During the early part of the seventies I was in college getting the first of three degrees in art. One of my Design instructors ran a small agency out of his classroom and would farm out work to some of his students. Through him I ended up doing a couple of illustrations for an adult magazine, which led to many more for other publications over the next twenty-six years. In October of 1973 I got a call from the editor of that magazine. “How far are you from Las Vegas?” “About five or six hours away, why?” “Somebody told me this swinger couple is supposedly throwing some righteous house parties out there… you can write can’t you?” “Umm… yeah.” “Then I want you to go over there and cover it. You’re the closest person I know out that way. Here’s the info…”
I didn’t know it at the time, but that phone call would start my relationship with swinging. One that has remained a part of me for the past thirty-six years.
Two weeks later, after several phone conversations with the couple hosting the party, I found my girlfriend and myself in a very upscale neighborhood west of the strip in Las Vegas. After driving through the gate and knocking on the door, a gorilla in a suit allowed us just inside and no further, while he went to get the hosts. As we looked around from our limited vantage point we could see people everywhere and hear splashes and laughter from a pool blocked from our view at the moment. You could see hippie chicks talking to showgirls, businessmen talking to rock stars, and any other human combination you can think of in every age and size. From an unseen music system Sinatra was giving way to Humble Pie while the aroma of freshly lit joints filled the house. A few were still dressed, but most of them were naked or with a towel wrapped around them. Some were getting blow jobs or eaten or engaging in some form of foreplay; some were simply socializing and flirting while groping each other. I looked over to my girlfriend and whispered, “It seems were not in Kansas anymore Toto” just as our hostess arrived.
She was an amazing-looking tall tanned blonde in her early forties wearing a black see-through cover-up that tied just below her neck, a pair of fuzzy heels and nothing else. She carried herself like she could have been a showgirl at some time in her life. I don’t remember much about what she first said because I was busy trying to keep my hard-on from bursting through my pants. She cheerfully gave us a tour, laid out the rules and introduced us to a few people before disappearing into a room. I couldn’t see what was going on because the gorilla was intentionally blocking my view but my imagination filled in the blanks nicely for the moment. We wouldn’t see our hostess again until much later when she finally came back out looking disheveled and exhausted.
At that time I was able to talk to her and her husband and hear about how they had gotten into swinging. It was like hearing about Alice falling down a rabbit hole.
Despite our initial nervousness, and even though we didn’t play with anyone other than each other that night, the people there were friendly and all too willing to answer my questions and give us more than one visual demonstration of swinging etiquette and sexual technique. Some were even willing to be photographed as long as we didn’t use any names and we altered their faces. A few didn’t care one way or the other. It turned out to be one of the greatest nights of our short lives at that point. I learned a great deal more than I expected to and quickly put that new-found knowledge to use once I got home.
“Swinging” was a relatively new term at that point in time, only coming into existence by that name after the Korean War. It was then that GI’s came back determined to emulate the “Party Hearty” attitude their WWII brethren had demonstrated upon their return home and make up for all of the lost time they’d endured sexually. The difference between the two groups of soldiers was that when the Korean vets came home they had a roadmap, a bible for the decadent to follow, because while they were gone a skinny guy in an apartment in Chicago armed with a card table, a typewriter and a pipe had produced a magazine to show them how to get the most out of the upcoming “Swinging Sixties.” The man was Hugh Hefner and the magazine, of course, was Playboy. Hef loved Swingers and their hedonistic “Rat Pack Cool” attitude at that time and the changes they’d go through so he’s kept them under the microscope for more than fifty years now. The Swingers, in turn, loved Hef and emulated everything he did in every way.
The “Summer of Love” was fast approaching and swingers, with their highly charged approach to life, fit right in with the counter-culture’s wide open sexuality. So with just a few adjustments and some blending on both sides there was always much to write about. Hef’s parties were legendary and everyone wanted to be there. So we all flocked to the newsstand each month to find out the latest and greatest “must do” party info.
One of his issues mentioned “Key Parties” and how to have one. The next thing we knew, everyone was having one… even my parents. I ended up with a ringside seat to “sexual enlightenment” just as I was hitting puberty.
