The Lifestyle (4 page)

It would be another three years before I left what swingers call “the real world” and entered their world full time. I knew it was a risky career move. “People will think you did it for the
sex,” a straight friend of mine told me. “Just to give yourself an excuse to swing.” I accepted that as a logical suspicion about a man in his mid forties. Indeed, when the crowd was attractive, as it was at Lifestyles conventions, I did like looking at couples who wore sexy clothing. Sometimes, like many men, I did like “watching others do sexual things.” But, as at a nude beach, that novelty soon wore thin. Once I’d been to a few lifestyle parties in a row, I could concentrate on the dynamics of the behavior rather than the visual aspects of it. For me, and for Leslie, the experience of being in a room filled with lifestyle couples was sometimes erotic, sometimes uncomfortable, and sometimes just plain funny. Generally, it was like going to the circus without wanting to run away and join it.

It was the
behavior
of these everyday people who had broadened their sexual practices into an all-encompassing lifestyle that fascinated me. And it was the denial that what they did was explainable that motivated me. The news had been spread far and wide that the gay lifestyle had been reasoned through by geneticists, anthropologists, biologists, and ethicists. But there was a virtual blackout on the news that the swinging lifestyle had also been reasoned through by experts in those same fields. In place of this news there was scolding. I wanted to explain the scolding too.

In the end, I know that I did not write this book “for the sex.” I spent months on my own among willing, beautiful swinging women, and I never cheated on Leslie once.

T
here’s a tale the president of the Lifestyles Organization likes to relate about the moment he realized he would spend the rest of his days publicly fighting for swingers’ rights. I first heard this tale when I arrived at LSO headquarters in the summer of 1996 and found Robert McGinley on the phone with a couple of members of Dallas’ Inner Circles club recently arrested in a raid that had also netted a house full of their white-collar friends, including a Drug Enforcement Administration agent and his partner. When McGinley got off the phone, he turned to me and began to tell his “pebble story.” He said he’d named the story after an incident in a children’s novel in which an Etruscan warrior, vowing to avenge the devastation of a town, picks up a pebble and carries it with him as a reminder of the change in his consciousness.

McGinley’s pebble story takes place in 1966 in Washington, D.C., outside the headquarters of the Department of the Air Force. The compactly built and bearded thirty-three-year-old was then an aerospace engineer employed by the Bendix Corporation to design and test some of the most sophisticated electronics systems in America’s aircraft arsenal. He was a civilian, but in his line of work he needed a security clearance, subject to military regulations—which included a code that oversaw the sex lives of all uniformed personnel. The week before, McGinley had been summoned to Washington from his office on California’s Travis Air Force Base, where the top-secret SR-71 spy plane was being tested. The charge against Tech-Rep McGinley was sexual deviance.

Walking beside McGinley on the road to his epiphany was a senior bureaucrat named Cronin, the head of an investigation team that monitored the sexuality of soldiers. Without legal warrant, the Air Force had been intercepting McGinley’s private mail and then turning it over to Cronin’s team, which had been working its way through a web of sexual intrigue that spidered out from almost every military base in the country. One of the strands they pulled from that web led to the hapless McGinley, then in the middle of a divorce from his fundamentalist Christian wife. Some months before, McGinley happened to have answered an ad placed by a sergeant’s wife in a swinger magazine. Her erotic reply to him, and his reply to her, had brought him to this moment.

Overhead, a Huey chopper was hovering so that McGinley and Cronin had to shout to make themselves heard as they approached the building where McGinley was, in effect, going to be court-martialed for the crime of composing steamy prose. He was terrified of ruin. He had five children to support, debts to pay, and he was totally dependent on his security clearance. If he lost that clearance he was afraid he’d never get a job in his field again. He’d be fixing television sets.

“I said to Cronin, ‘Sir, I swear, it never occurred to me that if I wrote a letter to a swinging lady I would become a security risk.’”

Cronin, six feet tall to McGinley’s five-foot-five, and with eyes that never lost focus from a point one yard in front of his hat brim, informed McGinley that his team had some fifty thousand cases of swingers under investigation. The government had reached the “trigger point” when it came to this threat and they were going to remove it by court-martialing and discharging all involved.

“God I was naive,” McGinley remembered—in fact, never forgot for a second. “I said: ‘Why? Were there any swingers who were Communists?’ Because Communists in those days
were traitors. Cronin said, ‘No, but swinging leads to blackmail by Communists, ruined lives, marriage breakups, suicides, and lost jobs.’

“So I sat there at the hearing, and heard them say the same thing over and over again—how swingers ruined themselves. And when they told me they were revoking my clearance and I began to collapse inside, it hit me. Swinging didn’t cause what I was feeling.
They
caused what I was feeling by doing this to me.

“That
was the pebble! That turned my whole life around. I thought of the fifty thousand people going through what I was going through, for what? And I said under my breath, ‘You bastards. You have picked the wrong guy to do this to.’”

