The Lifestyle

by Terry Gould

  “What is the lifestyle, Stan?” I asked.

  “The lifestyle is very simply more than two people who love each other,” he replied. “Notice I use the word love, not necessarily ‘have sex.’ No previous words suit who and what we are. What is funny is that I support all these different labels for the lifestyle, because the lifestyle goes the full 180 degrees, and I would like people to be a little less sure about what it is. On the one hand, swingers.” He put his hands together to his right. “On the other hand, us.” He did the same with his hands on his left. “But I support swingers. We’re not swingers, but I support them.”

  “Why does everyone hate the lifestyle? From over here,” I said, putting my hands together on my right, “to over here?”

  “Because early on, powerful people found that the best way they could impose their power was through sex,” he said. “To make certain behaviors wrong, evil—if they could control people with it, they knew they could control the masses. It wasn’t even a conscious thing. As soon as that started happening they had the power. If you’re interested in procreating, and somebody said, ‘Oh, there’s only a certain way you’re supposed to procreate,’ then they’ve imposed their fantasy on you—which is proof of the awesome power of fantasy if there ever was one.”

  He emphasized this concept of fantasy because it was very important to his seminars—and he didn’t mean sexual fantasies per se. Stan’s main thesis was that people have to choose to replace the “fearful” fantasies of their “social” and “biological” minds.

  His talk at the 1993 Lifestyles convention had dealt with that subject: it had been called “Overcoming Fearful Fantasies.” Fear, in Stan Dale’s Weltanschauung, was “the basis of all human problems” and “the most destructive power on earth.” It was brought on by the anticipation of losing, which we are always on guard against, and which causes us to be ridden with anxiety and depression as we fantasize the loss. “Utopia,” however, “lies just between the ears.”

  It was simple stuff, really; replacing the negative fantasies with positive visions, much like Olympic athletes are trained to do these days. But what was not so simple was the primitive cause of the fear: loss of a mate to a sexual competitor. We want to win at life to get and keep a mate, and if we lose at life we can lose the mate to a winner: crucial stuff to our genes’ agenda—what Dale called “the procreative imperative,” which he said was the source of much meanness and much love. What could we do to get rid of the meanness? We could “decide not to forsake all others,” he wrote in a book called Fantasies Can Set You Free. “The marriage myth tells us that the reward for marital servitude is a special kind of devoted love that is ours alone; that essentially we own it, as we might hoard a casket of jewels and defend it to the death against robbers. But misers live narrow, suspicious lives, fearful and shut in behind darkened windows lest thieves discover their treasure.”

  “Here’s the fantasy we’re given,” Dale told me now. “Some guy comes along and says he spoke to God and God said this is what you’re supposed to do. Women you cling. Men, well, hey, God’s a man, so he understands men.

  “What our workshops are about is choice,” he went on. “If you want to be monogamous, and choose to be monogamous, then be monogamous. If you want to swing, if you choose to swing, then swing. I happen to think there’s more down both those roads—there’s the knowledge that sex isn’t a particular moment that begins at A and ends at B, then you go do something else in the alphabet and then you come back to A and go to B—and so on. Learn all the letters and then choose. Most people don’t think they have choice. There’s a billion people in China who have been told that. Somehow I’ve managed to convince the powers that be there to let me come in and tell everyone they have choice. Each moment they can choose, not because someone said they spoke to God or Mao. Choose your own fantasy. Sometimes the choice is complicated, and sometimes it’s pretty funny.”

  “I’m really proud of Mitch and how he and I have worked through this last thing,” Audrey told the crowd at her polyfidelity seminar. She was referring to a love affair Mitch was having with a woman Audrey couldn’t relate to at all. Audrey liked Mitch’s other lover very much and had formed a poly women’s group with her. She really liked that woman’s husband, too. And then there were the two women Lewis was having affairs with. One he’d met at the Ancient Ways Neo-Pagan Festival, and she had just got married to someone else. Audrey liked her, although “that was kind of a tertiary thing.” There was the question also of whether her own boyfriend could get along with Lewis; he would almost certainly be able to get along with Mitch, if not Mitch’s girlfriends. “Actually, it could be a really beautiful thing to behold if they were included,” she said.

