Table of Contents

Introduction: The World of the Swingers

With a Little Help From Our Friends

If It Feels Good I’ll Do It

Three Is Not a Crowd

I Came Four Times—How About You?

What Are You Doing After the Orgy?

Fit To Be Tied

The Secret Swinger

About the Author

Excerpt: Beyond Group Sex

The Taboo Breakers

John Warren Wells
Lawrence Block

copyright © 1968, 2012, Lawrence Block

All Rights Reserved

Introduction:
The World of the Swingers

A Long Island housewife packs her children off to school, then sits down at the breakfast room to write a letter. She writes three drafts before she is satisfied, then folds it, encloses nude full-length photographs of herself and her husband, and mails it off to a Post Office box in Jersey City. The letter is an invitation to a bisexual airline stewardess to join herself and her husband for an evening of troilistic activity. The housewife has written a great many letters in the past several days and wonders what portion of them will be answered. Single girls for threesomes are in great demand, she realizes. But she recalls the last time she and her mate entertained a young lady and decided it’s worth the effort.

In Detroit, an automotive engineer and his wife leave their suburban ranch house and drive to a downtown hotel. They take a room, but stay in it only long enough for the dark-haired young wife to remove all her undergarments so that she is quite nude beneath her dress. Downstairs in the cocktail lounge they join another couple, a sales representative and his wife. They have never met before but recognize one another from photographs. They take a table together, order drinks, discover that they have several mutual friends. The conversation is desultory at first—the men talk football, the wives show each other pictures of their children. Each man dances one number with his own wife, after which they change partners for the next dance. The wives make their traditional pilgrimage to the ladies’ room; the men talk.

“We’re game,” the engineer says.

“Glad to hear it,” says the sales rep. “Mary’s crazy about you, and your Sheila is a little doll.”

They smile. “How do you want to work it?” asks the engineer. “All in the same room or separate?”

“I think separate, for openers at least.” The sales rep laughs. “After all, we hardly know each other.”

The wives return from the powder room. The sales rep calls for the check, signs it. Then he goes upstairs with the engineer’s wife, while his own wife takes the engineer to her room.

At a New England ski lodge, normally deserted in the off-season, two girls in their late teens stumble together into a bedroom and close the door. They are both nude. One collapses onto the bed and heaves a sigh. “I just had to get out of there,” she announces. “Two days is as long as an orgy should last. I’m beginning to understand what they mean by too much of a good thing. You know what I mean? After awhile you lose count, it’s just one man after another and it becomes impossible to concentrate.” She sighs again, then touches her genitals. “The thing of it is, it’s getting sore.”

“I know what you mean,” the other girl says. “But it’s not as if I’m getting turned off sex.”

“I’m hip. I know what you need.”

“So do I.”

“Someone to kiss it and make it feel better.”

“Oh, you know it!” The girl sighs a third time and spreads herself on the bed. “I just want to lie here and float on a cloud. Just real passive, you know, and be kissed and eaten all soft and gentle and female.”

“You sweet baby,” the other girl says, crouching over her. “Just close your eyes, sweetheart. You’re going to love this.”

•  •  •

Swingers.

The word itself has had quite a history in the lexicon of mid-century American slang. When it first appeared a decade or so ago, it had little if any sexual connotation. A swinger was someone who was not a square, someone who went to nightclubs, dug jazz, danced the new dances, dressed well—in essence, someone whose ideas of a good time was a little more elaborate than sitting in front of the television set drinking beer from a can. The young marrieds, the country club set, the middle-class hippies—these were the swingers.

But before these people had abandoned the swinger label, another group claimed it as its own. From the moment that wife-swapping first began to have considerable impact in America, its participants recognized that some “clean” euphemism for their activity was essential. One obviously could not run an ad in a newspaper describing oneself as a wife-swapper, mate-trader, sexual experimenter, or whatever.

A variety of euphemisms saw temporary service. Couples described themselves as “modern” or “liberal” or “adventurous.” Others proclaimed their interest in sun-bathing or labeled themselves free-thinkers. All of these expressions served well enough to get the point across, but none really stuck. Then the word swinger was seized upon, and somehow it filled the bill to perfection. One could characterize oneself as a swinger without the slightest fear of compromising one’s position in the square or straight world; other swappers would get the message instantly, while the innocents of the world would simply assume that the self-styled swinger was no more than a person who liked to have a good time.

Thus the meaning of the word changed almost overnight. Just as “gay” has become automatically translated as “homosexual” to the point where few persons use it in any other context whatsoever, so did swinger become the exclusive property of the sexually adventurous.

But the word did not stop evolving at that point. Interestingly enough, its meaning became increasingly specific over the years to the point where only a certain type of wife-swapper would properly label himself a “swinger.” As wife-swapping became more widely practiced, and as sexual varietism became more and more commonly a component of the swapping scene, “swinger” came to be used to distinguish the no-holds-barred anything-goes couples from the more conservative swappers who merely wanted to exchange mates for an hour or an evening of more or less standard sexual relations.

“We are only interested in simple swapping,” a letter might read, “and we are definitely not swingers.”

•  •  •

Swingers, swappers, modern liberal free-thinkers. Who precisely are these people? How do they get involved in the swinging life? What impact do they have upon the fabric of contemporary society? To what extent are they a symptom of it? And just what do they do, and with whom, and why?

There are, to begin with, no fast answers, no ready generalizations that can do much more than obscure the more important aspects of what we might call the swinging society. Swingers vary tremendously in virtually all respects. They come from all strata of society, range widely in age, and have any number of diverse motives, attitudes, activities, and so on. A social critic could easily demonstrate that they reflect any number of societal stresses and ills. A psychologist could examine any swinger and illustrate how his or her sexual behavior derives directly from personal anxieties and neuroses. A theologian could relate swinging to widespread moral decay and the declining influence of religion in modern life. All such analyses would have certain things to recommend them, and all of them would fall somehow short of explaining what swingers are and why they do what they do.

There is no question but that various aspects of contemporary civilization have shaped the structure of the swinging society. One can readily argue that the world of social security and pension plans and employment insurance has eliminated many of the hazards of ordinary living to the point where the swinger may with some justification regard sexual experimentation as a sort of Last Frontier. And, on a more concrete level, one can hardly deny that two triumphs of technology, the Pill and the Polaroid, have enormously facilitated swinging. The Pill, an absolutely effective safeguard against unwanted pregnancy, has effectively eliminated the greatest obvious hazard of systematic adultery. With extramarital pregnancy no longer a risk, a man can play the cuckold without worrying that he will raise another man’s child as his own.

In a very different way, the Polaroid enables swingers to send nude or obscene photographs of one another through the mails with little expense and less risk. A large proportion of swingers arrange all of their activity through correspondence with total strangers, and Polaroid photos enable them to learn in advance what (or whom) they are getting into.

Yet any discussion of pills and Polaroids, of social ills and sexual permissiveness, of increased leisure time and widespread prosperity, is certain to leave a plethora of questions about the swinging experience unanswered. One cannot deal forever in generalities. The key point is that swingers are people. One can form one’s own opinion of them, labeling them as fools or sinners, as the shock troops of the sexual revolution, as hell-bent hedonists piling one thrill upon another. Conversely, one can applaud them as individuals who have successfully separated sex from love and who have found a satisfactory and satisfying way to overthrow inhibitions and repressions in their pursuit of sexual pleasure. The reader is free to make up his own mind in this regard. It is my concern, in the pages which follow, to depict some of the men and women who comprise the swinging society.

It is as individuals that we shall meet these swingers. They are not composites or prototypes but individual men and women whom I have met and interviewed over the past several months. I have of course altered all of their names, and have occasionally changed the names of cities and states where such data might serve to identify the individuals involved. In every other respect, however, the swingers’ stories have been presented exactly as they were presented to me. In some instances I have reproduced dialogue verbatim from my tapes of interview sessions. In other cases, when the subject of an interview has been less articulate, I have rendered the material in narrative form in order that the reader may more readily assimilate it.

The subjects themselves have been selected with the object of showing the many facets of the swinging society presently in existence. They represent only a minute portion of the swingers whom I was able to interview, but, taken together, I believe they convey a generally accurate picture of the overall swinging scene.

•  •  •

It seems to be de rigueur for a writer on sexual topics to explain at some lengths his reasons for writing a given book. This sort of apologia pro libro meo is not required of other authors—a man who has written a history of the French Revolution, for example, need not devote a few paragraphs to an explanation of his motives. But, modern sexual enlightenment notwithstanding, we still demand of the sexual observer that he justify his choice of subject matter and that he establish his credentials as an observer of social phenomena and prove that he is not just a dirty old man.

My own interest in and involvement with the swinging society stems from a rather more personal element than the unfettered spirit of scientific inquiry. A little over a year ago, several months after I was divorced, the wife of a close friend began making unmistakable sexual advances to me. She was an extremely attractive woman and, although I found the idea of cuckolding my friend distasteful, I nevertheless took advantage of his absence on a business trip to spend a very enjoyable night with her.

The following morning, in what novelists persist in calling the “cold clear light of dawn,” I was understandably worried that I had betrayed my friend, that I might be getting myself into an unpleasant situation, that their marriage might be destroyed, etc. The wife then demolished my fears (and, I must admit, rather shocked me) by explaining that her husband knew perfectly well what had happened, that he had arranged his “business trip” specifically so that we could be alone together, and that she and her husband have been active participants in wife-swapping for several years. “We didn’t know if you’d go for it if you knew the whole picture in advance,” she said, “but I knew you were hot for me, and I figured if we were alone together and one thing led to another you wouldn’t be unhappy. Are you?”

I wasn’t, but I was certainly quite fascinated by my introduction to the swinging society. In the months that followed I became acquainted with a great many swingers and interviewed a considerable number of them at great length. When it came time to plan the organization of this present book, I consider detailing some of my own experiences herein. After some thought, I decided that I could serve my readers most objectively by omitting my own personal experiences with the swinging life. While they might make entertaining reading—I certainly found them entertaining at the time—they would necessarily be colored by my own perspective.

In a similar fashion, I have tried to avoid two approaches which frequently are to be found in books on this and kindred subjects. I see no point, first, in uttering any clinical or moral judgments. The reader may decide for himself whether the various persons appearing in the following pages are sick or sane, saints or sinners, frustrated or contented with their psychosexual adjustment to modern life. In addition, I have avoided playing the numbers game. Various commentators have estimated the number of practicing swingers at anywhere from one to twenty million in the United States. I frankly have not the slightest idea just how many people are involved in the swinging society, nor do I care to guess. Statistics are undeniably valuable, and at the same time they are deceptive and dangerous when bandied about by those who have inadequate statistical training.

Another approach commonly found in popular studies of sexual topics is one in which the author attempts to differentiate between normal and abnormal behavior. I must confess that normal is a word to which I particularly object, in part because it means something quite different to everyone who uses it.

With swingers, the norm is that there is no norm. Swingers by definition are at odds to a greater or lesser degree with the normative and existential sexual mores of our society. In some instances, the only taboo which they violate is that proscribing adultery—in other words, the acts they perform are those which society would deem normal, but the promiscuity with which they perform them would lead others to label them abnormal. In other cases, the physical practices of the swingers involve acts which a variable proportion of the population would characterize as abnormal or perverted, ranging in type from extracoital forms of copulation to pluralism, homosexuality, bestiality, exhibitionism, etc. Swingers themselves are not very much more logical than the general run of the population in this regard; it is very common, for example, for a swinger to regard lesbian activity as wholly permissible while looking askance at male homosexual activity.

One young woman whom I interviewed had taught her dog to copulate with her, and frequently took the animal to parties so that others could enjoy watching her perform with it. She told me of a couple she knew who had sexual relations with their own children. “They are absolutely disgusting,” she said. “People like that should be thrown in jail and left there to rot.”

I later interviewed the couple in question, and they happened to mention the young lady with the well-trained dog. “I can’t understand a woman like that,” the husband told me earnestly. “Sex is an exchange between people. It’s part of the whole process of loving, and how a girl can dehumanize the whole thing and let an animal go down on her is beyond me.”

De gustibus non disputandum est . . . one man’s fish is another man’s poisson.

•  •  •

We have seen how the word swinger evolved as a euphemism for swapper. In similar fashion, any number of expressions have been developed in the swingers’ underground to replace the unprintable. Since a large portion of the material to follow is reproduced verbatim, I suspect the reader might find a glossary of various terms helpful. Some are used almost exclusively in advertisements and correspondence; others figure prominently in swingers’ conversations.

Culture—Any of several special areas of activity, as:

French Culture—Oral-genital relations, either fellatio or cunnilingus. This has become so widely recognized a term that instructors who give legitimate lessons in the French language have found it virtually impossible to advertise their services; they inevitably receive phone calls from persons assuming they are prostitutes specializing in oral pleasures. When the word culture is used alone, French culture is commonly implied.

English Culture—Bondage and/or discipline, esp. flagellation. Sadomasochistic fun and games are also occasionally referred to as German or Prussian Culture.

Greek Culture—Anal intercourse. In certain contexts the term indicates male homosexuality, but the first meaning is far more common.

Roman Culture—Orgies, or some form of group sex.

Sadie Mae—Sadomasochist.

Docile—Indicates the passive partner in sadomasochistic relationships. Also rendered as weak-willed or submissive. The active role in such relationships is characteristic as strong, dominant, etc.

Fond of Animals—Obviously, an inclination for bestiality.

Husband A Joiner—A common phrase in advertisements placed by a woman seeking lesbian contacts, and indicating that the husband enjoys watching the lesbian activity and having relations with the participants.

AC-DC—Bisexual. Other euphemisms include ambidextrous, switch-hitter, switcher, et. al.

Group Grope—Variously, a free-for-all orgy, or a general mass petting session prior to pairing off at a swapping party, or any of several games in which nude couples try to identify their partners by touch in a dark room.

Camera Fan—This or any other mention of photography indicates an interest in taking or exchanging pornographic photos.

Enjoys Correspondence—Some hangers-on in the swinging society avoid personal contacts but write lengthy obscene letters to one another and exchange photographs. This phrase is the indicator.

Linguist—Indicates talent or desire for performing orally. Originally derives from cunning linguist as a rather obvious code phrase for cunnilingus.

Well-endowed—Used to suggest that a male has a particularly large penis. Almost any word relating to size refers to the genitalia; when a woman expresses a desire to meet large or small men, she is not talking about their height or weight but about their sexual apparatus.

Exotic, Bizarre, Unusual—Formerly indicating any swinging activity, these adjectives are now used primarily in a negative sense. An advertiser specifying “No Exotics” means he is not interested in sadomasochism, homosexuality, or any of the more outré forms of sexual relations.

Generous—Willing to pay. Prostitutes advertising in swingers’ media will describe themselves as anxious to meet generous or financially secure males, females, couples, or whatever.

Amateur Model—Occasionally a euphemism for a prostitute, or indicates a willingness to model for obscene photos, or that the advertiser has such photos for sale, depending upon contact.

Television—Transvestism. The practice was first abbreviated as TV, then extended again as television, a particularly interesting instance of the way underworld slang develops.

With A Little Help From Our Friends

Roy and Barbara Halliday look very much like Madison Avenue’s idea of America’s Young Moderns, graduates of the Pepsi Generation and veterans of the Dodge Rebellion, living the good clean life in the affluent society. They live in an exclusive development on the outskirts of Youngstown, Ohio, where Roy works as a systems analyst—“an efficiency expert for computers,” he calls himself. His salary is $16,000 a year. The Hallidays have two children, a boy nine and a girl seven. Roy is 34, a little over six feet tall, with the slender build of a cross-country runner. He wears his hair in a longish, crew-cut; his tastes in dress run to tweeds and vested suits and regimental striped ties.

Barbara, two years younger, has striking blonde hair which she frankly admits is not her natural color. “One thing about swinging,” she says, “not only your hairdresser knows for sure. Although we do know one girl who bleaches down there, too. But I think that’s carrying things a little too far.” A tall, shapely girl, Barbara swam competitively in college and retains the well-muscled body of a swimmer. Her breasts, though considerably larger than average, do not require the support of a bra. Her features are slightly on this harsh side, her nose a bit long, her jaw rather strong. While not beautiful, she is strikingly attractive.

For over three years, Roy and Barbara have belonged to a group of Youngstown-area swingers. Once a week they meet with seven other couples for an evening of organized adultery.

ROY: When we first got involved in the swinging life, I can honestly say we had no idea what it was all about. It was the furthest thing from our minds.

BARBARA: But we were certainly ready for it.

ROY: Well, as it turned out—

BARBARA: You were certainly ready for variety, honey. You had already proved that, remember?

ROY: What my dear wife means is that I had a little fling about six months before we got started with the group. That was before we moved to Youngstown. There was a girl who worked in my office, a cute little brunette with huge brown eyes, and she made it obvious that she was available. Barb and I had been married almost nine years then, which made me two years late in developing the traditional seven-year itch. Anyway, it was quite an itch, and I scratched it.

JWW: How did you feel about it?

ROY: Very guilty. It’s hard for me to believe now just how guilty I felt. I told myself that it wouldn’t hurt Barb as long as she didn’t know about it, and after I had been sleeping with Rosie a few times I just couldn’t stand the guilt, and I went to Barb and confessed. I Told All.

JWW: What was your reaction, Barbara?

BARBARA: Reactions, you mean. I reacted about five different ways at once. You know the way society conditions people. I had grown up believing that a man and a woman met and fell in love and got married, and once they were married they never wanted to have sex with anyone but their marriage partner. Of course human beings just aren’t built that way, but I wasn’t bright enough to know that at the time. When Roy told me about that little slut—

ROY: Don’t tell me you still resent her?

BARBARA: I guess I must. Isn’t that silly? But I was thinking about how I felt at the time. It really tore me apart. I felt terribly hurt and shocked and disgusted. I was sure something was wrong with me, because if Roy had to look elsewhere for sex it meant that I wasn’t giving him everything he wanted. And I felt that he had betrayed me, that our marriage vows were something sacred and he had done me a great injury by breaking them. And, oh, what else? I felt that he was soiled by it all, and that it would be dirty for us to have sex together. Brilliant, wasn’t I? My husband was screwing another girl and I was going to compete with her by not letting him near me. I’m surprised he didn’t walk out permanently.

JWW: Did you feel any desire to cheat on him in return?

BARBARA: Oh, certainly. Not a specific desire, no particular letch for any particular man. Just the feeling that what was sauce for the goose would be sauce for the gander, and that the best way to repay him would be by evening the score and going out and having an affair with someone. But I never seriously considered doing this, I just thought it would be a good thing to do. Oh, one other thing. When I thought of him with Rosie I was very turned on by the picture of the two of them together.

ROY: You never told me that.

BARBARA: I didn’t realize it myself, but it’s true. I would picture the two of you together and think about what you did to each other. It made me uncomfortable, but I think largely because I found it exciting and couldn’t accept it. I wondered if she Frenched him. Roy always wanted me to do that and I didn’t like to—

ROY: Knowing you now, that’s pretty hard to believe—

BARBARA: Well, I’ve come a long way since then.

ROY: And a great many times, too.

BARBARA: Stop it. What was I saying? Oh, yes. I wondered if she Frenched him—

ROY: She didn’t, as a matter of fact.

BARBARA: —and I pictured her, you know, with her mouth on him, and I was tremendously excited without knowing it. Anyway, you get the general idea. I reacted a dozen ways at once, and for awhile it looked as though our marriage was going to break up, and then we worked things out and Roy decided to make the move to Youngstown and everything was good again. Better than ever, actually. Once we were back together again we found that our sex life was a lot more satisfying than it had been. Roy seemed much more exciting to me as a lover, and I was far more anxious to please him. We made love more frequently and had a better time doing it.

JWW: You think this was a direct result of his extramarital affair?

ROY: Isn’t it obvious? That little bit of variety which I enjoyed directly and which Barb experienced secondhand rejuvenated our stale marriage. But neither of us understood it at the time. For my part, I swore up and down never to stray from the straight and narrow path again. I felt I was getting a second chance to make our marriage work. It’s amazing the way society conditions you to think in clichés. You get to the point where you can’t make obvious logical conclusions because of the way your mind has been conditioned.

BARBARA: Like brainwashing.

ROY: Right, except no one does it to you. It just happens, it’s part of growing up in a sexually repressed society. At any rate, that’s how it went. I was going to be Joe True-Blue forever onward. I even tried to monitor my own thoughts. I tried to keep myself from thinking of the times I had been with Rosie, and I fought the impulse to look at pretty girls on the street and imagine what they would be like in bed. How can you help what you think? Thoughts just happen to a person, but I really tried to fight it.

