by Terry Gould
Sitting down to their prime-rib dinners, men and women alike cast self-confident smiles about them. It was supposedly “the night you can chase your pagan fantasies,” but the establishment had supplied no toga wear and, in any case, the self-willed swingers preferred the least-dressed look featured in Madonna’s book, Sex, with its teasing glimpses of mock celebrity orgies that playcouples lived or watched for real. The most ample shapes were slipped into sexy wear that pushed what they had up, squeezed it out, netted it over tightly and draped it in lace. Shadowy fabric vectored the eye to points you were not supposed to stare at. As an underwear ad at the time had it: “There’s a side to every woman that’s very Marilyn.” But here the ante was frankly upped. Making a grand entrance a lady of pedestrian figure showily stripped out of a red silk robe by a potted tree near my table. Head back, hand held demurely in the air, wearing bikini underwear, she clicked shamelessly across the dance floor, trailing her cape, to cheers. “Olé!”
“You ever see in People magazine where they have the ten worst-dressed women?” Sonia from the seminar asked Leslie. “Where they set up these examples where they’re torn down for looking horrible—maybe the neckline’s too low or the hemline’s too short?”
“You mean if they’re not suitably built to wear the outfit?” Leslie asked.
“If they’re bulging out of the outfit,” she replied. “If they’re bulging out, if they’re not a skinny rake, and they dare to show some flesh that’s overflowing the costume, then they’ll point the fingers at them as looking ridiculous, and how could they even dare to go out in society like that, unless they’re young and beautiful models. But here she’s accepted—they don’t look anything like the models, but it’s fine. It’s beautiful. Don’t you love it? They’re so gorgeous!”
After a rich ice-cream-and-cake dessert, the music man, Stan, whom Jodie had engaged on our first meeting, put on the beat and we watched the show.
The dancing gave Skala an intuition that there was another level to this party. Being of ancient Bohemian stock he discerned a racial memory coming on: except for the jockstraps, teddies, body stockings and spiked high heels, he felt as if we could be in Pilsen at the height of the Middle Ages, at the licentious peak of Fat Tuesday, when the townsfolk behaved like the erotic gods their pagan ancestors had worshiped—except here the gods were tabloid. In Europe it was called “Kermis”—here it had no name—but it was still a night of steak, beer, and pillowy beauty that many in our anorexic age would not accept as being deserving of the word erotic.
At the tables the wives sat on their husband’s knees, breasts spilling out from merry widows and bedroom bodices. Allure established and sustained, they kissed neighboring guys, flounced onto the laps of female friends. No one had sex but it was still a skewer in the eye to Cosmo’s delicate sensibility. Tacky? Not to these guys. They had utter contempt for bulimic guilt over an ounce too much of this or that. Dangerous and detrimental? Only to institutionalized forces. It was like Woodstock—not a shot was fired, but it seemed to strike terror into the heart of the establishment.
“Blind Fondle Contest! Blind Fondle Contest!” Ron called at the mike, and the men clambered behind the painted plywood wall with the little doors. Their wives, lining up for a feel and a guess at whose scrotum belonged to them for life, soon broke the rules and reached all the way through, squeezing buttocks and thighs in more than dexterous inspection. There was supposed to be some scoring and a prize at the end, but the judging collapsed when Jodie and one of her friends ran behind the prop and began trying to get the men a little more prominently displayed through the trap doors.
Following the chaotic “contest” the hall was made disco-dark and every couple poured onto the dance floor beneath the swirling spotlights. All of a sudden Pia, breathless with titillation, her cheeks cadmium red, revealed one of her fantasies. You couldn’t keep many secrets on this night, but this one was so tame it was laughable. “I’d love to dance naked!” she told us—and this was certainly the place for it. Earl helped her undress and she proceeded to have a blast on the ballroom floor with Larry, our Thursday night tablemate, who was tall and strong enough to lift her. She rode his hips while he boogied, her arms waving at the lights above her head and her breasts stretched taut.
