The Lifestyle (40 page)

“I got involved in swinging between the beatnik generation and the hippie generation,” C.J. told me, “but I was neither. I’ve been a rebel all my life—I’ve always marched to a different drummer—so has George. We’ve always done everything different—nothing’s ever been the norm with us. Ever. Not my whole life. I was never a follower; if I couldn’t lead it, then I wouldn’t do it.”

“What’s your politics?” I asked. “Are you a libertarian?”

“No—most of my life I voted Republican, but I voted for Bill, and I’m gonna vote for him this year.”

“Bill’s a good man,” George said, sitting on the table beside Geri McGinley, who had known the two for many years. “I just read an article charging him with killing fifty-eight people and how him and Hillary killed Ron Brown, and I thought, my God! Who do you want in there with those lies—Ross Perot?”

“That’s probably the agenda,” Geri said.

“Here ya go, George,” Joyce’s husband, Richard, said, handing over George’s scrapbook. He laid it down open to eight sequential photos showing George and C.J. at play with a dozen people on the lawn and lounge chairs.

“Thanks,” George said. “Tell you a funny story about Ross.” George turned to me. “C.J. and I did business with him back years ago. He’s a moralist, right? People work for him wouldn’t dare go out with a woman that wasn’t their wife. That’s God’s way. Happens that a lot of my friends from my old days in the church are still ministers, so one of my friends was in the church society where Ross Perot’s mother went to church. So Ross gave them enough money to pay off the mortgage and do some work around the church. So I asked my friend one time, how’d it all turn out? He says, ‘George, I’ll tell ya, there’s more pictures’a Ross in that church now than there is’a Jesus Christ.’ Ross Perot is a moralist for Ross Perot, like most’a his kind.”

“Hi, George!” called the LSO employee Jenny Friend, walking by on spiked heels in a lycra dress that barely covered her bottom.

“Hey, sweetheart!” George waved. Then he called, “Jenny! you know why I like to say good-bye to you?”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I like to watch you walk away.”

“Well, then, why don’t you follow?”

“Ga’head,” George patted my shoulder. “I’m watchin’ my heart these days.”

Lifestyles employees do not mind when old friends crack sexist jokes about them at parties, so I felt no need to be offended. Besides, I sort of intellectually knew what George was talking about, since I’d sat talking with Jenny for an hour and a half in the interview room of LSO headquarters a few days before. In addition to being the director of research, Jenny was LSO’s on-staff counseling psychologist and certified sex
therapist who interviewed new couples wanting to join Club WideWorld. Now in her mid-forties, she had written her two master’s theses on swingers, both at the University of Texas at Austin ten years earlier, but she was refused entrance into a Ph.D. program because the administration thought the topic inappropriate. In many ways, Jenny was like Jodie, in that she was a single mother in the lifestyle and had an uninhibited sex drive that was unconnected to any one man. She’d discovered this—or rather admitted it to herself—at twenty-eight when after four months of happiness with the first man she both loved and enjoyed physically, she’d found herself desiring more sex than he was giving her, as well as a variety of men to get it from. He’d called her a “sexaholic.” So she went to see a pair of sex therapists, Michael Riskin and Anita Banker, who were once in the swinging lifestyle. They told her to reject the addiction label, that she liked sex, and either hadn’t met the right partner or wasn’t cut out for monogamous love. At which point she went to a wild club called Freedom Acres, in San Bernadino, which was as fastlane as New Horizons. It was a remodeled schoolhouse with a dance room and the equivalent of an Annex, although on an architecturally less awesome scale. During her first visit she had sex with a number of men in the mirrored rooms. “After that experience I came to accept that I was never going to fulfill my sexuality through monogamy,” she told me with astonishing dignity back at LSO headquarters. While taking a course on human sexuality at U.C. Riverside, she met Edgar Butler who told her about Bob McGinley and the Lifestyles Organization. “It came as a complete surprise to me that there was an actual organization devoted to people like me,” she said. She went down to McGinley’s old headquarters and he hired her part time to arrange academic speakers for the conventions. Then, when the office expanded to its La Palma location, she was hired on full time. Now she moonlighted as a counselor at the
Riskin-Banker Psychotherapy Center. Both therapists were here at the dance tonight, in a shifting crowd of folks which included Luis and Theresa, Cathy and Dan Gardner, and Frank and Jennifer Lomas.