BARBARA: And then we moved to Youngstown.

ROY: Right. And Rosie was part of the past, and we were both certain that it was monogamy and fidelity until death do us part. Which meant in a year or so one of us would have had a sneaky nasty little affair, and this time it would have sent Barb flying off to Reno.

BARBARA: Fortunately, we met Greg and Sue.

ROY: Right—we had a little help from our friends.

•  •  •

Greg Metzger was a data programming supervisor working for the same company that employed Roy. The Metzgers lived less than two blocks away from the Hallidays, and the two couples began seeing one another socially almost immediately upon the Hallidays’ arrival in Youngstown. The two men rode to work together, the wives met frequently for coffee during the afternoons, and the couples got together every weekend for an evening of cards and conversation. While the Metzgers planned an eventual swapping arrangement from the beginning of the relationship, they were careful not to make obvious overtures until they sensed that Roy and Barbara were prepared for them. “They must have dropped a few clues along the way,” Roy suggested, “but we were too square to get the message, and they let things slide until they sensed that we were ready.”

It was several months before the Metzgers felt “ready.” By that time, the two couples had become extremely close. Barbara had confided in Sue about Roy’s extramarital affair, and Roy had mentioned the episode to Greg, who confessed to a similar episode and suggested that extramarital relations sometimes brought people closer together. The suggestion led Roy to look back on his affair in a somewhat different light, and helped prepare him for a new attitude toward adultery.

Then, on a Friday night at the Metzgers’ home, the first real overtures were made.

•  •  •

ROY: We had gone over there to play bridge, but Greg met us at the door with a pair of stiff drinks and told us that he was damned if he felt like looking at a deck of cards after the kind of week he’d put in at the office. He said he felt like getting a little tight and unwinding. It sounded like a good idea to us, too. We went down to their basement recreation room and Greg put a stack of records on the stereo and kept pouring the drinks.

At first we just talked, but the conversation got a little sexier than usual. Greg told a few jokes, and Sue told one that at the time struck me as a hell of a rough joke for a woman to come out with in mixed company. But it seemed to fit the kind of mood we were all in. Naturally, it made me start thinking about Sue. She’s a hell of an attractive girl to begin with, very small and slim and boyish, with short dark hair and deep blue eyes. Almost purple eyes, actually. And she was wearing a peasant blouse, I think it’s called, with a scoop neckline, and she kept bringing a tray of hors d’oeuvres around and bending over to offer it to me, and there was nothing boyish about the view from where I sat. She was wearing one of those bras that support from beneath so that the upper halves of her breasts were bare. It was a voyeur’s dream, and I sat there determined to avoid getting horny at the sight of her. You know—she was my friend and Greg was my friend and I loved my wife and therefore it would be absolutely disgusting of me to get a jolt out of staring at her tits. When actually it would have been goddamned unnatural of me not to.

BARBARA: The funny thing is that I knew Sue was giving him a show on purpose, and yet it never occurred to me to resent it. We were all such good friends, you know, and beside that Greg was busy paying attention to me. He kept complimenting me on my appearance and the way I was dressed, and he would throw out lines like “Not many girls have the figure to wear clothes like you do,” that kind of thing. He made me very much aware that he found me attractive. I was delighted, and I didn’t realize that what I felt was sexual excitement, but of course it was. Nothing excites a woman as much as knowing that a man finds her desirable.

ROY: From then on in they handled everything pretty brilliantly. They were very smooth about it. A very danceable record started playing, and Greg said he thought he’d dance with his wife just as a change of pace, and he took Sue in his arms and danced with her. I’ve never been much on dancing, not in years, but when one couple starts dancing the other couple can’t sit around looking at the woodwork, so Barb and I began dancing, too. I was dancing with Barb and I found myself hoping we would switch partners for the next number. I was even trying to think of a tactful way to suggest it. I didn’t have any long-range plans in mind. I just wanted to dance with her. At least I thought that was all I wanted.

But Greg beat me to the punch. When the record ended he turned to Barb and bowed and asked her if she danced as well as she looked, and a few seconds later he was dancing with her and I had Sue in my arms. She started dancing close almost immediately and I felt her breasts pressing against me. When that record ended nobody said anything, and so we kept the same partners. She was wearing a wicked perfume, and she danced clumsily on purpose every now and then, so that we bumped together in a very pleasant way. Of course I got an erection

BARBARA: So did Greg. I almost died when I felt it pressing against my belly. The first thing I felt was embarrassment. I must have blushed like crazy. Then I got a wonderful warm feeling all over. I’d had quite a bit to drink, and all I wanted to do was go on dancing like that forever, just Greg and me and that wonderful hard penis pressing against me, and not think about anything, just enjoy the feeling.

ROY: I’m sure I was more embarrassed than Barb was. All I could think was how goddamned indecent it was. I tried to move away so that Sue wouldn’t notice it. I was sure she would be disgusted. But she kept pressing against me, and all at once she put her head back and looked up at me. She opened those blue-violet eyes all the way and let this slow sexy smile spread all over her face. She didn’t say a word, but she was telling me that she knew what she had done to me and that she was very pleased about the whole thing. That look did it for me. From that moment on I wanted her. I didn’t really think I was going to have her, but I damn well wanted her.

We danced one more number. It was practically a pantomime of coitus. We hardly moved our feet, just stood swaying together with my erection rubbing back and forth against her.

Then the music stopped and we stopped dancing. Shock treatment, I guess. They wanted to give us a chance to think about what had just happened. I just stood there with a stupid grin on my face. Greg went off to make fresh drinks and Barb scooted off to the john—

BARBARA: I knew my face was flushed and I wanted to cool off.

ROY: —and there I was alone with Sue. I went over and lit a cigarette. I offered her one but she just shook her head and smiled. Then I decided to make conversation, I don’t know what, I guess I said some dumb thing or other, and she didn’t answer, she just went on smiling and didn’t answer me. Then she took a step toward me and said, “I like the way you dance, Roy, I like it very much.”

My mouth was dry and my heart was pounding like mad. I couldn’t get my breath. She took a step closer and said that she would like to dance with me some more. I was fool enough to mention that there was no music playing. “We don’t need music,” she said. Then she was in my arms, pressing against me from head to toe. She was such a tiny little thing. I bent down to her and we kissed. I had just meant to give her an ordinary kiss but her mouth opened instantly and she began using her tongue.

Then while we were still kissing her hand moved around and fastened on my penis. She gave it these rhythmic little squeezes. I thought I was going to go out of my mind. Then she pulled her head away, and I thought she was ashamed of herself and wanted to stop, but when I saw the look on her face I knew better. And her hand was still on me, she was still squeezing me.

She said, “Oh, I want this, Roy,” and squeezed me. She said, “Oh, I want this, I want it very much.” I couldn’t say anything. It was all very unreal. It had the quality of a dream, and I felt as though I could do any thing wanted and it wouldn’t matter because it was a dream.

She pursed her lips and made a little O of her mouth. Then she said, “You know how I want it, my darling? I want it in my mouth. I want to kiss it, Roy. I want to suck it.”

That did it. That was just plain it as far as I was concerned. I think Greg and Barb and the whole Russian Army could have walked into the room just about then and it wouldn’t have made the slightest bit of difference. Sue had managed to hit my major fantasy right on the nose. Years ago, before I was married, I went with a prostitute once. I was nervous as hell and couldn’t get it up, so she performed fellatio and took care of me that way. I never got it out of my mind. Barb had never wanted to do it and I was pretty reluctant to ask her. I wanted her to and at the same time I didn’t, as if it was a dirty act and it would soil her to perform it. But, well, you get the general idea. When Sue said that I went out of my mind. I forgot about Barb, I forgot about Greg, I forgot about everything.

I kissed her again and ran my hands all over her. I grabbed her little buttocks and pressed them tight against me. I could feel the warmth of her groin burning into me. I just couldn’t get enough of her.

The next thing I knew we were on the couch. She made me lie down on my back and told me to close my eyes. I left them open, though. I wanted to watch her. She took off her blouse and her bra. Then she unbuttoned my shirt and leaned over me, kissing me and rubbing her breasts against my chest. All the while her hand was busy with the zipper of my pants. She opened my pants and found what she was looking for. She moved her hand up and down on it and kept whispering to me, telling me what she was going to do.

The she crouched over me and told me it was beautiful and she loved it, and then she went to work on me. Sue is an extremely oral person. I’ve learned since that she can reach orgasm just by performing fellatio on a man. She doesn’t have to be touched or anything. Just doing it is enough to make it for her.

Her technique was incredible. Somehow she knew exactly what I felt and exactly how I was responding, so that she could build up my excitement and slow it down at will. She used her lips and her tongue and the inside of her mouth and drove me absolutely crazy. I wanted to tell her to stop because I couldn’t control myself and I thought she would hate it if I let go like that, but she had no intention of stopping and I had no will at all.

I had the most extraordinary orgasm of my life. It lasted forever, and time absolutely stopped. It was the sun and the moon and the stars, the whole bit. I didn’t think of Greg or Barb. I didn’t think of anything. I was in heaven . . .

•  •  •

BARBARA: I wish I could have watched. I know the effect Sue can have on a man when she speaks French to him, and I can imagine what it must have been like for Roy. But if I had walked in on them then I probably would have dropped dead on the spot.

Fortunately Greg had other plans for me. The bathroom was on the first floor, and so was the kitchen where he was making the fresh drinks. When I opened the door, he just happened to be standing in front of it. I suppose he’d been waiting there for awhile, but I didn’t know that.

He said, “Hello, lovely lady. Can you give me a hand in the kitchen?”

That was an innocent enough remark, but I blushed instantly. All I could think of was his erection so I read a double meaning into the line and thought of just how I could give him a hand. I found myself staring at his crotch, at the little bulge there. Then he turned away, and of course I followed him into the kitchen.

He pointed to some glasses on the cupboard and asked me if I could carry them. I went to pick them up and before I even realized he was behind me, his hands were on my breasts. It was the most extraordinary shock in the world. It was like an electrical charge hitting me right in both breasts and shooting through every part of my body.

His mouth was at my ear and he talked and talked and talked. “You’re beautiful, Barbara. You’re the most beautiful woman in the world. I love you. You have a beautiful body.” On and on like that. The words hardly mattered. He moved against me and I felt his organ pressing against my bottom. It was hard as a rock again and that thrilled me, the effect I was having on him.

Then he took me by the shoulders and turned me around. He told me he wanted me and he was going to make love to me. I couldn’t speak. He lifted me in his arms and carried me straight into the bedroom.

From that point on he didn’t say a word. He undressed me, practically tore my clothes off. Then he took off his own clothes. It was the first time I had ever seen a naked man other than Roy. I was a virgin when I met Roy and he was the only man who had ever had me. I was enormously excited. I stared at his organ and couldn’t wait for him to put it in me.

He sensed my mood perfectly. No kissing, no foreplay, none of that. The way I felt just then, anything but the act itself would have cooled me off. So he got right to the business at hand. When you come right down to it, it was a lot like rape—except that I could hardly have been more willing. He put a pillow in the center of the bed and set me down on the bed with my bottom on the pillow, and then he threw himself on top of me and shoved himself into me all the way to the hilt.

I came instantly.

Then, before I could recover from the force of the orgasm, he was moving on me. He did it very slowly at first, all the way in and all the way out, slowly, and it was just the right rhythm for me, just right, so that passion started building up all over again, and he thrust faster and faster and harder and harder and this time we got there together.

I can’t describe it except to say that it was literally too good—I passed out.

I couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a few seconds. I came to with Greg holding me in his arms and stroking me and kissing my face and telling me I was his angel. The enormity of what we had done hit me all at once and I started to cry. I bawled like a baby and he held me and stroked me and told me everything was all right.

“Oh God,” I said. “Roy and Sue, Roy and Sue—” He grinned. “Don’t worry your head about those two,” he said.

“Roy and Sue—”

His grin grew wider. “They’re downstairs,” he said. “They’re downstairs screwing.”

•  •  •

ROY: Greg was right—we were doing just that. I really did forget all about Greg and Barb from the moment Sue began going down on me. I told you it was like a dream, and that’s the only way I can describe it. It was living fantasy.

Afterward, we got up and transformed the couch into a bed. Then we lay down together and began making love all over again. I couldn’t get enough of Sue. It was slow and lazy. We explored every part of each other’s body, kissing and touching, completely absorbed in the excitement we generated together. I became aroused again almost at once, but there was no urgency to it. We went on petting and stroking each other.

Finally, she lay on her side with her back toward me and I took her that way. Not Greek style—to tell the truth I didn’t even know that men and women made love that way, not at that time. But regular coitus from the rear. I had my arms around her and caressed her breasts with one hand and her loins with the other while we made this slow lazy love.

And, while this was going on, she began talking. She told me that Greg and Barb were upstairs making love. Her tone was very matter-of-fact, as though it was perfectly logical that they should be making love and that we should be doing the same. “Think about it,” she said. “Think about Greg and Barb together. Picture them in your mind. Picture his penis slipping in and out of her, think about what they’re doing.”

Her words combined with our own actions had a curious effect on me. It made the whole idea of Barb being with another man a very erotic notion for me. I’ve thought about it since, and I’ve discussed it with Barb, and we feel that it’s perfectly natural to be excited by that sort of image. After all, love is to a large extent a matter of identification with another person. And if you identify with another person, if you are a part of them and they are a part of you, naturally their excitement is exciting to you. I don’t know if I’m making this clear—

JWW: I think you are.

ROY: I hope so. I think it’s relevant to any understanding of the way we approach sex and love. But the point is that we’re conditioned to respond in a completely negative way, and Sue’s talking about it while she and I were making love had the effect of breaking down that conditioning. Greg did more or less the same thing with Barb, so I guess the two of them had planned the whole approach at some length.

BARBARA: I’m sure they did. When Greg told me, it didn’t just turn me on. It also washed all the guilt away. It was as if Roy was giving me permission to do what I wanted with Greg, and I wanted to do everything in the book. I think I would have stayed with him forever, but finally he suggested that we get dressed and go downstairs and join them. That should have been a very embarrassing moment, but I was still in too much of a glow to be embarrassed about anything.

ROY: We were still naked when they walked in, and I must admit I had a bad moment when I saw Greg walk into the room. I was sure he would be ready to kill me. But he just grinned and said he hoped we had had as much fun as he and Barb had, and Sue was obviously completely at ease, and I looked at Barb and all I could notice was that she had never looked more genuinely beautiful to me than she did that moment.

BARBARA: From then on it was all downhill. No pains, no problems. We sat talking for hours. They told us all about the swinging scene, the effect it had had on them, the way it brought them closer together than they had ever thought possible. They said that any sexual relationship has to get boring without variety, and that everyone has the urge for sex with a new partner, and—oh, all the usual arguments, but they were quite new to us. Roy had read articles about wife-swapping, but all I knew was that there were people who did that sort of thing. I had really never even thought about it, much less considered doing it myself. It was—well, the expression is pure corn, but it fits—it was whole new worlds opening up.

ROY: Then they told us about the club—

BARBARA: No, that was the next night.

ROY: You’re right, it was. They did give us the impression that this was something they did frequently, but the group wasn’t mentioned that night. Instead we just sat around talking and drinking coffee for awhile, and finally Sue suggested that we would probably want to get home and talk everything over among ourselves. “You’ll have some second thoughts,” she said. “It’s inevitable. No one throws off years of conditioning overnight. The first time we swung with another couple I got positively suicidal. Go on home and talk everything out. Everything. It helps. And I’ll tell you something else, kids. The two of you are going to make love tonight, and it’s going to be better than it’s been in years.”

BARBARA: I didn’t believe that for a minute.

ROY: Neither did I. But she was right, of course. We went home, and at first we had a lot of trouble talking. We’d been relaxed while we were with the Metzgers, but once we were alone with each other the usual walls went up. Then we did start talking, and we had a couple drinks to loosen up, and I suggested we compare notes. So we told each other just what we did.

BARBARA: In detail. It worked, all right. You should have seen him—when he described the Frenching she gave him he was positively drooling, and his excitement transferred to me at once. And I told him what Greg and I had done, and, well, the whole thing was more exciting in memory than it had been in fact. It goes without saying that we wound up balling, and I surprised myself by getting an uncontrollable urge to give him the same treat Sue had given him. Of course I didn’t really know how to do it properly—

ROY: You’ve come a long way since then.

BARBARA: Thanks for the endorsement. All I know was that I wanted to do it, and that I wanted to thrill him as much as Sue had. This was an act that had really sickened me beforehand, and here I was doing it and finding it very exciting and enjoyable. Well, without going into detail, we did just as Sue said. We made love, and it was better than it had ever been.

•  •  •

The following night, the Hallidays entertained the Metzgers. It was then that Roy and Barbara learned of the existence of the club, an informal group composed of the Metzgers and four other couples in the same age bracket. While no offer was actually made, the implication was that Roy and Sue could join the group if they desired.

ROY: It was hard to think about the group as such. The conversation was so sex-oriented, and we were all so hot for each other, that in a sense the world did not exist outside of our living room. All I knew was that in a little while I would be making love to Sue again while Barb enjoyed herself with Greg.

I think it was Greg who suggested that we all get undressed. He said it seemed fairly silly for us to wear clothes, since we all knew each other well enough for them to be superfluous. Sue promptly took her dress off, and there was nothing under it but Sue, and at that point everybody got naked in a hurry.

BARBARA: Then I got very bold and said that dancing had been so much fun the night before that we ought to try it again. I put on a stack of slow and dreamy records. It never occurred to me that we would all wind up making love in the same room. I thought we would dance for awhile and then I would take Greg to the bedroom. Only it didn’t work out that way.

ROY: I don’t see how it could have. When you’re naked, and dancing with a beautiful naked girl, and watching your own naked wife dancing with another naked man, you don’t feel like climbing a flight of stairs. At least I didn’t.

BARBARA: Neither did I, of course. Greg got hard instantly, and I felt myself get as wet and wild as a Seven Up commercial. I looked over at Sue and Roy. They were kissing and he had her breasts in his hands. That did it. I stood there watching them make love on the floor. I just stood and watched, and Greg started kissing and licking me all the way down my body. He spent ages of time on my breasts, running his tongue all over them and sucking hard on my nipples. Then he wound up kneeling on the floor in front of me and using his mouth on me, and I just gave myself up completely to the sensation while I watched Roy and Sue. They were head over heels in love—you know, sixty-nine.

ROY: You don’t have to draw pictures, baby.

BARBARA: I just remember it so vividly . . .

•  •  •

During the next week the two couples had no sexual contacts with one another. Roy and Barbara made love together every night, and found their relations infinitely more satisfying than they had ever been in the past. Roy, who had begun to worry that he was losing his potency, was now pleasantly surprised to discover himself far more capable of sexual performance than he had ever known. The new techniques they had learned, along with their altered mental attitude, improved all aspects of their performance.

Barbara did experience occasional doubts and guilt feelings in the course of the week, but she saw Sue frequently and managed to overcome her moods. Friday night the two couples met again and changed partners for several hours of lovemaking. The next night, Saturday, the Hallidays joined the Youngstown wife-swapping group. This particular club was comparatively conservative.

There were no orgies, no sexual exhibitions. The usual format was rather simple. The five couples—six, with the addition of the Hallidays—would meet at the home of one of the members for an hour or two of drinks and conversation. Occasionally a host would show a stag film or provide a similar form of entertainment, but this was by no means a standard feature.

ROY: There’s always a lot of necking and petting, but nothing approaching what swingers mean when they talk about a group grope. Everybody kisses everybody, of course, and there’s a lot of touching and breast stroking and that sort of thing. It’s damned erotic, that’s the whole point, but nobody gets down to brass tacks at the meeting. No disrobing, for example. Once or twice we’ve played a variety of strip poker, and one night Marilyn Klein introduced a swinger’s version of Blind Man’s Bluff she’d read about, but it frankly went over like a lead balloon.

BARBARA: Because the whole idea of the club is that it should be a refined and pleasant way for all of us to be very close friends and to share sex with one another. And the whole purpose is defeated if you wind up acting like kids playing post office, or as if it’s just fun because it’s forbidden. That plays a part, or course; we’re all of us rebelling against Puritanism to a certain extent. But we like to keep things on a mature level. Then, when we pair off and go home, then we make love. And it’s never anticlimactic that way. It’s always the high point of the evening.

JWW: What sort of pairing ritual do you use?

BARBARA: We’re traditional enough to use car keys, and if the husband draws his own key he throws it back and tries again. The wife takes her partner to her home in her car—that way the neighbors don’t have any clue to what’s happening, and the wife is there to take care of the children if they wake up.

JWW: What sort of people do you have in the group?

