by Terry Gould
That night, at the Marquis Hotel’s rooftop lounge, McGinley made an official announcement to the sexy throngs. “By now everybody in the world knows,” he said. “We tried to keep it quiet, but if you’ve been watching television at all or reading the newspaper, we’ve been having a momentous battle with the California Alcohol Beverage Control board. And it’s one thing we could not have walked away from: we felt that because what they were trying to do was so dangerous to any lifestyle, not just ours here at the convention—but to the gays and lesbians and Latinos they were oppressing—to all the citizens of California, that we felt obligated to charge ahead with it. We are the first citizen group that is forcing the ABC to actually obey the law, something they’ve never been asked to do before. Incredible!”
The crowd went wild with cheers and applause. Somebody gave the best vocal imitation of the Seventh Cavalry bugle charge I have ever heard in my life. “You get ’em Bob!”
I was standing beside Earl and Pia, the physician and nurse I’d met at New Horizons, who had just entered the lifestyle back at the “Lifestyle and You” seminar, but who in the last year had paddled up the rivers of the subculture to its most remote and steamy reaches. Over the winter they had gone all the way in and come all the way out to their grown kids, and were thinking—just thinking—that if public acceptance increased, they might like to come out generally. This victory was a good sign.
When the huzzahs died down, McGinley went on, soberly: “But—we have to obey the law, too. Now that we’ve cleared all the issues they brought before the court, we want you to have a heck of a lot of good old fashioned adult fun. But I want to caution you not to get carried away. I’m sorry to put it this way—but particularly the women—”
The crowd exploded into uproarious laughter. They were in on a joke the world hadn’t yet caught onto—except, that is, when it was presented in the form of some glaringly erotic and self-confident ladies called the Spice Girls.
“Ain’t nobody’s business if I do!” Pia curled her hands around her mouth and called, a changed woman from the one who had folded her fantasies into little squares on her lap at New Horizons.
“Yeah, whose convention is this, anyway?” said Earl beside her.
The LSO’s lawyer, Paul Murray, took the mike, smoothed the rebelliously long hair he wore over his suit collar, rolled his head back as if raising his nose through water to air he hadn’t breathed in weeks, and inhaled a breath that could have filled the lungs of Moby Dick. For two months he hadn’t had a day off. Word by word he proceeded to state what lifestylers believe is their ultimate due.
“What we are about,” he said, then paused, surveying the line of spicy women in the front of the crowd, and their proud husbands holding them around, and the sides of the room packed with couples standing high-heeled and barefoot upon tables, and the back of the room crowded with people sitting on the bar, and the patio filled with couples leaning in. Murray raised a hand in the air, “What we are about,” he said, “is liberty! Maybe this isn’t the kind of liberty that everybody things of as liberty, but it is liberty. It’s the right to express ourselves in the medium that we enjoy and understand. A medium that is offensive to other people and that possibly isn’t afforded to other people because of their personal tastes or inhibitions. But it is our medium, our expression, and we want to preserve that right, and continue to be treated in the public press in the same unique and positive light we have just been treated, which has never to my knowledge been so favorable and respectful. And we want that to continue!”
He waited a long moment for the cavalry-charge bugle calls and the applause and the victory cheers to die down. He waited, in fact, for silence, and then again held his hand in the air.
“Now,” he said. “I need your help. Dr. McGinley needs your help and this is what I am going to ask of you. NO PUBLIC SEX! Absolutely none! We are going to be watching because one couple, one couple, could undermine everything we’ve been fighting for months. I will make a confession to you right now. Are you ready?”
This time the crowd waited.
“I LOVE PUBLIC SEX!”
That released the crowd again, as hard to stop as an avalanche of beer barrels fallen off a truck on a steep hill. Murray didn’t try and stop the racket. He just shouted over it.
“I like to watch it; I like to participate; I like to see it,” he said, and order was restored, mostly out of curiosity, shared interest. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “the ABC wrote a report about this convention last year and there were thirteen citations of public sex. And in my office we came up with a game: ‘What number public sex do you want to be?’ ‘I want to be number nine.’ Public sex is a wonderful thing and I think that’s a big part of what all of us are. But you cannot do it. As much as you want to, you can-n-not do it!”
Fifteen minutes later, when the speech-making was over and the getting-to-know-you party had commenced, I sat down for a beer with Pia and Earl not far from the triads and tetrads grinding out on the dance floor and asked them what they thought of this—the enormous numbers, the California glitter crowd, the ABC victory haloing them all. Earl repeated almost verbatim what the New Brunswick woman had told me beside the pool at last year’s convention. “It’s like a gay person coming out.”
“And it isn’t even so much any actual physical thing,” Pia said. She looked around at the crowd. “Obviously no one’s having sex all the time. It’s not having to hide who you are naturally—with women, with men, with your partner—being able to relax and share it and not be tortured by guilt about it.”
“How long do you think it lasts for?” I asked. “In marriage—that happiness in release?”
“In sharing? Why not forever?” Earl said.