  “Sounds like swinging to me,” Jean Henry leaned sideways and commented in my ear.

  To tell the truth, after over an hour of this, I didn’t know which persons Audrey was thinking of including in her triad. Although they did have a methodology for dealing with different “qualities of jealousy.” There was the standard jealousy the “male primary” felt for his wife, and vice versa. Then there was the female primary’s jealousy over her secondary partner for his tertiary love affairs, and the different qualities of jealousy he would cause her by becoming jealous of his girlfriends for their affairs. They also had a rotation schedule they’d worked out for sex.

  I knew that bourgeois swingers would say that the way they themselves lived seemed simpler. They had one partner, they loved that partner, and they had sex with other people once in a while whom they liked and fantasized about loving. But, though it’s easy enough for me to make polyfidelity into a “Who’s On First?” routine, the poly people were dead serious: they wanted to change the world for the better by multipartner means. Like Dale said, it was a matter of choice.

  “Okay,” Audrey said, “we’re going to close by having everyone stand up and form a circle, or hold hands with those around you, but a circle would be really nice. We’d like to invite you to just take in what you heard, the joys, the pain that we have felt, and hold a vision for yourself of what you’d like to take, and sing along.”

  All the polys held hands, forming a circumference around the room. People in long gowns, naked people, long-haired hippies, short-haired execs. Lewis hit the button on the boom box and Audrey closed her eyes and leaned her head back as everyone began to sway. “Together,” Audrey shouted. “Oh yes, together.”

  Love is but the song we sing,

  And fear’s the way we die…

  Come on people now

  Smile on your brother

  Everybody get together

  Try and love one another right now.

  One hour later I was driving down 1-5 in 110-degree heat to swing central, firm in my prejudice that swingers and polys were after something similar. After all, the word “love” comes from the Sanskrit word lubhyat. Lubhyat means desires.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Beyond the

  Pleasure

  Principle

  The lifestyle has nothing to do with overthrowing society—although that’s not a bad idea.

  ROBERT MCGINLEY

  When I first arrived at LSO headquarters after the “Loving More” conference, Bob McGinley had predicted that the New York Times would be “on that line wondering what the hell has happened to society.” With the success of the conventions, the growth in the number of NASCA clubs, and the wide open attempt by millions of suburbanites to combine their values and fantasies, McGinley had a sense that the lifestyle was about to be taken seriously. On the other hand, it might be taken too seriously for the likes of some.

  As the whirl of activity at the Lifestyles Organization accelerated in preparation for McGinley’s 1996 convention at the Town and Country resort, there were real machinations going on behind the scenes to wipe out the openly erotic lifestyle in California. It was the job of the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, the state’s most powerful agency, to enforce regulations that prohibited “cond
uct involving moral turpitude” on licensed premises. The agency now believed those regulations applied to private hotel rooms as well. Under the conservative administration of Governor Pete Wilson, the aptly monikered ABC was planning to apply the letter of the law to licensed premises where swingers gathered. The government had definitely reached its trigger point with playcouples, and was about to scatter buckshot over multimillion-dollar hotels, resorts, and clubs from Sacramento to San Diego—either revoking liquor licenses or threatening to revoke them if a hotel dared to hold a gathering at which behavior “contrary to public welfare and morals” might take place. Eventually, during the summer of 1997, it was the Washington Post that called McGinley to find out what the hell was happening to society.

  By then the pebble in McGinley’s pocket had grown to the size of a boulder.