BARBARA: People like ourselves, really. Our friends. That’s really what it comes down to. We have no close friends outside of the group, and I couldn’t feel closer to the people in it. Every girl in the group is like a sister of mine, and every man—

ROY: Is like a brother, if you incest.

BARBARA: You couldn’t resist that one, could you? It’s true, though. As far as what they’re like, well, we’re all between 28 and 37—

ROY: 29 and 37. Mimi had a birthday last week.

BARBARA: I stand corrected. So we’re all about the same age, and all the men are making about the same amount of money. All of us have children. Everybody has had some college, and most of us are college graduates.

ROY: And we’re all white.

BARBARA: Right. Lately we’ve talked a lot about the idea of getting a colored couple into the group. Everybody’s in favor of the idea, but the problem is that we really don’t know any Negroes well enough. It sounds like a bad joke, but it’s true. If it weren’t that we think it’s so very important to keep this amongst friends, we might try contacting a colored couple through one of the correspondence clubs. That’s been suggested, and I think Mimi and Frank may try it and see what happens. They have occasional contacts away from the group—

JWW: And the rest of you don’t?

ROY: We did once, and never again, thank you. We drove all the way to Toledo to meet a pair of sub-literate degenerates and we couldn’t get the hell away from them fast enough. Frank and Mimi are the only ones from our crowd who swing with strangers fairly regularly, so if they turn up a suitable colored couple in the area, and if things work out, well, we might try to add them to the group.

BARBARA: I’d love to have a colored man.

ROY: I’ll just bet you would, honey chile.

BARBARA: His current fixation is oriental girls, but I’m afraid there’s a shortage of them in Youngstown. I told him we could go to New York for his birthday and I’d treat him to a night with a Japanese call girl.

ROY: Treat us both—we’ll share her.

BARBARA: Now you’re tempting me.

JWW: You are joking, aren’t you? Or do you also go in for lesbianism?

BARBARA: That’s an awfully clinical word, isn’t it? If you mean do I like to make love with the other girls now and then, the answer is yes. Mostly with Sue, but with some of the others as well. That’s pretty standard, you know. From what I’ve heard, the swinger who doesn’t dig girl-girl stuff is in the minority.

JWW: No question about it, but I seem to have taken a wrong turn somewhere. The way I understood it, there’s no group sex at the group meetings, just man-woman coupling off, and—

ROY: Oh, you did take a wrong turn, and I think it’s our fault. That’s how it works at the group, but what we do on our own is something else again. At least once and sometimes twice a week we’ll get together with another couple from the group, and then anything goes. Sex in the same room, four in a bed, whatever everybody wants to do.

JWW: I see. Now I understand.

BARBARA: And then, if the other girl and I want to try it on, we do. It doesn’t always happen. Just now and then.

JWW: And do the males have homosexual contact too?

ROY: Never.

JWW: Any particular reason?

ROY: I could probably think of a dozen. The obvious one, and the one you’ll see written up constantly, is that a man feels his manhood threatened by the thought of playing faggot games. I can see how that might apply, but I just don’t buy it as the major factor. We’ve all of us discussed this at some length. I’d say half the men had some sort of homosexual contact during early adolescence—mutual masturbation, generally. I never did that, but I remember a friend and I had contests, you know, to see who could come the fastest, and while we never touched each other I’m sure a psychiatrist would say that it amounted to the same thing.

BARBARA: He’d say it was faggoty to enjoy watching another man with your wife, or to watch girls make it. Some psychiatrists say that anything you do proves that deep down inside you’re a faggot.

ROY: True, but to get beyond that, I think a more important reason lies in the fact that there’s a very basic difference between the sexual nature of man and woman. For a man, lovemaking demands the presence of a female love-object. It is what she is and what he is doing to her that turns him on.

BARBARA: And therefore—

ROY: Let me finish. For a woman, I think it’s different. Her role is somewhat more narcissistic. It is what is being done to her that she finds exciting, the caresses she is receiving, the excitement her flesh is arousing in her partner. So when she embraces another woman, she is essentially caressing herself and receiving caresses from herself. Thus homosexuality is compatible with a woman’s basic sexual nature, while a man just finds himself turned off by the whole thing.

BARBARA: You sound like a lecture, but I think you’re right. That’s why it’s far more important to a man that his partner be physically attractive, while a woman will be drawn strongly to a man who isn’t good-looking in any sense of the word. A lot of women will find a man attractive who is genuinely ugly, for instance. But I’ve never known of a man who is drawn to truly ugly women.

ROY: How about me? I’m drawn to you, funny face.

BARBARA: The comedian.

JWW: I’ll have to think about it, but you may have a pretty good theory there. The fear-of-being-a-faggot argument does wear a little thin, when you consider that a good many swingers don’t draw the line at any sexual practice and still find male homosexuality repugnant. But to get back to lesbianism, could you tell me how you reacted to it, Barb?

BARBARA: Favorably.

ROY: That’s the understatement of your career, baby.

BARBARA: You could be right. I’ll tell you about it, if you like. It was Sue who captured my elusive virginity, as it happened. It happened about two months after we joined the group. I had never even thought about it beforehand, not in connection with our group. During some of the meetings one girl would occasionally give another girl a long kiss, or cop a feel of her breasts, but I always thought this was just a form of kidding around. I didn’t think anybody actually did anything.

Anyway, we had Greg and Sue over for an evening of fun and games, and that night we worked it a little differently from the usual routine. First Greg and I would take a turn while Sue and Roy watched, and then it would be our turn and they would watch. Toward the end of the evening it got to be a little more intense than just watching. For instance, Roy and Sue were playing Puppy Love. You know, dog style, and I got very excited and reached between his legs and caressed his testicles while he had her. And another time Roy kissed my breasts while Greg was Frenching me. We hadn’t reached the threesome stage yet, but we were heading in that general direction.

Eventually everyone was pretty worn out, and Greg said something like, “Well, Roy and I are exhausted, girls. Why don’t the two of you enjoy yourselves while us men watch?”

I didn’t think he was serious, but I looked at Sue and saw her blush. That astonished me. I mean, I never thought anything would make that girl blush. He asked me if I wouldn’t like to make love to Sue, and I said something, I don’t know what exactly. I made a joke of it, and that was the end of it for that evening.

But the next day I found myself thinking of it, and the more I thought about it the more I decided that it wasn’t entirely a joke. There’s an expression for that, when you make a joke but it’s not just a joke—

ROY: Kidding on the square.

BARBARA: That’s right. I saw Sue that afternoon and I sort of mentioned it, said that it was really funny what Greg had suggested. And she blushed again, and I knew there was more to it than a joke.

She said, “Don’t you ever wonder what it would be like?” I said I hadn’t, but I was beginning to wonder now. I asked her if she wondered. “I don’t have to,” she said. “I know.”

It was the answer I had expected but it still shocked me. And she went on to tell me that it was no big thing with her, that she could take it or leave it alone, but that occasionally she found girls very attractive, and enjoyed making love with them. I asked her whom she had made love to from the group, and she told me.

Then I blurted out, “Well, do you find me attractive that way?” She said that she did, that I was beautiful and she was strongly attracted to me. And I found myself thinking what a little doll she was with those eyes and those slender hips and those perfect breasts. Then I remembered the wild oral routine I had seen her perform on Roy, and I instantly imagined her doing that sort of thing to me, and I guess I blushed.

She just looked into my eyes. It was as though her eyes were absolutely drinking me. And she said, “Would you like to, Barbara?”

I said, “Now?” “Right now,” she said. “We’re all alone, the children won’t be home for hours, and no one will ever know unless you want them to. If you don’t like it at least you’ll know one way or the other, you won’t have to go on wondering. And however it works out, it won’t change things between us. I’ll always love you, Barbara, whether or not you want us to love one another physically.”

ROY: Put the right melody line to that one and I think you’ve got a hit song on your hands.

BARBARA: Be still, soulless man. It was a very beautiful thing she said. I’ll never forget it. I said I wouldn’t know what to do. She said I wouldn’t have to do anything, that she wanted to make love to me. I couldn’t talk. I just nodded. We went upstairs and got undressed, and when I looked at her body I knew that I wanted her. It was a very pure and clean and beautiful experience. She knew just what to do to excite me, and it was wholly different from being with a man. It was gentle and slow. It was never as powerful as it is with a man, but it was, oh, sweet.

ROY: Getting back to what I said earlier, I think that fits in. Can you imagine two predominantly heterosexual men having a try at faggotry and thinking of it as sweet and beautiful? Women are different from men, that’s the real explanation.

BARBARA: Well, vive la difference. I just know it was wonderful, and I know, too, that it unlocked desires I never knew I had. I wanted to give pleasure as well as receive it. I touched Sue, I kissed her breasts, I kissed her genitals, I did everything to her. Things I had never even thought about doing, and suddenly I was learning that it thrilled me to do them. It was . . . well, kind of jarring. And very grand.

Of course, a private session like that is very different from having sex with another girl while the husbands watch. That’s pleasurable too, but there a large portion of the thrill comes in the excitement of the men and the sense of performing for them and all of that. When I’m alone with Sue it’s different. It’s a very profound sharing loving thing, and . . . my God, listen to me, I sound like a dyed-in-the-wool dyke.

JWW: No, I think I understand you.

•  •  •

Roy and Barbara are particularly good examples of swingers who have married their sex lives to their social lives. In a very real sense, they have no sexual contacts outside their circle of friends and, at least as significant, no important social contacts outside their sexual circle. Their group has remained essentially the same since they joined it; one couple left when the husband was transferred out of state, and two other couples have joined, but the membership is otherwise unchanged. The operation of the group is conservative in ritual and lacks the emphasis on far-out thrills which characterize many such organizations. While individual group members have their own sexual preferences—Sue’s oralism is one example, as is one male member’s special enjoyment of performing anal intercourse with women—varietism is more an added bonus than the reason for the group’s existence. Sadomasochism never plays a part, nor do transvestism, bestiality, obscene photography, or any of the other “exotic” characteristics of the swinging society.

Roy and Barbara seem to be unequivocally delighted with the way their lives have worked out. I asked if they had any regrets, and Roy could think of only one—“That it took us this long to get started. We wasted a lot of years.” Barbara disagreed, pointing out that the frustration and sexual monotony of their early years of marriage have equipped them to appreciate what they have now.

A great many problems and anxieties that beset the average swinger do not trouble the Hallidays. They engage in no correspondence, and thus have no fear of postal authorities. They limit their contacts to their friends, and need not worry about blackmail or public exposure. Nor is their version of swinging one in which greater and greater thrills are the goal; that sort of life often seems to be frustrating in the long run, when the inescapable discovery comes that there is nothing new under the sun.

Finally, they seem to have no conscious moral reservations about the way they are living. “I am doing nothing immoral,” Barbara stated. “I am not cheating my husband; instead I’m helping him live a fuller and richer and happier life. If there is a God, and if he’s intimately concerned with the way I live my life, I can’t imagine how I could be doing something that would bother him. In a sense, I don’t even think of all of this as being extramarital. That means outside of marriage, and this is very much inside of our marriage, it’s a part of our marriage. You could even say that the seven couples are married to one another. Each of those men is a sort of husband to me, each of the girls is a wife to Roy. I cannot imagine a better way to live.”

Then, I asked her, did she think everybody should live that way?

“No,” she said, “Absolutely not, any more than I think everybody should have two children or dye their hair or live in Youngstown. This life happens to suit us. Other people have their own personalities, their own inhibitions, their own drives. A lot of them would be uncomfortable living as we do. I think there are a great many couples who don’t live the way we do and who would be better off if they did, but that’s something else again.

“What I really think, what I know, is that everybody should live the way they want to and do anything they want to do as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. Whatever it is. If people want to flog each other with whips, if that’s what they really dig, if they’re happier doing it than doing without it, then more power to them. I may not want to play their games, I may not want to have them over for dinner, but let them live their life.”

“Absolutely,” Roy said. “And if a man happens to want an oriental girl—”

“Right, lover. We’ll get a Chinese girl for you and if we’re lucky she’ll have a Negro husband, and we’ll all live happily ever after.”

“Amen,” said Roy.

If It Feels Good I’ll Do It

The chapter’s title comes from a lapel button, and it is one of the more popular buttons throughout the country. I don’t know what sort of people buy this button. As far as that goes, I don’t know what sort of people buy any of these buttons. There is a button which reads Dracula Sucks, for example, and I have seen it offered for sale wherever buttons are sold, and I have never seen anyone actually wearing it, and I never hope to. Many of the button shops are located in hippie neighborhoods such as San Francisco’s Hashbury district and New York’s Lower East Side. I can’t believe that the hippies, who are generally penniless, would squander a quarter on a button. Maybe the tourists buy them and take them home and keep them hidden away among their souvenirs.

Whoever buys the buttons, and for whatever obscure reason, some of them do express unusual sentiments in a particularly pithy fashion. If it feels good I’ll do it—seven words to live by.

And Marcia Duffy lives by them.

•  •  •

Marcia will never stop traffic. She is a slender girl in her late twenties, about 5’7”, with small breasts and hips and thin, almost bony arms and legs. Her hair is a nondescript shade of light brown and she wears it quite long, sometimes loose, sometimes in a ponytail style that is several years too young for her. Her face is long, her mouth large, and her upper front teeth slightly bucked; the general impression is equine. She is at her worst in dresses and favors slack and sweaters, in which she looks moderately attractive.

At first glance, then, she is a rather plain girl, not quite ugly but closer to ugly than beautiful. A longer look will leave one with a changed impression of Marcia. It is hard to analyze, but it comes, I think, from the light in her eyes, the set of her mouth. She projects a definite aura of sexual abandon, of constant hunger, of the willingness to experiment with sexual pleasure in whatever form it might take.

Traditionally girls like Marcia have been popularly referred to as nymphomaniacs. Technically, though, this term is properly reserved for compulsively promiscuous women who, owing to partial frigidity, move from man to man in a rather desperate search for sexual gratification. Marcia does not fit this sense of the word. She reaches orgasm easily, finds sex extremely satisfying and fulfilling, and is about as frigid as a forest fire at the Equator.

If labels are required, a more accurate one for Marcia Duffy is polymorphous pervert. This was Freud’s term to describe the sexual nature of the child who has not grown to view sex as a function of a certain type of relationship. This sexual attitude, normal in childhood, is considered abnormal in adolescence or adulthood. A psychologist could explain the nature of polymorphous perversion in several thousand polysyllabic words, but its essence may be rendered far more economically.

If it feels good, the polymorphous pervert will do it.

“Different people are born for different things,” Marcia told me. “Some people like to work hard at their jobs, really get hung up in their work and the success they’re going after. Others, their big thing is a well-furnished home and a batch of kids. Or wearing beautiful clothes, or traveling all over the world, or the intellectual bag, reading great books and listening to great music and grooving with their own private beautiful thoughts. I’m a simple sort of girl. I like to fuck.”

Another time she expressed the same sentiment somewhat differently. “Some people just go through life as though it’s something you have to do on the way to the grave. I think a lot of people are like that, my first husband is a good example, they live like they’re putting in time at a boring job and when they finally die they can punch out for the day and go home. Others are lucky, they find the one thing in life that really turns them on. And when that happens to you it’s a blessing and a curse at the same time, because there’s this one thing that when you do it you’re alive and all the rest of the time you’re a walking corpse, and so you have to do it. Whatever it is, whether it’s dangerous or not, whether it’s right or wrong, it doesn’t matter. You have to do it because you know what it feels like to be alive and you can’t be satisfied with anything else. That’s why I can understand people who race cars and climb mountains, I know what moves them. Or people who gamble or drink or take dope. You can call it a hang-up or a habit or a neurosis or whatever you want, but that’s just a way of copping out. I’ve known a few heroin junkies well enough to know why they’re on the stuff, and it’s never once been because they can’t kick it. They’ll kick it a hundred times and start up again a hundred times, and the reason they stay on it is because they hate being straight and they love being high. Then they get to thirty-five or forty and heroin just doesn’t make it for them any more, they don’t mind being straight and they don’t get a kick out of being high, and then they kick it without any big thing about it at all, they just stop cold.”

(This, incidentally, is quite true; while it is virtually impossible to cure a heroin addict, spontaneous remission of addiction is an extremely common occurrence among addicts in their late thirties, generally after fifteen to twenty years of addiction.)

“For me, my thing is sex. It’s my version of racing cars or betting horses or shooting heroin. It turns me on. When I’ve got a cock in me I’m alive and when I don’t I’m dead and that’s all there is to it. You can tell me it’s wrong or it’s disgusting or it’s self-destructive or it’ll rot my teeth and make my hair fall out. None of that matters a damn. As long as it turns me on I’ll do it, and it always turns me on, and if it ever stops I’ll stop. But not until.”

If it feels good, Marcia Duffy will do it. And it always feels good.

•  •  •

She was born and brought up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Queens. Her father was an Irishman who had left the Church at an early age and who subsequently denounced religion with the special fervor of the apostate. He worked for the New York City Transit Authority, drank heavily, left home for long periods of time, and died of a liver ailment and general debilitation when Marcia was 13. Her mother, of mixed Slavic stock, ran a small stationery store. The family—there were two younger brothers—lived in rooms behind the store.

“My father was a bum,” Marcia said, “but he knew what he wanted. He wanted to keep all the distilleries working nights and he did the best he could. When he was drunk he would curse the Church at the top of his lungs. I think he was convinced that religion was nonsense but at the same time he wanted to believe in it because he felt empty without it, and if I had to guess I would say that was what made him drink. Whatever it was, he drank himself to death.

“But it’s not him I feel sorry for. You could say he wasted himself, but it’s my old lady who’s the real waste. He at least did what he wanted. She never had anything she wanted to do. Her whole life is just a struggle to stay alive and get by. That’s all she wants to do, just to get by. Nothing makes her happy and nothing makes her sad. She gets up in the morning, she manages the store, she goes to bed at night. Somewhere along the way she eats two or three meals and smokes a pack of cigarettes. I’m positive she never slept with anybody but my old man, and they couldn’t have done much, not the way he drank. She still runs that store. If she made a hundred thou a year out of it she would live the same way, she wouldn’t change a thing. I go out there and see her maybe once a year. We have nothing to say to each other. It’s the most depressing thing in the world. Last time I saw her I walked out of that store so uptight I couldn’t take it. I thought I’d go home and drag Phil into bed but then I decided I couldn’t wait, and I stopped the first man I met. Took him by the arm. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I’m serious, this isn’t a gag, but I’m horny as a toad and would you like to screw me?’ First he thought I was kidding and then he thought it was a con and finally he decided I was crazy, but a screw is a screw so we went to his place and we did it, and I came, and then I felt better.”

Marcia’s introduction to sex came at a very early age. Childhood seduction by an adult, often a relative, is a common element in the history of prostitutes and other promiscuous women. In Marcia’s case, the seducer was the proprietor of a candy store which she passed every day on the way to school.

“I must have been seven or eight, no more than that. All the kids knew about Mr. Poulard. I’m surprised he never got arrested, but I guess he must have had good connections on the force. The word was that he would give you candy if you let him do things. No one ever said what the things were, but you sort of knew that they were dirty.

“I went in there one day after school and said I wanted some candy and I didn’t have any money. I did it on a dare, another girl dared me to and I did it. God knows why. I said my little speech, and the old greaseball said he would be good to me if I would be good to him and pretend I was his own little girl. Somehow that sounded nice to me, I don’t know why, as though it would be fun pretending this dirty old man was my father. God knows why.

“But I said I would, and he went to the front of the store and pulled down the shade and put the Back In Ten Minutes sign up, and then he took me into the back room and had me sit on his lap. He put his hand up my dress and played with my legs and touched me through my panties. Then I guess he popped, because he gave a sigh and put me down off his lap and let me pick out whatever kind of candy I wanted. I remember I took a Mars Bar. People remember the damnedest things.

“I was a rare find for the old bastard. I never got scared, I never told a soul, and I came back for more two or three times a week for the rest of the year. At first it was the same routine, rubbing the legs and the crotch through the panties. He gradually worked himself up to bigger and better things. When he got to the point of taking down my panties and rubbing my slit with his fingers, I really began to enjoy it. It made me feel good. All tingly and warm and funny.

“His big production number was going down. It was a long time before he got around to it, and when he first put his mouth to me I was shook, I thought he was going to bite it. But all he did was lick me. I guess I was too young to have an actual orgasm, but whatever I had would do until the real thing came along. Good old Papa Poulard. I got all hot and tense whenever he started eating me, and then I would relax and feel loose and warm and fine all over.

“Eating was his big thing, but he also had me play with his penis occasionally. I thought it was really groovy the way it would start out small and get big and spit at me and then get small again. I felt very proud that I could make this wonderful thing happen.