On the night of the Masquerade Ball, Dr. Robert L. McGinley, Minister of the Earth Church of the Pacific, married a couple who couldn’t have been more than in their mid-twenties. The wedding took place at the height of that wild last evening of this politically triumphant gathering of swingers—long after the packed news conferences and endless string of TV interviews in the lobby and at the pool and at the dinners. It was held, thanks to the victory over the forces of sexual concealment and secrecy, in the Palm Springs Convention Center Ballroom, where both Bob Hope and Ronald Reagan had been honored in the past.
The couple were Rachel and Michael, and he—tall, square-jawed, and very handsome—marched though the carnival crowd to the stage in a tux, flanked by a best man and friends also dressed in black and white. The veiled Rachel, on the other hand, wore a metallic, silver-sequined bikini, high heels, and a garter on her left thigh; she marched down the aisle with friends wearing matching bikinis of gold. They were embarking on a marriage in the playcouple lifestyle—young for that, but they were doing it—and these days they are featured on Lifestyles promotional literature for conventions.
“Let me have your attention, please,” the tuxedoed McGinley called, hoarse after three days of shouting at dinners and dances and news conferences. “Rachel and Michael and all who are here! All come! Michael and Rachel! Let this be a day of gladness, thanksgiving, possibilities, and great good fortune for all!
“Michael and Rachel,” he went on, as this year’s batch of media camera crews wove and ducked to record the event, “we have come together this evening to demonstrate the wonder of love through the celebration of marriage! We all live in the hope of loving and giving love,” McGinley stated in sincere belief. “Michael and Rachel, therefore, we give thanks—for sweet happiness. Their enthusiasm,” he turned to the crowd, “their loving and their belief and destiny for love is inspiring! And their great expectation!” he said in wonderment, which must have caused a few members in those media crews to wonder what sort of bizarre expectations this couple had for their wedding night.
“For a marriage is a very happy place, a sheltered environment in which we can endlessly explore ourselves in the presence of another,” McGinley went on. “We are so happy that Michael and Rachel and everyone
know how much in love they are. And that they have found each other and that they’re choosing this day, a very special day, to become for all time the accurate and beautiful reflection of each other’s essence. We ask that the visions they have of one another be always informed by the spellbinding radiant power that first brought them together,” he said, a little cornily, as was his occasional bent. “And we pray as they move to the hallowed ground that is marriage, that they may always hold one another in the light of all times in the love of all love.
“May I have the rings, please!” he called.
On my left and on my right, middle-aged women dressed in every conceivable girdle-and-lace outfit, most not too far in skimpiness from the bridesmaids on stage, wiped tears from their eyes. The men—naked cowboys with holsters, bare-assed buccaneers, and a lifeguard with a pith helmet that read “Let me save you!”—held their wives tight, smiling.
“Michael and Rachel,” McGinley announced in the heightening silver glare of klieg lights, “now that you have heard of the magic of the mysteries of marriage, the way it will continue to broaden you, the spring and wisdom it will everlastingly have for you: Do you, Michael, want to marry Rachel, to have her and hold her above all and have her as your life’s partner?”
“I do,” said Michael.
“Do you, Rachel, want to marry Michael and have him and hold him above all and have him as your life’s partner?” McGinley asked.
“I do.”
“Having taken these vows before this assemblage and according to the laws of the State of California,” said the man who had just battled that state to a standstill, “we are extremely pleased to pronounce you husband and wife.”
Robert McGinley turned from the couple’s kiss, threw his arm back, and, looking as if he had attained the highest peak of pleasure and happiness in his own life, declared: “May I have the honor of presenting to you Mr. and Mrs. Michael Barns!”
Mendelssohn’s Wedding March came on in deafening organ fanfare and the couple and their train marched back through the crowd, to ecstatic cheers and shouts.
“Good luck!”
“Take care of each other!”
“Mazel tov!”
“I give these kids six months,” the director of one of the media crews said to me as we watched the young couple go by.
“No,” I told him. “Probably longer. In the lifestyle or outside it, most everything’s the same. The only thing that’s different is the style. They think it’s more fun their way.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Future
We could have had sex but there weren’t enough people.
WOODY ALLEN, Sleeper
Eight months after that night of victory at the 1997 convention, Robert McGinley’s voice was broadcast across Canada in nine separate CBC radio interviews, each in a city that had at least one swing club, many of them affiliated with NASCA. Two weeks before, on March 1, 1998, Montreal’s Club L’Orage, one of fifteen lifestyle clubs in the city, had been raided by the police and twoscore solid citizens had been arrested and charged as “found-ins in a common bawdy house.”
The raid made front-page headlines in the national and local press, but there was a different spin on the story than was usual when swingers were driven into the street with raincoats over their heads. What had startled the press this time, and had put McGinley on the radio, as well as on the front page of the Globe and Mail, was the reaction of the public. Rather than morally condemning orgiasts, everyday people expressed support for the swingers and outrage at the police. “On the city’s most popular open-line talk shows,” the Montreal Gazette reported, “the majority of the callers said the state has no business intervening in the orgies of the nation, so long as they involve consenting adults, do not include degrading or dehumanizing behavior and otherwise do not cause harm.”
