place where you can come with your partner, where you can have your fantasies, and then you can go back to your real life and your inhibitions.” She waved her hand at a wall of pigeonhole lockers lining a cedar passage that led into a room of showers, sinks, and toilets. “And that is where you put your inhibitions! There’s a bidet in there, a good, powerful one that almost lifts you off the seat,” she told my wife. “Now, you guys don’t have to walk around naked—you can wear a towel or a bathing suit or a nightie or kimono—but they want to prevent fully dressed people from coming in and gawking. And speaking of kimonos, here’s the Japanese room.” She took off her heels, pointed to our shoes for us to do the same, and led the way into a bright red, velvet-walled room whose floor was completely covered in flowered futons. Stylized drawings of couples with satirically enlarged genitalia were hung on the walls and in one corner there was a stack of pamphlets from the community health office: “Straight Talk for Safe Sex” and “As Safe as You Wanna Be.”
“This room’s kind of simple and intellectual and sophisticated,” she told us. “What I like about it is that everyone’s on one level. Actually, all these open rooms, if you come in and make love don’t be surprised if a couple asks if they can join you. So if you don’t want to be near another woman, don’t want to be near another man, this isn’t the place to lie down. For me it’s kind of an all-encompassing, enjoyable sort of thing. You stretch out and look up in a mirror and it’s like a fantasy-dream watching all these men adore you. But whatever your boundaries are,” Jodie said to my wife, “it’s to be respected. And if people hear of someone not respecting your boundary, they’ll say something to the Carebears and that person will be asked to leave.” She turned to me and Skala. “There are top-of-the-line condoms in each room in these wicker baskets and they’re always being refilled. And I suggest that that is a very important step you take before engaging in any activities. And then deposit them afterwards in these metal canisters.”
She worked the foot pedal up and down with a clank and led us back to our shoes, around the fireplace, and along one of the red-lit corridors that turned sharply and then opened into an amphitheatre with broad, ascending tiers of beds and form-fitting couches that faced a giant, black TV screen. “This is the video room,” she said. “They have pornos playing throughout the evening and you might have twenty couples coming and going in here, so to speak. Myself, I prefer to sit over here and watch the people. Who needs a video?”
As we returned to the central area, she pointed to an electric socket beside a set of five Eros Seats and said to my wife, “If you like power toys, there’s outlets all over. They have a woman coming i
n this weekend, Dr. Ruthless, she sells them if you didn’t bring yours.” She patted a furry massage table by the stairway. “Also, they have a very handsome Jamaican who comes and does Swedish erotic massage for free. Nothing penetrative,” she said, leading us upstairs, “but he works the sciatic nerve in the thigh and buttocks and brings you to orgasm after orgasm—which is an amazing experience, honey, so there’s a real lineup for him. Okay, these are what we call the condos.” She pointed to the dollhouses I’d seen from below, plus several other criblike cubicles built into the landing and overlooking the downstairs. “They’re really private, and you can crawl in here and be with your partner and look over the action through the windows. A lot of new younger couples wind up in here and have their private fantasies. You can hear all the moans and groans of everybody around you but nobody can see you. There’s condom baskets in here, too—see? Also, you find a lot of the husbands come in here on the sly just to watch their wives without them. It’s like a man’s fly-on-the-wall fantasy—you know, what is she really like without me?”
“This way, this way,” she sang. “We’ll have to move because there’ll be a big tour coming through soon.” She led us quickly through the “Sultan’s Tent” and “Miss Daisy’s Academy” and the the “Amtrack Room,” reminiscing all the while about her experiences on the pillows and divans and benches and tables. Then, walking back down from the top floor “Loft,” whose two hundred square feet of mattresses was reflected in beveled mirror-walls to produce multiple images, she stopped and turned to my wife.
“Do you like women?”
“As friends,” Leslie said.
