The Lifestyle (14 page)

“And it becomes very annoying at times,” Ed said, with his back to the water. “Because if Carla ever sat in a group’a friends and said she liked sex for fun—not one’a them’s not gonna think, uh, oh, home-wreckin’ tart. Take them seven months’a talking to understand you’re normal and they’re weird. Seven months’a talking or one good party!”

The group broke into loud laughter and a few claps.

“I just think it’s unfortunate,” said Greer, the law-and-order Republican. “Very unfortunate.”

“About three months ago when Elliot and I went to the club we’re members of,” Linda said, reaching back and stroking her husband’s head resting on her bottom, his eyes fast shut, “we met some people and had a wonderful experience with them, and we both found, hey, we’d like to spend time with them. So it’s almost developed into a steady relationship now. And he runs a trucking business, and Elliot’s got the plant—”

“So it’s a perfect fit!” Greer chirped.

“Perfect. Whereas we have good friends, they’ve been married twenty-five years, she’s never had another man in her life, and they have a very passionate relationship—but it’s nice to be able to add the spice to your relationship just by the atmosphere, whether you have sex with somebody else or not. But when she approached him about it—wow!—like putting a pin in a balloon. Kaboom! Threatened! Totally threatened!”

“The male ego is very delicate,” Ed pronounced, “like a fine piece of china. All you gotta do is tap it and it shatters.” He
flicked his forefinger at air and spread his hands at the pieces falling between his legs.

“I’m not sure I see anything delicate about that guy’s reaction,” Joe said, taking the floor with a pertinent point. “Wouldn’t he figure that if his wife wants to go to a swing club then maybe she wants to have sex with another man? Or else she wants to have an affair?”

“I think that a lot of people take that mind-set,” Ed said. “That’s the way they’re brought up, though. Doesn’t
have
to be like that.”

“After four days observing the congress of many couples on Lifestyles’ houseboats, I am
convinced
it does not have to be like that,” Chuck said, winking at me, his drink resting on a long scar beneath his chest hair. As I’d found out the night before, he’d had surgery about a year ago to replace some coronary vessels, and the veins from his leg now threading his heart were expected to last, at most, five years. There was no possibility of another operation. “‘In all these things connected with love, everybody should act according to his own inclination,’” he intoned from the
Kama Sutra
.

“You know, when we travel,” Leah said to me, “it’s like riding with one of those headsets you rent at a museum. We pass a mountain, he’s got a quote from Whitman. A woodpile, Robert Frost—”

“A porno shop,
Hustler,”
Chuck said.

“Hey, I just thought of another point for your book,” a husky fellow named Harvey from Washington State said. “You look at the native Americans, and you go way back and it was a great honor to share your wife. If you go anywhere in the South Pacific, New Guinea, all through Samoa, and all the islands down there it’s been part of the culture forever. North American Indians, it was part of the culture up until the 1800s.”

“Oh yeah,” Elliot said, his eyes still closed. “There was a
movie I saw about Indians, where they welcomed a guy to the tribe by letting him sleep with the chief’s wife. Have a cup of coffee and my wife.”

“Well, we look at it as strange but they don’t,” said Harvey. “It’s a way to say ‘We welcome you.’”

“But isn’t that in their culture?” Joe asked, sounding as if he thought he was the only rational man in the vicinity. “If you tried that over on the other beach with the wrong guy, wouldn’t there be a scene—a fight?” He looked at me, eyeing my camera around my neck and my notepad on my lap. “I mean this guy’s a
reporter.”

“I think he means what would you do if the
National Enquirer
showed up?” I asked, separating myself from the tattle-tale press.

“Scariest thought ever on my mind,” said Elliot, opening his eyes at the sky. “Deny, deny, deny.”

“Actually, there was a club raided last year,” Mark said. “They published some names in the papers, I hear. What a mess that was.”

A silence fell over the group. After thirty years of activism gays might have progressed from “pervert” to “deviate” to “diverse,” but swingers were still stuck somewhere between the two former terms. Who would want to come out and be referred to publicly as “Deviates in Love”—never mind “sweaty, smelly and uncivilized”? In fact, Greer had complained that very morning to Joyce that I took too many pictures and asked too many questions, although there was not much Joyce could do about me since both Robert McGinley and Jan Queen had encouraged my accompanying Lifestyles events right through to the end of the convention two months hence.