In the midst of it all I watched Jean Henry and Clark Ross dancing civilly with each other out on the floor—good sports. The music and hilarity of the crowd was too deafening to have a meaningful conversation, but I’d already posed a big question to Jean the other day by the pool: How did she go about explaining the sudden popularity of this?
“Cultural psychology,” she’d told me. “What’s the overall culture that permits this? It has to do with cultures that develop within the culture. It doesn’t explain all of it, but you have to weigh what’s so-called forbidden and what might be becoming permitted. I think that’s a cyclical thing. We could be moving in a new direction.”
Clark offered me his layman’s opinion. “Also, you have to look at the domestic needs of women,” he said. “How many of these women are in that domestic mode? I don’t think very many of them are. How many of them have independent incomes? Most of them.”
“But they all have that emotional anchor with one man on an ongoing, long-term basis,” Jean said. “So that may be satisfying that need—that kernel. You’ve got that anchor: I have my family, I have my long-term emotional bond. Whether they’re fooling themselves or whether it’s real, it’s there. They’re also satisfying the cultural definition of relationship as well. If you can get approval within that, you can go do whatever you want.”
“Look at the other side of it,” Clark said. “Instead of asking ‘why?’ Ask: Why not? How could you explain why not?”
An hour later Skala, Leslie, and I took a break in the lobby and watched the swingers through the glass wall. At least half the partiers were now stripped down to fiesta underwear, or less, and were shaking their bodies, gyrating in their bare feet, kicking the night through what they perceived as the goal post.
“I might phrase where they’re coming from very simply,” Skala told me as we watched them from the couch.
“How’s that?”
“There’s a line in Passion Play, by Jerzy Kosinksi. The hero, Fabian, he takes his girl to a swing club. It’s called Dream Exchange. She asks him something like, ‘How can they do this in public? Who are they?’ He gives an answer. I don’t remember it exactly. Something like they’re just normal people, I think. Maybe it’s just as simple as that. It’s always been this way for some people.”
On the drive down to California the next day, I stopped off at a bookstore in Portland and found a copy of the paperback and the exact quote.
“‘Who are these people?’ she asked.
“‘Just people, their appetites traveling without break between desire and gratification.’”
CHAPTER NINE
Loving More
We also believe there are more of us out there: people who would flourish in the lifestyle, but who haven’t discovered it yet…. Perhaps you are one of us?.
RYAM NEARING, Loving More:
The Polyfidelity Primer
Audrey and her two spouses, Lewis and Mitch, climbed onto stools and invited the hundred men and women sitting on the floor to share their “saga in poly-fidelity.” As I’d heard stated and restated in a variety of tribal drum sessions and seminars over the past three days, poly-fidelity is a term used by idealistic lifestylers to describe “a new relationship form.” It means exactly what it says: polyfidelitists are faithful to many. Like swingers, they make love with more than one partner, but, unlike swingers, they have more than one partner to whom they are faithful. This weekend marked the tenth annual gathering of these polyamorous folks, and it was held in Harbin Hot Springs resort, a “sacred healing place” in the dry mountains above the Napa-Sonoma wine valleys. The conference was called, definitively, “Loving More.”
“We are a work in progress,” Audrey, a corporate lawyer,
explained, meaning that she, her legal husband Lewis, and her co-husband Mitch were in the process of getting some of their approved lovers to move in with them—which is what most of the people here were up to as well. In fact, the redwood walls of the rustic meeting hall fluttered with letters pinned there by both veteran and neophyte poly couples announcing their aspirations for “more.” As in this purple sheet with a smiling face that I noted down: “Loving Dyad Seeking to be More: We are looking to develop a close, loving, committed polyfidelitous life-long partnership with others. Talk to us!” Or this one: “We are looking for a very special man to be part of our lives and relationship. I am 23, 5′6,″ attractive, and manage a law office. My husband is a 35 yr. old accountant. We’re both into Science Fiction fandom. Our daughter is an adorable, well-behaved five year old. Please call me at…. If a man answers, COMMUNICATE. Warmly yours, Regina.”
