The Lifestyle (38 page)

I had interviewed Dale just before I’d driven up to Harbin. He lived in the clean, airy California town of Belmont, south of San Francisco. On his wall was a drawing of Gandhi given him by a lifer at San Quentin prison. On another wall was a computer drawing of two nude airborne lovers embracing—with the man’s erect penis coming into view after a few seconds of staring. On the mirrored table was a Japanese sculpture of a No dancer—a male dressed as a female—called “Looking For Her Soul in the Mirror of Her Face.”

Stan was about seventy, with two spouses—Helen, whom he’d been married to for thirty-nine years, and Janet, who’d been living with the Dales for two decades. He had the vandyke beard and arched brows of the sixties “guru” Allan
Watts, whom he distinctly resembled. He received his training in Japan during the Korean War—not from a Zen master, but from the aged female head of a geisha house, at which he lived for seven months. The geisha gave him a stone and told him to discover the beauty of the universe in it. When he found it there three days later in a moment of satori, she offered him an adage to live by for the rest of his life: “If God wanted to hide, He would hide in human beings, because that’s the last place you would think to look.”

“I learned reverence in the geisha house for all people and all things,” Dale told me in his sonorous, almost hypnotic voice. It was the very voice that played the Shadow on radio in the 1940s, and then narrated the
Green Hornet
and
Sgt. Preston of the Yukon
. Later, in the sixties, Dale was the host of the first phone-in radio show, in which a burdened public called in to talk about love, relationships, work, and sex. It was just an idea that had occurred to Stan one night in 1968, at WCFL-Radio in Chicago, when he was “Stan, the All-Night Record Man”: Why not open up the phone lines across the nation and let people talk? Within a couple of days he was averaging a hundred thousand calls a night. That prompted him to hold his first “Love, Intimacy, and Sexuality” seminar—for which he coined the term “love-in,” another first—which drew a thousand people just by word of mouth. He formalized his experiential seminar into a workshop, got a doctorate from Ted Mcllvenna’s Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, and he was now the longest-reigning encounter-group facilitator in North America.

“What is the lifestyle, Stan?” I asked.

“The lifestyle is very simply more than two people who love each other,” he replied. “Notice I use the word love, not necessarily ‘have sex.’ No previous words suit who and what we are. What is funny is that I support all these different labels for the lifestyle, because the lifestyle goes the full 180 degrees,
and I would
like
people to be a little less sure about what it is. On the one hand, swingers.” He put his hands together to his right. “On the other hand, us.” He did the same with his hands on his left. “But I support swingers. We’re not swingers, but I support them.”

“Why does everyone hate the lifestyle? From over here,” I said, putting my hands together on my right, “to over here?”

“Because early on, powerful people found that the best way they could impose their power was through sex,” he said. “To make certain behaviors wrong, evil—if they could control people with it, they knew they could control the masses. It wasn’t even a conscious thing. As soon as that started happening they had the power. If you’re interested in procreating, and somebody said, ‘Oh, there’s only a certain way you’re supposed to procreate,’ then they’ve imposed their fantasy on you—which is proof of the awesome power of fantasy if there ever was one.”

He emphasized this concept of fantasy because it was very important to his seminars—and he didn’t mean sexual fantasies per se. Stan’s main thesis was that people have to choose to replace the “fearful” fantasies of their “social” and “biological” minds.

His talk at the 1993 Lifestyles convention had dealt with that subject: it had been called “Overcoming Fearful Fantasies.” Fear, in Stan Dale’s
Weltanschauung
, was “the basis of all human problems” and “the most destructive power on earth.” It was brought on by the anticipation of losing, which we are always on guard against, and which causes us to be ridden with anxiety and depression as we fantasize the loss. “Utopia,” however, “lies just between the ears.”

It was simple stuff, really; replacing the negative fantasies with positive visions, much like Olympic athletes are trained to do these days. But what was not so simple was the primitive cause of the fear: loss of a mate to a sexual competitor. We
want to win at life to get and keep a mate, and if we lose at life we can lose the mate to a winner: crucial stuff to our genes’ agenda—what Dale called “the procreative imperative,” which he said was the source of much meanness and much love. What could we do to get rid of the meanness? We could “decide
not
to forsake all others,” he wrote in a book called
Fantasies Can Set You Free
. “The marriage myth tells us that the reward for marital servitude is a special kind of devoted love that is ours alone; that essentially we
own
it, as we might hoard a casket of jewels and defend it to the death against robbers. But misers live narrow, suspicious lives, fearful and shut in behind darkened windows lest thieves discover their treasure.”

“Here’s the fantasy we’re given,” Dale told me now. “Some guy comes along and says he spoke to God and God said this is what you’re supposed to do. Women you cling. Men, well, hey, God’s a man, so he understands men.

