The Lifestyle (5 page)

By 1960, twenty magazines devoted exclusively to swinging ads were selling out on the stands of North America. That led to the first big swing parties, which were advertised in these magazines at twenty-five dollars a couple (big bucks for then), and some of which were attended by hundreds of respectable married pairs. Naturally enough, the wives at these events objected to the term “wife swapping,” and, in any case, the public flirtations and hotel-room orgies that took place at these events involved something far more than “swapping.” No one knows who came up with the term swinging, though it probably has its ties to the music vernacular of the forties, which in turn probably derives from the freedom of movement which the dances of that era exemplified: it sure captured the loose-limbed freedom of the swingers’ gatherings that quickly spread across North America. By the time Robert McGinley
opened a club called Wide World in 1969, everybody knew what swinging was.

“Okay, here’s what we’re about,” Robert McGinley announced, standing directly beneath a model of the
Enola Gay
, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb. “LSO is now mainstreaming the lifestyle. We’re showing society how acceptable being a playcouple is. Now I realize certain segments of society may not be too happy with that, but we’ve come a long way.”

McGinley was lecturing me and another writer named David Alexander in the fluorescent-lit board room of the Life-styles Organization, whose headquarters sit midway between Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm in Orange County. On a green chalkboard the short, barrel-chested CEO had listed eight LSO companies that circled the globe both physically and electronically and accounted for more than $1.5 million in annual revenue, the employment of fourteen people, and the five thousand square feet of office space around us. According to the figures on the board, LSO, Ltd. had grown by a factor of five since the bad old 1980s when swinging had been declared a public health threat and its so-called “King,” McGinley, had been labeled “willfully ignorant,” “dangerous,” and “irresponsible” in the liberal media. Three hundred swing clubs now belonged to the North American Swing Club Association (NASCA), the trade organization McGinley had founded in 1980. There were three million swingers in the U.S. and Canada and in a month thirty-five hundred of them would be converging for the 1996 Lifestyles convention, scheduled to take over the forty-six-acre Town and Country Resort in San Diego just after the delegates to the Republican National Convention left the premises. Certain Republican bigwigs pushing “family values” held reservations for both conventions.

“I’d say swingers are already pretty mainstream,” observed Alexander, writing down McGinley’s chalkboard notes. Alexander, the editor of a magazine called
The Humanist
, published by the International Humanist and Ethical Union, was a fifty-year-old nonswinger who occasionally attended LSO’s Friday-night dances with his artist wife and their academic friends. He was also the author of the best-selling
Star Trek Creator: The Authorized Biography of Gene Roddenberry
. The combination of Alexander’s reputation as a popular writer and an editor led McGinley to ask for his help in designing a Lifestyles Internet magazine. McGinley told me he wanted LSO’s magazine to be of a caliber that mainstream, straight couples would never expect to be associated with swinging. In fact, he wanted the magazine to follow
The Humanist’s
editorial mandate to present “a nontheistic, secular, and naturalistic approach to philosophy, science and broad areas of personal and social concern.” To be sure, there would be articles on sexuality, marriage, as well as tactfully described swing parties.

“Playcouples are mainstream, of course,” McGinley said now, “but most people don’t know that. Millions of honest citizens—doctors, lawyers, teachers—they’ve got to stay in the closet because of how they’re perceived.”

“They’re different-colored chickens and they’re afraid they’ll be pecked to death by the other chickens,” Alexander said.

“That’s
got
to stop,” McGinley replied. “That’s what my life has been about for thirty years. That’s what the playcouple philosophy is about.”

The two-paragraph playcouple philosophy, posted on McGinley’s Playcouple Website, opened with the suggestion that people were naturally non-monogamous: “Adult men and women are sexual beings and they have relationships.” Unfortunately, McGinley pointed out, “the religious and political right wing proselytize that open sexual expression is sinful and worthy of condemnation, while the political left wing seeks to
inhibit and restrict sincere and honest expression.” Defying both political wings, however, playcouples shared erotic fantasies, traveled exotic paths, and placed “the highest value on the intimacy they share with each other and those around them.” The word swinging was not mentioned in the play-couple philosophy, although a click of the mouse on the Website gave you a tour of swing clubs on five continents, including McGinley’s Club WideWorld, the most successful and longest-running swing club in North America. It was just down the sun-scorched suburban block from us, and every weekend it hosted dozens of playcouples in a Japanese-style mansion featuring a California-size pool and patio, a hot tub, a glass-walled bedroom that bordered the living room, and numerous mini-boudoirs down the hall. “We want to raise the consciousness level of people so that playcouples can come out of the closet if they so choose,” McGinley said. “There is no reason anyone should feel they have to be ashamed or afraid, or that they risk anything. These are men and women who are fully enjoying their life and sexuality,” he went on, paraphrasing more of the playcouple philosophy in the emphatic manner he’d used in hundreds of TV and radio interviews over the years. “We have every right to the enjoyment that this lifestyle affords us—without interference from religion or neighbors or the boss or government or the media.”

A voice paged him on the intercom: “Bob McGinley!
Cosmopolitan’
s on line three.” As usual at this time of year, he was receiving a flood of calls from editors, TV producers, and reporters wanting to attend his convention.

“Excuse me, guys, that’s their British edition, I gotta take it,” McGinley said. “I’m not paying thirty bucks to return an editor’s call to England just so she can shaft me. The Brits are as bad as our guys.” He was referring to a British edition of
Elle
that had published an article the previous year amply illustrated with bikinied playcouples whom the writer had appraised as
society’s “walking wounded.” A couple of years before that the British edition of
Marie Claire
had featured five large photos of naked swingers, and then scolded them for using “their bodies as sex objects, toys to enjoy.”
GQ
—“our guys”—labeled McGinley’s conventioneers “sweaty, smelly and uncivilized.” One Florida TV station had even played McGinley’s jovial comments about swinging over shots of a graveyard.