As I would learn, it was one of the ironies of McGinley’s life that the Department of the Air Force, which rejected him and launched his career as a swinging activist, unwittingly worshipped the memories of America’s first modern spouse sharers. According to two doctors of sexology named Joan and Dwight Dixon, who have been in the lifestyle since the sixties and writing on sexuality in journals for two decades, the original spouse sharers were none other than World War II fighter pilots. The marital exchanges that Cronin had been determined to wipe out because they supposedly led to marriage breakups and ruined lives first emerged as an Air Force ritual that united families into a clan and provided an insurance policy for wives.

As Joan and Dwight explained to me later that summer, pilots, unlike infantrymen, were relatively well-paid officers. During the war years they often brought their spouses to live near their bases across the U.S. “There was a special brotherhood among those pilots,” Joan said, which was reinforced not
only by their elite military status but by their fatality rate (the highest of any branch of service), which would claim one out of every three in combat. It was the pilots who first defied the officer tradition of keeping their wives monogamously at home while they philandered about town. It was the pilots and their wives who invented the term “key club,” which was unknown in the forties, became widely known in the fifties and sixties, and then was forgotten until the 1997 film about suburban swingers,
The Ice Storm
. It remains unconfirmed whether airmen actually threw keys in a hat, their wives then randomly choosing one and making love with the owner. Nevertheless, if actual key parties did occur among World War II pilots, the process would have been less random than you’d think. On a combat air base, pilots and their wives were all part of an exclusive caste—with every pilot carrying a set of genes that was probably in the top 1 percent of the nation. They were often extraordinarily attractive men, both as physical specimens and as the kind of risk takers who signal success everywhere they go. The women who married them were risk takers too: they fell for these wild warriors who might very well die within the year.

At first it struck me as odd that the most aggressive and competitive warriors on the planet were also among the least possessive when it came to their wives having sex with other men. But the culture of contemporary swinging to which pilots and their wives gave birth apparently served purposes that went beyond the sexual. They shared each other as a kind of tribal bonding ritual, with a tacit understanding that the two-thirds of the husbands who survived would look after the widows. For North Americans, it marked the start of a whole new, “co-marital” way of experiencing adultery.

When the war was over one of the veterans, whose last name was Leidy and whose first name has disappeared into the mists of swinging history, became a traveling salesman,
packing around with him a list of known swingers that came to be called the Leidy List. The Leidy List grew longer with every town the salesman visited, and everywhere he stopped he left copies of the list with swingers. This was probably the original swingers’ magazine, with a few details about each couple next to their first names, plus a contact phone number or post office box. Spouse sharing had never really ended on the air bases, however, and in the late 1940s military installations from Maine to Texas and California to Washington had thriving swing clubs that still bore the code word “key” in their names—probably as a metaphor, since,
The Ice Storm
notwithstanding, no academics have ever been able to verify the rumor that swingers drew lots at parties. By the end of the Korean War these “key clubs” had spread from the air bases to the surrounding suburbs among straight, white-collar professionals, and the growth of these clubs was paralleled by the emergence of group sex among the first beatniks of the era. In 1953, the sex statistician Alfred Kinsey made a brief reference to the phenomenon in his book
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
. Kinsey reported that of the thousands of adulterous histories he and his co-authors had accumulated, “there is a not inconsiderable group of cases in the sample in which the husbands had encouraged their wives to engage in extramarital activities.” The motivations of the couples were varied, including the desire of the husband “to find an excuse for his own extramarital activity,” but Kinsey concluded his few lines on swinging by restating his primary finding: “It should, however, be emphasized again that most of the husbands who accepted or encouraged their wives’ extra-marital activity had done so in an honest attempt to give them the opportunity for additional sexual satisfaction.” To Kinsey, “This represented a notable break with the centuries-old cultural tradition.”

Kinsey’s reference to spouse sharing went almost unnoticed, however, as it was overwhelmed by his exhaustive revelations
of other secret sexual behaviors. It was not until 1957 that the story broke in the media—or the fringe media, at least—and was picked up by the mainstream press soon after. Everett Meyers, the New York editor of a semipornographic men’s magazine called
MR.
, published a short article on “wife swapping,” set between photos of bosomy, half-naked females that were the usual fare of his trade. He had no idea of the impact the story would have. Sales for that issue were so overwhelming that Meyers realized he had hit something like a pressurized stratum of oil. He began to publish a monthly column of letters from readers telling their own suburban tales of orgies with the neighbors.
MR
. prospered and other girlie magazines copied Meyers, adding a twist that would become the staple of the swing world. It was the swinger ad, usually accompanied by the crude swinger photograph, which generally went something like this (at its best): “Attractive white couple, he thirty-seven and fit, she thirty-four with hourglass figure, interested in meeting other couples and bi women for romantic evenings of pleasure. Will answer all.”