The Lifestyle (39 page)

“We’ve got two TV crews who want to cover the convention now,” McGinley told Luis and me in the board room. “One’s HBO and the other’s German TV, so they’ll both be doing something on the Erotic Arts Exhibit. I made sure I got a ‘fair treatment’ clause in the contracts.”

“That’ll actually be nice for the artists,” gentle Luis said. “I don’t think they’ll have any problem with that.”

“They’ll be doing interviews with them standing beside their work. So it’ll be a nice promotion for the show—and for them, and for us. All across North America and Europe.”

“That’s wonderful, Robert.”

While they turned to arranging the moving trucks to transport this year’s several hundred artworks to the Town and Country, I looked Luis over, assessing what a valuable asset he was to McGinley’s plans. Although he was not a swinger, if you mentioned the swarthily handsome man to the women here at Lifestyles you would see eyebrows shoot skyward and hear sighs uttered. Luis’s photogenic qualities aside, McGinley was pleased that Luis was very effective at getting the Erotic Arts Exhibit taken seriously by critics in mainstream media. Luis was a man of considerable stature in the “straight” world of painting and sculpture as director and curator of the Newport Harbor Art Museum and the Los Angeles Art Association. In the last year, that uppercrust world of “nonerotic” art had focused on Luis. In the next year I would watch the focus turn to McGinley, the convention, and swinging itself.

It had all begun eleven months earlier, when the Fifth Annual Sensual and Erotic Arts Exhibition had wrapped up at the end of the 1995 convention. Luis, Theresa, and McGinley had decided to extend the show by moving two hundred paintings, sculptures, and collages to the Desmond Gallery, located in a mall on Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip that contained such fashionable outlets as the Virgin Megastore. Following its high-society wine-and-cheese opening, the show was to have had a one-month run; McGinley even hired a guard to prevent kids from wandering in and beholding, say, a painterly rendition of group sex, or some sculpture of a woman riding a terra cotta phallus as big as she was (the latter the work of Lee Thomas, a former novice in a convent). But the mall’s owners, 8000 Sunset Ltd, which had approved the show, shut it down three days later, citing their right to protect the mall’s image.

Luis and McGinley gave some interviews to Los Angeles reporters, and then
Penthouse
magazine got excited over the censorship issue and featured an eleven-page story on the show
(amply illustrated, of course) for its 1.1 million subscribers—which caused a laughable irony for Canadian readers. Those north of the border who flipped through
Penthouse’s
January 1996 issue would have discovered that this article on the censorship of erotic art was itself censored by the Canadian authorities. Three-quarters of a computer painting depicting a loosely roped woman frolicking with disembodied penises in a desert canyon was blacked out. “Art liberates,” De La Cruz explained in
Penthouse
. “It’s also a catalyst to other thinking…. And that’s exactly what medieval kings and priests wanted to stop—free thinking—and the way they did that was to oppress sexuality, amongst other things.”

The point was, said
Penthouse’s
writer, Susan Reifer, explaining Luis’s philosophy, that where sexually free art goes, people follow. “When erotic art, which originates in the hidden recesses of an artist’s imagination, is released to the public, a chain reaction begins,” she wrote. “The viewer who recognizes his or her secret—his or her fantasy brought to life on the walls of a gallery—may begin to think more freely about sexuality, as well as art. The artist whose work is heralded in the light of day may begin to loosen the bonds of self-censorship so subtly imposed by social mores.”

“The transformation of people’s liberties is amazing,” Luis said in the article—stating what was essentially the goal of McGinley’s playcouple philosophy.

The supreme irony was that the Lifestyles Organization, Robert McGinley, and swinging were treated with dignity by the magazine. Why would that be odd in what was really a mainstream skin rag? Because, just three years before,
Penthouse
had, with the ringing righteousness of a crusading expose, featured a sexually explicit story on its cover, “Swinging Sex Clubs’ Dangerous Comeback.” “What on earth is going on here?” Ellis Henican wrote. “Don’t these people know this is the 1990s? What about AIDS…? Are these people nuts?”
They were “whistling past the graveyard.” And who was the mercenary Pied Piper leading these swingers to their deaths? “His name is Robert McGinley,” the “Ross Perot” of modern swinging. “Yes, they even have their own trade group.”

Now, in 1996,
Penthouse
was calling the Pied Piper of sexual death “Robert McGinley, Ph.D.,” head of “a free-thinking advocacy group,” which, parenthetically, “still throws some reputedly wild parties.” The issue had become “free expression” in the face of “repression.”

At the time, McGinley was thrilled by
Penthouse’s
change of heart; it was the first positive press he had received in a dozen years, and he would mark January 1996 as the date the mainstreaming of the lifestyle had begun to show results. But he also intuited that the good press could prove a trigger point for the authorities.

McGinley’s name was called over the intercom and I recognized the voice of Debbie Espen, his forty-three-year-old daughter, who worked full time in the Club WideWorld end of the business. Two of McGinley’s other children were part-time help at the company as well: David took promo pictures for Lifestyles brochures and Dan was a handyman at the club. They weren’t swingers but they looked up to their father as a hero.

“Dad? Are you there? Your lawyer’s on the phone.”

“Excuse me,” McGinley said. “It’s over that club raid again.” He meant the one in Texas where the DEA agent, his partner, and eight other swingers had been arrested and the Inner Circles Club shut down.

While McGinley was saving the Inner Circles I asked Luis why he was involved in putting on explicit erotic-art shows at a swing convention.

“Well, I tried to put it on somewhere else, but you saw what happened,” he laughed.