By the mid-to-late Sixties everyone wanted to be part of the Sexual Revolution and dozens of magazines began to appear trying to get their piece of the pie Playboy had created. Some of them had a “Personals” section you could post an ad in and along with that came “Swingers Magazines.” The Lifestyle was making a serious leap forward in numbers, and swingers were looking for ways to meet like minded people besides the chance invitation to house parties.
After a little trial and error, regional magazines started to appear in adult bookstores and news stands with titles like Midwest Swingers, California Swingers, and Switch Hitters, etc. All of them were formatted pretty much the same way. There would be one photo in black and white about half the size of a postage stamp, a quick profile blurb, a short line for what you were looking for, and a PO Box. The whole thing was about ½ inch by 1 inch. This became THE way to make contact with other swingers and remained so for nearly twenty years until the Internet appeared in everyone’s homes.
The first thing I did when I got back home to Phoenix after that first house party in Las Vegas was get a PO Box. During that brief trial and error period the swingers’ magazines went through, they quickly discovered putting your phone number or real address in an ad was asking for every nut case out there to be showing up at your doorstep or calling at all hours of the day and night. I’m guessing half of all the PO Boxes rented back then were to swingers. (Side note: A few years into this my wife and I got a letter from a couple wanting to meet us. I looked at their PO Box and noticed their Box number was just four boxes away from ours and we ended up accidentally meeting them while collecting our mail a few days later.)
Once you obtained your PO Box, you would then search the ads in those swingers magazines and/or whatever local newspapers for swingers that were around then and would find the people that interested you, take a couple of Polaroid pictures of the two of you, write them a note telling them about yourselves and why you’re interested in them then mail it all to their PO Box.
It generally took about a week to get a response (if at all). After two or three mail exchanges, you would then meet in some neutral place for drinks before finally meeting to play. All said and done it would generally take you from one to two months to actually do anything with that couple. In the meantime you still had the parties to enjoy.
At the parties there were always oceans of alcohol, piles of recreational drugs, munchies ranging from gourmet goodies to chips, along with hot horny (usually naked) people ready to play at the drop of a hat. The sexual revolution had everyone experimenting with their sexuality at that point. Bisexuality was popular with both sexes along with every fetish and fantasy one can imagine. Anything sexual that had been discreetly hidden away in the closet was now out there for the whole world to see and do.
Every party I attended until the late eighties had that basic recipe. About the time the mid-eighties came along the drugs started disappearing and had been replaced by bowls of condoms everywhere and people started having informal “interviews” before they would agree to play with someone.
Male bisexuality suddenly took on a negative note at that time too and went back underground. Bisexual males would be deemed a health risk to the Lifestyle due to the scare of HIV and AIDS. Many bi men I knew withdrew completely from swinging or denied they were bi from that point on. It’s only in the past four or five years I’ve seen bi men begin to re-surface, but they still seem to be getting negative responses from much of the Lifestyle community. Women, on the other hand are almost always assumed and expected that they are bi and it’s the straight women who get the odd looks… go figure!
Not long after my first trip to Las Vegas I was invited to a house party. I didn’t know the host but I was told by a newly-minted Lifestyle friend that he was someone to know and I should make a point to talk to him. In less than five minutes of my getting there and meeting him he began to tell me of a new concept he was going to launch for swingers. He was going to open a “Swingers Club” then went on to tell when, where, and how it was going to happen. It was pretty revolutionary thinking, since swing clubs didn’t exist at that point.
True to his word, a short time later Tony opened up the first swingers club in the country. More would quickly follow in Florida, New York and LA. So would other concepts appear like “Swingers Bars” with catchy names like The Inferno where there were phones at each booth so you could call the couple across the room you thought was hot and strike up a conversation before physically saying hello. Along with that were nightclubs that were touted as “Off Premise” swing clubs. None of that lasted long. Partly due to our inability to control our libidos in public thus causing the places to close because of law or ordinance violations, and partly due because it just was not a great idea, but the swing clubs continued to grow.
