The Lifestyle (42 page)

So began the 1996 Lifestyles convention: it had taken a year to put together but it had really been “23 years in the making.” After the congestion of Los Angeles, the stuffiness of Dublin and Bonn, the isolation of New South Wales, or the insufferable political correctness of Toronto, Lifestyles ’96 came as an enormous release for these thousands. It had always been this way at conventions, and no matter how big it had grown, Lifestyles remained vastly unpretentious, spectacularly intimate, with the vernacular transactions of the swing world available to all.

You registered and you were in, but you never disappeared, for your playcouple spouse was by definition always on your arm. Around the pools the convention was a sunlit party; at the dances it was a dark, rowdy, and electric disco; at the seminars and art show it was high-minded and studious; at the adult marketplace it was plain tasteless; at the big luncheon it was archly political, First Amendment stuff; and—day and night in the rooms—it was tender in threesomes and purely “orgastic” in groups. In other words, the convention was constantly in flux. You wandered from college class to Mardi Gras to porno booths to pajama parties to group-sex passion. When you heard the laughter of more than four or five behind closed doors, you knew what was going on; you could knock and you would probably not be refused a place of witness. You were surrounded by those who were intolerant of smugness, but kind to both the timid voyeur and the cackling exhibitionist.

To take up residence in the Town and Country between August 21 and 24 was to install oneself on a merry-go-round in a marital amusement park. “Lifestyles ’96 is a time of liberation and enchantment,” McGinley had bannered his ethos on the back of his beige convention booklet, this one with another nakedly embracing couple airbrushed on the front. “A time to rekindle the passion and to enhance the romance in your
relationship. The PlayCouple Philosophy is alive and well at Lifestyles ’96.”

At noon Thursday, the best and worst opened simultaneously. Behind the pool, on the far side of the Rose Garden, Luis welcomed the public to his gallery in what was called the Council Rooms. He stood with a shy young artist named Karen Swildens before a dozen bronze sculptures, one of a headless female riding a stiff phallus, named
Passion
, another of a body with a phallus-head and arms reaching up and holding its testicles, called
Ecstasy
, a third called
Battle of the Sexes
—that is, phalluses dressed as knights and doing battle with sword and mace. “You have to get on a level between the thought and your response to the thought—art’s the original response,” Karen told the bikinied couples who were at the convention precisely in order to cultivate original response. “Art is communicating on that level.”

“I actually call art the shorthand of language,” Luis said. “It goes right past that mental rhetoric, right past the definitions, occurring before the words about the thing itself come to mind. In Ms. Swilden’s work we see the juxtaposition of fantasies—the male-female style of the critical creature….”

What was most fascinating about Luis’s long-handed hour’s talk was that fifty swinging couples listened raptly to it all, strolling from canvas to collage to sculpture with elbows resting upon fists and eyeglass-stems held to their mouths. “What is the challenge here?” Luis asked before some graphically homoerotic works that he always included in his shows to emphasize the plurality in the name
Lifestyles
. “Quite simply, it is the challenge of Goya. He too fought against the dogma of denial.”

The Good. The Bad. The Ugly. The art show was the good. The alleged bad went on in the rooms. What about the ugly?

If you walked left from the Council Rooms, crossed the
solar furnace of the Mission Patio into the cool convention center where registration was proceeding furiously, then turned right into the Mission Ballroom, you entered the warehouse world of commercial porn and erotica, done up in feathers and boas, a suburban whorehouse trade show. This was what Jennifer Lomas referred to as X-Town, tempered every third or fourth booth by some redeeming concept like Lifestyles Travel, or the Tom of Finland Foundation—a charity for gay artists with AIDS—but otherwise flaunting kinks sold by Leather Masters, Pleasure Piercing, and Silverscreen Video. Still, it was also a place to buy the outfits worn as a matter of course at the dances, offered at bargain-basement prices by companies like Desire Fashions, Tanya’s Clothing & Shoes for Brave Women, The Lingerie Lady. “Dressing rooms to try on clothes are located in each corner of the exhibit hall”—and, just for fun, some of those changing let their new friends watch.

Outside, at two o’clock that day, a reggae band named Fried Bananas jumped up and the barefoot guys and dolls in their American-flag bikinis jumped with it. A blind woman reggaed with her Seeing Eye Dog; a one-legged man did so on a roller skate. “Are you in the lifestyle?” I asked the blind woman. She reached out and felt my face and chest. “Now am.

With the rest of the world locked out, the couples knew that everyone here was a swinger, or sympathetic to swinging—they were playcouples, at least. Heterosexual wives oiled other wives while their husbands oiled them. Shapely toes extended to shore from air mattresses, offered as sucking candies, and complementary remarks were made on bottoms you could have rested tea cups upon as they passed. Hundreds sunned and gossiped and cracked lewd farmer’s jokes and then looked up through the laughter and music and tall, spindly cabbage palms to the green San Diego hills. Everything seemed yellow and beige, white and green, cut
sharply by black shadows. “This is paradise,” said a woman from Saint John, New Brunswick, for whom Lifestyles ’96 was her first convention. “It must be what gays feel like when they come out.”

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 me 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.