“You know, I actually didn’t think I liked women sexually either, until this one time, I was in there with three young men”—she pointed to the Sultan’s Tent as we passed it—“and I was just enjoying the luxurious oral on all those soft pillows with my eyes closed and their hands all over me and whatnot, and all of a sudden I thought, Wow! does that guy ever know what he is doing, who is that? So I opened my eyes and there’s long, silky hair on my belly from this young woman who was this guy’s wife going down on me. So she says, ‘It’s just pleasure, darling.’ So I thought, Okay, close your eyes, relax. And so I did. And I realized, Hey, I’m comfortable with this—why not? So, you see, whether you just visit once or every weekend, there’s always another little room of your mind that you might say, ‘Well, I might like to go in there.’ Speaking of rooms, I’ll take you into the Dungeon now.”
“The Dungeon?” I heard my wife whisper behind me, which caused Skala, following behind, to erupt in laughter.
“What’s that?” Jodie asked, turning around. “Oh, I see. No, no, no, it’s not what it sounds like at all.” She flicked on a flood light and we made our way down a long staircase, creepily creaky. “This is just play stuff.” On the landing above the firepit she pulled back the set of bars and we entered a room painted white and bathed in light from a ten-foot window. “See, it’s not really a dark dungeon—everything they build here is really middle class. Which isn’t to say it’s everybody’s thing. I guess it’s a matter of taste.” Against the window was a line of beds covered in leopard-print fabric at the foot of which were soft, fuzzy stirrups. “You’d be surprised at how ladies go crazy in here, though.” She took down from the wall a couple of feather ticklers with whip handles, and then a pair of “chains,” which were actually strips of fishing net. She threw the chains over the stirrups and backhandedly tickled and whipped the bed, pointing to the mirrored wall and mocking a tongue-lolling look of lost pleasure. “Not my thing at all,” she laughed to her reflection, “but there’s always a crowd of couples. You figure it out. Beats me!”
She led us out the other end of the Dungeon, past a king-size waterbed, more bunk beds and other mirrored rooms floored with mattresses and hung with love hammocks, and then to the firepit again, where we ran into a dozen middle-aged couples being led through the main door by a pair with teddy-bear badges on their chests that said “Don and Judy.” “See!” Jodie laughed. “The early bird gets the worm and the private tour!”
We were introduced in a blur of names and were walking back down the long passageway towards the pool when my wife asked, “Your boyfriend doesn’t mind you coming here by yourself?”
“Not at all. He’s a very wonderful younger gentleman—you’d love him,” Jodie said. “He knows I don’t think I’d ever want to be with one man again. I’m single and a totally independent nonconformist, with all my children grown. I don’t need or want one man. And he says he finds me very refreshing.”
“Because generally the lifestyle is only for couples,” I remarked.
“Oh God, I really get into this conversation with some husbands a lot here—some guys just don’t seem to get it, only the women,” she said confidentially to my wife. “See, the lifestyle refers to a lot of different things,” she said to me. “Most of the people here are couples—and that’s the lifestyle for them, it’s very arousing for them. But I have several girl-friends in the lifestyle who are single professionals like me—I’ll introduce you tonight, one’s a massage therapist, another’s a welfare-fraud investigator—and we just find we’re really at home here; it’s a very wonderful life for us. Most of us, we lived our whole lives without knowing this was possible, and then we came here, one way or another, and, like I said, it was like this was really what we’d been looking for our whole lives. My circle of couples here is so close, it’s like a real tribe. Oh, by the way, here, this is one of the lecture rooms where they give seminars,” she said, rolling back sliding-glass doors into an empty room above the pool. “Some people will be bringing sleeping bags and spending the night here too. See, that’s the banquet hall on the far side.” She pointed down the length of the pool back to where we had started out.
“You are saying that this is a space that you and your friends feel comfortable in every weekend,” Skala said, seeming to want to get it right as we walked above the pool to the second-floor dining area.
“Exactly.”
“You and your friends came here,” Skala said flatly and with clarity, “and you were looking for something, and when you experienced it here you instantly knew you had found it. There was no adjustment period.”
