The Lifestyle (33 page)

“And that was on one weekend. They in turn invited us to a party on the next weekend, where we met another group of people that also were all our age group, our same income, that had a lot of things in common. And then they invited us to a third party. And then we started meeting a whole crowd of couples that we had something in common with, who we could go bowling with and then go to the lake with and go skiing with. And it started making sense. Today we still know a lot of couples from that first party.”

“So it took you five years,” I said. “And then in just a few weeks you were all the way ‘in the lifestyle’? No transition from soft swinger to recreational?”

“Right, it was a mental paradigm shift. Once you meet a
crowd of great people who you can be friends with, that’s the way it happens sometimes. I guess, for me, it was that here were all these married people so totally comfortable with who they were as sexual, emotional people—they were so relaxed and playful about their desire for variety—right in the open. I hadn’t met too many couples where one or the other hadn’t cheated on their spouse. Lying and cheating and backstabbing and going in back doors. Here you could flirt, know you’re attracted to men, so why not be open about it and pursue it in the lifestyle? We practice safe sex, we get tested every six months on top of that—so why not? It’s just generally so exciting. What it does is give you butterflies again, like, oh God, I wonder what’s going to happen tonight, and you take extra special care to do your hair and makeup, and wear a special outfit. It’s kind of like a dating process all over again, but you still have the comfort of going home with your spouse. The security of your inner relationship that’s perfectly fine, but you get to have this inner excitement. For me the variety is
wonderful
. No one’s the same. Some men are more intimate, some are more passionate, but there’s really no end to the excitement of being among people who accept that this is socially acceptable—it’s fun, it’s friendship, and it’s great sex. I think it’s the way life should really be lived. And if it’s no longer fun you just get out of it. It’s not like a sex cult where couples come looking for you to haul you back or else. We know a few couples who dropped out who we’re still friends with.”

“Why did they drop out?” I asked.

“In two of the cases they got into swinging with relationship problems, and I think swinging magnifies problems if you already have them. They both wanted it but it got to a point where they realized, we’ve got problems and this is making it worse. The worst thing you can do in this lifestyle is try to swing when you’re not getting along. So you have to stop. It can become interpreted as a payback for an argument, or a
rejection. It basically violates the rule that you’re in there as a couple. Once you do that, and you’re not in there as Mr. and Mrs., but as Mr. doing his thing and Mrs. doing hers, it’s not really the lifestyle anymore. It becomes more like singles swinging or adultery or a marriage of convenience. It just got too hard for them to cope and they dropped out. Another couple I know, the husband became very prominent, so they dropped out because they became afraid it would ruin his career with clients. Which it hasn’t done for me and Frank since we came out.”

“You’re out of the closet to everyone?” I asked.

“Completely. Work, family, and friends. I don’t have any terrors about being discovered. I came out when I went to work here at Lifestyles in 1989, and I’m never going back in. I took a big pay cut just because I really believed in the lifestyle and wanted to be around lifestyle people all the time. And, of course, now that I’m back on a standard career track and no longer work here, that means several things. I work with all guys, and it’s pretty standard that every man that meets you thinks you want to have sex with them. Every woman thinks you want to have sex with their husband. If they don’t get to know me, they pretty much consider me a threat to the stability of the world. So I always have to wind up having to have this little talk with everybody: ‘I’m in a lifestyle. It’s between Frank and me, you don’t have to worry, we don’t cheat on each other. We’re in control of ourselves as anyone else.’ I went through that stage at Laser Tech for about a month or so, and things are very cool there now. It’s kind of like what being gay was like in the early sixties.

“But here’s something very interesting that’s different from being gay. After we get through that stage, and they see I’m quite normal, they become really, really curious, especially if they see Frank and me together and see how happy we are. They start to ask a lot of questions. For instance, I have two
totally straight girlfriends that I used to work with at Barclays Bank. And at first they were shocked: ‘He let’s you, you let him, how can you stay married?’ Well, we keep in contact, even though we’ve gone our separate ways, and when we get together for our once-a-year dinner and our catch-up, nine times out of ten they’ve finished telling me their whole year in five minutes and they want to know how many parties I’ve been to, how many men I’ve been with, what holidays have I been on. And they go, ‘Oh my God, Jennifer, you’re living a fantasy life, you’re so lucky, oh I just can’t believe it.’ I go, ‘Well, yeah, it’s a fantasy but it’s still real. It’s just an alternative for some people.’”

“What about your family?”

“My mother’s great about it. Her exact first words were: ‘What goes on behind closed doors is none of my business.’ But she also said—we brought a whole crowd to the house to meet her and my sisters, eleven couples—and Mom took me aside and she said: ‘Jennifer, you have the nicest friends. These are very decent people—wonderful people. I’m amazed.’ All my sisters have accepted it. I have three. One’s a schoolteacher, very serious. It’s funny. I was always in her shadow. And now it’s reversed. She envies me and would like to become more like me. Not necessarily in the swinging lifestyle, but to be more self-accepting and outgoing.”

“Are any of your friends out of the closet?” I asked.

“Just one or two, like Cathy Gardner, and that’s it. As I say, I think it’s probably fairly rare, mostly because of the job situation. They all have kids—some of them have grandchildren—some kids know, some don’t. We’re thinking ourselves of having children pretty soon now that I’m at that age. It’ll be a serious move. Some things will change, not everything, but we’ll have to make different priorities. That’s not to say we have to stop totally, either. I think we’ll be going to parties less frequently but I don’t think we’d get out of it. All of our
friends stayed in the lifestyle; I can’t imagine just, like, ending it—boom.”

