The Lifestyle

by Terry Gould

  The sun moved, the black shadows lengthened, and about 150 couples lifted themselves from the water or stepped away from the dance party and headed east for Regency Hall, just a few steps from Charlie’s, where McGinley conducted an hour-long seminar for those new to the convention, or those who could use some inspiration to get a better bang out of this one. “General Orientation Session,” McGinley’s seminar was called. “How to Enjoy Lifestyles ’96.”

  “We see the convention as a place for people to meet people,” he told them, while the HBO and German TV cameras whirred. “To come and be the adult sexual people that you really are without a great deal of fear that someone’s going to frown upon you.” He explained that the convention was also about the education they would receive at the seminars, the fun at the dances, and the spiritual awareness that came from being open in a nonexploitive environment. “People in the lifestyle have a spiritual side,” he said. “And this comes to the fore many times. Obviously, one is in weddings,” he stated, inviting the couples to attend one he would perform that afternoon. “Another has to do with the other side of life—when we leave.” Oddly enough, he then urged them to contemplate the funerals he officiated at, offering up evidence that playcouples established lifelong bonds that brought them to one another’s graves, since, he said, the lifestyle added to the capacity for long-lasting emotion. He urged them to come to the luncheon on Friday and hear Dr. Edith Eger give the convention’s keynote address. “You’re going to be surprised. She and her entire family were sent to Auschwitz when the Germans invaded her country. She was due to go to the Olympics as a gymnast, I believe. And Dr. Mengele, the Angel of Death,found out that she was also a dancer and told her she was to dance to entertain them for their luncheons. So dancing is what saved her life, although her entire family was killed and cremated. Her talk is called ‘A Dance for Life.’ It’s not a downer, not at all, it’s very inspirational. It’s designed to help put the past behind you, to enjoy your life. Which is something of value to almost every one of us. If you’ve gone through a divorce, or lost a loved one, or whatever human tragedy you’ve endured, you’ve asked yourself, ‘How can I go on?’ Dr. Eger has asked that question after experiencing the worst there is—and she has put all this behind her and gone on to have a great life.”

  A great life! People cried at the wedding, threw colored rice at the couple, who would share their celebrations that night at eight with the thousands who swarmed the Atlas Ballroom dressed as flappers and Arrow Men for the Roaring ‘20s Dance. “You want fights and drunks and jealous tears?” Cathy Gardner told me during a dance. “Go to a psychiatrists’ convention.” These folks, on the other hand, were pro-sex popsicles—and the lineups at the bar were always short, the swinging men taking care not to stimulate desire then lose the ability to perform, the swinging women generally liking to stay in control. Some were tall, some skinny, some fat, and some looked like they could have been leading men and women in Hollywood movies. Some were. They had their hours of foreplay, which, for at least half of them, led inevitably to hundreds of rooms being occupied by more than two. You took it for granted. You did not think it odd.

  Considering how many hours these parties dragged on, it was amazing that so many couples were up bright and early each day to attend some of the forty seminars that were scheduled over the weekend. It was even more amazing that Jenny Friend arranged these seminars so they would be kicked off by “Better Sex Through Religion,” whose leaders, Rick and Carol Truitt, took an Aristotelian approach to God-communion. Rick was a main-line Protestant minister with a doctorate in divinity and Carol was a social worker. “We both obviously come from a Christian perspective,” they told the spouse exchangers, comparing the structure of Christian rules to a manmade mountain and the reality of God’s relationship to humans as like the rain and rivers that washed that mountain away, or went around it. The mountain of religious commandments opposed organic growth; religious structure opposed natural movement; rules set boundaries to intimacy; doctrine was rigid while God’s spirit was free. It was the purpose of traditional religion to control people, not free the spirit. “The rules have become so important that people live for the rules, not for God.” God was playful, not angry. Look at the world! All contained within God’s mind, like a play He’d imagined and performed through each one of us. Indeed, they said “think of that word—‘play’.” It was in the play, and in play, that we felt God most. “That’s why the Lifestyles convention is such a great place,” Carol said. “Marriage is important to us, and intimacy in marriage is gained through playfulness.”

