The Lifestyle (29 page)

Let’s start with the left-hand, right-hand seduction-and-condemnation of swingers in a glossy men’s magazine:
GQ
.

Middle-aged men thinking of attending the New Horizons convention that summer of 1996 would have found inspiration in an April article called “The Last Swinger,” about Tony Curtis. Perhaps the most blatantly orgiastic star in Hollywood, the seventy-year-old actor “showed us how to live life with a capital L.” “Tony Curtis! He’s fucked them all; he’s fucked everybody, and here we are, another night on the town with old T.C., because guess what? He
still
fucks!”

The reader encountered “the sly old satyr, unsated” over his lunch date at the Los Angeles restaurant Spago with the actress Jill Vanden Berg, “this strapping 25-year-old triumph of a blond,” outfitted (like many of the wives at New Horizons) in “five-inch spike heels” and “a skintight dress of pearlescent vinyl whose high hem continually gooses her epic ass.” Describing Curtis’s recent heroic times with strippers and actresses
and secretaries, the writer, Tom Junod, offered a hymn of praise to how Tony had “had enough lovers to qualify him, in his own estimation, as ‘the greatest cocksman to ever come down the pike, man.’” Tony was “dedicated to the art of eating pussy.” He was “alert to every instance of appetite, however idle.” “Offering the world instruction in the art of
celebrity”
Tony’s philosophy of life was, “Take it.”

Sound familiar?

Yet in
GQ’s
estimation such play was not permitted for average, middle-aged folks. In its 1993 article on swingers punnishly titled “Strange Bedfellows,” Judith Newman informed us that the thousands of playcouples at a Lifestyles convention she attended seemed like ridiculous figures in “a painting by Hieronymous Bosch, Bosch by way of Wal-Mart.” From her opening reference to a fellow as an “iguana” with “serious love handles” to her final disparagement of a “plump and dowdy” plumber’s wife, the holy trinity of fashion—age, shape, and class—was used as a major argument for why we should feel revulsion for these unfashionable transgressors, for whom “swapping mates is simply adventure on the cheap.”

After interviewing a Lifestyles Care Team couple identified as “Gwen” and “Stan,” Newman mocked lifestylers for the dignity with which they’d treated their spouses: “A woman is invariably ‘a lady’ in swingers’ parlance, which is sort of like calling Elizabeth I ‘the Virgin Queen.’” She pitied the déclassé conventioneers because they tried to live like the stars while preserving the niceties of home, family, and jobs: “I considered the homes in the suburbs and the grindingly dull jobs. I thought about the lousy paychecks and crying babies and malls.” And she was horrified that these unassuming burghers could enjoy so much sex and not be terrified by the wrath of avenging angels: “Wait a second, I thought. No more discussion of AIDS?
That’s it?”
she asked herself at a Lifestyles seminar on STDs, part of her five-hundred word tirade against the reckless ignorance of all swingers. Yet when profiling its celebrity swinger, Tony Curtis,
GQ
handled the subject of STDs by not bringing it up. Not one of its seven thousand words warned of the bad karma that the former heroin addict and his partners risked incurring by having as much sex as the swingers who’d made Judith Newman “feel an urgent need to be elsewhere.”

Women’s magazines practiced the same Janus-faced ethic, glorifying the promiscuity of the stars as they reinforced proper monogamous happiness for average, married females. In the case of
Cosmopolitan
, the chief preoccupation in the months
leading up to the New Horizons convention was “Hollywood’s Sexiest Women”—an article that fostered the fantasy of achieving the irresistible sexual power these gadzookian dishes had over others. “These are the fields where I learned oral sex,” Kim Basinger told us, indicating an entire town and its surroundings, which she’d purchased by dint of her sexual powers. “Women are cynical about being used as sex objects—which is a shame, because it’s fun to use your sexuality.”

“Just looking at her makes me want to have sex with her,” the producer Menachem Golan said in agreement.

“I went wild,” Jane Fonda, the former group-sex-oriented star, told us on the same page.

“I was wild,” Melanie Griffith said, baring her soul. “I could do anything I wanted and did.”

On and on it went—bosoms bulging from low-cut gowns fit for a lifestyle party—one female icon after another pruriently bragging from the rarefied Hollywood heights about the swinging edge to their sex lives. Meanwhile, a few pages in,
Cosmo’s
advice columnist, Irma Kurtz, offered the following warning to a lady who confessed she had “kind of enjoyed” the kiss of a woman in a group-sex encounter: “Each time a new partner is added, chances of contracting an STD increase exponentially. Sex, by the way, is meant for
couples
. We are not group sex animals. So forget about the exploits of a few free spirits.” And on another occasion, when a happily married woman wrote Kurtz to say she and her husband “want to become swingers,” the potential playcouple were rudely castigated: “I think swinging is detrimental, dangerous and just plain tacky. You say you ‘want something more.’ It seems to me that when two people who love each other and have good sex decide to include strangers, they are settling for something a lot less than what they already have: the true intimacy that commitment creates.”

