The Lifestyle (2 page)

And yet something odd happened after the publication of my scathingly condemnatory article. I got more telephone calls from curious readers—both male and female—than I’d had for all my articles on the Chinese Mafia, Sikh terrorists and gun-running Nazis combined. Here is a partial transcript of a typical call I received from a woman.

One way or another, most of the people who called me got around to asking that question, and I doubted it was because they intended to picket the Vancouver Circles club, which actually saw an increase in membership. Who knows but maybe these callers were among the 20 percent of women and 40 percent of men under forty-four who (according to a National Health and Social Life Survey) consider that “watching others do sexual things” is “appealing.” That was certainly one of the biggest fascinations for the lifestyle couples I’d met. Perhaps my female callers were among the 10 percent of women who admitted to pollsters that they found sex with a stranger appealing, or the 9 percent who considered group sex in the same favorable way?

What I certainly noticed over the next few years was that the lifestyle movement began to take off. The personals ads in newspapers were filled with couples seeking other couples; a thirteen-acre lifestyle resort with “twelve thousand square feet of party space” was doing a thriving international business just across the border in Washington State; and new clubs were sprouting up all over North America. Pretty soon I found my own article in good company:
GQ, Marie Claire, Details
, and even the thoroughly hedonistic
Penthouse
all published sarcastic and sanctimonious assessments of swingers. One article in
Esquire
, titled “Deviates in Love,” broke the news that “at this very moment, all across America, millions of others are doing
the same thing.” If millions were doing it, I began to think, why were they called deviates? Why were public voices still denigrating them in ways one would never accept if they were gays or lesbians—on whose behalf feminists, liberals, and arts-funding agencies were now adopting a vigorous defence. Watching a number of government-backed documentary films about gays (the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s
Coming Out)
, lesbians (the National Film Board’s
Forbidden Fantasies)
, and voguing drag queens (the National Endowment for the Arts-supported
Paris is Burning)
, I began to ponder in a new light the couples who were drawn to this avowedly heteroerotic subculture. I also became suspicious that those publications that condemned lifestylers for their organized licentiousness were actually capitalizing on the vicarious needs of their readers. Had I hurt some vulnerable people simply by denying them the same dignified treatment afforded other “fringe groups” in society who were now recognized as victims of sexual intolerance?

Then, in 1993, I met an articulate couple in the lifestyle whose seeming normalcy contradicted everything printed about swingers in the popular press. I was at a party for a prominent Vancouver author when I overheard a woman joking to her husband about moving the whole staid crowd down to New Horizons—the thirteen-acre swing club in Washington. That got my attention. I introduced myself, and, after assuring the pair we were off-the-record, I learned that they’d been in the lifestyle for five years in the States and had then moved smoothly into the swing scene here in British Columbia. When I told them I couldn’t picture them at the Vancouver Circles parties I’d attended, they informed me that in many of the clubs in which they’d been members there were people they couldn’t relate to at all, but maintained that, as in any group, “you have to pick and choose your friends.” Much of the time, they said, they didn’t even swing. They just enjoyed
being in a close-knit crowd of married people where the boundary between friendship and sex was a titillating line to be openly approached, not a wall to sneak around in deceit. They also offered an interesting explanation for the variety of mainstream opposition to their behavior: married couples, they said, both treasure and are terrified of the adulterously wild genies in their bottled bodies (ergo the term “heterophobia”) and would rather sneak the cork open in secrecy than have a fling in the open. “Men and women who cheat on their partners are addicted to dangerous romance,” the woman told me. “In the lifestyle we’ve grown out of that immaturity. Straight people think we spoil all the fun. Actually, we don’t threaten morality—we threaten immorality.”

At that moment, looking at this couple against a backdrop of academics and writers (some of whom I knew to be adulterous), I began to believe there might be a broader dimension to their lifestyle—a “true movement,” the couple claimed, about which the world had an incomplete understanding.

They gave me a contact number for a Vancouver association called New Faces New Friends—a “Cadillac club,” they called it, as opposed to the “low rent” Vancouver Circles club I’d written about. New Faces New Friends was so discreetly run that I’d never heard of it, but it had become so profitable in the last three years that its owners, known to the world as Jim and Linda, were in the process of purchasing a mansion in the suburbs as the first step to opening a ten-acre lifestyle resort. (The resort is currently called Paradise Ranch and it packs in more than a hundred people on many weekends. It has an Olympic-size pool, a glassed-in dance floor lit by swirling strobe lights, dining facilities, “straight” recreation areas for neophyte couples, and softly lit rooms lined with beds separated by translucent muslin.)

When I met Jim and Linda a few weeks after the author’s party, I found them to be attractive, perceptive, and disarmingly
straightforward; like William Masters and Virginia Johnson they had seen just about every human behavior there was to see when inhibitions are cast off. They said they made sure their 250-couple organization retained its cultured panache by conducting lengthy interviews with all prospective members. These were rigorous affairs in which couples were assessed for any hint that one partner might be coercing the other into joining. “Women drive the lifestyle movement,” Linda told me emphatically. “We would never accept any couple in which the wife was not as interested in exploring the lifestyle as the husband. If I even suspect otherwise, I tell them both, ‘Go home and think again.’”

“I hate when jerks call the lifestyle wife swapping,” Jim averred. “I hate that term and what it implies. By that I mean a woman being forced into something because her husband says, ‘Look honey, let’s go.’ To me that’s abuse. That’s opposite to what the lifestyle is all about.”