It wasn’t until the mid-nineties the swing clubs started to come apart because they were starting to thrive a little too well. They got bigger and more visible which made some people nervous, causing cities across the country to attempt to shut them down for a variety of reasons… usually as favors to noisy right wing contributors with deep pockets.
Up until the beginning of the 1990’s swinging had pretty much plodded along as it had since the seventies. It kept to magazines, PO Boxes, house parties and/or a small secluded club and such staying well under the radar back then. Everything was discreet and you had to be intentionally looking for those resources and places to find them; you just couldn’t stumble onto them. But the Internet had been taking hold with things like adult bulletin boards, chat rooms and the early types of web pages that weren’t nearly as secure as they are today and were beginning to draw tons of people, plus some curiosity seekers who would cause trouble for swingers in a few short years. Swing clubs started getting bigger to accommodate the growing numbers and began to look more prominent and a little less discreet.
It was becoming easier and faster to meet more people on the Internet, so magazines and PO Boxes were beginning to be used less and less. The discretion was evaporating rapidly. It wasn’t too far into the nineties that swingers found themselves confronted at work, school, and church by people who had “accidentally found” their ad or home page online, causing some people to get “outted,” lose their jobs, security clearances, and get sexually harassed by co-workers who wrongfully assumed that swingers will fuck anyone, any time, any age, anywhere and other crap like that.
Swing sites had suddenly exploded onto the scene in much the same way the magazines had done in the sixties and seventies… only at a much faster rate. Because of all of this there are probably twenty times the potential swingers out there than when I jumped into the lifestyle back in 1973.
With all of that growth the Lifestyle couldn’t help but draw attention to itself and with religious leaders fearing we were all headed towards Sodom and Gomorra II and loss of their control they pressed the cities to reel us all in.
Swingers are historically horrible at organizing any type of political action group. Claiming anything from fear of reprisal, family members finding out, damage to their social prominence and more. We never can hold together long enough to make an impact. We’re loud and in your face as long as everything is going our way, but as soon as something doesn’t, we behave like roaches in the kitchen when the light’s turned on: we scramble for cover and it’s everyone for themselves. So many clubs began closing. A situation that, as of this writing, is still happening. So where to go and what to do if your local club closes? I dunno.
Many have gone back to modified versions of the old fashioned house parties mixed in with hotel parties Probably every site on the Internet has at least one resort takeover and perhaps even one “Convention” each year all designed around the members of that specific site. Is this a bad thing? Yes and no. The Lifestyle has grown so much you can’t possibly make everyone happy at one event, nor can you find a place to house all of us or deal with all of the fractionalized tastes we have these days. That’s a large part of why the original Lifestyles Convention went bankrupt and folded after nearly forty years in Reno and Vegas. One would go nuts trying to find the group at a huge event that fit into your personal preferences, and by the time you did find them you’d either be too tired to play or the event would be over. Unfortunately it has also created an “Us and Them” mentality with some sites trash talking each other to get as many people as possible to their events.
The closing of clubs has driven the Lifestyle further out into the public eye and creates most or all of the potential problems swingers try to avoid. Many now have found themselves re-thinking everything they do or want to do in the Lifestyle and weighing in with how much collateral damage might happen to them if something exposes them. As I mentioned earlier, hotel parties can be a crap shoot. Even if you secure an entire floor of rooms there’s nothing preventing a whole soccer team of twelve year olds and their parents from getting off on the wrong floor and making the news the next day (It’s happened!). There has been much talk the past couple of years of purchasing an entire hotel and making it Lifestyle friendly and “Adults Only” to avoid such things in the future, but it doesn’t look like that will happen any time soon, if ever.
So where does the Lifestyle go from here? I have no idea. It’s been around as far back as recorded history can take us. It’s too big to just disappear now and I suspect it’s going to get bigger and more complicated before a workable solution is found. The Lifestyle today, although still fun, bears only a vague similarity to the lifestyle I became part of thirty-plus years ago. I can only imagine what it will be like in another decade or two. Any ideas?