It is not at all strange that the editors of these magazines
could publish these contrasting assessments of swingers without even a passing acknowledgment of their own class bigotry. As we have seen, preserving the privilege of the few and keeping the masses hungering for that privilege by denying it to them is one of the ways the media profit all around. But, in addition, mainstream media bosses appear to honestly believe two things: one is that elite swingers, being few, don’t threaten the fabric of society, while plebeian swingers, being numerous, do; the other is that elite swingers, having attained status by virtue of some special power, can be trusted to be safely orgiastic, whereas common swingers, having attained nothing besides lousy paychecks that they spend at Wal-Mart, have to be treated like sheep.

To my mind, the media in these cases have ignored what they would normally call a “holy-shit story”: ten thousand gatherings a year are held in North American swing clubs packed with spouse sharing couples, yet one doesn’t hear of violent confrontations taking place in any of them. The media have dismissed all the evidence that middle-class swingers can be trusted to behave like the promoted archetypes Curtis and Basinger. At the very least, that evidence suggests swingers are as deserving of dignified treatment as gays and lesbians, whom the media stopped humiliating as degenerates some time ago.

The social facts the media have not reported are succinctly phrased by Edgar Butler: “Swingers aren’t any less well-adjusted or more unhappy or less psychologically fit than any average cross-section of conservative, middle-class, middle-aged married people,” he told me in his campus office at the University of California at Riverside. “It’s no longer academically permissible to study them seriously, but I’ve seen no new evidence to modify my view.” He directed me to his textbook, in which he’d cited one of the most extensive (and last) studies of swingers—Brian Gilmartin’s National Science Foundation-funded survey: “About 85 percent of both husbands and wives
feel that swinging is not a threat to marriage or love between spouses. None of them reported that their marriage became worse since they began swinging, and the majority feel their marriages have improved…. Many swingers reported that rather than dampening their ardor for each other, swinging often caused an arousal of sexual interest for each other. Many of them often engage in sex together immediately after returning from a swinging party.”

Since he first began investigating the phenomenon in the mid-1970s, Butler has studied the lifestyle by attending Lifestyles conventions and interviewing its participants and leaders. An international authority on the subject, he’s been greatly disturbed at the way swing couples have been vilified by a society that forces them to live what Bob McGinley had called “secret dual lives.” Given that the vast majority of swingers come from the ranks of right-of-center, white-collar suburbanites who are avowedly anti-drugs, pro-law-enforcement, and who drink no more than the general population, Butler sees the lifestyle phenomenon as
part
of mainstream society, not separate from it. He’s no promoter of swinging, but his inclination is to defend all minorities against human-rights violations. That is why, as chairman of the sociology department at a prestigious university, he risked ridicule and took an unpaid position on the Lifestyles Organization’s board of directors, taught the facts about alternative sexual lifestyles in his classes, and included an eleven-thousand-word chapter on swinging in his sociology textbook.

“If you look at the data, HIV/AIDS hasn’t surfaced among swingers in a way to justify using it as evidence of their instability,” he told me. “It’s not used as a medical argument. It’s used as a moral one. The behavioral patterns of that subculture are guided by the same bourgeois rules which govern straight marriages, except they’re expanded to allow for all kinds of sexual expression within a bourgeois marriage. Of course it’s a
different lifestyle—no question—that’s why it’s a subculture. But the rules they follow are designed, from their perspective, to enhance what we call a traditional dyadic relationship. They’ll tell you they swing in part because it makes them hot over each other. They do it for a lot of reasons—sexual, egotistic, social, playing out a fantasy—but they also say they do it for the marriage. And the studies I’ve looked at of long-term swingers back them up on that claim. They do feel surges of warmth, closeness, and love for each other after swinging. The rules of their subculture allow them to do that in safety and with some measure of security.”

As Frank Lomas once told me: “Swing couples don’t play with fire so much; they build a hot one in the fireplace and keep it going behind the grates.”

Saturday morning the playcouples at the New Horizons convention had to take a test. It was administered at a seminar called “The Lifestyle and You”—a group discussion that in its own casual fashion addressed the rules of swinging.

By then the clientele at the club had changed somewhat from the mostly hard-core attendees that had arrived Thursday. Now crowding into the glassed-in seminar room above the pool were representatives of the other three-quarters of the lifestyle. Here were the soft swingers who only watched and massaged in the manner of Chuck and Leah at the Eden Resort. Here were the “interpersonal swingers,” the Elliot-and-Lindas, who most of the time did not have sex with couples unless they felt some emotional bond. And here were the “recreational swingers,” the Carla-and-Eds, who were “more fast,” but who shied away from having sex with more than one couple at a time, and who got most of their fun from dressing like the stars and, in Butler’s words, socializing in
“fairly stable groups.” These were the official “types,” although most academics like Butler refer to all as “recreational swingers,” to differentiate them from the small subset of the lifestyle known as “utopian swingers”—the movement’s left-wing ideologues who believe in group marriage, whom I would meet at my next scheduled convention a week hence.