“Do you guys have kids?” Joe asked everyone in general.

“Yes and we keep this completely from them,” Linda said. “I don’t want them ever to know. They’re too young.”

“What did you do last week you don’t want your kids to know?” Ed asked Joe. “What did you do this morning?”

“It’s relative to the chances of getting caught I guess I’m talking about,” Joe said.

“No, it’s not. It’s relative to what society tells you don’t get caught at.”

“Anybody ready to go eat lunch before they close up?” Greer asked, having had enough of the discussion.

“If I can get our other halves back,” Ed replied, craning around at the water.
“They’re gonna close for lunch!”
he shouted. “Like they could give a damn,” he laughed.

“Our feeling is that our kids would just be overwhelmed by the whole situation,” Leah said to me, becoming animated. “We draw a strict line.” She emphatically chopped the lounge with the side of her hand at the same time as she drew a towel over her lap. “I mean there are kids that are really screwed up by knowing what their parents are doing. They can’t comprehend that. Kids don’t need to know that mom and dad have fantasies; they can hardly accept that mom and dad have sex. I know with our parents, you can’t picture it, you don’t want to. A kid’s world is where it’s at, they know that mom and dad create them, but the potentials of sexuality are just not a part of their consciousness yet. I had a real hard time when our kids came home and they’d been to a porno, I told them that’s not really what sex is. Because kids take it and they distort it; to me, the first part of sex is what you have with someone when you’re intimate and you love your partner. And that’s the healthy part of sex that I want my kids to know before they’re exposed to anything else—that they would know what normal sex is, by my standards. This kind of alternative evolves in a very long-term relationship. It’s not what you should start out with.”

“I totally agree with that,” Linda said, and all the other mothers nodded assent. “It’s just a natural barrier that should
be there. But in its proper context, when you’re ready for it, old enough, in a committed relationship, the lifestyle is very effective in reviving what was there all the time, but which probably would have died without it.”

“But,” Doris spoke up for the first time, “this is all very—what’s the word—paradoxical. To me, anyway. You must be all so guilty all the time, leading a secret life. You know what I’m saying? If what you do is moral—and I’m not saying it’s not—then why do you have to keep it from your children?”

“Because we are still parents,” Julia said. “We’re not out of it. If my kids grow up and after so many years they decide on their own to do this with their partners, then it’ll be all right. It’s moral when no one gets hurt, like Carla said. It’s moral for consenting adults. Kids can’t consent. That’s why we say ‘below the age of consent.’”

“No one should use sex and hurt someone,” Elliot said.

Carla came out of the water arm in arm with Bill. “You all look like you been cogitatin’ the infinite,” she declared, looking around at the somber crowd. She gave Ed a kiss on the lips and a stroke up the thigh.

“Chewin’ on the infinite,” Ed nodded. “Chewin’ on it.”

“To everything there is a season,” Chuck sang, playing his scar like a flute. “And a time to every purpose under heaven. There’s your liberal-existentialist’s definition of morality.” He raised his drink to me. “No man can find out the work that God maketh from beginning to the end,” he said, enunciating a rarer line from Ecclesiastes.

A
t most Lifestyles Erotic Arts shows you will find reproductions of two venerable works that elegantly illustrate the open sharing of love between couples—the kind you see on an average toga night on a swingers’ holiday. One is Western, Nicolas Poussin’s sixteenth-century painting
Bacchanalian Revel Before a Term of Pan;
the other is Eastern, the bas-relief frieze of bending and twisting couples on the Tantric Temple of Kajuraho in India. In both orgies, all the participants are deities who seem exuberantly happy to be in the middle of their erotic spectacle. Their passion is light, voluntary, and feminine as opposed to satanically driven, vicious, and probably deadly. In other words, they are portraits of social gatherings in which everybody has agreed to have guiltless sex. The galactic wheels of carnal engagements are immoral in our time, but by virtue of their consensuality they are curiously ethical, since they obey Hillel’s maxim, the source of all ethical codes, paraphrased to me by Ed and Carla: “Do not do unto others what you do not want others to do unto you.”