In fact, there was no
single
lifestyle, Jim and Linda told me, and they were particularly resentful of the received wisdom that their subculture was populated only by groping orgiasts. A certain percentage of their clients came to parties merely to express the usual voyeuristic and exhibitionist fantasies that are part and parcel of erotic parades. Others practiced “soft swinging,” which only permitted nudity, massage, and some sexual touching. Some drew the line at having “side-by-side” sex with another couple, with no spouse exchange. “Open swingers” practiced spouse exchange with a couple in the same room. “Closed swingers” enjoyed the circumscribed thrill of adjourning to separate rooms to make love with exchanged partners. None of which is to say that on a roaring night I might not see wives involved in lesbian daisy chains three links long, and other couples group-chambering the way I had seen the busy bodies at Vancouver Circles enjoying themselves. Basically, it seemed from their rundown, couples
set their own parameters and accepted and respected the parameters of others.

The lifestyle was also not about dying of a dark disease, Jim said, a pointed concern given the number of different people to which some couples made love. While Jim didn’t patrol the many bedrooms on his premises with a flashlight, he did have a safe-sex rule, and his PR brochure stated, “Complimentary condoms are available and placed in several convenient locations in the house and we encourage you to practice safe sex at all times.”

Jim gave me permission to attend parties so long as I kept things on a first-name basis. (Couples at lifestyle gatherings generally identify themselves as, say, “Jack and Jill;” in these pages I’ve sometimes modified that to “John and Jody.”) A few weeks later, New Faces New Friends held a “Ladies’ Lingerie Night” in a ballroom at a suburban hotel that was quite posh. I showed up to find middle-aged career women wearing practically nothing. There was one woman in a fishnet outfit and no underwear, another in underwear and no outfit, yet another dressed as a bikinied version of Dracula. At ten o’clock many of the ladies lined up for a beauty contest. One by one these executives, teachers, and real-estate agents strode across the dance floor, stopped in the spotlight and assumed grandly self-parodying poses, then ran off to embrace their laughing husbands and friends. Dracula won a gift certificate from a lingerie shop.

I watched this amazing display from a table where I was sitting beside a stunning woman anomalously attired in jeans and an old sweat shirt. I turned to her and told her I was a writer and that I was thinking of exploring the lifestyle in depth. Maybe I would make a documentary. Maybe I would write a serious book.

“Oh I think that is marvelous,” Ellie said, in accented English. “It is time. Now is the time.” When I asked her why
she was a lifestyler, she replied: “The reason is simple. I do not like to lie.”

“One thing in life that is lied about most is sex,” her husband Jerard said. “You look around here. What do you notice? Very many women almost naked—better than naked, very sexy, no?” He gestured at the dance floor, now packed with intermingling couples. “These men, they are acting very civilized. No groping, even when they dance close. See? Now, imagine if any of these ladies, they go to a disco dressed like this?”

“There’s no understanding, no matter what you wear—none,” added Ellie. “Just young brutes, old brutes. Men proving themselves. Sex and anger—sex and jealousy.”

Another couple, Murray and Cara, pulled back chairs and sat down at our table. “You do find a percentage of bi-women,” Murray said when I asked him about the lesbian component in the lifestyle. “It’s a mode of expression.”

I then posed what in my own mind was The Big Question: How did they handle jealousy? Why were they not plagued with stabs of hate and angry recriminations that a single way-ward kiss at a normal party would elicit from a spouse? I told them I was married for twenty-two years and that if I ever caught my wife cheating on me my entire world would be upended.

“Who’s talking about cheating?” Murray laughed. “Watching her is one of my biggest pleasures in this lifestyle.”

“I enjoy the pleasure of Murray when he’s enjoying sex with a woman,” Cara said. “I do get a vicarious thrill. But that doesn’t violate our devotion. And Murray knows that my pleasure with someone—be it a man or a woman—doesn’t lessen my devotion to him.”

Again and again I would hear that refrain in the ballroom. In the lifestyle, they all said, veteran playcouples become connoisseurs at transforming their own spouse into an alluring fantasy figure. Once they learned that their relationship
was not threatened by comarital sex acts—acts that very rarely became extramarital affairs—a husband or wife found observing their partner with another was an enormous aphrodisiac. And they often watched each other with their eyes locked in love. After parties they had sex as if they’d just met.

“You see,” Ellie said, “straight people, they cheat on each other all the time. Tremendous percentages. They lie. They sneak. But the erotic act is part of our marriage. It is not an act of cheating, but play. Flirtation, it’s between us—as a couple—and someone else. Jerry is always there, he is there. We do not cheat, we do not lie.”

Cara kissed Murray’s forehead. “I always save the last dance for him.”

None of this is to say that after expanding my circle of acquaintances in New Faces New Friends I did not encounter marriages that had rearranged themselves in the club, that people were not hurt, or that I didn’t learn of swinging “dropouts.” I tracked down one such exile from the subculture, a Vancouver professional who told me that he regretted the day he introduced his common-law wife to the erotic exchanges at Jim and Linda’s. He said they were not part of any “depressing, anonymous, look-for-a-space-and-jump-in crowd.” They had in fact set up a series of sensitive, lasting friendships with intellectual couples in which several dinner dates or camping trips would go by without sex. The difference, of course, was that if sex did come up, it was not forbidden. He and his partner had an understanding whereby they “shared the excitement as part of our relationship.” But after a year of pick-and-choose fun at the club, his woman experienced a flaming session with the mythical man of her dreams, and was lost to him for good. “It was a devastating shock,” he told me, pointing out that he had somehow deluded himself regarding the possibility of an unexpected, heartfelt detonation occurring during sex. “It would be wrong to say that this is not a charged
and dangerous atmosphere to become involved in. I’d hate to see you advocating it.”

Not long after he offered me this warning, however, he was back on the margins of the lifestyle, attending parties on special occasions. And not long after that I learned that his former common-law wife had dumped her swinging lover and then taken up with a straight married man.