“Well, before my marriage I was actually very promiscuous—my whole life I’d been very curious in sex, but it was never fulfilling because it always felt wrong. Just a minute. Hi, Stan! Yoo-hoo! Ready or not, here I come!” she called down from the dining room banister to a young D.J. setting up equipment below. He waved back and blew her a kiss. “I met him last week, isn’t he cute? Anyway, this is fulfilling because it doesn’t feel wrong. It’s just a very natural way for me to be, it feels right. So, yes, I found a place that has always been a part of me, no one introduced something new to me here because it’s a part of me. This is the only place I’ve ever found where I can be that part.”
“I see,” Skala said.
The three of us stood leaning against the banister while Jodie ran to the stairs in her heels, clickity-clacked down the flight, and dashed across the dance floor below us to Stan. She embraced him, kissed him passionately, and, getting to her knees, pulled his shorts and underwear right down to his ankles. Skala looked at me and I looked at Skala.
“Interesting,” my wife said.
“The strength of the drive determines the force required to suppress it,” Mary Jane Sherfey wrote regarding female sexuality, and a big swing club is the place to go to see many women like Jodie offering uninhibited evidence of why that suppression might have been so forceful throughout history. It is also, paradoxically, the place to see male jealousy—the irrepressible emotion behind that murderously repressive force—turned on its head, with husbands enjoying rushes of lust for their promiscuous wives, then overwhelmed by volcanic orgasms they cannot explain but which they want to repeat. Here couples lie with their mouths glued in love while they have sex with others. Here there are romantic games of seduction but almost no competition among men for
women. Here a wife’s jealousy is sparked less by her husband having sex with another than by the possibility that he is feeling love for his new partner. Yet wifely jealousy is minimized because, as Brian Gilmartin says, “Swingers believe that couples with good, strong marriages are highly unlikely to ‘fall in love’ with someone with whom they are not married.” In fact, at clubs like New Horizons, a bond is usually formed among potential female rivals: wives are often casually bisexual with one another, expressing a pleasure that is so sanctioned in the sub-culture that it bears the name “confirming.” Although they may have just met that night, “most swingers value the emotion of friendship with the couples with whom they share their recreational pursuit.” And when these friendly recreational pursuits are finally over, another party begins: “After having spent hours in an orgiastic social setting,” couples return home “even more erotically charged toward their spouse than when they left” and have the best sex of all—with each other. “Swingers expect swinging to have this aphrodisiac function for conjugal coitus, and so it does.” Finally, on Monday morning they all go back to work as teachers or pharmacists, therapists or editors—and begin planning for the next event, all the while aware of the central meaning of their erotic rites: “The idea is to protect and defend the marital unions of everyone involved, yet still enable everyone to enjoy playful, recreational sex.”
It’s another world that doesn’t seem to make sense on any cultural, evolutionary, or biological level, although the underlying logic of the lifestyle on all these levels is written so tinily in code and acted out in such a visually overwhelming fashion that until recently we just haven’t had the proper instruments and perspective to read its message.
In fact, until the mid-1990s, the message of the lifestyle phenomenon was so indecipherable, its milieus and activities so foreign to the experiences of most people, that most often it was written off as a perverse aberration that should never have been interpreted in the sixties as “sexual freedom.” Swinging wives, we were told, could not really be “choosing” to have promiscuous sex with friends, because even nonhuman primates were discriminating in their choice of sex partners. Therefore wives were either being forced into the lifestyle by husbands anxious to swap them for other partners, or they were victims of some psychological malady that compelled them to act in this unnaturally hedonistic manner. “Swinging is fundamentally a male device for obtaining extramarital sex,” one of the world’s leading evolutionary anthropologists, Donald Symons, concluded in the sociobiologist’s “handbook” on sex, The Evolution of Human Sexuality, published in 1981. “Presently available evidence,” Symons wrote, “supports the view that human males typically experience an autonomous desire for a variety of sex partners and human females are far less likely to do so.”