Standing by the sliding door to the patio, haloed by these winglike personal ads, was Ryam Nearing, one of the chief organizers of the conference, now bouncing her naked baby, Zeke, on her hip. The wholesome-looking Ryam had a primary spouse named Brett Hill—the confirmed father of little Zeke—plus a legal husband, another co-husband, and one co-wife. Polyfidelitists give their group marriages funky names like “Jubilee” and “Sanity Mix;” Ryam’s Hawaii-based tribe was called “Syntony Family.” Perhaps because it was meant to be a model for the world, the Syntony Family was considered by many polyfidelitists at the conference to be the most puritanical expression of their subculture. “In Ryam’s family you really can’t have sex with someone until they’re in the family and they move in,” Audrey had told me outside on the porch. “It’s like no sex before marriage. I mean, Ryam and Brett have the poly version of Ozzie and Harriet.” At the moment handsome Brett was down at the lower hot tub giving a seminar just as popular as Audrey’s: “Tips on Finding Other Poly People with Locals and Online.”
“Everybody’s relationship is a work in progress,” Audrey affirmed on her stool. “So, what we’re going to be relating to you over the next two hours is our own particular experience in this lifestyle. It is not a judgment or a statement that this is the right or wrong way to do it. We hope, in turn, that you will respect that this is our way of doing things. All of us in the poly lifestyle have a lot of humility and awareness that family expansion is an organic process.”
At this the whole room nodded somberly. Unlike the bawdy ambiance of that other spouse sharing convention I’d left behind last week at New Horizons, here gravity and childlike sincerity ruled the day. In terms of age the poly people were about ten years younger than the New Horizons crowd; in terms of fashion they walked around nude or wore earthy sarongs, tie-dyed T-shirts, and muslin dhotis. The fact is, no one at Loving More would have been caught dead wearing a garter belt or silk jockstrap, and whenever I’d overheard some of them loving more than one, it was through the flap of a tepee where inside they were calling spiritual words to their partners such as you would never hear in Miss Daisy’s Academy: “Thou art God! Oh my love, you are God to me!”
They also quoted their favorite author a lot. For instance:
“As Heinlein said, ‘The more you love, the more you can love,’” Audrey’s husband Lewis, a forensics expert, interjected. “I was always a big Heinlein fan. Is there anyone here who isn’t?” he laughed, knowing there wasn’t. Robert Heinlein wrote the 1961 science-fiction bible of the poly people, Stranger in a Strange Land, which took the viewpoint of a newly arrived Martian to make the case that sexual competition and sexual jealousy were the ultimate causes of the wars, murder, and mayhem on Earth. To solve the world’s problems, the novel’s alien protagonist, Valentine Michael Smith, establishes the Church of All Worlds and teaches his followers to open their marriages and say “Thou Art God” when they make guiltless love in groups on the grounds of his idealistic commune. Not unexpectedly, the media declare the communards detrimental and dangerous and Smith is physically torn to pieces by a mob of Christians storming his free-love paradise.
“I have all kinds of things from Heinlein posted on my wall,” Lewis said. “‘There’s no limit to how many people you can love.’ ‘If there was enough time, you could love the vast majority.’ That’s why this type of marital structure has always made complete sense to me.”
“I am very deeply in love,” Mitch, a computer consultant, affirmed, taking the hands of his spouses. “I have always been searching for ways to love more. Now I’ve found these two and I’m very happy. I’m out from the shadow.”
Most everyone in the room knew what Mitch meant by that. He’d just published two articles in Loving More magazine—the ideological organ of the poly people—revealing that he was a refugee from San Francisco’s Kerista Community. Founded in 1970, Kerista had been one of the most successful sexual-sharing communes ever to be modeled on Heinlein’s Utopian vision, with dozens of adults involved in an open group marriage and various business enterprises that had grown to produce communally shared revenues of eighteen million dollars. Yet Mitch had described how, by 1991, the money had disappeared in bad business moves, and Kerista had “turned into a cesspool of insensitivity, megalomania, debauchery, and childishness.” His most disheartening conclusion was that even at the best of times during the twenty-one-year existence of Kerista, the worst had never been absent. I’d read Mitch’s “Dark Side to Community” that morning over a breakfast of scrambled tofu and granola, and I realized that, like many swingers, polyfidelitists can cut short the incipient snarkiness of outsiders when they admit to being aware that every one of their brightly lit dreams has, as Mitch said, its “shadow” side. They seemed flaky, but only at a quick glance—in the manner that a peek into the New Horizons Annex could leave you with the impression that swingers were anarchic and uncivilized.