  Then there were the academics. Butler never made it, but a social anthropologist named Leanna Wolfe spoke to a packed house on “The Dynamics of Polysexuality,” her thesis being that by practicing monogamy we were “defying our ancestral polysexual programming.” “So you may ask,” she asked her audience, “at a biological level, what causes humans to have the desire to have multiple partners? Anybody have a sense of what this might be? Just ’cause it’s fun?”

  “Variety!” someone shouted.

  “Variety, that’s right. And what’s that variety based on? Basically it has to do with species survival. The more we mix around the gene pool, the more likely that some very healthy specimens will be produced that in turn would pass those very healthy genes on to the next generation. And so males are driven to do this by inseminating as many females as they can. And females are also driven, in a similar way, but there is a little difference. Basically the female appetite has to do with ensuring the survival of her young. And, in the behavior of many primates which we anthropologists study, we find that when a male encounters a female he’s never seen before and she has a young one with her, he knows that that young one isn’t his, and his likely response will be to kill it. And then once she cycles into heat again, she’ll be his, and the baby that results he would never touch. And so for a female to ensure the survival of her young, she has to give every male in her vicinity the impression that the young could be his. That’s part of the biological rootedness of why we are drawn to multiple partners.”

  It was welcome news to the “aberrant” swingers. Dr. Susan Block was there to drive home the point with her celebratory lecture “The Bonobo Way.” “Don’t let anyone ever tell you you’re bad because you’re a swinger,” she proclaimed. “Bonobos aren’t bad, and they swing constantly. They are the prototype of the human swinger! They practice playful, recreational, nonreproductive sex, and they never kill each other! Plus, ladies, they are not male-dominated!”

  At a luncheon, McGinley gave out a Lifestyles of America Award to the Jamaican resort Hedonism II. “I think it’s only fitting,” he said, “that Jan Queen present the award, because it’s in large part because of the efforts of Lifestyles Tours and Travel, working with Hedonism II, that we have created one of the most spectacular resorts in the world that has accepted what we call the lifestyle community. And they’ve done a magnificent job at Hedonism.”

  Jan climbed to the stage dressed in a glitzy gown, looking like a presenter at the Academy Awards. “The annual Lifestyles award is presented to the club voted most popular resort by playcouples around the world for creating an environment of freedom for the mind, body, and soul, on this date, August 23, 1996,” Jan said. “Thank-you, Hedonism II.”

  After that the MC, comedian Larry Clark, standing beside a nude model, invited everybody and the Hedonism folks to “swing at the parties upstairs afterwards.” He then introduced Dr. Edith Eger. “She’s here today to speak with us because it’s not only important to have fun and frivolity, but also to learn important lessons in life. So if you will please join me in a big round of applause for Dr. Edith Eger.”

  A tiny, frail woman mounted the stairs, looked the naked model up and down, and then sang in a heavy Eastern-European accent: “Anything you can do I can do better!”

  This broke the audience into riotous applause.

  “I’m older than you, but I’m also wiser—so don’t call m
e shrink, call me stretch.”

  More laughter and applause from the two thousand people eating their fried chicken.

  “I’m sort of a combo between Dr. Ruth and Joan Rivers,” Eger self-mockingly apologized. Then she cut the jokes. “I just really am very, very happy to be here. My little token to you is to talk about the dance of life, about how beautiful it is for you to take time out and come here and take stock of your life, where you have been, and where you are now. And of course, how you can live in the present, and to be able to integrate the past, so you would never be the prisoner or the hostage of the past. That’s why I studied human behavior, and that’s why I became a sexologist, because if you were sexually abused as a child, you were far more in prison than I was.