“He also had me suck him off once. just the one time and never again. I liked it well enough, but I guess he was scared that they would really string him up by the balls if they found out, because other times when I tried to do it he would push my head away.

“By the time we reached the eating stage he told me it wasn’t right for me to call him Papa. But I did anyway. I liked to, I liked the sound of it, I got a kind of a kick out of it.

“After a year of this he wouldn’t let me in the store. I guess he had gotten more involved with me than he dared, and he was worried about what might happen. Obviously I went with him for the kicks. He always gave me candy, but what kind of a big deal was candy? For Christ’s sake, my mother owned a candy store, I could have all the candy I wanted. I did it because it made me feel great.”

•  •  •

The oedipal implications of the whole affaire de Poulard are fairly evident, and deserve more attention than the scope of this book permits. It is worth noting, though, that Marcia differs from most victims of similar seduction in that she derived actual physical enjoyment from her seducer’s attentions. For most girls in such circumstances, the reward is either purely emotional—they feel needed and worthwhile and desirable—or financial—they receive money or gifts which would otherwise be denied them. In either case the seeds are sown for the development of the prostitute personality, the exchange of sexual favors for non-sexual gains.

This was by no means the case with Marcia. While her association with Mr. Poulard did provide emotional gratification of a sort, it also provided pure physical pleasure. The association of sex with pleasure was established, and Marcia headed not toward the joyless sex of prostitution but the wildly sensual sex of polymorphous perversion.

Her sexual development during adolescence followed a predictable route. By age 14 she had lost her virginity. and within a year afterward she had acquired a reputation for wanton promiscuity. “My name was on the wall of every high school men’s room in Queens.” Throughout this period she knew that what she was doing was considered morally reprehensible, that it gave her a bad reputation and damaged her prospects for a happy life.

“But this didn’t matter. I was a sexaholic. I did everything the same as before, but I knew it was wrong, and so all I accomplished was I felt rotten about it and hated myself. It was like the difference between a drunk and an alcoholic—they both drink as much, but the alcoholic goes to the meetings and spends half his time feeling bad about it.”

At sixteen, after a number of close escapes, the law of averages caught up with Marcia. She became pregnant, had the baby out of wedlock, and gave it up for adoption through a welfare agency. “I thought the world was over. I decided I would get religion, I would never let a boy touch me again until I was married. There was this home they kept us in out on Long Island, and there was this girl I knew there, a very sweet girl named Tanya, and we would have long talks about how boys were rotten and all they did was get girls like us in trouble, and didn’t respect us or care for us. You can imagine the dialogue better than I can remember it.

“She was older, she must have been nineteen or twenty. And she’d been around. She did a bit at a girl’s reformatory for stealing a car. I suppose that was where she first made the lesbian scene. You must have seen it coming, the long earnest talks about how girls can get along better without men, how women can know real love but men are animals. If you did see it coming you were miles ahead of me, because I honestly didn’t. For a girl who screwed like a rabbit I was extremely ignorant. I didn’t know much of anything about the facts of life. I wasn’t a reader and nobody ever told me and all I ever knew was that it felt great when a boy got on top of you and stuck his cock in you. So I didn’t know much of anything about lesbians beyond the fact that they existed.

“So one night Tanya got in bed with me. This was common there because a lot of the girls had little gay scenes going, but good old Marcia the Moron just thought it was friendship and cuddling together for warmth. She had two fingers up me before I knew what was happening, and by that time it was too late to do anything because I’d had the bad luck to find out I liked it. Once I find out I like something that’s the end of the line for me. From then on until I got out of that hole I wouldn’t let Tanya alone. I was after her all the time, and if she wasn’t in the mood I found a girl who was. We did everything, eating and fingering, smuggling sausages from the mess hall and using them on each other as dildos. Everything.

“Then I got out of there and went home, and within two days I let a guy in the neighborhood take me down to his cellar and lay me, and then I thought, hell, I was the lowest of the low, a pushover tramp and a lesbian besides, and I’d probably screw an elephant if I could figure out how, and I didn’t deserve to go on living. I used a razor blade on my wrists and I couldn’t even do that right. They found me bleeding all over the bathroom sink and rushed me to the hospital, and I had to stay there in the psycho ward for two weeks of observation. Then they sent me home and told me please, not to try to kill myself anymore.

“So I went out and let a guy pick me up because what the hell else was I going to do. It went through my mind that I would have one final bang and then go home and kill myself permanently. So we balled, and it was good, better than usual, and just after I came, as I was lying there in that sweet rosy glow you get when it’s good, I had this thought. I said to myself, Marcia Musclehead, you damned fool, you could have missed this. You could of been dead and missed this. And right then I took an oath that I would never so help me God try to kill myself, and there have been good times since then and a thousand bad bad times, and I always kept that oath. I never tried to kill myself again.

“And I never will. You reach a point where you say, okay, screw it, this is what I am, maybe it stinks, maybe it’s more bad than good, maybe it would be worlds groovier to be somebody else, but screw it, this is what I am and I’ll live with it. It was a lot more years before I got to that point but I’m there now and I’m not about to fall off. This is me, I won’t kill myself and I won’t eat my heart out. This is Marcia Duffy, so take her or leave her alone.”

•  •  •

The route Marcia traveled to this particular level of self-realization was as rocky a road as the one to Damascus. She made two bad marriages along the way. The first lasted for almost three years, the second ended in less than eight months.

“My first husband was one of those nice guys who finish last. He was a college graduate with a job in sales promotion for a toy manufacturer. He took the job because they had a great profit-sharing and pension plan, and he got lots of expense-account lunches and the company paid his way to trade fairs. He wasn’t exactly a world beater. All he wanted was a nice comfortable life and a house and kids. I understand he’s remarried now and he’s happy. I can believe it, because he’d be perfect for the right girl, but the two of us, all we did was tear each other up.”

Marcia married him because she saw marriage as her sole chance for a normal life. She thought it would change her, that the sexual outlet it provided would satisfy her. Love didn’t enter into the picture. “At the time I didn’t know about love. Love to me meant you could make it together. Howie and I could make it together so that was close enough to love for Duffy the Dumbbell. And Howie thought he was in love with me because we went to bed together, and I was his first. He had been with hookers but never a girl who did it with him because she wanted to. I met him at a party in the Village and went back to his place and we balled. He couldn’t believe it. He thought I was the greatest thing since tinned salmon, he went out of his head for me. For sex, really, but sex was me to him. And it was cool, because I thought I had latched onto the greatest stud since Whirlaway, because all he wanted to do was ball.

“The thing was, it was the novelty that had him. By the time we were married the novelty had worn off for him. He had worked it all out of his system, and now he could go back to his true interest in life, which was being a bore.” She laughed at the memory. “Christ, it was awful. It would have been funny as hell if it had been happening to somebody else. Before we were married it was impossible to turn him off, and now it was impossible to turn him on. ‘We’ve got all our lives to make love,’ he told me one night. ‘We don’t have to use it all up now.’ It was just like his stinking pension plan. I told him he was putting all his extra sex in a bank so he could enjoy himself when he was sixty-five.

“And at the beginning there was this big thing about how he loved me in spite of my past. Tramp or no tramp, I love you—that routine. Later on, when his schlong went into a permanent state of wilt, I heard a different version of that line. Suddenly it turned into Married or single, you’re still a tramp. I just recently learned the right word for Howie. Sanctimonious. He was a sanctimonious prick.”

Marcia began leaving the apartment for long stretches of time and picking up strange men for casual sex. She waited for Howie to catch her at it, and when he failed she confessed. Each time he forgave her, and each time she swore to be faithful, and each time she broke her own vow.

“I finally got the message. I was going to cheat until hell froze, and he was going to forgive me each and every time, and waltz me around again, Willie. I flew down to Alabama and came back with a divorce.”

Her life between marriages was about what one can expect—intermittent affairs coupled with casual sexual encounters, occasional forays into lesbianism, and violent emotional upheavals. “I decided that if I was going to be the easiest lay in the world I might as well be the best lay in the world, too. But I didn’t like the kind of person I was turning into. Bitchy, aggressive. I know that a lot of girls like me like to be the aggressor. They want to select men and use them and throw them away. They enjoy being dominant. I didn’t enjoy it at all, I wanted to be courted and petted and chosen like anyone else, but I was being forced into behaving this way in order to have sex as often as I wanted it.

“Then I went and did another stupid thing. I fell in love for the first time and it hit me like a bullet in the forehead. That was Jimmie, and I married the son of a bitch.”

Jimmie was a far cry from Howie. A Greenwich Village artist who had never sold a painting, he somehow managed to live without ever working. “He was like hell an artist. In all the time we were together I never saw him paint a damned thing. He was an artist because it was a respectable way of being permanently out of work. What he did was drink wine and ball college girls. I was no college girl but I was ten years younger than he was and better in bed than six dormitories full of Barnard sophomores, and I guess that was enough for Jimmie, because we got married. I suggested it, but he was all for it all the way.”

While the marriage was a fiasco, it did serve one purpose; it introduced Marcia to the swinging society. “It started with him bringing home guys, sometimes friends of his, sometimes strangers. He and the guy would sit around drinking for awhile and then he would say, ‘You see my wife? She ain’t the prettiest girl in the world but she might be the world’s best lay. If you’re in the mood, why don’t you throw it to her? I don’t mind, and she’s always ready. All you got to do is look at her and she comes in her pants.’ The first time he did this I thought all right, I’ll call the bastard’s bluff, and I hopped out of my clothes and hauled this friend of his into the bedroom. But it was no bluff. Jimmie dug watching us. Then when the clod put on his pants and went home Jimmie would be excited, and we would ball. I would lie there hating him but loving the sex.

“Or else he would bring guys home for threesomes. He’d have me blow a guy while he laid me or the other way around. A few times he would pick up some college girl and get her drunk and bring her home and we would have a threesome that way. I didn’t like that, I didn’t care for it, it was taking advantage, but sexually I couldn’t help it. I dug it very much.

“Then he came home with one of these tabloid papers with swinger advertisements in it. It cost a quarter so I’m sure he didn’t buy it. He must have found it in a trash barrel somewhere. He wrote a letter to one couple. Their ad was the usual sort of thing. Swinging couple, he 36, muscular, athletic, she 27, petite, 34-22-33, enjoy nudism, photography and French culture, the whole bit. They called us on the phone and we took a train up to their place. They lived in Westchester County, I forgot which town.

“And it was a whole new world . . .”

•  •  •

The world Marcia found that night was one she had looked for in dreams without ever knowing it existed. It was a world in which people indulged their sexual appetites to the fullest without demeaning themselves in the process. It was a world in which a woman with her sexual make-up was looked upon not as a tramp or a pushover or a neurotic but as a member of the sexual elite. It was a world in which she could give herself with utter candor without sacrificing her femininity.

“For years I was a doormat, and now people were putting me on a pedestal.”

The sexual activities were as intense and unusual as any she had experienced, but that was only part of the new world. What really delighted her was the discovery that there were people who shared her sexual attitudes while remaining respectable, cultured, sensitive human beings. All this time, she said, she had thought that sexual adventurers were bums like Jimmie. Now she was finding out that this was not the case at all.

“They had a lovely home, they dressed beautifully, they spoke like Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. And they were beautiful people, really striking. He had a marvelous build and she was really striking, jet black hair and a delicious figure. And they knew what to do in bed, that was the best part of all. You wouldn’t believe how many people don’t. All the yo-yos who think you just get on and wiggle your butt and come as fast as you possibly can. They knew techniques I hadn’t even heard of and they prided themselves in their techniques. The guy’s object wasn’t to get his rocks off, it was to please me, to thrill me and make me happy.

“We did everything in the book, we made it a dozen different ways. Then they served us a great dinner with two different wines and we sat around talking about the swinging life. I was drinking it up with both ears. They couldn’t tell me enough, and I walked out of there neck-deep in plans, like my whole life had a direction now. And we get on the train, and Jimmie turns to me and says it’s an awful long ride just to get laid. That was Jimmie.”

Further forays into the swinging society made two things abundantly clear to Marcia. First, this was obviously the stratum of society in which she belonged. Second, she could function there much more effectively without Jimmie.

“A lot of the people we met liked me and didn’t care for Jimmie. Face it, he was a bum. He wasn’t even clean. It took an act of God to get him under a shower. But the big thing wasn’t that other people couldn’t stand Jimmie. It was that I couldn’t stand him any more myself, and there was no reason to go on living with him.

“So I did the Alabama number again and came back single. I got my own place and started making contacts with people. I wasn’t back a week when the bell rang and it was Jimmie. He said, ‘Well, I see you got your old name back and everything. I just thought I’d drop by and say there’s no hard feelings on my part and I hope none on yours either.’ I said there were no feelings, hard or soft. ‘So why don’t we ball one last time for old time’s sake, and to see what it’s like now that we ain’t legal?’

“So I figured why not, and we did, and it wasn’t bad but it was also nothing special, and when we were done he got up and gave me his lazy smile and said, ‘Well, ex-wife, you’re still the best lay in the world.’ And I said, ‘Well, sweetie, you’re still a son of a bitch and a bum, and it’s been fun.’ Then I sent him home and opened all the windows to air the place out, and that was Jimmie, and you can have him.”

•  •  •

With the termination of her second marriage, Marcia was able to find a comfortable and fulfilling niche for herself in the world of the swingers. She has been functioning as a swinger for several years and expects to go on forever, or until sex stops playing its current role in her life. “I’ve been a sexpot for a little over twenty years,” she says, “which is about as long a time as the average junkie stays on heroin, so maybe I’ll wake up one day and the desire won’t be there, and I’ll find some other kind of ribbon to wrap up my life in. Or maybe it’s more like alcohol where you stay on it forever and your body adapts to it, and then I’ll swing until I die. I’ll play whatever cards they deal me.”

In every real sense, Marcia’s life at present is infinitely more stable and secure than anything she has known in the past. She has friends who not only accept her but actually treasure her for what she is. She earns a sufficient income by entertaining out-of-town buyers for several dress manufacturers.

“You could technically call it prostitution,” she told me, “in that I go out with these fellows and I’m paid for it. I’ve always said I could never be a prostitute and I don’t feel that I’m one now. True, I’m being paid, but the guys I sleep with are not the guys who pay me. As far as they know I’m just a date, and what they try to do is take me out and show me a good time. They don’t want whores. They want a nice pleasant attractive girl who will end the evening by sleeping with them, and about a quarter of the time they don’t even make a pass and I get paid the same, sex or no sex. The way I look at it I’m paid to go out with them, and balling them is something I do because I want it as much as they do, which at least ninety percent of the time I do. They aren’t as good in bed as the average swinger, but for the most part they are very nice fellows who just want to have a good time, and they are gentle and considerate and it really makes them happy when you show them a really good time in the hay.”

This picture of Marcia’s life among the swingers, stable and secure and happy as never before, takes on a sharper focus when one realizes that she is presently leading as wild a sex life as any I have ever heard of. She is a hard-core anything goes 32nd-degree Swinger. If her name was once scrawled on every high school men’s room wall in Queens, it is now entered in the little black book of every truly kinky swinger from Boston to Atlanta, but the little girl with the mousy hair and the buck teeth who was a doormat in one world is a divinity in the other.

Any attempt at a biographical summary of Marcia’s life for the past few years is foredoomed. It could not possibly avoid reading exactly like the précis of a hard-core pornographic novel, with several aberrations piled one atop the other.

Both the quantity and the variety of Marcia’s sexual contacts literally stagger the mind. Perhaps I can best illustrate this by simply stating that, after my first interview with her, I seriously toyed with the idea of erasing my tapes and writing the girl off as a pathological liar. I found it impossible to believe that she was telling the truth. Fortunately I first checked out her story by asking a variety of swingers about her. An astonishing number of them not only knew her but had had sex with her. A selection of their comments might be of value—

•  •  •

“Marcia Duffy? No matter how many women you have, that’s one you never forget. It’s not just that she can’t get enough. The world is full of women like that, hung-up stretched-out girls who can take on an army and never get done because they never get satisfied. But Marcia’s different. She gets her kicks and still wants more, and when you make it with her you don’t feel as though you’re inadequate. You feel that you’re the greatest lay in the world, and you’ve thrilled her beyond belief, and the reason she wants somebody else is no fault of your own, it’s just that she loves sex so much that she wants to ball the whole world. If she could roll the entire planet into a cylinder and jam it into her snatch I think she’d do it, and I think the Earth would quit before she did.”

•  •  •

“I only met her once, but it was something. We threw a stag for this friend of mine, a bachelor party. He and his bride had been swinging together for over a year and were only making it legal because she thought it would be groovy to have some kids, so it wasn’t the usual bachelor party thing at all. The guests were all male and all pretty seasoned swingers, and the entertainment was Marcia Duffy. I don’t know whose idea it was to bring her but they ought to give the guy a medal.

“She walked into the room wearing a pair of stockings and a wedding veil and nothing else. Her body is nothing spectacular, hardly any breasts to speak of and not much padding anywhere. And she’s got this sort of horsy face. It’s a funny thing about her face. At first you think she’s ugly, and after awhile you decide she’s actually quite attractive, and later on you realize it doesn’t matter whether her face is ugly or pretty, but that there’s something about it that turns you on.

“Four guys grabbed the bridegroom and stripped him and tied him to a table, and then Marcia went to work on him. She had him six ways and backwards. She played him for a solid hour until he was in such agony he would have cried if only he could have gotten the smile off his face. She drained him so completely we had to send him home in a matchbox.

“Then she turned to the rest of us with a Shirley Temple smile and a little innocent voice and said that she was going to have the time of her life and hoped we had the same idea. And she said that if we had any wild ideas we should just name them, because she was an anything girl and there was no scene she wouldn’t make.

“It was the most cockeyed orgy I’ve ever attended. There were about thirty of us and just one of her, and she did everything in the book and wrote a few new books beside. There wasn’t one of us who didn’t have her at least three times, and there wasn’t a part of her body that somebody didn’t get into, and there wasn’t a thing that happened that didn’t give that crazy doll a charge. I will never forget her. I could bang Sophia Loren in living color on the Sullivan show and it still wouldn’t drive that nutty horse-faced broad out of my mind.”

•  •  •

“. . . told me he saw Marcia Duffy getting herself gobbled by a dog at Irv and Betsy’s anniversary party. I said listen, that’s not worth reporting, not where the Duffy kid is concerned. I said, that’s ordinarily too tame for her to bother with. Forget it, I said, but I’ll tell you what, I said, if you ever see her getting Greeked by a two-horned rhinoceros, then maybe you got a story worth repeating. Because, I said, this kid, this Duffy kid, she’d screw a snake if somebody would hold its head . . .”

•  •  •

“I’ve heard all the stories about her and I don’t care what they say, I cannot believe that Marcia is heterosexual. She may get some pleasure from men but anyone who makes love to a woman as well as she does is obviously a lesbian first and foremost. She is the most gentle and tender and warm and considerate lover I have ever had. Male or female. And that, lover, covers rather a lot of ground—”

•  •  •

Marcia herself tells many of the same stories about herself, but there is a difference. When she speaks, the awe which flavors other accounts is missing. She is quite matter-of-fact about her most incredible exploits, and this tone coupled with her earnest gaze and uncannily innocent manner makes one wonder if she is actually saying what one is hearing.

“So many swingers will dig one variety of balling and then turn around and put down another as perverted,” she told me, wonderingly. “Like all the girls who love to go down on each other but think faggots are disgusting. Or all the swingers who come down hard on the Sadie Mae people. Faggots don’t bother me and neither does sadomasochism. As a matter of fact it’s a scene I like to make now and then. Not the extreme stuff, the torture stuff, because a person can get permanently injured and that turns me off. But other things.

“Bondage, for example. It has a special kick to it when one person is tied up, restrained. It’s harmless but it adds variety as a change of pace. Or flagellation, a little paddling on the rear end. People talk a lot of psychological crud about it, but you don’t have to go that deep. It’s a physical thing the way a spanking will excite a person. The nerve endings down there are very closely related to the sexual business. I remember a party, they were almost all Sadie Mae types except this one teenager that somebody brought, a very cute type with red hair and freckles. She was probably eighteen but she looked all of twelve, and this made the whole routine very boss as far as a lot of the crowd was concerned. She thought it was just going to be a regular orgy, she’d been at Group Gropes with the Sexual Freedom League and she thought it was one of those things. But instead the whole idea was that they would take this girl by surprise and turn her out and show her what Sadie Mae was all about.

“And that’s what happened. They had her tied up and fastened so that she was kneeling on the floor, and then they made her give some head to everybody, men and women too, and then they started on the paddling. They had all sorts of whips and rods. The Sadie Maes are very long on paraphernalia, they’re real collectors.