Luis went on to explain that he and Theresa had first met McGinley in 1990 through Theresa’s sister, Cathy Gardner, and her husband, Dan, the out-of-the-closet swingers who were good friends of the Lomases. At a club dance that Cathy and Dan had invited them to attend, Luis (and all his credentials) had been introduced to McGinley. A couple of months later, at another dance, McGinley asked Luis if he would consider curating a show of erotic art at the upcoming convention at the Hacienda Hotel in Las Vegas. Assessing the people around him as normal, yet extraordinary in a way that was condemned as abnormal, Luis realized there was something profound taking place “on a level of pure perception.” As intrigued by the hatred swingers aroused as by the movement itself, he said yes.

“I’ve always wanted to cut down the insider-outsider aspect of life,” he told me. “Both within the individual and in society. I don’t think
‘they’
recognize that
‘we’
are one
of ‘them ’—‘we’
make those designations internally, excluding parts of ourselves, which allows us to make those designations externally, excluding others.

“For instance,” he went on, “I told
Penthouse
the whole show was about ‘taking down fences,’ because the real essence of the show is about making the art acceptable. What’s the fence keeping it from being acceptable? It’s that there’s definitely a conscious intent on the part of many of the artists to sexually arouse the viewer. Now that’s always been the case in art. The contemporaries of most artists understood that, so a lot of great art was banned at the time it first appeared. Then, over the years, we came to pretend that that wasn’t at least part of the motivation of the artist, and so the art became acceptable—as if, now that we could set up a fence and deny the arousal aspect of the work, we could appreciate its beauty. Yet the work is still arousing. And that whole progression from
recognition of the erotic, rejection of it, and acceptance of it when it’s come to be seen as nonerotic
precisely
imitates the process of everyday life.
We
see the art as pure, but only
they
and
them
on the other side of the fence get aroused by it. When, in fact,
we all
get aroused by it too. We just pretend we’re not on the same side of the fence with the pornographic outsiders.”

“Do it if you have to, but make sure you feel bad about it and make sure you don’t tell anybody.” I stated the historical theme italicized on the Lifestyles exhibition brochure.

“Exactly,” he said. “And what I find so engaging about the lifestyle is that I think they’re way beyond their time as far as that mindset goes—I think it’s amazing how far-reaching the whole mindset of the lifestyle person is. It’s so far-reaching it can almost look dangerous, because it’s unproven that a society could function if everyone was like that, having such a frank appreciation of human arousal—and not just intellectually.”

I told him I had a party for him to go to up in Washington State.

“Talk about pornography!” he said. “They completely reverse the intellectual parameters so that
concealment
is pornographic and openness is wholesome. I’m not even referring to physical behavior, disrobing, or actual sex. If you go to McGinley’s Friday-night social, you’ll see what I mean,” he said, referring to the Lifestyle’s “Sultry and Sexy Night” soiree coming up at the Fullerton Day’s Inn. “They’re very—quote—well behaved in public. But what they do is practice true democracy. It’s a kind of democracy no one but they practice.” He contemplated a couple of small pen and ink drawings in the portfolio he’d brought along, by a woman named Sarah Troop. One was called
Erotic Odyssey I;
the other
Erotic Odyssey II
. Both were swirls of couples connected mouths to middles and hands to passionate faces.

“You know, I always say there’s nothing created, just discovered,” he said. “These artists, like the people in the lifestyle,
have discovered their sensuality—the same sensuality that’s in all of us, but which we have to feel guilty about because of the control it gives the people who rule us, who tell us to build those fences inside us and between us so we can’t get out. But what I see at Robert’s and in this art is—they’re not guilty! And what I can tell you is that I believe that that’s the correct direction for humanity’s sake. So it’s a matter of discovering what’s already inside and ripping down the fence around it. If the art I present does a part of that, I’ve done my job. They can do the rest.”

“Sultry and Sexy Night” was exactly that. One hundred and fifty patrons dressed appropriately, as did LSO’s fourteen staff and some friendly volunteers who would constitute the core of the Care Team at the upcoming convention. The brochures at the door featured an illustration of a couple making love and the promise that this would be a “Sensual Night of Fun, Desire & Arousal.”

“Got somebody I want you to meet,” Bob said, taking my arm and turning me around as I entered the ballroom, which was filled with well tanned couples in glamorous partywear. “Old-time swingers from Little Rock. They’re friends of the Clintons’,” he chuckled, entertained at the connection. “They used to visit at the governor’s mansion with Bill and Hillary; they go to his birthday parties in the White House.” He led me back outside to the sixtysomething female volunteer who’d affixed my wristband at the cash box, and who’d known the president since he was a boy. You can guess my first question.

“They do not, they never did, never, ever,” the quite young-looking C.J. Callanen pronounced while her elegantly handsome husband, George Irwin, showed around a scrap-book filled with photographs of him and C.J. making love with
the guests at their parties in Santa Monica. “Bill doesn’t know our lifestyle.”

Even if they had no scoop on group sex in the White House, C.J. and George were an interesting couple in their own right. They’d been together some thirty-eight years, swinging every one of them. George was a one-time Methodist minister from Texas with the white mane and patrician features of a Hollywood actor—which was his current occupation. In his long and varied career he had done counterintelligence work for the U.S. Army, brokered big business deals—including a personal investment in the Whitewater land deal—and between 1988 and 1992 had been a stand-in for George Bush, standing at the mike before the president would make his speeches so that technicians could set the sound for a Texan’s wavering drawl. George and C.J. knew a lot of people high up in straight American politics—Bush, the Clintons, Ross Perot—yet they were total mavericks in their private lives.