  “You see, I knew who was the enemy,” she went on with utter gravity, “so I became very, very involved in the area of how a person can be a survivor, rather than a victim, of any circumstance. This afternoon I’d like to take from you any form of victimization in order that you can feel empowered, and be able to enjoy every moment of your life.

  “I must tell you,” she said, “I was lying among the dead in 1945 when a young GI, maybe your father or grandfather, found me, and my hand was moving. So my life is postmortem every moment, it’s precious—and, of course, freedom and health are things we don’t seem to appreciate until we lose them. I like very much the humor, the love, the laughter, the permission to have all the pleasures in the world which you can enjoy. I really feel that your love is very contagious, so that I know that when I go home I’m going to bring with me the celebration of life. I think that you are able to have freedom of expression. Thomas Jefferson said all men are created equal—he did not say that all men are created the same. The same is not equality. I think all of us have the equal right to be treated with dignity. And, with that in mind, I honor you for your self-expression, and if I can be me, and you can be you, together we’re going to be much stronger than me alone and you alone. God bless you, thank-you.”

  Afterward McGinley was ecstatic. “They got the message!”

  Four hours later, the three-hundred-couple “Evening Of Caressive Intimacy” took place on the floor of the pink Regency Ballroom. It was led by a hypnotherapist, Rick Brown, a huge, shaven-headed man with an Amish beard, accompanied by a gorgeous stripper-model from Toronto named Jesse Hill, who would lie on a big table as he demonstrated his techniques upon her. Rick stated up-front what everybody at the convention acknowledged to be the case: for all its fame and notoriety as a public-sex convention, actual coitus and genital fondling happened behind the closed doors of rooms. Therefore: “The goal of this evening is caressive intimacy. No sexual contact, no penetration—we’ll have none of that. It has to do with touching and expressing the feelings of the person you are with. This is not a sexual event, but it’s very close to it. If you leave here and you’re not turned on, I didn’t do my job.”

  Nine-tenths of the affair consisted of nothing more than soft music, hypnotically relaxing talk by Rick, and the oily caressing of toes, breasts, backs, and foreheads by six hundred naked partners sprawled upon the rug. Nevertheless, this one-hour massage workshop always concluded with a happening whose name was as notorious as its modus operandi. It was the “Car Wash,” and it was so scorned and condemned by the media that magazines almost always felt it necessary to include double-page photographs of the naked participants so that readers could fully comprehend how terrible the experience was. Essentially it was this: the ballroom was separated into quadrants of about seventy-five couples each. Men and women then divided and formed two lines facing each other inches apart. These lines of facing people kept their hands at their sides—“This is not a group grope; anyone in line who raises their arms will be asked to leave”—and the couple at the end of the line raised their arms and twirled their way up the line between bodies, slithering against bellies and breasts like they were moving past brushes of a car wash. Then the next couple in line followed on up until everybody had a turn. I personally could never appreciate its sensual appeal—but it was definitely not, as GQ had called it, reminiscent “of those fine Tailhook parties,” the abusive gauntlet female naval cadets had been made to go through as part of their hazing ritual some years ago. It was just harmless and silly swinger fun.

  After these couples had danced their heels off till three in the morning at the Sci Fi Costume Ball, many of them again managed to wake up and attend yet another 9:30 A.M. spiritual seminar booked by Jenny Friend—this one a “Dynamic Meditation” service led by one Dr. Carlos Penafiel. There they sat in their loud shorts and shirts, hands upturned in their laps and picturing the light at their third eye, watching their breath while Dr. Penafiel reminded them that the God in that light was the same for all—friend or enemy, relative or stranger. They may have been thinking about afterward attending Jack Lambie’s seminar on “The Three-Way Experience,” or a live demonstration of female ejaculation conducted by a porn star named Kerri Downs, or even Mistress Delilah’s “The Loving Art of Domination.” But these taxpayers constantly reminded you by either their giggles or straining sincerity that they were not inhabitants of a demimonde of sordid sexuality. They were just folks putting the icing on a cake they thought tasted pretty neat.