“They lashed the kid for about half an hour. Not too hard, not hard enough to do any damage or give her more pain than she could handle, but hard enough so that no one could get the idea that she was being tickled. It was a whipping, plain and simple.

“And she hated it, and she cried and begged all the way through it, and within half an hour it got to her. It just plain happened to her. All of a sudden she was squirming and moaning and making all sorts of wild noises, and then she was coming. An orgasm, and a big one. She wasn’t converted. When they finally let her out of there she ran away screaming. But it proved a point. When it’s done properly, a session of Sadie Mae will turn anybody on. That girl may never have thought it was sexy, not even while it was going on, but she came just the same.”

An unattached male has many problems in developing contacts in the swinging society. For a single girl, however, no such problems exist; she is invariably sought actively by couples anxious for threesomes, is always welcome at parties and orgies. If she wants to get together for a swap session with a couple or couples and a partner is required, it is never a problem for her to find a man to join her.

Thus Marcia has found it quite comfortable functioning as a single swinger—or a swingle, as the species is occasionally capsuled. She has not remarried, although a surprisingly high number of men have proposed marriage to her over the years.

She told me, though, that she had not ruled out the possibility of an eventual third marriage.

“I can see how it would work,” she said. “No romantic nonsense about true love conquering all, because things just don’t happen that way for people like me. But there have been a lot of decent guys I’ve met on the swinger circuit, and I can see how sooner or later I might meet one and want to hook up with him on a permanent basis. It hasn’t happened yet but I can see how it could.

“He would have to be a person very much like me, that goes without saying. And our marriage would have to be a swingers’ marriage, and all the way. Not just that we would swing together but that we would both be perfectly free to swing separately. Complete freedom on both sides, that’s how it would have to be.”

I asked her why she would want to bother with a marriage of that sort, assuming that romantic love did not enter the picture. Did she want some day to have children?

“Jesus, don’t be silly. Can you see me as a mother? Anyway, that particular store has gone out of business. A year ago I showed a little sense and had my tubes tied.”

I asked how she had managed to get the operation performed. It is one which doctors are reluctant to perform upon women who have not already had several children.

“There are swinging doctors, too,” she said. “Doctors, lawyers, maybe even Indian chiefs, though I never met one. No, I wouldn’t want to have kids. I couldn’t handle it. But there’s other reasons to get married, if it’s the right kind of marriage. In any kind of life you feel the need to have something that’s steady, something permanent. Somebody who’ll always be there and you can talk to over the years. There’s a kind of loneliness you get as you grow older, a loneliness that works no matter how many people you surround yourself with or how much balling you do, and you want to have somebody close to you. I start feeling this from time to time now and I’m not even thirty yet. It’s not a strong feeling now, not strong enough to make me start hunting for a husband, but it could grow and things could change, and I wouldn’t be surprised, Johnny, if I was married by the time you finish writing your book.”

(As of this writing, Marcia is still single.)

“And anyway, if it doesn’t work out Alabama is only a couple of hours away, and they give me good service there, you know. They know me by now. They say if you get divorced three times the fourth is on the house . . .”

Is she happy with her life? Does she think it’s the right kind of life? These are difficult questions for anyone. But Marcia considered them thoughtfully, fingering her long hair.

“Well, I could say what’s happy and what’s right and so on, but forget that. I do what I want and I’m more alive than dead and that’s happy as far as I’m concerned. As far as the right kind of life is concerned, I can say it’s the right kind of life for me.

“But I wouldn’t give a lecture at Radcliffe and say ‘Hop to it, girls, this is the way to live.’ Because it isn’t. You know, a lot of the time I would like to be somebody who lives in a house and never balls anyone but her husband and feels all full and happy from just that, the house and the kids and the husband. I’d rather be somebody like that than Marcia Moron the Sex Machine. I would also rather have a pretty face and straight teeth and blonde hair and good legs and big tits, but I don’t have these things and never will, any more than I’ll wake up one day and be Mrs. Happy Housewife with charge accounts and heavy furniture. That’s not the hand of cards I was dealt, so I might as well wish for wings.”

“So you’re happy with the way you’ve played those cards?”

“You could call it that. They’re not bad cards, they win a lot of small pots.”

“And no regrets?”

Her eyes widened slightly, and I understood the full strength of Marcia Duffy’s sex appeal.

“Just one regret,” she said, her voice husky.

“What’s that?”

“That we’re here talking, Johnny, in a nice room with a comfortable bed in it, and we’re sitting in chairs with our clothes on when we could be having more fun naked in that bed. That’s a regret, Johnny, but it’s one we could probably handle.”

Marcia Duffy.

If it feels good, she’ll do it.

Three Is Not A Crowd

CLEVELAND AREA

Refined, intelligent moderns, he 28 and muscular, she 29, C-cup, shapely, wish to hear from couples and swingles throughout Great Lakes region. Come one, come all—three is not a crowd . . .

The above advertisement appeared in a recent issue of a magazine published by a correspondence club catering to members of the swinging society. It is typical of many such ads placed by couples anxious to enlarge their circles of sexual acquaintances. It is the last line, explaining cryptically that three is, contrary to the old adage, even better company than two, which separates this particular advertising message from the greater portion of notices placed by couples who are interested solely in meetings with other couples.

The Cleveland couple has thus expressed a willingness to engage in what sexologists call troilism, what the French call a ménage à trois, and what an ever-increasing group of Americans call good clean family fun. For most swingers, troilism is a component of the sexual scene but hardly its main feature. Many enjoy an evening with a bisexual female as a pleasant change of pace from the more usual forms of couple games. Less frequently, couples will admit an unattached male to their bedroom, but there are always far more unattached males anxious to make this particular scene than there are couples willing to have them. Such threesomes most often occur in marriages in which the wife is clearly the dominant figure and the husband’s enjoyment of the sexual relations are largely voyeuristic.

In the course of my researches, I did have the good luck to encounter one couple whose participation in swinging life was limited exclusively to threesomes, with either an extra man or an extra woman joining husband and wife. Their threesomes were by no means limited to one-night stands; in quite a few cases they had entertained a male or female guest at their home for a week or more, and commonly took a girl or young man along as their guest on vacations in Europe or the West Indies.

•  •  •

David and Carole Shelton were at first quite reluctant to grant me an interview. They were, in fact, rather put out that I had learned of their existence, and considerably more annoyed at the thought of my making their sexual predilections public information. It was only after I had presented gilt-edged personal references and assured them that any material written about them would incorporate neither their names nor any data about them which would serve to identify them that they consented to discuss their lives as swingers.

The Sheltons are unquestionably several social strata above the garden variety swinger. Both David and Carole came from socially prominent families, attended exclusive private schools, and inherited substantial wealth. Their wit, poise, and good looks, along with their urbanity and zest for living, qualify them for inclusion in whatever “In” group enjoys semantic popularity—the Beautiful People, the Jet Set, or what you will.

The very rich, according to F. Scott Fitzgerald, are different from you and me. “Yes, they have more money,” Hemingway is supposed to have retorted, but the truth of Fitzgerald’s observation is undeniable. Perhaps one of the less significant of these differences, but one of special relevance here, is the particular standards of the rich regarding sexual morality. A great deal of leeway is permitted to members of this class who are otherwise acceptable persons, and unusual sexual behavior which would automatically lead to ostracism in middle-class society is tacitly accepted in many of the higher social circles. Everyone may know that BeeJay had a thing going with her brother a few years back, and everyone may nod and cluck over Everett’s weakness for Arab boys, but no one claims BeeJay as an incestuous little mink or fails to invite Everett to the Charity Ball.

Thus it is not unlikely that, in the particular social world in which David and Carole Shelton move, their troilistic activities are at the least suspected and most likely generally recognized. Nevertheless the possibility of their being identified as a result of our interview genuinely worried them. “It’s not merely a question of publicity,” David pointed out. “There’s also the omnipresent threat of criminal prosecution. I needn’t remind you of the tiresome laws regarding sexual behavior. Not only the Blue Laws, for we’re not quite paranoid enough to worry about being sent to jail for extracoital copulation or homosexual contacts, not in this day and age. But the authorities do take a rather dim view of sexual relations with minors, and I’m afraid I must say we do rather a lot of that. The laws are damned unrealistic, don’t you think? The age of consent is 18 in most states, and I can’t recall the last time I so much as heard of an 18-year-old virgin outside of a cloistered convent. Or inside now that I think of it.”

“I can understand establishing some legal age of consent,” Carole put in. “One does want to protect little children from degenerates, surely. But the present situation is foolish, and it could become inconvenient.”

I assured them that no recognition could be made from the material as I would prepare it. For this reason, I have made rather more than the usual alterations in biographical specifics concerning David and Carole, but with these insignificant exceptions the material quoted from their interview is verbatim.

•  •  •

David Shelton is in his early forties. He is just under six feet in height. A regular tennis player and skier, he has maintained a trim, even elegant figure. His hair is jet black gone slightly gray at the temples. He has a broad forehead, cool blue eyes, aristocratic features, and a precisely trimmed black moustache. When I interviewed him he was wearing a maroon smoking jacket with pearl gray slacks and turtle-skin loafers. It was an ensemble few men could have worn without looking foppish; David appeared at ease and eminently in style.

Carole, a dark blonde, stood almost as tall as her husband. She is almost fifteen years younger than her husband and married him ten years ago during the summer vacation following her first and only year of college. Her face is strikingly beautiful, her figure quite opulent. David said at one point that his wife was living proof that well-bred girls were not invariably flat-chested.

Our interview began, not awkwardly in that the Sheltons were too graceful to permit one to become ill at ease in their company, but rather tentatively; I did not know quite how to broach the subject. We approached it obliquely by discussing some of my research findings to date. They were very much interested in the size and scope of America’s swinging society, and the operations of the correspondence clubs especially fascinated them.

•  •  •

DAVID: One reads this sort of thing in Sunday supplements and never knows how large a grain of salt ought to be taken with it. What does astonish me is that presumably sensible men and women will compromise themselves by sending letters and photographs to total strangers. Don’t they get into a bit of trouble?

JWW: The Post Office Department has made things difficult for quite a few swingers. And there are always stories about people who have had trouble with blackmailers.

DAVID: I can imagine. But here we’re interviewing you, aren’t we, and oughtn’t it to be the other way around? You want to know who does what and with which and to whom, to quote the old limerick, don’t you? I might say that from what you’ve told me I can understand why we would be of interest. We do run parallel to these swingers you’ve talked of in some respects, and yet in other ways we’re not like them at all.

CAROLE: We did trade partners once, you know.

DAVID: That was purely a lark, it was years ago, and you’ll remember it was singularly unsuccessful. No, I’m thinking more along the lines of what we do now, and I think Mr. Wells is as well. True? Now let me see how best to put this.

Well. Carole and I are very much in love and have been ever since we met. By this I mean not merely that we care for each other and desire happiness for each other. Ours is a more profound sort of love. We actually require one another’s company so intensely that a separation of more than a few hours is genuinely painful. We play the same sports, read the same books, cherish the same friends, and truly share everything. Our thoughts, our hopes, our fears, our sorrows, everything. If you cut Carole I would bleed. It’s that sort of closeness, and I’m making such a point of this because we’ve found our sort of love to be a very rare and precious thing indeed.

CAROLE: And the same closeness pertains in sex, of course.

DAVID: Of course. Sexually we are quite perfect together. That does sound unspeakably pompous, doesn’t it?

CAROLE: Yes.

DAVID: You must learn not to answer rhetorical questions. If pompous, true nevertheless. We anticipate one another, we share one another’s responses. In sexual matters, each of us in a sense becomes the other. Yin and yang, everything its opposite, a whole comprising the sum of its parts—you might say, actually, that Carole and I are component parts of a living entity known as The Sheltons. We add up to one person with two bodies.

CAROLE: Which is where the value of a third person arises. I’m sorry, am I getting ahead of things?

DAVID: Not really. I was going to make the same point but take a little longer to get there. Look, try to visualize Carole and myself as separate halves of a single emotional organism. Now, in that sense, when the two of us make love—which, I might add, we do far more frequently than we add a stranger to our boudoir—but when we make love, you might almost regard our activity as autoerotic. Do you follow me?

JWW: Yes, but—

CAROLE: God knows it’s not at all like sitting on the toilet and playing with oneself—

DAVID: What an unflattering thought—

CAROLE: —but there is an autoerotic element, if not what you would call a masturbatory one. Do you think narcissistic has a better connotation, dear?

DAVID: Yes.

CAROLE: The other smacks so of pimply adolescents. David told you that each of us is the other, or that each of us is half of a dual being. Thus when we embrace each other we embrace ourselves.

DAVID: Of course all lovemaking is narcissistic, to the extent that one sees oneself in one’s partner.

CAROLE: Yes. And the more complete the identification—or, if you will, the stronger and more profound one’s love—the more narcissistic the performance becomes. Not in a negative but in a purely descriptive sense.

DAVID: If you can follow that line of thought, the next step is not too difficult. When Carole and I share the sexual affections of a third party, a young man or young lady, it simply adds a new dimensions to our sexual lives. This emotional entity, this living being which we call The Sheltons, abandons narcissism for a moment and takes a lover from the outside world. Do you follow me? It’s an involved line of reasoning, and I’d surely hate to defend it before a television audience, or even present it to a jury of my peers, whoever such might be. I do believe it holds water, though.

JWW: Perhaps, but—

DAVID: You’ve found a hole in my theory?

JWW: Not that. I find it very interesting, and in a way it fits in with certain emotional tendencies I’ve noted in conventional wife-swapping, if there is such a thing. But if you’ll forgive an impertinence—

DAVID: Oh Lord, in view of the topic under discussion I do think we may all speak frankly!

JWW: Well, I was going to say that your argument had a smell of sophistry about it.

DAVID: (Laughing.) Oh, that is good. I suppose it does, doesn’t it? I was going to say that it had rather a Jesuitical flavor to it, but I doubt that the Jesuits would delight in the comparison. It’s true, though; I’m sure if Thomas Aquinas ever found himself in the unhappy position of marshalling arguments for troilism he would hit upon just the line I’ve taken. Still, you’ll want to consider it. Carole and I think there’s truth in it over and above the display of dazzling logical virtuosity, eh?

CAROLE: We also know it doesn’t pretend to tell the whole story.

DAVID: Hardly. Another fact worth noting is that we are a rather kinky pair. Or what’s the word Toni likes so much? Pervy?

CAROLE: Yes. And just for the record, I dislike that word at least as much as Toni likes it.

DAVID: I’ll banish it from my working vocabulary forthwith. Let’s stay with kinky, then. We both of us have many perverse impulses, coupled with a special delight in that which is forbidden. And why, incidentally, do all these liberal and enlightened persons you talk of make such a point of denying the obvious attraction of forbidden fruit? Methinks they protest too much, but don’t they realize the Limbo that awaits them on the day when all acts are permissible? Nothing will yield a special secret thrill any more.

CAROLE: Tell Mr. Wells what you said the other day about pornography.

DAVID: I only said that as soon as pornography is readily available it loses what the courts call its appeal to the prurient interest, and without it the trash is no earthly good, is it? The anti-obscenity statutes are all stuff and nonsense, but they did perform the negative function of preserving the potency of underground pornography. It wasn’t too very long ago that one felt a quivering in one’s loins upon seeing the word fuck in print. Because it was forbidden, obviously, not because of any magical property of those four letters. Now there are no unprintable words any more, no actions that can’t be discussed at length in print. Fuck fuck fuck. Cunt cocksucker. I can talk like that, and you can print it in your book, and no one will raise an eyebrow, much less a phallus. I know there’s nothing too much more absurd than being nostalgic for the dirty words of one’s youth, but there you have it. They served a purpose, and now that anyone can write them anywhere they’ve been quite emasculated.

CAROLE: You’d think we spent our younger days reading stacks of dirty books. I did read quite a few, now that I think of it. Smuggled in from Paris. And of course it was the lure of forbidden fruit. I would get an anticipatory tingle just looking at the covers.

DAVID: And there was never anything more sedate than the covers Maurice put on those things.

CAROLE: I know, he packaged them like textbooks. David, don’t you think Mr. Wells might want to know something about the lives we led before we were married? You told him we were kinky and we used to like dirty books, but I’d hate to sum up my impetuous youth so briefly. Will you begin?

DAVID: I will begin by getting us all fresh drinks, and then you will recite your sexual autobiography for us. Ladies first, after all. Besides, as Rousseau said to St. Augustine, you have so much less to confess.

CAROLE: I’m sure Rousseau never would have said anything of the sort. And I wonder whether I’ve just been complimented or insulted.

DAVID: Neither, my love. I was speaking not qualitatively but quantitatively. You had so much less time available for premarital sin than I.

CAROLE: I started younger.

DAVID: E’en so, e’en so. You were my child bride, and I a cradle-robbing old roué. Same for you, love? And another Scotch, Mr. Wells, or would you prefer a brandy?

•  •  •

The “confessions” of David and Carole Shelton need not be reproduced verbatim. While they made interesting listening at the time and would no doubt make interesting reading now, especially from a psychoanalytical standpoint, a simple factual summary of their premarital sexual experiences should suffice to equip the reader with enough background to place their later troilistic experiences in proper perspective.

Carole, an only child of divorced parents, had her first sexual experience at age 10 at the hands of her Scottish governess. The woman, whose task it was to bathe the child, caressed Carole’s genitals until the girl became aroused. Then she took Carole to her room, explaining that she would tell her about men and love and marriage. This lecture concerning the facts of life was accompanied by a stack of pornographic photos showing a great array of sexual acts, several of which Carole recalls quite vividly. The governess disrobed, displayed her own body to Carole, masturbated in front of Carole both manually and with the aid of a Naturalistic rubber phallus, and in the course of several weeks gave the child an extremely intensive course in the various techniques of autoeroticism and lesbianism.

This relationship ended when Carole’s mother discovered it. The governess left to seek other employment and Carole was limited for the next several years to solitary sexual pursuits. She did manage to retain several obscene photographs which the woman had loaned her, along with a mimeographed pornographic story of an unfortunate young lady who was kidnapped by Arabs, beaten, raped, burned on the breasts and genitals, bitten in various places, and otherwise maltreated, until at the conclusion of the booklet she stopped hating all of these indignities and let herself relax and enjoy them. Armed with the booklet and the photos, Carole masturbated incessantly, experimenting with various techniques and learning how to best excite and gratify herself. It was in the course of one such experiment, in which she employed an automatic pencil, that she punctured her hymen—“So you could say I lost my virginity before my twelfth birthday.”

At 14 Carole was sent to a Swiss boarding school where lesbianism was almost universal. For a time she had a crush on an older girl and fancied herself in love, but for the most part her homosexual activities had little if any emotional overtones. “We did it because it was far more pleasurable to have one’s clitoris caressed with another girl’s tongue than with one’s own finger, and we also did it because it was against the rules. There is no social class as fanatically rebellious as rich girls at exclusive boarding schools. We would have brushed our teeth forty times a day if the Head had told us we weren’t allowed to.”

At 15, an Italian youth, the son of a count, finished the job the automatic pencil had begun. For the remainder of her days at the Swiss school, Carole was as promiscuous as her circumstances would allow. Like the majority of her classmates, she devoted a great share of her energies to devising ways to leave the school grounds at night and meet boys for sexual dalliance. And, again like most of her classmates, she continued to have casual lesbian relations during this time. She says that she had no more sexual activity than was commonplace at the school, and that the desire to flout authority was at least as great a motivator as the desire for sexual pleasure.

“I suspect most of us were too sophisticated to have much of a sense of sin. I know I never thought of sex as being right or wrong. It was neither—it was simply Not Allowed, like smoking or drinking or reading after Lights Out. The object was to do it without getting caught, and if one did get caught it wasn’t all that awful. The usual punishment was loss of privileges, and the worst that could happen for a chronic offender was expulsion. Since we hated the place, we weren’t too put off by the thought of being sent away from it. One’s Mummy and Daddy would be upset, but one saw Mummy and Daddy too infrequently to worry that much about them. So one simply broke the rules and had the fun of telling the others all the deliciously dirty things one had done.”

After graduation from the boarding school, Carole returned to the States where she enrolled at one of the more well known eastern women’s colleges. She led a moderately active sex life during the year she spent there, including one homosexual episode and casual weekend sex with dates from an Ivy League men’s school. By the spring, however, she found herself growing restless. She found her dates quite boring and ultimately ceased dating altogether. She gave up sex, more out of dissatisfaction than anything else, and spent her free time either reading philosophical novels or drinking wine alone in her room. “I had romantic thoughts of drinking myself to death, but all I liked was a light Moselle, and it was hard to do more than get a little tiddly, let alone develop symptoms of acute alcoholism.”