  Twelve days into my sojourn at LSO, Luis De La Cruz, the facilities director of the Los Angeles Music Society, walked in through the travel agency, waved as he passed me in the photocopy room, then turned into McGinley’s glass-walled office. Luis and his wife Theresa had volunteered to curate the Lifestyles Erotic Arts Exhibition and they were responsible for making the show the largest of its kind in the world. In the past year, however, Luis had been uttering direct intellectual challenges to those in authority who were not pleased with the exhibition. Luis claimed that the real aim of the Erotic Arts show was to get people to throw off the thinking imposed upon them by political rulers and religious leaders. Not surprisingly, Luis’s principled pronouncements about the political goals of sexual freedom drew the attention of the authorities, and those principles—according to a Federal judge—were what the 1996—97 war on the lifestyle was ultimately about.

  “We’ve got two TV crews who want to cover the convention now,” McGinley told Luis and me in the board room. “One’s HBO and the other’s German TV, so they’ll both be doing something on the Erotic Arts Exhibit. I made sure I got a ‘fair treatment’ clause in the contracts.”

  “That’ll actually be nice for the artists,” gentle Luis said. “I don’t think they’ll have any problem with that.”

  “They’ll be doing interviews with them standing beside their work. So it’ll be a nice promotion for the show—and for them, and for us. All across North America and Europe.”

  “That’s wonderful, Robert.”

  While they turned to arranging the moving trucks to transport this year’s several hundred artworks to the Town and Country, I looked Luis over, assessing what a valuable asset he was to McGinley’s plans. Although he was not a swinger, if you mentioned the swarthily handsome man to the women here at Lifestyles you would see eyebrows shoot skyward and hear sighs uttered. Luis’s photogenic qualities aside, McGinley was pleased that Luis was very effective at getting the Erotic Arts Exhibit taken seriously by critics in mainstream media. Luis was a man of considerable stature in the “straight” world of painting and sculpture as director and curator of the Newport Harbor Art Museum and the Los Angeles Art Association. In the last year, that uppercrust world of “nonerotic” art had focused on Luis. In the next year I would watch the focus turn to McGinley, the convention, and swinging itself.

  It had all begun eleven months earlier, when the Fifth Annual Sensual and Erotic Arts Exhibition had wrapped up at the end of the 1995 convention. Luis, Theresa, and McGinley had decided to extend the show by moving two hundred paintings, sculptures, and collages to the Desmond Gallery, located in a mall on Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip that contained such fashionable outlets as the Virgin Megastore. Following its high-society wine-and-cheese opening, the show was to have had a one-month run; McGinley even hired a guard to prevent kids from wandering in and beholding, say, a painterly rendition of group sex, or some sculpture of a woman riding a terra cotta phallus as big as she was (the latter the work of Lee Thomas, a former novice in a convent). But the mall’s owners, 8000 Sunset Ltd, which had approved the show, shut it down three days later, citing their right to protect the mall’s image.

  Luis and McGinley gave some interviews to Los Angeles reporters, and then Penthouse magazine got excited over the censorship issue and featured an eleven-page story on the show (amply illustrated, of course) for its 1.1 million subscribers—which caused a laughable irony for Canadian readers. Those north of the border who flipped through Penthouse’s January 1996 issue would have discovered that this article on the censorship of erotic art was itself censored by the Canadian authorities. Three-quarters of a computer painting depicting a loosely roped woman frolicking with disembodied penises in a desert canyon was blacked out. “Art liberates,” De La Cruz explained in Penthouse. “It’s also a catalyst to other thinking…. And that’s exactly what medieval kings and priests wanted to stop—free thinking—and the way they did that was to oppress sexuality, amongst other things.”

  The point was, said Penthouse’s writer, Susan Reifer, explaining Luis’s philosophy, that where sexually free art goes, people follow. “When erotic art, which originates in the hidden recesses of an artist’s imagination, is released to the public, a chain reaction begins,” she wrote. “The viewer who recognizes his or her secret—his or her fantasy brought to life on the walls of a gallery—may begin to think more freely about sexuality, as well as art. The artist whose work is heralded in the light of day may begin to loosen the bonds of self-censorship so subtly imposed by social mores.”

  “The transformation of people’s liberties is amazing,” Luis said in the article—stating what was essentially the goal of McGinley’s playcouple philosophy.