That was the ethical ideal of all the veteran lifestylers I visited under the beach umbrellas in the bright Baja daylight, and it is probably why, like the deities in the art works, they could be sexual with one another without being riven by guilt. They simply did not accept that they had passed through Alice’s mirror into a wicked, swinger’s version of Wonderland. To their minds ethical rules, which urged individuals to live in a way that did not harm others, made sense, whereas moral principles of right sex and wrong sex did not. It seemed eminently
logical to them that people could indulge in a sexually immoral lifestyle and still lead decent, ethical lives, whereas people who were fully entitled to be described as sexually moral might break ethical codes daily.

In putting their beliefs into promiscuous practice they were, without doubt, challenging society’s bedrock orthodoxy that sexual morality and ethical behavior are inextricably linked. The logic of the ages tells us that if people were ever freed from moral censure to cultivate hedonism they would become slaves to their bottommost desires both inside and outside the bedroom and be rendered incapable of thoughtful, ethical behavior. Thus, with the partial exception of Tantra (which has its own idiosyncratic orthodoxy), each of the world’s major religions, their mystical traditions, and even some humanist schools of thought, have for the betterment of humanity arranged the pursuits of life along a vertical scale, with those that encourage lust at the hellish bottom and those that encourage chaste love at the heavenly top. From the seven spinal chakras of the Hindus to the seven rungs of Jacob’s ladder in the Bible, and from the seven links of the Elizabethans’ great chain of being to the seven tiers of the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs,” the directional arrows are all the same: saturnalian pursuits drive one downward to the lowest sphere of genital instinct, selfishness, and evil; spiritual pursuits lift one upward to the godly crown of superconsciousness, selfless service, and goodness.

This hierarchical scale, which to this day is accepted as a valid metaphor for a standing person’s centers of awareness, accounts in part for why swingers push so many apocalyptic buttons in the media. The metaphor was certainly at work in
Marie Claire’s
coverage of the 1991 Lifestyles Convention. Surveying two thousand couples who bore a “glazed look of generalized lust” that made them “revolting” and “repellent,” the writer, Louisa Young, concluded that they formed an
undifferentiated mass of soulless debauchers who had jettisoned all ethical responsibilities in their blind pursuit of “recreational sex.” “After all, these people haven’t even got as far as realizing that there is a connection between the body and the rest of a person—heart, mind, intellect—so how can you expect more from them?” Young asked rhetorically at the end of her article, reflecting the vertical scale of awareness that had informed her upbringing.

Of course, there is no denying that redneck louts and beach babies have always been present in swing culture in about the same proportion as in straight society and that they have given writers the opportunity to pound tables with the same bigoted pejoratives once used to demonize all gays. On the other hand, there just doesn’t seem to be enough room in the tiny medium of an article to weigh evidence that, relatively speaking, there are as many high-minded heterosexual couples in the swinging lifestyle as there are cultured homosexuals in the gay and lesbian lifestyles. For example, the concluding event of the 1991 convention, completely ignored by Louisa Young, was a round-table discussion of the lifestyle co-hosted by Dr. Edgar Butler. It drew hundreds of mostly white-collar conventioneers, including physicians, psychiatrists, and social workers, all of whom believed they lived at the other end of the value scale from those whom Young had assessed as having nonstop group sex with “no thinking or feeling (beyond ‘Mmmm, feels good’) involved.” Indeed, in the years since then the ratio of the mentally vigorous to the vacuous in the lifestyle has shifted ever-steadily upward. In 1996 the keynote speaker at the Lifestyles convention was an Auschwitz survivor and psychologist, Dr. Edith Eger, who lectured to a thousand swinging couples on “the dance of life,” which, as a girl, she had perceived as taking place even in the midst of hell—a decidedly nonerotic topic for a sex convention. Based on the survey form they’d filled out at the registration desk, three-quarters of these folks were
college graduates. And at the next year’s convention people just like them would crowd into seven seminars and workshops that addressed the question of how swingers who believed in God—even a fundamentalist Christian God—could integrate their faith, their sexuality, and their sense of themselves as ethical people.