“Are you going to tell your kids?”

“Frank and I were just talking about that. I think they’ll ask when they’re ready, and I’ll give them an honest answer. There’s no reason to deny it. I’m not doing anything wrong, and it’s very obvious that we have a very loving, caring relationship. I don’t think they would ask if they weren’t curious or ready for the information. It’s no different from being a lesbian mother, say, except, for some odd reason, in our society I’m supposed to be much, much worse than any lesbian that walked the earth.”

“I guess because there’s thousands of lesbians out of the closet and not very many swingers who are out,” I said.

“Exactly—and you have to ask, Why is that? I think the numbers of swingers are about the same as for lesbians. I’m not advocating couples come out and go marching. What I do believe is the public should be educated that we have rules, and it’s just plain bigotry for the press to be writing about us as if we’re freaks and for police to be raiding clubs and arresting people like they did in Texas, or closing down clubs. It really is bigotry. The majority of swingers are just like normal straight people at a party; they talk to people and get to know them, and then maybe focus on people who they’re really interested in. And if it happens, it happens.

“I have to tell you, for Frank and me we’ve always had such a good, strong relationship that it’s never been a problem for us. We’ve always had an eye out for each other, and we know our dos and don’ts.
Do ask! Don’t disappear!”

When the dos and don’ts were strictly adhered to, they allowed swinging marrieds to enjoy all manner of dress, flirtation, and
sex practices. The rules Jennifer followed made her feel justified in posing questions to her critics: “Why are we not allowed to be uninhibited? Why stop, if it’s controlled and it’s not harming us?” At its enticing core the lifestyle may have been about the real possibility of spouse sharing but, in varying degrees leading up to that act, it was just as much about dressing like sexy stars, flirting in the style of those stars, and watching others on parade and in action. As Jennifer told me, “It’s so liberating to be in this community and nobody is judging you. I can dress tarty as Madonna and do anything I want, and not feel judged. I can watch everybody else and not judge them.” If, as they say, adulterous extramarital sex is about breaking the rules in secret, with no rule other than adhering to the bond of secrecy, then the lifestyle was about living by rules so that the same excitement could occur openly within marriage.

If you take the viewpoint of a sociologist, rather than a moralist, it’s obvious that swingers were doing exactly what the likes of
GQ
and
Cosmo
glamorize Tony Curtis and Kim Basinger for doing. In the media’s eyes, playcouples were guilty of taking their privilege “on the cheap,” of replicating
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
even though they no longer had a prayer of being rich or famous. You had only to look around New Horizons to see what the media had wrought: the club was a veritable five-star resort. At any hour of the day you could see couples playing like the stars in the giant heated pool and others relaxing side by side in the luxurious Jacuzzi at the foot of a molded rock grotto underlit in blue and green and flanked by potted palms. The huge, windowed wall at the head of the pool gave you a view into the banquet hall, with its crisply set tables crowded with conventioneers sipping soft drinks or eating their five-dollar snacks while Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
played softly over the speakers. Spectacularly framed by the windowed north wall that ran the length of the entire club, the flowers, lawn, and forest of the grounds stretched
away like a duke’s demesne. In every facet of its ambiance, New Horizons contrived to imitate the kind of hideaway that catered to the needs of the world’s sequined and tuxedoed icons, who enjoyed their well publicized trysts on the other side of the moneyed world from small-town Washington. Collectively we pay billions to the media for a peek at the exploits of the rich and famous. Why can’t you, swingers ask, if you are comparatively poor or anonymous or nowhere near beautiful, indulge in those exploits for a few days, and then go back to work?

The most astonishing thing about the Saturday-night climax to the convention was that only about a tenth of the couples wound up going back to the Annex. The real fun to be had was at the dinner and dance surrounding the Blind Fondle Contest—a self-parodying affair in which patrons strained to capture the public private lives of all those TV and movie celebrities who had been married five or six times or were prone to attending awards ceremonies in slinky slit gowns and keyhole halters. I have been to a lot of lifestyle bashes where the glitter was garish and the outfits had been worked on for months, but in terms of blatantly accentuated body shapes that bore no relation to our cultural ideal, nothing matched the parade that flounced into the banquet room at eight. To be sure, half the people were skinny or shapely, muscular or even gorgeous—made for magazines—but it was the big folks who riveted attention merely because they were so happy and glamorously proud.

Sitting down to their prime-rib dinners, men and women alike cast self-confident smiles about them. It was supposedly “the night you can chase your pagan fantasies,” but the establishment had supplied no toga wear and, in any case, the self-willed swingers preferred the least-dressed look featured in
Madonna’s book,
Sex
, with its teasing glimpses of mock celebrity orgies that playcouples lived or watched for real. The most ample shapes were slipped into sexy wear that pushed what they had up, squeezed it out, netted it over tightly and draped it in lace. Shadowy fabric vectored the eye to points you were not supposed to stare at. As an underwear ad at the time had it: “There’s a side to every woman that’s very Marilyn.” But here the ante was frankly upped. Making a grand entrance a lady of pedestrian figure showily stripped out of a red silk robe by a potted tree near my table. Head back, hand held demurely in the air, wearing bikini underwear, she clicked shamelessly across the dance floor, trailing her cape, to cheers. “Olé!”