  The supreme irony was that the Lifestyles Organization, Robert McGinley, and swinging were treated with dignity by the magazine. Why would that be odd in what was really a mainstream skin rag? Because, just three years before, Penthouse had, with the ringing righteousness of a crusading expose, featured a sexually explicit story on its cover, “Swinging Sex Clubs’ Dangerous Comeback.” “What on earth is going on here?” Ellis Henican wrote. “Don’t these people know this is the 1990s? What about AIDS…? Are these people nuts?” They were “whistling past the graveyard.” And who was the mercenary Pied Piper leading these swingers to their deaths? “His name is Robert McGinley,” the “Ross Perot” of modern swinging. “Yes, they even have their own trade group.”

  Now, in 1996, Penthouse was calling the Pied Piper of sexual death “Robert McGinley, Ph.D.,” head of “a free-thinking advocacy group,” which, parenthetically, “still throws some reputedly wild parties.” The issue had become “free expression” in the face of “repression.”

  At the time, McGinley was thrilled by Penthouse’s change of heart; it was the first positive press he had received in a dozen years, and he would mark January 1996 as the date the mainstreaming of the lifestyle had begun to show results. But he also intuited that the good press could prove a trigger point for the authorities.

  McGinley’s name was called over the intercom and I recognized the voice of Debbie Espen, his forty-three-year-old daughter, who worked full time in the Club WideWorld end of the business. Two of McGinley’s other children were part-time help at the company as well: David took promo pictures for Lifestyles brochures and Dan was a handyman at the club. They weren’t swingers but they looked up to their father as a hero.

  “Dad? Are you there? Your lawyer’s on the phone.”

  “Excuse me,” McGinley said. “It’s over that club raid again.” He meant the one in Texas where the DEA agent, his partner, and eight other swingers had been arrested and the Inner Circles Club shut down.

  While McGinley was saving the Inner Circles I asked Luis why he was involved in putting on explicit erotic-art shows at a swing convention.

  “Well, I tried to put it on somewhere else, but you saw what happened,” he laughed.

  Luis went on to explain that he and Theresa had first met McGinley in 1990 through Theresa’s sister, Cathy Gardner, and her husband, Dan, the out-of-the-closet swingers who were good friends of the Lomases. At a club dance that Cathy and Dan had invited them
to attend, Luis (and all his credentials) had been introduced to McGinley. A couple of months later, at another dance, McGinley asked Luis if he would consider curating a show of erotic art at the upcoming convention at the Hacienda Hotel in Las Vegas. Assessing the people around him as normal, yet extraordinary in a way that was condemned as abnormal, Luis realized there was something profound taking place “on a level of pure perception.” As intrigued by the hatred swingers aroused as by the movement itself, he said yes.

  “I’ve always wanted to cut down the insider-outsider aspect of life,” he told me. “Both within the individual and in society. I don’t think ‘they’ recognize that ‘we’ are one of ‘them ’—‘we’ make those designations internally, excluding parts of ourselves, which allows us to make those designations externally, excluding others.

  “For instance,” he went on, “I told Penthouse the whole show was about ‘taking down fences,’ because the real essence of the show is about making the art acceptable. What’s the fence keeping it from being acceptable? It’s that there’s definitely a conscious intent on the part of many of the artists to sexually arouse the viewer. Now that’s always been the case in art. The contemporaries of most artists understood that, so a lot of great art was banned at the time it first appeared. Then, over the years, we came to pretend that that wasn’t at least part of the motivation of the artist, and so the art became acceptable—as if, now that we could set up a fence and deny the arousal aspect of the work, we could appreciate its beauty. Yet the work is still arousing. And that whole progression from recognition of the erotic, rejection of it, and acceptance of it when it’s come to be seen as nonerotic precisely imitates the process of everyday life. We see the art as pure, but only they and them on the other side of the fence get aroused by it. When, in fact, we all get aroused by it too. We just pretend we’re not on the same side of the fence with the pornographic outsiders.”