McGinley headed out of the board room to his adjoining office, which was decorated not with
Marie Claire’s
portraits of naked swingers but with framed photographs of fighter aircraft cruising through clouds. In fact, from the front door facing the busy corner of La Palma and Magnolia to the back door where McGinley sometimes parked his beat-up 1979 Mercedes, there was almost nothing in the modern offices that indicated LSO catered to the needs of couples who practiced open eroticism. McGinley
always
expected cameras, and he wanted any reporter coming through the door to be shocked that there was nothing pornographic about the business end of the lifestyle—it reflected the nonsalacious everyday lives of the people LSO served. That was the reason why the swinging employees McGinley hired for the front office were all white-collar folks both in their straight world credentials and in their conservative dress and demeanor. Jenny Friend, director of research, had one master’s degree in education and another in science; seeing her in her business suit, you wouldn’t have had a clue what she did on weekends. Dr. Steve Mason, LSO’s director of publicity, was the Southern California program chair of Mensa and a onetime psychology professor at Penn State. Joyce, the company’s iron-willed operations manager (affectionately called General Joyce by the LSO staff), was a high-profile activist for various civic enterprises throughout Southern California (although, because of this, she never gave TV interviews and never used her last name around reporters). One swinging travel agent for Lifestyles Tours and Travel was
the wife of an Orange County police detective, another was a churchgoing Christian. Like Frank and Jennifer Lomas, who had recently left the company to resume their career tracks in the straight business world, they all fit McGinley’s belief that most swingers were ordinary people. And now that so many millions of these garden-variety folks were in the lifestyle, McGinley expected an official backlash. He had a sense that his “mainstreaming” of the playcouple lifestyle had reached the trigger point as far as the government was concerned. Ultimately, that was why he wanted help from Alexander, who had recently devoted an entire issue of
The Humanist
to documenting the threats posed to the U.S. Bill of Rights by both the angry folks on the religious right and the kindly inquisitors on the politically correct left.

McGinley came back in the boardroom laughing. “Every year they tear us apart and every year they phone me up all nice and sweet to ask if they can come back and tear us apart again. Funny thing is, a few of them wind up having a fabulous time at the convention and
still
write the story they decided to write before they showed up.”

“I’m personally having a little difficulty differentiating between the
New York Times
and the
National Enquirer
these days,” Alexander commented dryly.

“The
New York Times
hasn’t phoned me yet, but if I’m right they’ll be on that line wondering what the hell has happened to society. Biggest concern I have,” McGinley added, turning to me, “is that some Cronin-type bureaucrat will come down on us because they think the press is behind them. However, I’m taking steps to deal with that.”

The LSO chief has a plan. He is moving forward on all fronts and making headway at gathering the most stable element in
the world behind his playcouple philosophy: the suburban middle class. It takes only a married couple, a house, and willing friends to make a lifestyle club; it takes a businessman with a mission and an engineer’s mind to link them together.

If you asked most swingers about McGinley’s plan, they’d be unaware of it. They would tell you they were part of a populist subculture that acknowledged no leader. Indeed, most couples in the lifestyle have never even heard of Robert McGinley, or, if they have attended a Lifestyles convention, only vaguely know him as its impresario. But if you asked the owners of the clubs and resorts where swingers gathered for their opinion of McGinley, they’d speak of him deferentially. They’d explain that he’d succeeded in gathering so many hundreds of facilities under one umbrella that the lifestyle was now thriving, and that he was the subculture’s most important defender.

“If there’s one thing I’m going to work for till the day I keel it’s the freedom for couples to openly express their dreams without guilt or public backlash,” McGinley told me over a dinner of buffalo burgers across the strip from Lifestyles head-quarters. He sipped his extra-large root beer and stared out across the avenue at his two-storey office building, which, with its terra cotta eaves and sunproof windows, looked like a suburban bank. The side streets that ran perpendicular to his headquarters were all lined with small homes fronted by neatly trimmed lawns, replicas of the houses lining the block on which Club WideWorld stood, as well as the homes of its patrons. “My whole life’s message is this,” he said. “You can be a middle-class, mature couple, responsibly married yet free to responsibly enjoy your dreams.”

Middle class; responsibly married; free to enjoy a dream; and—by implication of the word “mature”—middle-aged. If there were four characteristics that expressed the core of suburban life in North America since World War II, McGinley
had just stated them. In the articles I’d read through in McGinley’s library, most journalists disparaged swingers for fitting this suburbanite profile—for resembling “the Florida mall crowd,” in the words of
Elle
. For much of my life I’d shared that prejudice against suburbanites. It had been taught to me by my New York City parents, reinforced by my peers, and I’d been tested on it in college sociology courses, where I’d studied books on 1950s-era North American culture:
The Lonely Crowd, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The Organization Man
. Suburbanites were conformists and philistines who were doing materially well but who were always hungering for something just out of their reach. McGinley, on the other hand, is the only Ph.D. I’ve ever met who proudly professes a respect for suburbanites. He hates bourgeois bashers and values suburban values. That McGinley is so sympathetic to the mall crowd has been attributed to the fact that they form the core of his clientele, but he told me the media has him wrong. His respect for the bourgeoisie is sincere: McGinley is loyal to his kind. After all, he hadn’t just grown up in the suburbs; he’d grown up where the suburbs were invented.