Frank greeted me with his usual extroverted warmth, and Jennifer asked if I was managing to get a handle on the full spectrum of the lifestyle in Southern California. I told her I was getting there. The previous weekend, at my request, Frank had taken me out to Freedom Acres, which Jennifer had decided to pass on since it wasn’t her favored haunt. When I got back I’d mentioned casually to McGinley that, in contrast to his club, many of the rural patrons at Freedom Acres looked like the first swingers I’d ever seen at Vancouver Circles seven years before—that is “low rent,” as I’d heard them called. The words caused McGinley to launch into a five-minute lecture about how every person was entitled to the full enjoyment of their sexuality, no matter what they looked like or what their education. He said he counseled obese people and people in wheelchairs, and he reiterated how adamantly he was opposed to shapism, classism, and bourgeois-bashing, the main weapons the media always used to humiliate swingers. He concluded by saying: “Nevertheless, I understand your point, if you’re speaking purely from a matter of taste, rather than as a judgmental journalist.”

Out on the dance floor, the seventy-five couples were doing the Slide with their usual exuberance—raising their skirts and Tarzan cloths, basically giving the outside world the finger, practicing the open brand of democracy that Luis had called my attention to.

“I’m really glad to hear you’re doing some serious work on this lifestyle,” Theresa De La Cruz shouted to me. She was a petitely pretty woman who, in contrast to most of the others, was covered demurely to her knees. Luis had told me that while he assessed art with his mind, Theresa assessed it with
her heart. When I’d asked whether that proved effective in choosing erotic art, he’d told me that the other day she’d looked through sixteen hundred small paintings of vulvas and uncannily chosen one for the show that was the artist’s favorite. “You know what I find most interesting that’s happening with these situations?” Theresa said. “They’re having a domino effect, where people that utterly reject it say, ‘Well, I’ll go once,’ and they come here and meet people and they say, ‘Well, if they’re in it and they’re normal—.”’

“People learn to let go when they’re in a lifestyle sexual situation,” Cathy Gardner said to me, standing beside her tall husband, with whom she was a partner in their brokerage firm. “Not that that’s the only way to get to that place of freedom, but it appears that that’s an effective way. When you’re at middle age, remaining sexually open means remaining intellectually open. That was my point on
Geraldo.”

“I’ll bet that went over well,” I said.

Cathy and Dan, Frank and Jennifer, and Jenny Friend had all been on the talk-show circuit, which collectively included their appearances on
Donahue, Sally Jesse Raphael, Geraldo
, and a few others of that stripe. They subjected themselves to that insanity because they all passionately believed they should be out there showing the world that the lifestyle was populated by normal folks.

“It was like, ‘Lynch ’em, kill ’em!’” Frank said. “‘Sickos! Pathological freaks.’ I really got scared for a second.”

“What right do people have to call these people pathological?” Anita Banker asked. “What information do they have?”

“I guess they think they all have five or six guys a night,” I said.

“So—what’s wrong with that?” Anita laughed, and she wasn’t joking at all. She and Michael Riskin were writing a book called
Simultaneous Orgasm and Other Joys of Sexual Intimacy
. In their convention workshops they treated open eroticism and
the lifestyle as normal behavior for those who liked it. Michael had even worked as a sex surrogate for women before he’d become a therapist; that is, he’d been paid for having sex with females who wanted the experience. I hadn’t even known there was such a thing as a male sex surrogate.

“The government doesn’t want people feeling this free,” Cathy said. “I go out and I say, ‘Look, we have five kids, we’re grandparents and we care about the future.’ I never say the lifestyle is the end in itself, but it’s a stepping stone to discovering yourself and a lot of mental freedom. That’s spooky for the powers that be, especially when they see me up there on TV. I am mainstream America. And my mind-set is mainstream American. And I have done everything socially acceptable to what mainstream is. Yes, I have one husband. But yet I have found a way that I can satisfy my sexual desires and social needs by going through this door. I know that makes me very unmanageable from [their] point of view, but don’t dare try and stop me.”

“We’re adamant about that,” Frank said to me. “Anybody discriminates against us because of the lifestyle, we’ll sue their ass.”