“Okay, it’s early, so to change the energy and increase the spirit of fun before we get started,” Audrey said, “I’d like everybody to stand up. We would like our friend Marguerite, who I’ve discovered loves to sing, to help us do a fun little song that kind of embodies some of the philosophy that’s helped us. We’re going to start doing it, and you just kind of ‘monkey-see-monkey-do.’”
A dark-haired woman in a flowing muslin dress and plastic sandals walked to the front of the room. “I sing this song with children, so I’d like to invite all of your inner children here to participate fully, including the hand motions,” said Marguerite. “It’s fun. Actually, it can be as deep as you want. Some of you know this song. It’s called ‘The Magic Penny.’ It’s really about this: The more love you give away, the more you get! We’re going to do the little children’s hand motions so that you can practice giving more love away and getting more love back. You can really get into it by actually giving away love to the individuals around you in the room. Ready?”
“Ready!” everyone shouted, eager as six-year-olds.
“Okay, here we go.”
Love is something if you give it away
Give it away give it away
Love is something if you give it away
You end up having more
It’s just like a magic penny
Hold it tight and you wont have any.
At the end of this song everyone hugged the polys in full circumference around them. I offered hugs to the non-poly Texans Dr. Jean Henry and Clark Ross, then found myself in the arms of a ruggedly handsome old man named Lloyd, whom I held onto because I really liked him. Back in 1971, when most swing clubs were still living-room affairs, Lloyd had been on the executive committee of Sandstone Ranch, the encounter-group oriented “love community” in Topanga Canyon, whose members included individuals of such stature as Max Lerner, the syndicated left-wing columnist; Betty Dodson and Sally Binford, the pioneering pro-sex feminists; Daniel Ellesberg, who’d leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times; Alex Comfort, author of The Joy of Sex; and Edward Brecher. Lloyd had kept the sexually politicized spirit of those swinging days alive in his heart, as I’d found out the very first
hour of this conference when he stood up before the two hundred assembled polyfidelitists and said: “At the end of World War II, America invented the nuclear bomb and the nuclear family. The nuclear family is more dangerous!”
Now, after several encounter sessions in which we’d sat beside each other relating our “personal myths,” Lloyd said to me, “Brother, I know you’ll be gentle and loving to this lifestyle. You don’t have to see us as we see ourselves, but you have to hear us. We are only trying to expand the narrow passage through which the race can’t fit anymore.”
Poly people really talk like that.
To get a handle on how the day-to-day lifestyle of spouse-sharing polyfidelitists differs from that other “lifestyle” led by playcouples, you have to understand the bottom-line distinction between “utopian swingers” and “recreational swingers.” As defined by sociologists like Edgar Butler, poly people are to recreational swingers as, say, Trotskyites are to liberal democrats. They are radical theoreticians who believe the lifestyle is much more about changing the world than it is modifying a single marriage. “Recreational swingers have no great overt revolutionary feeling that the establishment needs to be overthrown,” Butler wrote. “They violate norms but nevertheless accept them as being legitimate. However, Utopian swingers are nonconformists who publicize opposition to societal norms and [make] attempts to change them.” They “advocate some form of group marriage or communal life, an idea rejected by almost all swingers.”
Frank Lomas pointed out for us the conservative desire of swingers for their own bathrooms, and in this they are historically congruent with mainstream swingers since World War II.
Most of them have grown from the rows first sown by that suburban Johnny Appleseed, the traveling salesman Leidy, who promoted recreational sex within a primary pair-bond. Although many Utopian swingers like Lloyd started out as recreational swingers—and still cross the line on occasion—we can trace their more serious approach to multipartner sex to a different source, the free-love communes of the nineteenth century, in particular the Oneida commune in New York.