  For all those who came to Lifestyles, however, there was one event that was really the top of the cake: the height from which all the other layers would be surveyed in memory. The seminars, luncheons, dances, poolside flirtations, and room parties were sweet steps to this most important night of Lifestyles each year—one for which some couples literally worked months preparing: the Erotic Masquerade Ball. You can go to Mardi Gras in New Orleans and Fasching in Munich. You can participate in the Gay Pride Day parade in San Francisco and the Dinah Shore golf tournament—the annual gathering of lesbians in Palm Springs. Nothing you experience there will match the Erotic Masquerade Ball at a Lifestyles convention. It is not that the peacock costumes playing peekaboo with sexual flags are any more gaudy at Lifestyles than at the other events. It is that the people wearing these costumes are models of heterosexual parenthood and middle-aged modesty back home.

  Two hours before the official start of this glitzy sabbath Leslie and I were surprised to find ourselves placed at a table of honor at a full-attendance sit-down dinner—along with Luis and Theresa, Cathy and Dan, and the porn star Ona Zee and her boyfriend Frank Wiegers. About half the people in the room were in costume at this point, the other half in tuxes and just plain sexy outfits—which would have been costumes at any other party. “This is food foreplay,” Ona told me. At McGinley’s table sat Frank and Jennifer, Jan, and the Eden Resort’s Pascal Pellegrino. Bob jumped up to greet a costumed couple who looked like they were getting on to eighty. He called me over.

  “I want you to meet some swell folks,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder when I got to his table. “Terry, this is Carmen and John Major—they just celebrated their fifty-fifth wedding anniversary.”

  John was dressed like Wyatt Erp, with dildos for guns, and Carmen was wearing a skintight, silver-spangled, cowgirl outfit with her breasts poking through, fluorescent bangles hanging from her nipples. A woman in a see-through sari with a bindi on her forehead grabbed John around the waist and pulled him backward to the dance floor. “How long you guys been in the lifestyle?” I asked.

  “We’re newcomers!” Carmen replied. “Only about ten years!” They’d both worked for the airlines, John as a mechanic, Carmen as a booking agent, she said. “What happened was, after we retired we both became real cranky, our sex life went from good to terrible. So two of our friends who were swingers—we didn’t even know—they suggested a club. Took us about six months to get used to the dos and don’ts, then it became all dos!”

  “Do you come to the convention every year?”

  “Oh yeah; we just missed last year. The first time. My God! The people were wondering what the hell was going on we didn’t make it.”

  “Your costume is spectacular—you’ve
got a body like a young woman. Do you guys actually swing here?”

  “Oh yeah, we always party. Every weekend. People always ask us, what keeps us young. I say, ‘Swinging.’ It’s this kind of atmosphere that keeps us young. I said, ‘Without this, I could see me getting old.’ I will never get old. It takes sex to keep us young. No way will I ever give this up—the Lord gives me my health, and the Lord gives me my pleasure.”

  “Terry’s writing a book about all this for Random House,” Bob said.

  “Ohh, about time someone did.”

  Amid the uproar of thousands talking at once a bare-breasted Cleopatra and G-stringed Pharaoh came up to Carmen.

  “Oh, you look gorgeous, Carmen!”

  “Well, you know me. This young fellow saw me on the dance floor, he came up to me, and said, ‘I’d love to have you as my mother.’ I said, ‘No way! I’m the sexiest lady you’ll meet here tonight. I’m not sitting on a porch sipping tea being your mother.’”

  “Oh, you’re bad, Carmen!”

  “You better believe it! Sex keeps me young. ‘No way in hell am I being your mother!’ He asks me, ‘How do you keep your shape?’ So I said, ‘I’m very active where and when it counts!’ Without sex, what’s life all about?”

  “Some of the women here are going through menopause and are wondering whether their urge to be in the lifestyle will be lowered. Did you find that?” I asked.