That summer she flew to London to spend a month with her father and his latest wife. Within a week of her arrival she had met David Shelton, and from the moment of their meeting the entire course of her life was irrevocably changed. The two could not get enough of each other. They were together every evening and most of every day. While each felt a powerful sexual attraction to the other, their relationship had continued for more than a month before they even kissed.

“Then one day David said to me, ‘You know, I’ve rented a cottage in the Highlands and I’d awfully like to take you there.’ He had a very fast car at the time. We drove up there at top speed that afternoon and went immediately to bed and stayed in bed for a week. Then we drove back to London, flew to New York and got married.”

•  •  •

David Shelton’s father was an English industrialist, his mother an American heiress. The father died during David’s early childhood and his mother never remarried. David’s early years were marked by constant movement from England to the States and back again, with periodic intervals on the European continent.

His earliest sexual experiences took place at the English public school where he spent a year—“not Eton or Harrow but not more that a cut below them, you know.” There the leading indoor sport was what the boys called “MM” for mutual masturbation. Like Carole’s experiences in the Swiss school, these public school experiments were more sexual than homosexual per se. David recalls that in certain instances boys would have strong crushes on one another, but in his own case and the greater majority of other cases, mutual masturbation implied no emotional relationship between the partners. “It didn’t even especially feel better than pulling it off yourself,” he recalls. “It was simply more social and friendly, do you know.”

A year later, at fifteen, David became involved in a sexual relationship which endured intermittently for almost four years. His partner in this relationship was a beautiful, high-strung, nervous young girl a year his senior.

She happened to be his sister.

“We were very close all our lives,” he explained. “Most brothers and sisters either compete or ignore one another. We did not, we felt extremely close and had a real love for each other. Perhaps you’ve guessed as much already, but I might add that Carole distinctly resembles my sister Edith, and I’m not fool enough to deny that this must have attracted me to her at the start. It’s also no doubt true that our present relationship bears definite similarities to the sort of love Edith and I bore for each other.”

David and his sister first became sexually involved when she entered his room without knocking and discovered him masturbating. Sexually unsophisticated at the time, she asked him what he was doing and, after he had offered a brief explanation, asked if she could watch while he brought the business to a conclusion.

“She was older than I was but almost completely ignorant insofar as sex was concerned. For my part, I found her presence extraordinarily stimulating. She sat on the bed beside me and watched while I did myself. She was quite delighted with my sexual apparatus and squealed with delight when I ejaculated. She came to my room the following day and asked if I was going to do it again, and if she could watch. I said she could. Then she asked if she could touch me, if I thought I would enjoy that. I had an orgasm the instant her hand touched me.”

Over the following weeks David and his sister gradually added to their sexual repertoire. She undressed and permitted him to examine her body and touch her breasts and genitals. She was the first nude girl he had ever seen and her flesh excited him tremendously. He delighted in placing his hands between her thighs and sucking her breasts while she masturbated him.

“It was months before we actually got around to copulating. I managed to get hold of some lewd books which we read together, and this gave us an improved idea of some of the possible things we might try. It was a very lazy time and we had hours available every day. Usually Edith would come to my room and get in bed with me, and then we would do whatever we thought might be fun. I learned to bring her to orgasm, first with my fingers, then orally, and then by rubbing my organ against her clitoris. She for her part developed a tremendous enthusiasm for fellatio, and while it may sound rather bizarre to say this, to this day I cannot think of my sister without instantly picturing her crouched at my side in my bed, her long hair brushing my thighs and her mouth filled with my penis. We did everything we could imagine. I had her between her breasts, in the cleft of her buttocks, under her arms, everywhere. The only thing that kept us from coitus was the terrible fear that she would become pregnant, but ultimately I managed to buy some rubber things and we surrendered up our precious virginities to one an other.”

This incestuous relationship continued for nearly four years. Whenever the two had the opportunity to be together, they were inseparable. When they were apart, each sought sexual gratification with others, but with limited success. David found himself incapable of enjoying relations with other girls. Several times he proved impotent, and once when he was capable of sustaining an erection he could not reach orgasm in coitus. Edith later confessed to much the same problem with the two or three men whom she had taken as lovers. They did not satisfy her and the episodes left her extremely nervous. Each resolved this problem by entering into homosexual relationships to ease the pain of separation, and each found homosexual relations extremely rewarding. “I particularly enjoyed having boys younger than myself, boys with little or no experience at that sort of thing. I enjoyed fellating them. Perhaps I identified with Edith. One would suspect that might be the case.”

These homosexual experiences were discussed at great length by the sibling lovers each time they were reunited. “I found myself both excited and delighted by her stories, and mine had much the same effect on her. Both of us agreed that our own lovemaking was a great cut above anything we could find with anybody else. We worked out elaborate romantic fantasies for ourselves. We decided that when we came of age we would go to some part of the world where we were quite unknown so that we could live together openly as husband and wife. I honestly think we might have done this if we had had the chance. I’m sure it happens rather more often than people realize. Sibling incest isn’t all that rare, you know, and when a couple moves into a community as man and wife the neighbors aren’t going to suspect that they’re actually brother and sister. One could actually get away with it with no trouble at all.”

Whether or not Edith and David would have married remains a moot point. After almost four years of sexual sharing, Edith broke her neck on a ski slope in Austria and died instantly.

David, who was with her at the time, suffered a massive nervous breakdown which kept him institutionalized for the better part of two years. Shortly after his release from the mental hospital his mother died suddenly, leaving him sole heir to a substantial fortune. He was at loose ends, absolutely alone in the world, with no particular direction or goal.

For the next several years he was exclusively homosexual. At first he fought this, but sexual relations with any woman turned out to be quite impossible. He equated all females with his sister and blocked himself off completely from the possibility of potency with them.

With other males he had no such trouble. He was especially attracted to adolescent boys and enjoyed a variety of relationships with youths several years his junior. He was involved in several scandals with underage boys in Britain and the United States, all of which he managed to hush up. While he never became distinctly effeminate in speech or behavior and never dressed in female clothing, his orientation at this point was exclusively homosexual.

This orientation changed somewhat in his late twenties when he became involved with a fast crowd on the Riviera who specialized in a constant change of partners and generally orgiastic behavior. One evening he shared the favors of a Parisian woman with her husband, who had formerly been a sex partner of David’s. “Anyone who functions homosexually learns to be thrilled by the forbidden,” he explains. “The idea of a ménage à trois with a married couple had immediate appeal. The original idea was that Emile would alternate between us; first he would embrace his wife, then he and I would have a go at it. But I watched while he took her anally, and I found myself violently excited, and I immediately joined them on the bed and managed a coital connection with the woman. We both had her at once. It was unbelievably thrilling, more exciting than anything I’d done since Edith’s death. And plain homosexuality had always left a slightly bad taste in my mouth—no pun intended. This did not. Incidentally, the woman did not look at all like my sister, if you were wondering. She looked rather like a cow as it happened, not an attractive thing at all. It wasn’t her, it was the situation.”

By the time he met Carole, David had settled down considerably. Although he had an international reputation for loose living, he had become more circumspect in his behavior. He had occasional affairs with woman, occasional homosexual contacts, and, on rare occasions, joined another man and a woman in troilism. Sex was not the be-all and end-all of his life, however, and he felt he was able to keep things in proper proportions.

“Then I met Carole and fell in love. It was not a gradual thing for either of us. It was immediate. Love at first sight, if you will. From the moment I saw her no one else on earth existed for me.”

•  •  •

DAVID: I think our past histories ought to give you a fair idea of certain elements of our personalities. We both have a background of homosexuality. In my case, you might well say that the homosexual contacts I had while Edith was alive were troilistic—she was a sort of silent partner in those affairs, physically absent but emotionally present. Carole and I both have an element of kinkiness, a desire for forbidden fruit.

CAROLE: We were perfect for each other from the first day we met. And utterly perfect in bed. Lord, now I’m the one who sounds pompous. It was a few years before we began to think about having sex with other persons. We discussed everything, you see. I knew all about Edith. You might think I resented her, but I didn’t, not at all. I felt as though she was someone I would have loved because of the love David had for her, and I identified with her and felt the tragedy of her death, even though it had happened long before I even knew David. He also told me about the times he had had sex with a married couple. He said that he’d never understood why two people who loved each other would want to share their affections with a third party like himself, but that he was beginning to understand now. From the beginning the idea had considerable appeal for me, but I didn’t think of it as something we might do.

JWW: How did it become that?

DAVID: In a way, I suppose it got an assist from an incident Carole referred to earlier. We’d been married three years and were vacationing in Antigua. A beautiful island, but there’s almost nothing to do there but swim and lie in the sun. No night life to speak of. We met another young couple, the sort of swingers you were talking about earlier, I suppose. Not quite our sort, but rather attractive people. We spent an inordinate amount of time with them. You know the way one becomes drawn to strangers in a strange land. They were the ones to suggest a change of mates, and I think each of us went along with it out of a suspicion that the other wanted to. It was a lark, not much more than that. We went to our separate cottages, Carole with him and I with his wife, and we spent the night together.

JWW: And enjoyed it?

CAROLE: Not really. It was enjoyable in retrospect but not at the time. By that I mean that when we talked about it later we got extremely aroused, but while we were with those other people it wasn’t very good at all. I had to force myself to go through with it, and I know David felt he hadn’t given a very good account of himself with the other girl.

JWW: There was no feeling of jealousy on either side?

DAVID: I should think it would be impossible for Carole or myself to feel jealous. We know each other too well.

JWW: I see.

CAROLE: It was later, when we discussed what had happened, that we begin to think in terms of a third party. We did feel the urge for a touch of variety, for something outside our regular marital experience, but we didn’t want to have affairs, certainly, nor did we want a repeat of that couple-switching experience. We thought that if we could have one person and sort of love him or her together, it might be extremely enjoyable.

JWW: Did you prefer the idea of a male or female partner?

DAVID: Our first contact was with another man, as it happened, but we didn’t really distinguish beforehand. We felt either a man or a girl would provide excitement. The only consideration was that it would be a person toward whom we were both attracted. Sex didn’t enter into it.

CAROLE: The dynamic conversationalist means that the person’s sex didn’t enter into it.

DAVID: Oh, I did phrase that stupidly, didn’t I? I’m sure Mr. Wells followed me, love.

CAROLE: Our first partner was a young bachelor midway between the two of us in age. David had had a sexual experience with him sometime before we met and liked him very much. And I knew Louis was attracted to me. He always sought me out at parties and flirted with me, all quite innocent of course because he absolutely idolized David and thought the world of our marriage and wouldn’t have made a genuine pass at me for the world. But he did find me exciting, and we knew he wouldn’t be put off by the thought of David since the two of them had had that thing once before.

We discussed it all at some length and decided he would be ideal. We invited him over to the house for dinner a trois. This was in Torremolinos, we had a villa there for two months that winter. David showed his usual free hand with the wine and we were all feeling good.

After dinner we sat sipping brandy on the patio. David went up into the house and I sat beside Louis on the sofa. He was a beautiful young man, very slender, an almost girlish mouth. He made some attempt at conversation and I didn’t answer him, I just stared into his eyes rather soulfully, and he colored and couldn’t meet my gaze. Then I put my arms around him and kissed him on the lips.

He responded, then stiffened. He was obviously excited and anxious at the same time. I told him not to worry, that David knew I was doing this, that David wanted us to make love. I said that David and I both liked him very much. He didn’t really understand but I told him not to talk but just to make love to me. We disrobed and made love on the couch. He was older than I but I felt years older, like a woman of the world with an adolescent boy for a lover. He came the instant he was inside of me and was all apologies. I told him not to be silly, that we had all night.

Then David walked in. Louis reacted like a lover in a French bedroom farce, he did everything but dive under the couch. David put him at ease right away, though. “She’s divine, isn’t she, Louis?” he said. Then he put his hands on Louis and stroked him and said, “And I knew she would like you, Louis. I’ve never forgotten you.”

DAVID: It was a delicious experience. He was a beautiful boy and very shy. We went to our bedroom. I undressed and we all got in bed together. We petted and stroked one another. I touched Louis with one hand and Carole with the other. We made him lie down on the bed and the two of us loved him as one. He became excited again almost at once and wanted to improve upon his initial performance with Carole, so I held her in my arms and kissed her breasts while he had coitus with her.

CAROLE: It was the most powerful climax—

DAVID: Louis moved into our guest room the next morning. He stayed with us until we left Torremolinos in March. It seemed as though every night we invented a new way for three people to make love. In a purely physical sense, the addition of a third partner greatly augments the number of possible variations on the old theme, you know.

CAROLE: We did everything we could think of. Sometimes one would watch while the other two made love, but most of the time all three of us would participate at once.

DAVID: We found we enjoyed that the most.

CAROLE: Yes. Most often two of us would focus our attentions on the third. I’m sure every woman has fantasies about being loved by two men at the same time. I should think it would be abnormal not to. For example, long before we even thought about forming a threesome, I had fantasies along those lines. I loved to have coitus with David and I also loved to take his penis in my mouth and suck it—oh, I don’t suppose you can print that in those words, can you?

DAVID: You can print anything nowadays, dear. Go on.

CAROLE: Well, I would try to imagine what it would be like to suck David at the very moment that he was having coitus with me.

DAVID: Unfortunately I only have one penis.

CAROLE: Yes, isn’t that a pity? But with two lovers I was able to fulfill that fantasy by having one vaginally and the other orally—I’m sure you can print it that way. And other fantasies besides. I could tell you about some of them, but I think we might leave something to your readers’ imaginations, don’t you?

•  •  •

After l’affaire Louis had run its course, the Sheltons decided that they would like to make troilism a permanent part of their lives. It was some months before they selected. They were in London. David had gone shopping in Piccadilly and was walking through Soho when a prostitute solicited him.

•  •  •

DAVID: I was about to brush her off when I suddenly thought that Carole might enjoy her. She was a rather attractive girl and quite young, with a strong provincial accent. Yorkshire, I think. I told her I would give her some exorbitant sum, perhaps ten pounds, if she would come home with me and spend a few hours with me and my wife. The idea didn’t appeal to her but the ten quid did. I took her straight home in a flat and told Carole I had a surprise for her. She was delighted.

CAROLE: But it wasn’t all that much fun after all.

DAVID: It was a fiasco, actually. We had in mind the sort of thing we’d done with Louis, and it didn’t work out at all. The girl was just there for the money. We were extending ourselves in an attempt to excite her and that was clearly impossible. We sent her home and decided to limit ourselves to friends.

CAROLE: Of course the problem was our attitude. I realized as much a few days later and discussed it with David. We might enjoy ourselves with a tart, but not if we approached it as a love situation. We had to take the attitude that the girl was ours to command, a sort of mutually owned sex slave. I told David to see what he could find, and he surprised me wonderfully by bringing home a West Indian girl. I’m sure she was no more than seventeen. She was black as pitch, with firm little breasts and those grand protruding buttocks that some Negro girls have. It was easy for us to pretend that she was our slave. I’m sure the difference in race helped.

DAVID: We got terribly kinky.

CAROLE: Oh, we were dreadful! We kept her there all night. She wanted awfully to go home but we wouldn’t let her. We made her do everything. At one point she and I had mutual cunnilingus while David took her anally. I don’t think she’d ever been buggered before and it was evidently very painful for her. And at first this cooled me off, and then I thought, no, one ought to enjoy this sort of thing, so I locked her head in place with my thighs and made myself glory in her pain so that it became not a depressant but a stimulant. One never realizes one’s own capacity for the perverse. It was far too kinky for a regular thing, but marvelously effective as a change of pace. After that, we did let her go home. David gave her an outrageous sum, more than twice what he’d promised her—

DAVID: Forty or fifty pounds.

CAROLE: More than she could have earned in a week, I’m sure, but we didn’t want to risk her informing anyone. Money does soothe the injured spirit. She’d been in distress all night, but once she had the money in her hand she wanted to arrange another meeting with us. But we never did see her again.

DAVID: Another night like that one and I think the little chocolate bar would have learned to enjoy it. Astonishing how easy it is to pervert a person’s sexual orientation.

CAROLE: Or the reverse. You do remember Vivian, don’t you? Vivian was a lesbian who had a terrible crush on me, and she was aggressive in the special way some of the dykey types are apt to be. She kept telling me that if I once went with her I would find out how much pleasure one woman could give to another. I’d been brushing her off for years until one day I lost patience and told her I’d had plenty of homosexual experience myself, and liked it very much, and would be glad to go around with her anytime she wanted, with one condition—that David participate.

DAVID: She wasn’t really serious.

CAROLE: No, because I never dreamed she would consent. I just wanted to shut her up. She was exclusively homosexual and had a great fear of coitus. She said she’d been raped as a child, but I’ve never been sure that that wasn’t just a line she used. At any rate, instead of being put off she was intrigued. She wanted to know if we’d done this before, and I told her perhaps more than I intended to, and she said she would play the game our way with one reservation—it had to be agreed that David would not have coitus with her. Anything else was permissible, but her sacrosanct vagina was not to be penetrated.

DAVID: Which was fine with me. I didn’t very much want her at all, as far as that went. Mannish women have never appealed to me.

CAROLE: Or to me either. but we did seem to be committed. We spent an evening at her flat and did the sort of things one might expect. She approached it all with the attitude that she would endure David in order to get to me, but in spite of herself she began to enjoy his caresses, and before the night was out she insisted that David have intercourse with her. Actually insisted. And enjoyed it greatly, and had an orgasm. Viv couldn’t have been more astonished. New vistas and wider horizons, all of that. We never had her again—not our type, really—but ever since then she’s been truly bisexual.

DAVID: Her whole personality changed in the process. She’s gotten rid of all her tough butch mannerisms and is a good deal less aggressive than she was. Is she married, do you know?

CAROLE: There was something. She had a lover who was going to divorce his wife and marry Viv, but I don’t think it ever happened. I haven’t heard a thing about her in months.

DAVID: Well, that’s beside the point. At any rate, she actually became bisexual, and in the process grew a good lot easier to take.

•  •  •

As their experiments with troilism progressed, David and Carole were able to determine just what sort of relationships best suited them. They learned that the role they most enjoyed was that of sexual instructors to a younger male or female. Their ideal partner was a boy or girl in the late teens with relatively little prior sexual experience. With the proper partner, they prefer a protracted affair of several weeks to a one-night stand.

DAVID: Our short-term games are simple entertainments, kinky adventures. One of us might pick up someone without mentioning that there’s a husband or wife anxious to join the fun. I picked up a darling little fairy in New York once, for example, and he nearly broke down when Carole joined us. I gather he had one of those oedipal things where any woman immediately became his mother. My dear wife literally raped him. I mean exactly that. I held him down and Carole used a vibrator on him so that he simply couldn’t avoid becoming erect, it was a purely physical reaction. Then she mounted him and had coitus.

CAROLE: It was frightening, actually. He fought it all the way but couldn’t prevent himself from responding, and at the end he began thrusting violently. When he ejaculated he was squeezing my breasts in his hands and shouting “Mommy, Mommy!” at the top of his lungs. Exciting but terrifying. And he passed out immediately after orgasm.

DAVID: At first we thought he was dead.

CAROLE: Simply terrifying. David took him home and we left New York the very next morning. We were honestly afraid to see him again, or even to be in the same city with him. Do you suppose he had a breakdown?

DAVID: I shouldn’t be surprised.

CAROLE: That is a horrid thought. Quite the worst thing we’ve ever done, and the only act that I can’t look back upon without getting a queasy feeling. And not just in terms of the evilness of it. The way he called me Mommy, that did strike close to home. We know very well that we play a distinctly parental role with our younger partners. The permissive-seductive parent figure. I believe that’s the term I read somewhere. But it’s one thing to recognize this and another thing entirely to have someone actually think at the moment of orgasm that you are his mother. Unquestionably the worst thing we’ve done.

DAVID: You’re forgetting Catherine, aren’t you.

CAROLE: Lord, you’re not going to discuss that—

DAVID: Why not? I—

CAROLE: We’ve never discussed that with anyone.

DAVID: And with good reason. But Mr. Wells already knows enough about us to destroy us utterly, you know. And in terms of effect there was nothing so dreadful about what we did with Cathy. Besides, unless I’ve misjudged my man, Mr. Wells isn’t the sort for moral judgments. Am I right?

JWW: As a matter of fact, I don’t like to judge anyone else’s acts. I have enough trouble figuring out my own life. But please don’t tell me anything you don’t want me to know, or that would make Mrs. Shelton uncomfortable.