About half an hour later Jean Henry and her partner Clark Ross came through the door with a couple of colleagues she was staying with in Los Angeles. The looks on her friends’ faces betrayed no surprise at the crowd: it turned out that they too believed swinging deserved some attention from academia. I waved to Jean and we sat down at a table in the back and watched some of the rites on the dance floor. I asked Jean if she’d found any differences between the subculture at clubs on the Coast and in the South and Mid West. “I was just telling them that I haven’t, it’s actually pretty uniform,” she said. “What’s interesting is that the norm wherever you go in the subculture is to rebel against this one area of sexual prohibition, and leave everything else alone. They really honestly
believe the prohibition’s based on an old set of rules that have survived despite the fact that the conditions have changed so much.”

“I suppose historically we’ve always been ruled by men who’ve made those prohibitions and then ignored them,” her friend said.

“We still are and they still do,” Jean laughed.

W
orking feverishly, the staff at the Town and Country tore down the bunting, put up the bows, and changed the parking lot marquee from WELCOME REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION to WELCOME LIFESTYLES ’96. As couples from around the world converged on the resort, four Teamsters officials from Northern California innocently decided to stop at the hotel’s popular sports bar for a quick beer before heading to their own inn across the street. They pulled into a back lot, made their way through the still-empty cement canyons formed by the rows of luxury towers, and entered Charlie’s lounge, where I happened to be eating dinner. Like macho union boys, they rumbled back chairs around a table on the opposite side of the room from some middle-aged people and leaned forward over crossed arms to strategize their next day’s negotiations. When the beers arrived, one of them toasted success in the morrow, then stopped swallowing with the glass at his lips, foamy Miller brimming his black mustache. He put his glass down.

One by one the Teamsters followed his gaze to the table across the still-quiet room. They saw a raven-haired woman of about forty in a leopard-print dress leaning across a balding guy in a golf shirt and soul-kissing with a woman in a padded power push-up outfit. Behind this fellow an athletic-looking woman in a bustier was bending over and nibbling at his ear. Stage left at this subtle table drama, two guys were sandwich-dancing a heavyset woman of perhaps fifty, whose hands were
wrapped fore and aft about the belly and back of her partners. Stage right, two women slouched in the arms of their husbands with their legs overlapping and resting in the laps of their opposite spouse’s.

“Something’s up,” one of the Teamsters said, noticing that the folks were wearing shiny blue wristbands, and that other banded couples in their thirties and forties were now crowding into the bar. The beaming males of this set were dressed mostly in loud, tropical shirts, loafers or sneakers, shorts or jeans, but the ladies at their sides were clad like soap-opera stars. The middle-aged union officials began to catch frank female stares without even trying. Checking reality in each other’s faces, they watched these couples from Pluto establish a rapport that seemed to advance the starting gate of social intercourse almost to the finish line. Combos of triads, quartets, and quintets formed, and when “Erotic City” started throbbing from the jukebox a covey of them, with the exuberance of teenagers, leaped into the Electric Slide, emitting peals and squeals of laughter. Taken together, the whole scene must have seemed to the Teamsters to be the most fevered example of heterosexual activity then cranking up on earth.

Shortly after, another partygoer and his sexily dressed wife strolled in and stood five feet from the Teamsters at the bar. He was Roger Stone, and he had just spent five days at the Republican convention as one of Bob Dole’s main PR consultants, advising the right wing on how best to condemn the degraded morality of America. He was also one of the partners of the conservative Washington, D.C., firm Davis, Manifort and Stone, and had been an operative in the Republican Party since 1968. I don’t mind telling you his name because it would not be me who would expose him (although I did take a couple of pictures of him around the pool). He was “outted” in the
National Enquirer
, the
Star, Esquire
, Associated Press, and
Newsweek
, the latter featuring a double-page portrait of the couple that
gave you a good peek up the short dress of his wife, Nikki. I’m only mentioning him now because of the events that would follow this convention, events in which Stone could be said to have had a part to play by helping others condemn the kind of immorality he had been experiencing at the past four conventions. “Roger Stone is not who I’m talking about when I say we’re mainstreaming the lifestyle,” Bob McGinley told me. “People have the right to remain in the closet and shouldn’t be punished if they’re outted, but they shouldn’t be fostering a society that makes it likely others suffer if they’re outted. We don’t need those kinds of headlines.”