“What our workshops are about is choice,” he went on. “If you want to be monogamous, and
choose
to be monogamous, then be monogamous. If you want to swing, if you
choose
to swing, then swing. I happen to think there’s more down both those roads—there’s the knowledge that sex isn’t a particular moment that begins at A and ends at B, then you go do something else in the alphabet and then you come back to A and go to B—and so on. Learn all the letters and then choose. Most people don’t think they have choice. There’s a billion people in China who have been told that. Somehow I’ve managed to convince the
powers
that be there to let me come in and tell everyone they have choice. Each moment they can choose, not because someone said they spoke to God or Mao. Choose your own fantasy. Sometimes the choice is complicated, and sometimes it’s pretty funny.”

“I’m really proud of Mitch and how he and I have worked through this last thing,” Audrey told the crowd at her polyfidelity seminar. She was referring to a love affair Mitch was having with a woman Audrey couldn’t relate to at all. Audrey liked Mitch’s other lover very much and had formed a poly women’s group with her. She really liked that woman’s husband, too. And then there were the two women Lewis was having affairs with. One he’d met at the Ancient Ways Neo-Pagan Festival, and she had just got married to someone else. Audrey liked her, although “that was kind of a tertiary thing.” There was the question also of whether her own boyfriend could get along with Lewis; he would almost certainly be able to get along with Mitch, if not Mitch’s girlfriends. “Actually, it could be a really beautiful thing to behold if they were included,” she said.

“Sounds like swinging to me,” Jean Henry leaned sideways and commented in my ear.

To tell the truth, after over an hour of this, I didn’t know which persons Audrey was thinking of including in her triad. Although they did have a methodology for dealing with different “qualities of jealousy.” There was the standard jealousy the “male primary” felt for his wife, and vice versa. Then there was the female primary’s jealousy over her secondary partner for his tertiary love affairs, and the different qualities of jealousy he would cause her by becoming jealous of his girlfriends for their affairs. They also had a rotation schedule they’d worked out for sex.

I knew that bourgeois swingers would say that the way they themselves lived seemed simpler. They had one partner, they loved that partner, and they had sex with other people once in a while whom they liked and fantasized about loving. But, though it’s easy enough for me to make polyfidelity into a “Who’s On First?” routine, the poly people were dead serious: they wanted to change the world for the better by multipartner means. Like Dale said, it was a matter of choice.

“Okay,” Audrey said, “we’re going to close by having everyone stand up and form a circle, or hold hands with those around you, but a circle would be really nice. We’d like to invite you to just take in what you heard, the joys, the pain that we have felt, and hold a vision for yourself of what you’d like to take, and sing along.”

All the polys held hands, forming a circumference around the room. People in long gowns, naked people, long-haired hippies, short-haired execs. Lewis hit the button on the boom box and Audrey closed her eyes and leaned her head back as everyone began to sway. “Together,” Audrey shouted. “Oh yes, together.”

One hour later I was driving down 1-5 in 110-degree heat to swing central, firm in my prejudice that swingers and polys were after something similar. After all, the word “love” comes from the Sanskrit word
lubhyat. Lubhyat
means desires.

W
hen I first arrived at LSO headquarters after the “Loving More” conference, Bob McGinley had predicted that the
New York Times
would be “on that line wondering what the hell has happened to society.” With the success of the conventions, the growth in the number of NASCA clubs, and the wide open attempt by millions of suburbanites to combine their values and fantasies, McGinley had a sense that the lifestyle was about to be taken seriously. On the other hand, it might be taken too seriously for the likes of some.

As the whirl of activity at the Lifestyles Organization accelerated in preparation for McGinley’s 1996 convention at the Town and Country resort, there were real machinations going on behind the scenes to wipe out the openly erotic lifestyle in California. It was the job of the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, the state’s most powerful agency, to enforce regulations that prohibited “conduct involving moral turpitude” on licensed premises. The agency now believed those regulations applied to private hotel rooms as well. Under the conservative administration of Governor Pete Wilson, the aptly monikered ABC was planning to apply the letter of the law to licensed premises where swingers gathered. The government had definitely reached its trigger point with playcouples, and was about to scatter buckshot over multimillion-dollar hotels, resorts, and clubs from Sacramento to San Diego—either revoking liquor licenses or threatening to revoke them if a hotel dared to hold a gathering at which behavior “contrary to public welfare and morals”
might
take place. Eventually,
during the summer of 1997, it was the
Washington Post
that called McGinley to find out what the hell was happening to society.

By then the pebble in McGinley’s pocket had grown to the size of a boulder.

Twelve days into my sojourn at LSO, Luis De La Cruz, the facilities director of the Los Angeles Music Society, walked in through the travel agency, waved as he passed me in the photocopy room, then turned into McGinley’s glass-walled office. Luis and his wife Theresa had volunteered to curate the Lifestyles Erotic Arts Exhibition and they were responsible for making the show the largest of its kind in the world. In the past year, however, Luis had been uttering direct intellectual challenges to those in authority who were not pleased with the exhibition. Luis claimed that the real aim of the Erotic Arts show was to get people to throw off the thinking imposed upon them by political rulers and religious leaders. Not surprisingly, Luis’s principled pronouncements about the political goals of sexual freedom drew the attention of the authorities, and those principles—according to a Federal judge—were what the 1996—97 war on the lifestyle was ultimately about.