DAVID: Would it, love?

CAROLE: No, not really.

DAVID: Then you might as well hear this, Wells. Print it if you want, but with discretion. We were in London briefly a year ago. Some very good friends of ours left the country suddenly, they had to attend a funeral somewhere. Was it Stockholm? Stockholm or Oslo, I never remember which. It scarcely matters. They were to be gone for a week and asked if we could take in their daughter while they were gone.

Catherine was twelve then, and just coming into puberty. I don’t believe I have ever seen a more beautiful child. A stunning face and silky blonde hair. Little girl breasts that had just begun to blossom, the finest blonde pubic fluff—

CAROLE: You may gather that she made an impression upon David.

DAVID: On both of us. She had lovely legs, also. That’s very rare in young girls, you know. It’s unusual for them to have shapely arms and legs.

CAROLE: We never in our lives expected anything would happen. Never. We lead unorthodox sex lives, as you well know, but we’re not the sort who find themselves carried away by uncontrollable impulses. Cathy was a child, the daughter of very dear friends, and not at all someone we would think of to have sexual relations with.

DAVID: Except that we found ourselves doing precisely that. The first night she woke up with a bad dream and came to sleep with us. We both found it impossible to sleep. The thought of seducing that child was appalling to both of us, yet we found ourselves overwhelmingly attracted to her. It was devilish. We had to have her and yet we couldn’t bear to. Carole awoke to find the little thing sleeping all warm and snug against her, and she automatically reached to caress her.

CAROLE: Fortunately I realized what I was doing before Cathy awoke, and I was able to restrain myself. Barely.

JWW: Did you seduce her, then?

DAVID: Yes and no.

JWW: I’m not sure I understand.

DAVID: This is disgusting, I’m afraid, but here you have it. After two nights of intense frustration we discussed it at length and decided what we must do. We drugged her.

CAROLE: That sounds even worse than it was. It was just something to make her sleep soundly.

DAVID: A barbiturate compound. We gave it to her with her bedtime cocoa and she went right off into a sound sleep. We took her to our room and undressed her. It would be impossible for me to describe the beauty, the sexual attraction of that sleeping child. We played with her for hours. Of course we didn’t tamper with her virginity or anything of the sort. We stroked her and kissed her all over that sweet girlish body and worked off our more intense enthusiasm with each other. And she remained unconscious throughout it all.

CAROLE: But she responded, David.

DAVID: Yes, and that was particularly lovely. She writhed and purred in her sleep almost as if our caresses were reaching an unconscious layer of her mind, or as if we were making her have sex dreams. And when she awoke the following morning it was as though nothing had happened at all. Everything was as it had been before.

JWW: It was just that one night, then?

DAVID: And another night as well. There you have it—perverse and immoral, yet no one was hurt. Cathy herself never knew what had happened to her, and we’ve never told anyone but you. Her father would kill us both if he knew. He would literally kill us, and I can’t say that I would blame him. Yet I’d do it again without a second thought.

CAROLE: There is something about a girl of just that age. Not all of them, just a very few—

DAVID: What do you say to spending part of September in Tangiers? You can get anything there, you know, either sex and my age. I’ll rent us a girl.

CAROLE: One that looks like Cathy?

DAVID: I’m afraid I can’t promise you that. Blondes are a bit hard to come by in that part of the world, you know. But some young thing with the same sort of beauty and innocence. We’ve a tenth anniversary coming up, we could call it an anniversary present. How does that strike you?

CAROLE: Do you really have to ask? But Mr. Wells is going to think we’re dreadfully kinky people.

DAVID: And well he might, love. Ah, my darling, wasn’t it a piece of great good luck that we found each other? How on earth could we have gotten through life apart?

•  •  •

The Sheltons, as you may have already figured out, were a rather extraordinary couple, and interviewing them was quite an experience. Not only did they constitute a unique variety of swinging marriage, but they also spoke very frankly of extremely bizarre incidents without ever permitting the interview to lose its tone of polite formality. David could discuss an extracoital technique in one breath and address me as Mr. Wells in the next, and did so without seeming either stilted or inconsistent. They are unique in my experience, and the reader would err greatly in considering them typical of either the general run of troilists or, on the other hand, the general run of Jet Setters. It is no doubt self-evident that they are a case unto themselves, but I state it again to make doubly sure.

As I write these lines, several months have passed since our interview. By now the Sheltons have perhaps flown to Tangiers to celebrate ten years of a rewarding if unconventional marriage by taking a twelve-year-old girl into their bed. And, as I reflect upon them now, I am a little less inclined to dismiss David’s theory of their behavior as sophistry. I suspect it does play a real part in the formation of their sexual attitudes.

Nevertheless, it is also quite obvious that the desire for variety, along with the need to satisfy mutual homosexual desires, plus of course the allure of forbidden fruit, all figure prominently in motivating these two unusual people. Furthermore, the reader may draw his own conclusions as to the manner in which their early sexual experiences and family backgrounds have shaped their lives.

I Came Four Times—How About You?

LEE: One thing, when you meet through the mails there are a lot of couples that are less than what you had in mind. Like last week we took a run down to Harrisburg to see this one couple. The wife was great, knockers out to here and great muscular control, so I had a damned good time. But it was a drag for June.

JUNE: We always insist on exchanging photos first, that’s a must. But you can understand why some people won’t send full-length nudes through the mail. Everybody’s heard too many stories about Post Office snoops. And a picture never tells the whole story. This guy looked good in his picture, but he turned out to be a shrimp. I don’t think he was more than five-foot-two with his shoes on, and that wasn’t the only thing small about him.

LEE: She couldn’t get any satisfaction.

JUNE: Isn’t it the truth. Lee here was having a ball and as far as I was concerned we could of stayed home and stuck with each other. And then of course this other woman wanted to go down on me, and I’d just as soon get along without that. Plain old-fashioned screwing is good enough for me, but Lee likes to watch and take pictures so I was a good sport and went along with it.

LEE: You came, didn’t you?

JUNE: Not with her. I faked it or I figured she’d never quit. With him I did, but it was no big deal. It just goes to show. You never know what you’ll get, or one of you’ll have a ball and the other won’t. Like now he wants to see them again, and I told him he can go without me and stay as long as he likes. Me, I’ll spend the time with Joe and Rita. Joe’s hung like a bull and he can last forever, but Lee hates to swing with him because Rita’s flat on top.

LEE: I admit it, I’m crazy about boobs. Maybe we’ll do it that way, you work something up with Joe while I have another shot at Harrisburg. The hell, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t both have a good time . . .

•  •  •

It would be impossible to imagine either Roy and Barbara Halliday or David and Carol Shelton ever carrying on a conversation similar to the one quoted above. The crudity of speech notwithstanding, the whole emotional attitude sets this dialogue far apart from that of the other two couples we have studied.

All of our subjects thus far, both couples and Marcia Duffy as well, share one characteristic. They have all arrived at a relatively stable sexual relationship and have made what they consider an unequivocally ideal adjustment to their own individual circumstances. Whether one is or is not inclined to view them as healthy, sane, moral or normal, one cannot obscure the fact that all five persons are satisfied with their position and that they are likely to continue to enjoy their sexual roles, at least for the foreseeable future.

Furthermore, in the case of the two married couples, swinging has been very much a marital function; it is viewed within the framework of the marriage, is considered as having a beneficial effect upon marital relations, and is designed for dual rather than individual gratification. Roy Halliday could not possibly enjoy sexual relations with another man’s wife if he knew that Barbara was having a bad time, any more than he could ask Barbara to submit to unenjoyable lesbian caresses just so that he could become excited watching her. Nor could David Shelton enjoy sexual relations with a man or woman whom Carole did not find attractive.

This is in no sense the rule in the swinging society. On the contrary, for a great many couples swinging represents an unstable and only partially successful way to resolve the frustrations of a marriage. Often it is a compromise between the desire to stay married and the desire for extramarital adventure. Utter selfishness is not uncommon; if one’s partner has a good time too, so much the better—but if not, one still enjoys oneself as much as one can.

There is often a sense of desperation in the attitude of this sort of swinger. I have occasionally found myself feeling that certain husbands and wives use swap sessions as a form of competition. I also cannot help feeling that these swingers who keep count of their orgasms and collect obscene photos of former swap-mates are compiling evidence to prove that they are sexually adequate and their lives sexually fulfilling. The idea that sex is the be-all and end-all of human existence, that the perfect lover and the perfect position and the perfect soul-shattering orgasm lie just beyond the horizon, keep a great many swingers leading generally frustrating lives, pursuing phantoms and rainbows on a sexual treadmill.

This chapter’s title sums up for me one aspect of the games these swingers play. It was a statement-cum-question which one wife put to her husband on the way home from a party, but I’m sure various versions of the line are uttered every day. “I had four orgasms, how about you?” As if sexual success or failure can be tallied as precisely as a corporation’s financial statement, and as if a sexually satisfied person has any need to keep score. Lee and June Kreinhauser live in eastern Pennsylvania in a city in which a number of John O’Hara’s novels and stories have had their setting. While they are several cuts below the country club set most often thought of as typical O’Hara characters, characters very much like the Kreinhausers have figured prominently throughout his work. Both Lee and June come from old Pennsylvania Dutch stock. Lee owns the downtown sporting goods store which his father opened years ago and has just recently arranged to open a branch store at a new shopping plaza. June’s father works as a teller at a local bank.

After high school graduation Lee went directly into the Army for three years, then joined his father in the family business. June, a year younger, held several clerical jobs after high school and continued working during the first two years of marriage until she became pregnant with the first of their three boys.

Their premarital sexual experiences were nothing out of the ordinary. Lee first had coitus at age 16; he and seven other boys took turns with a mentally retarded girl who lived in the neighborhood and made a habit of that sort of thing. He went steady with a girl during his last year in high school and, after four months of increasingly more elaborate petting, had coitus with her. The act was repeated several times, always in automobiles, until a pregnancy scare led the girl to prohibit further copulation. They broke up shortly thereafter.

During his army years, Lee was generally limited to prostitutes; other girls were not available. He enjoyed most of these contacts, and one prostitute introduced him to fellatio, which he had heard of, wondered about, and which he now enjoyed greatly. One of the few non-prostitutes with whom he had sex during this time, a tavern pickup, tried to get him to perform cunnilingus upon her and offered fellatio in return. He would have wanted the latter but the former disgusted him and he refused. “I was pretty square then,” he explained, laughing. “If she came around now I’d eat her with a spoon.”

June remained a virgin throughout high school. Afterward she dated a local boy and, after the usual pattern of gradually increasing intimacy, permitted him to have coitus with her. The first time was painful and succeeding acts were unsatisfying for her. She knows now that her lover was troubled by premature ejaculation, but at the time she was convinced she was frigid and despaired of ever enjoying the act. She broke off with her lover and dated sporadically for some time with no sexual intimacy.

Some time afterward she dated a salesman from the Midwest. She knew that he was married and that she probably would never seen him again, and decided to go to his motel room with him because it would be a safe way for her to find out whether or not she was frigid. She was pleasantly surprised to discover herself capable of a more than adequate sexual response, including orgasm.

Despite this revelation, June did not have sexual relations again until she began dating Lee shortly after his discharge from the Army. They had known each other since childhood but had never dated, perhaps because Lee graduated from high school before June’s breasts were fully developed. While a strong breast fetish is commonplace among American males of Lee’s generation, his is far more pronounced than average. A large bosom is for him a sine qua non in reacting to a woman, and a particularly large-breasted woman will strike him as sexually desirable even if she has a face like a prune. In this connection, he will remark predictably that all women look the same in the dark; the fact that one is apt to remember what they looked like with the lights on does not seem to influence his reactions.

By the time he returned, June had outgrown all her high school bras. “I couldn’t believe it was the same girl,” he recalls. “I figured she was wearing falsies, but I also figured I’d go out with her and do a little research, and it was a couple of weeks before I could get that bra off, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t all her inside of it.”

Within a few more weeks the two were making uncomfortable but enjoyable love in the back of his father’s station wagon, and not long afterward they were married. Both families were delighted with the match. Lee and June borrowed a down payment from their parents and bought a small house in a new development and set about the business of Living Happily Ever After. They were 22 and 21 when they married. Twelve years had passed when I interviewed them, in the course of which Lee had inherited the hardware store and June had delivered three boys. They had moved twice, each time to a larger house in a newer and more prestigious development. And, with the passage of time, they had developed some new ideas on the concept of Living Happily Ever After.

•  •  •

If the Sheltons are examples of the Beautiful People, and if the Hallidays are typical Modern Young Marrieds, one might call Lee and June Just Plain Folk. It is their very ordinariness that is striking about them; one thinks at first meeting something like, “If these people are swingers, what on earth are the squares like?”

Lee at 34 is beginning to lose some hair. He has been putting on weight, and although he plays golf whenever the weather permits this exercise has not kept him from developing a slight beer belly. June is also slightly overweight. Her breasts, considerably larger than average, were almost intimidating in the tight sweater she sported for the interview. One found oneself thinking of cannon shells. Her face was less impressive. A natural brunette, she had recently metamorphosized as a redhead, and the new hair color was wrong for her. Age lines detract from what was obviously once a moderately attractive face. Taken together, the Kreinhausers are neither attractive nor unattractive. They are, again, ordinary.

Lee himself said as much when I first suggested an interview. He insisted that he and June were pretty average folks, not much different from the normal run of persons on the swingers circuit. I told him that a study of swingers would ideally include both the standard and the less common types in order to present a full picture of the situation. This seemed to make sense to him. I gathered, too, that he was pleased by the attention and had an exhibitionistic desire to discuss his sex life with a stranger. Whatever his motivation, he consented to the interview. We met for drinks in the cocktail lounge of my motel, then went to my room where I taped the material which follows.

•  •  •

LEE: The way we got started with swinging was through the newspaper ads. If you’ve been around at all you know the papers I mean, nutty stories about sex crimes in front and a few pages of personal ads in the back. Some clown brought one of those papers into the store. There was a story in it he wanted me to read, something he thought was exciting as hell about a doctor in Germany who drugged his women patients and raped them. I guess it didn’t take much to excite this jerk, or maybe he’s got a hard-on for doctors, I don’t know. But I read the ads and that got to me.

JWW: You had never thought of wife-swapping before?

LEE: Oh, sure. You see these books on the newsstands, articles in the men’s magazines. I thought of it, you know, but I never thought of it as something for ordinary people like me and June. I mean, I thought how great it would be, having all these different women with no sweat. What else is anybody going to think? But actually reading the ads really brought it home. It wasn’t just knowing that people lived this way but knowing all it took was a stamp to get in touch with them and get in on the action. That made it real.

JWW: Had you been married long at that time?

LEE: Lemme see, it was five years ago, so we were married what? Seven years. The seven-year itch. Only I got the itch a long time before that.

JUNE: You scratched it before then, too.

LEE: I didn’t make a regular thing of it. It’s funny, a guy’ll get married really expecting that he’ll never want another woman but his wife. I really thought this at the time. Then we’re married and the honeymoon is over and I’d see another woman on the street and she would look as good to me as ever. Being married didn’t change that. Does it ever? But I still figured I would stay faithful to June. The hell, I was getting all I could handle at home and I figured I wouldn’t need anything else.

JWW: When did you change your mind?

LEE: It was when she was pregnant the first time. It wasn’t a case of being horny for somebody else but just being horny period. You can’t do it for six weeks before or six weeks after, and here we’d been going at it hot and heavy for two years, close to three years, plus before we were married, and you get used to having it steady and it’s hard to do without.

JUNE: There are other ways, if you thought about it.

LEE: Me? How about you? I thought about getting you to go down on me but the way I felt then it wasn’t a decent thing to suggest to your wife. I was hoping you’d think of it on your own.

JUNE: How? I didn’t even know about it then.

LEE: We were both pretty square, see. Anyway, I got through the six weeks before without too much trouble, but after the kid was born I just couldn’t take it.

There’s a colored whorehouse in town, not exactly a whorehouse but they hang around out in front and there are rooms you can go to with them. I was scared somebody would see me or I’d pick up a disease, especially that I’d pick up a disease and then bring it home to June. But I went about once a week until June was in shape again. The first time was an ordinary screw and I was really shook up about getting a dose. For a full week I kept going to the john and washing it with soap and water maybe five, six times a day. I must of had the cleanest one in town.

The other times I figured I didn’t want to go through that kind of worrying again, so I didn’t have intercourse. Most of the time I would get a blow job, or this one time I had this fat colored girl who was really built, like a pair of watermelons, and I had her between them. I was very proud of myself, I thought I invented something new.

JUNE: And all this time I’m sitting home with dirty diapers and formula and he’s out getting his ashes hauled.

LEE: I stopped after you were in shape again. But there’s something about it, you cheat once and it stays in your mind. Like a girl who finally loses her cherry and suddenly she’s the easiest make in the world.

JUNE: I was never like that—

LEE: Jesus, don’t take everything personal. I didn’t mean you, and anyway it wasn’t like I started chasing around right away. But I didn’t turn anything down. As soon as she got pregnant the second time I thought to myself, well, a few more months and it is time to cat around, and when I realized what I was thinking I knew I was looking forward to it. What I did for the next couple years, oh, say I’d go out of town for a convention or something, at least once a trip I’d make sure I got next to something nice. A pickup if I could find one but usually a pro because they were easier to find and less aggravation. And there was this one customer I had, her husband was in the service and you could tell she was looking for it. She came in one day and started shaking her knobs in my face so I took her back in my office and put her up on the desk and threw it to her. Nothing special.

JUNE: More than that, though. You and her had a thing going.

LEE: A couple times at a motel, that’s all. I broke it off because she looked as though she was nutty enough to get serious, and I didn’t want anything complicated.

That was about it, then. I’m an average sort of guy, I love my wife and kids, I work hard to keep the business going, I’m happy if you put me out on the golf course or stick me in front of the TV set with a couple cans of cold beer. And I’d say I was doing about as much catting around as the average Joe, no more and no less. If I was out of town, or if it came to me and I didn’t have to chase it, that’s all. I did more of it as June and I got less active ourselves, but that’s normal, too.

JWW: Did June know you were unfaithful to her?

LEE: No, she didn’t.

JUNE: Oh, I could put two and two together. I figured he had a special kind of business going on those business trips, and then the second and third times I was pregnant I noticed he wasn’t complaining about doing without like he did before. You know what they say about woman’s intuition. But what I also figured was what I didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me. You can know something but not know it, if you know what I mean.

JWW: And that was the situation with you, Lee, until you read the tabloid ads. Had you done anything yourself at that point, June?

JUNE: Not a damn thing, and when I think of some of the chances I turned down while old tomcat here was enjoying himself, it burns me up. I thought about it. I thought that if I were somebody else I could really have a ball, but the way I thought of myself, it just wasn’t something I would do. About swapping I didn’t have any thoughts at all, because I honestly had never heard of it. I had heard the phrase, wife-swapping, but I thought it meant like some news stories I had read about two couples living next door to each other for years, and then one day they get divorced and each one marries the other one’s husband. I thought that was wife-swapping. I also heard the phrase “key clubs,” and I thought they meant like the Playboy Club.

LEE: Which gives you an idea of how much she knew. We were both pretty square, come to think of it.

JWW: And how was your marital sex life at this stage?

LEE: Not the greatest. It wasn’t so much that we did it less as that it was no big deal, you know? We were used to each other, we would do it one time and it would be the same as a hundred other times. Partly because we only did it two ways. Her on top once in a while, but the rest of the time me on top. I wanted to try some variety—

JUNE: But he was afraid I would ask him where he learned his new tricks!

LEE: So it wasn’t good and it wasn’t bad. You could say it was average, considering how long we were married by then. The thing of it wasn’t that we sat around thinking how bad it was but that we didn’t realize how much better it could be.

•  •  •

Lee found it impossible to dismiss the idea generated by the newspaper ads. Using a fictitious name and his store address, he answered several couple ads, ostensibly to find out if they were genuine. A high percentage of these advertisers replied, many with photographs of themselves. Lee wanted to continue the correspondence but feared the couples would insist on a meeting. He stopped writing and instead began a careful and elaborate campaign designed to prepare June for what he had in mind.

He bought every book he could find on the subject, partly because he wanted to find out as much as he could about it, and partly so that he could take them home and leave them around the house where she would be sure to find them.

JUNE: I got the message after I picked up the third one. Before then I didn’t think he was interested and when I read them I was really amazed at what people did. It seemed disgusting at first.

JWW: Did you mention the books to Lee?