The public, it seemed, had adopted the principles of ethical hedonism: “Police have found themselves in the unexpected position of having to defend the raid.”
In staid Ottawa, home to both government and the sophisticated Club Desire—a member of both NASCA and the Equal Opportunity Lifestyles Organization—a CBC radio host wondered (as McGinley had predicted the mainstream press would start wondering) what the heck was happening? Swingers?
“The word swinging just conjures up martini glasses and polyester, you know,” the not unfriendly but nonplussed host, Ken Rockburn, commented.
McGinley set him straight. The best words to describe swingers were “in the lifestyle.” And polyester was not the favored attire of most lifestylers. “Socioeconomically we’re talking middle- to upper-middle class,” he explained. “We’re talking relatively high education levels. These are primarily married couples but not exclusively so. And obviously they have discretionary income to enable them to be involved in such activities. So we’re really talking about the movers in Western society.”
Yes—but what about having extramarital sex within the institution of monogamous marriage? That sounded a little different.
Not to McGinley. “They view swinging as a social activity. They view it similar to being involved in dancing, for example. Dancing is an activity of the couple that’s not something that’s going against their marriage at all.”
Then Rockburn hit McGinley with the million-dollar question, the one that was hardly ever asked of him, except rhetorically. “Is there a long-term detrimental impact on a couple’s relationship if they’re involved in this activity over a prolonged period of time?”
McGinley referred Rockburn’s audience to “Dr. Edgar W. Butler, chairperson of the Department of Sociology at the University of California at Riverside, who has done research on this and indeed has published in the area. And there are many others. We find that swinging relationships tend to be very solid ones.”
Since his battle with the ABC, McGinley had been having his say in just this manner. In the press there were none of the usual snarling adjectival phrases that for more than fifteen years had invariably followed his quotes in print. On the radio, talk-show hosts withheld their angry interruptions that at one time peppered every interview; in McGinley’s previous experience the most civilized interviewers, without the least nod to politeness, would accuse him of being a sex profiteer in the face of plagues and psychological illness. The Los Angeles Times, the Globe and Mail, network radio, and television stations—always reflecting societal norms—now reflected the curiosity of their clientele. They interviewed “Dr. McGinley” straight up. They seemed to temporarily accept him as a spokesperson for people of a particular orientation.
There was also a new, human texture to this commentary. Newspaper reporters, induced by reader interest to open their eyes to the full range of the people at the events they attended, started going beyond searching out the most obvious examples of abnormality or duncehead IQs. Writers still often led their articles with these spectacular types, but they started including others as well. Most significantly, they were willing to let go unchallenged McGinley’s claim which they perceived the public might now be willing to accept: Lifestylers, whatever you thought of their sex lives, came from the ranks of “the movers in our Western society.”
Overall, it seemed, they detected a new tolerance among the bourgeoisie for swingers and they allowed themselves to relate the story that had been staring them in the face for years. Something was definitely happening that might not yet be mainstream but was flowing parallel to the mainstream; it was being fed by the mainstream through underground channels, and the swinging lifestyle just might, if the force of that flow ran its banks, actually merge with the main channel.
The big question, of course, is: Will it?
Twenty years ago Edgar Butler had predicted “that swinging, as an emerging alternative lifestyle, will continue to exist and probably grow substantially in the future.” In his Ph.D. thesis McGinley had made the same argument. “All evidence points to swinging as a natural desire. It is not new, only its ready availability is new.”
&n
bsp; To date, those predictions have proved accurate: swinging continues to exist, and it has grown substantially. The annual Lifestyles convention is a mega-event. Miniconventions are taking place every Saturday night in the smallest towns, and new clubs are opening all the time. In Legion halls and hotels, normal people dress the same as at the big conventions, talk the same, and do the same things with one another on the dance floor and in the bedrooms. It is just possible that we are entering an era in which the playcouple lifestyle is going to take a big jump in popularity. I have several reasons for feeling that way.
The first is that there has been a sea change in the North American public’s overall attitude to unconventional sexual behavior. It can be summed up in the oft-used phrase, “It’s none of my business,” and it augurs well that swingers may have less to fear now than ever before if they are “outted.” In a study of middle-class Americans published in 1998, One Nation, After All, the sociologist Alan Wolfe deduced that, at least at the time he’d written his book, the media were completely out of touch with the new wave of public tolerance for the private sex lives of individuals—even public individuals, as demonstrated by the “leave him alone” reaction of most Americans when the media began endlessly repeating Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s detailed exposure of the consensual sexual activities of President Bill Clinton. They accepted that he was married and that he lied about having had sex with a White House intern. They were aware—and willing to admit they were aware—that their own sex lives were not as clean as the driven snow either. Sexual condemnation, once an automatic reaction even in the face of one’s own personal sexual indulgence, was finally being assessed by common people as “no longer cool”—just as swinging had once been assessed. The Gazette could in all seriousness ask the question: “Do orgies fall within acceptable community standards?” The answer seemed to be: “Yes.”