JUNE: Are you kidding? When I did see what he was getting at the last thing I was going to do was bring the subject up. I was really furious at first. Then I started thinking about it, and I thought about those monkey-business trips out of town, and I started to do a slow burn. Because now it was pretty obvious that he was cheating, and here I’m sitting home keeping my legs crossed. And another thing that burned me was that he would want me to be with other men just so he could get to other women. That he wouldn’t be jealous.

JWW: So how did the subject come up?

LEE: I brought it up because I could see hell would have three feet of snow before she mentioned it. We were watching TV and there was this sexy actress on the Tonight show, I forgot who, and I mentioned this, and June said who she was married to and that he was good-looking, so I said, “Look, I’ve been reading these books about swingers, what the hell, call this dish and her husband up and we’ll have ’em over to the house and swap.” It was just a joke to bring the subject up, but it was like opening a faucet. All of a sudden she had a hundred angry questions about why was I bringing home the books and who was I sleeping with and what kind of a woman did I think she was and I don’t know what.

JUNE: I cooled off after awhile and then we really let our hair down and did some serious talking. We were still talking when the sun came up. We talked some more the next night and he brought home those letters he got and the pictures, and we decided maybe it was something we ought to try. We talked about all the couples in the books that said swapping brought them closer together and told each other it would do the same for us. That very night we did make love. We tried out some new ideas that we’d read about in the books and between the variations and being aroused with the idea of swapping it was more exciting for us than it had been in a long time. That seemed to prove our point, that getting involved in this sort of thing would help us enjoy our marriage more.

JWW: Would you say that was your main motive for—

JUNE: No, no, no, nothing like that. Not for either of us. It was what we said but I didn’t believe it and neither did Lee. All we knew was we wanted to do it because we thought it would be exciting, but we couldn’t come right out and say that to each other, so we said the other. It meant he could have other women and I could have other men and there would be no sneaking around and no jealousy.

LEE: And no expense, and no chance of disease or some damn fool girl getting pregnant.

JUNE: Or getting in some mess where you fall in love with somebody else and a marriage goes down the drain.

LEE: Right.

JWW: So you both agreed to go ahead with it?

LEE: We decided that very night. I brought home a new issue of the paper but we decided why wait to exchange opening letters when I already had these letters from half a dozen couples that I never answered. We went through the photographs and there was one that appealed to both of us very much. The woman was beautifully built with long blonde hair and a great set and June found the man appealing—

JUNE: He was tall and slim. Not exactly handsome, but you would call him distinguished-looking.

LEE: —and what’s more they seemed like regular people. He was a pharmacist with his own store, they were about the same age as us, and they lived not twenty-five miles away. I checked the phone book for their city to make sure they were using the right names, and as an extra check June drove all the way out there one afternoon to buy a bottle of aspirin from the guy and make sure he looked like the picture he sent. It was him, and his wife was working behind the counter.

JUNE: I stood there and felt myself blushing. Here I was making small talk with this woman and I knew what she looked like with no clothes on. I wanted to say something, but at least I had the brains to keep my mouth shut.

LEE: For once.

JUNE: You’re the one to talk, all right.

LEE: Anyway, to make a long story short, I wrote them a very frank letter. I couldn’t see what we had to lose. I bought this Polaroid years ago to take pictures of the kids, so I hauled it out of the drawer and we took pictures of each other. Not full-length nudes, I was still a little leery of that, but me in a bathing suit and June in a pair of shorts and no halter. We shot a whole roll of film before we were happy with the results. Then I wrote this frank letter explaining that I had written earlier under another name because this was our first time and we were a little nervous about it. I told him about us and that he could check us out if he wanted and that we’d like to get together.

JUNE: They never did bother to check. Two days later I’m ironing and the phone rings. A gal says, “This is Miriam. Cliff and I were really impressed with your letter and we’d like to get together with you.” At first I couldn’t think who the hell Miriam was, and then I remembered and I started to blush, as if she could see me blushing over the telephone. I said we’d love to meet them and how about Saturday night? She said that was a long time and why didn’t we come up to their house that very evening? I said something about getting a sitter on a week night, and she said they didn’t have kids and could come to our place if that was more convenient. I was very nervous at the idea of doing anything with the kids in the house. I said I’d leave the kids with my mother or get her to come over and watch them, and we set a time and I hung up and called my mother and made the arrangements, and then I quickly called Lee at the store and told him, and then I spent the rest of the day watching the clock and wondering what to wear and was my hair all right and would I be able to go through with it and would the guy, Cliff, like me.

LEE: She didn’t have any worries on that score. They had a cute little bungalow just around the block from his drugstore and when we got there they were ready with drinks and soft music on the hi-fi, Miriam recognized June from at the store and we all got a laugh out of that and it helped break the ice. I was seeing Miriam for the first time aside from the picture. She looked much better than the picture. I was ready for her ten seconds after I walked in the door, and it was obvious Cliff felt the same about June.

JUNE: When I saw the bulge in his crotch it was obvious, all right. I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. Knowing he wanted me made me very excited and a lot less nervous.

LEE: First we sat around and talked. There was no small talk, we got right down to business and talked about swinging. We had a million questions and they gave us a lot of information. Mostly they just said the same things we had gathered from the books, but we did pick up some fresh slants on the whole thing. Then Miriam came over and sat next to me on the couch. She kept telling me how attractive I was and her eyes were centered on my crotch, and I had a rod you could have hung out a week’s wash on. Cliff was in the other room adjusting the volume on the hi-fi or something. I didn’t know what the hell to do, whether I was supposed to kiss her or grab hold of those tits of hers or what, and with June just a few yards away it made it even more confusing. I’m a guy who usually can make up his mind in a hurry, right or wrong, but for once in my life I was really stumped. Then Miriam told June maybe she could help Cliff with the hi-fi, and fortunately June got the message.

JUNE: I almost went in there before she told me to. But any idiot would of gotten the message.

LEE: And before June was even out of the room Miriam took her blouse off. No bra, she didn’t need one. I already saw them before in the picture but this was 3-D and life-size and living color, and I guess my eyes must have gone out on stalks. Miriam got a kick out of the way I reacted. She said she guessed I was a tit man like Cliff and that hers were all for me and why didn’t I enjoy myself. I was still pretty slow on the uptake but I didn’t wait for a second invitation. I was all over her in a minute.

We kept feeling each other and undressing each other as we went along. I just couldn’t keep away from her boobs, and it really drove her wild to have them touched. By the time all our clothes were off I got rattled again. I didn’t know whether we were supposed to find a bedroom or just go to it or what. And on the one hand I didn’t mind just playing with her for the next fifteen years, and on the other hand I didn’t know how much longer I could hold out before the gun went off.

Then she said, “We thought you’d like separate rooms for the first time, but it’s up to you. They’re in the bedroom, Lee, so we can join them or stay right here. Do you have anything against fucking on couches?” Well, that did it. Except for whores I never heard a woman use the word before. The way June talks now that may be hard to believe, but it’s true. And it really got to me. It snapped me out of this fog I was in. I took one of her jugs in each hand, and I said, “Honey, I could fuck you on a Ferris wheel,” and I put her on that couch and showed her what I meant.

JUNE: Meanwhile I was with Cliff, and he was giving me the opposite treatment, all slow and sentimental. When I joined him in the other room he put his arms around my waist. Very innocent, but I just about jumped out of my skin. He said I hadn’t seen the rest of the house yet, and cool as could be he led me straight to the bedroom, all the time telling me how beautiful I was and how much he liked me and how he was going to make beautiful love to me.

Seeing the bed rattled me. There it was, a king-size bed with the covers turned down, and it sort of let you know what you were there for. But Cliff didn’t give me a chance to get too shook up. He kept talking nice and gentle. I didn’t even listen to the words, just the tone of his voice. He had me stand still while he stripped me very slowly, complimenting me on my body and petting me as he undressed me. I had my eyes closed, but he must have been undressing himself at the same time because when I was naked he took me in his arms and kissed me and he was naked against me and his thing was hard as a rock and pressing against me all the way up my belly.

I was suddenly as hot as a stove but at the same time I was frozen, not frozen cold but frozen stiff, solid. I had to keep my eyes closed, for instance. Cliff knew just the right way to handle me. He made me lie down on the bed and he dimmed the lights way down, they had one of those gadgets on the switch

LEE: She means a rheostat, I put ’em in here too, I stock ’em at the store—

JUNE: Oh, for Christ’s sake, who gives a shit what the name of it is? just shut up and let me tell it, will you? I didn’t interrupt when you started singing hymns about Miriam and her big firm titties, did I? Where the hell was I, anyway?

JWW: Uh, he dimmed the light.

JUNE: You interrupt me and I lose the thread, Lee. Cliff dimmed the light so that there was just enough light so we could see each other but if I closed my eyes it was like a perfectly dark room, which I did. Then he spent a solid half hour just preparing me for it. He wouldn’t let me do a thing. He told me to lie perfectly still, that he would do everything, and he certainly did. Everything.

I don’t want to give the impression that Lee wasn’t always a good lover. He was, but swingers are different from other people when it comes to pleasing a person with sex. Like me, for example; I didn’t know anything at all. How can you really expect to be good at sex and to be versatile when you’ve only made love with one man in your whole life? Because I wouldn’t even count the two men before I started with Lee, because that was just on and off, just doing it rather than learning what to do. Even that salesman, he satisfied me, but all he really wanted to do was get his rocks off before I changed my mind. Swingers learn new techniques all the time and really train themselves to give a good performance. Some of them even develop special muscular control.

Anyway, I’m not knocking Lee when I say that Cliff made me feel really wildly passionate like never before in my life. I never knew it was possible to feel this way.

Even on our honeymoon, hot as we both were, at each other every minute of the time, I didn’t get this kind of a thrill. It was like every cell in my body was throbbing. Like cells that were normally sleeping were being turned on every time Cliff threw another switch.

But I wasn’t in a rush the way I always got before when I was excited. I would of let it go on forever. Then Cliff drew away from me, and I thought he was going to climb on top, and then I felt something brand new, something different from anything else in the world, and I opened my eyes and looked down and there he was going down on me.

I almost died. The thing is I sort of took it for granted that this would happen because of the books, and in their letter Cliff and Miriam had written that they went in for French culture and from the books we knew what that meant. So I had thought about this, but I wasn’t ready for it. I mean in my mind. I was sure ready for it every other way. Even with the reading and deciding to swap and trying new techniques, Lee and I hadn’t tried this yet. We couldn’t even discuss it with each other, and now Cliff was doing it, and why the hell we were married so many years without trying it I’ll never know, because it drove me out of my skull.

I didn’t know a woman could come from just that, which shows what I knew. I thought you just did it first, like petting. I changed my mind about that, though. I came like a volcano.

Then we made love in three different positions and I came each time. Cliff was able to hold off orgasm as long as he wanted. It’s a control you can develop, Lee can do it too now, and Cliff waited until the third time before he let himself go. When he did, he timed it so that we went off together, and he really let the neighbors know. He’s the kind who roars like a bull when he pops.

LEE: Meanwhile, I’m down there with—

JUNE: Just one more thing and then it’s your turn. All the time he’s having coitus with me I’m thinking that I ought to go down on him later on. Partly because turnabout is fair play and also because I want to do it. I wasn’t really sure I would like it but I thought why not find out at least, and even if I didn’t like it, it was the least I could do. But the thing was I didn’t know how.

They didn’t teach it to me in school and maybe it just comes naturally to some girls, but from what I’ve learned from other swingers it’s something you really have to be taught. So when he asked me how I felt and if I was happy I said there was just one thing wrong, and he was anxious to find out what it was, as if he had done something wrong himself, and I told him. Not in so many words. I took hold of him with one hand and put my other hand to my mouth and he got the message. And I said, “I’d really like to return the favor. But the thing of it is that I’ve never done it and I don’t really know what to do.” I was afraid what I said might turn him off, but it had the opposite effect. He talked about the thrill of taking my oral virginity. He showed me just what to do and explained things to me and assured me that he would give me warning when he was getting close so I wouldn’t get a mouthful. I had been worried about that. It’s hard to believe now that it would bother me, but it did, and I understand that’s true with most girls. I did it to him and though I can’t say I enjoyed it then I was glad I was able to do it and that it excited him. A couple of times I almost gagged but not quite. And he gave me plenty of warning and had me finish him off by hand.

That night without saying a word I did it to Lee. You never saw a more surprised man in your life!

LEE: You done now? It’s about time. Well, while Queen June here is getting the royal treatment back in the bedroom, I’m on the couch with Miriam, and it’s fantastic—(Here Lee supplied a lengthy account of the various forms of sex he engaged in with Miriam. While it was interesting to note how vividly he remembered the minutest details of the experience, we need not endure them verbatim but might merely note that the regimen included mutual oralism a la soixante-neuf, which Lee had always wanted to try, and anal copulation, which he found physically enjoyable but, at the time, quite distasteful. Miriam was one of a minority of female swingers who enjoyed this form of sex. The majority, with the exception of the Sadie Mae crowd, are like June, who finds the act both degrading and painful and will not permit it under any circumstances.)

LEE: —so finally we all got together and had drinks. We didn’t bother putting on clothes. I hadn’t stood around in the nude in front of another guy since the Army, but it’s hard to be embarrassed in front of another guy when the two of you have been making it with each other’s wives not fifty yards away. It did rattle me when they started comparing notes right there in front of us. I don’t know why, if you can do it you ought to be able to talk about it, but it takes a while for the average guy to adjust to new ways of thinking about things. The upshot was that they wanted us to stay the night and all stay together in their bed. It sounded great to me but June wanted to be home when the kids woke up, or if her mother should happen to call in the middle of the night, so we left, and later she told me she wasn’t too sure about the idea of all of us together, not until she had some time to think about it first. We went home and decided to write letters to other couples and maybe put in an ad of our own, and then right while I’m in the middle of a sentence June did what she said earlier, she popped it into her mouth like a piece of candy. I couldn’t believe it. I did the same for her later on that night and the sun was up before we were done with each other.

From that night on there was just no question, this was it for us. I told June the thing that really hurt was all the damn years we did without it. I told her if we only had it all to do over again I wished we could start in swinging the day we got back from our honeymoon, or at least the day it first started to be a routine for us, and she agreed with me on that a hundred percent.

•  •  •

From that point on, Lee and June jumped into the swinging society with all four feet. Through a combination of luck and careful selection of swap-mates they built up a long list of contacts before their first unpleasant experience with an older couple from Philadelphia. “Real creeps,” Lee remembered. “They sent us a picture with the heads cut off, which a lot of people do for safety’s sake, but their bodies really looked great and they wrote a good letter so we took a chance and invited them down.” This was a mistake—with the other couple actually at their house, there was no easy way to call off the show. And, as it turned out, the other couple was unsatisfactory in sexual taste and in appearance as well.

“Those weren’t their pictures. They sent us a couple of ringers, but with the heads off who could tell until they stripped down? And once they did, what could we do about it without looking like a couple of stiffs? The old guy was skinny as a rail and the woman, well, when she took her dress off she took her tits off along with it. He wanted to go Greek with June and she said no, absolutely not, because we tried it once and she said never again no matter what. So then he wanted to do it to me that way and he just about insisted. Well, by that time I was burning, I had already had his wife once and I certainly didn’t want to have her again, not on a platter. And I know some guys dig the faggot scene, although he was the first one I’d met, and I had enough sense not to get mad when he suggested it. I’ve found that the average guy, if he wants that kind of action, he’ll either come right out and ask or maybe he’ll hint at it, but when you say no that’s the end of it and the subject isn’t brought up again. But this clown was something else. I told him to put on his clothes and that he and his titless wonder of a wife had better get out of our house in a hurry or I’d kiss his ass till his teeth fell out. He got nasty and said something about June and that did it, I really belted him. I suppose I should have controlled myself, but I figured the son of a bitch had it coming.”

If this couple had served as the Kreinhauser’s introduction to the swinging world it is doubtful that they would have had anything more to do with it. But by the time this incident occurred they had rolled up a long string of successful swaps and were deeply committed to the life. I asked several times if they had had any feelings of jealousy during those early days, or if moral questions troubled them. I found their attitude quite interesting, especially when contrasted to that of a couple like Roy and Barbara Halliday. Unlike the Hallidays, Lee and June both stressed not that wife-swapping drew them closer together and enabled them to share greater intimacies but that it brought each of them individual pleasure without injuring the other and kept their marriage together without specifically enhancing it.

While this distinct selfishness is by no means uncommon, the Kreinhausers serve as a particularly good example of it in its most undiluted form. In a sense each regards the other as a ticket of admission into the bedrooms of other couples. Lee treasures his wife if for no other reason than that he would be less able to swing if he couldn’t trade her for other women.

As far as the morality of their actions, both Lee and June professed never to have felt troubled from the beginning. I found this rather hard to believe. Their recital of the traditional justifications for the systematic adultery of swinging had the ring of parrot-talk; it could as easily have been taken word for word from the pages of one of the books they had read. Perhaps they believed it and perhaps they did not. I could only conclude that they had used it as a rationalization for so long that it made deeper thought unnecessary.

In the same vein, I suspect that they are genuinely amoral in a special sense—i.e., the whole concept of a personal subjective standard of moral behavior is foreign to them. An act or attitude is morally acceptable to the Kreinhauser’s insofar as they feel it to be “normal.” If it is the sort of thing regular folks might do, if it jibes with their image of themselves as plain ordinary Americans, then they do not find it morally reprehensible.

This is not to say that they are blind to the fact that swinging is socially unacceptable to the great mass of non-swingers, nor do they even condemn as hypocritical society’s condemnation of their way of life. On the contrary, they are acutely aware of the fact that their friends and neighbors would ostracize them if their activities come to light, and they therefore take great pains to hide their actions from the world.

Inconsistencies abound in their position. This would bother more cerebral individuals, but the Kreinhauser’s have exceedingly simple minds—and I use the adjective not pejoratively but purely as description. They do not think deeply. They do not analyze or contemplate. They act and react and indulge in remarkably little true thought.

As swingers, they fall somewhere between radicalism and conservatism, as one might suspect such devoutly ordinary people would do. They quickly passed from the tame swaps in which the partners repaired to separate rooms to sociable couplings, and before long added three-way and four-way tricks to their stock.

At the same time they have carefully eschewed the more bizarre activities of the swinging world. They will have no truck with sadomasochism and do not participate in orgies—interestingly, they have never met with more than one couple at a time. They are unimaginative in sexual matters, although they would resent bitterly such a label. Lee has never had any sort of sexual contact with another male. When he and the other husband share the sexual favors of one of the women, he is always careful to manage things so that he does not come into physical contact with any portion of the other man’s body. That there is an unconscious homosexual element present in the entire situation is a concept which perhaps has not ever occurred to him.

June’s attitude toward homosexuality seems confusing at first. She has stated that she does not enjoy it but tolerates it for her husband’s benefit. Since she seems otherwise uninterested in his satisfaction, this does not make much apparent sense. I have since concluded that she is lying. She does enjoy playing the active or the passive role in cunnilingus with the other wife but feels it would be indecent to admit as much. Evidently it is “normal” for a swinging wife to participate in lesbian activity in the context of a group sex session, while it is not “normal”—and hence not allowable or admissible—to derive real pleasure from the proceedings.

•  •  •

The Kreinhauser’s version of swinging has another interesting side to it, and it too is quite common. They are collectors. They file all their correspondence, June keeps a brief coded diary and enters notes on each trade, and Lee has filled a cabinet with pornographic photos taken at their swap parties, each picture labeled with the names of the participants and the date the picture was taken. The original Polaroid, purchased to photograph his growing sons and hardly ever used for that purpose, has long since been traded in on a deluxe model with a Rube Goldberg assortment of attachments and accessories.

LEE: We make contacts strictly by mail, through false names and post office boxes. We use the correspondence clubs almost exclusively. The tabloids are considered old stuff nowadays, and the word is out that most of them fill their columns with fake ads because of the buck they take in for every letter they forward. The clubs, the good ones, are supposed to be run honest. You won’t necessarily keep from meeting the creeps and kooks in the clubs, but you stand a better chance of coming out all right. A few contacts we’ll get through other people, folks we’ve swung with in the past who pass our names on and recommend us. But I’ll say 95 percent of it is through the correspondence clubs.

JUNE: It’s not the easiest thing in the world meeting new people all the time, especially when you consider that we don’t swing with more than one out of every five or six couples we exchange letters with. Of course as the kids get older it’s easier for us to travel, but now with the two stores it’s going to be that much harder for Lee to get away.

JWW: And you feel a need for new people?

LEE: That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? New people means new thrills.

JWW: I know that some swingers just trade partners in a small circle, and this may go on for years. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I get the impression that you two rarely meet more than once with the same couple. Is that true?

JUNE: I wouldn’t put it that way. Every once in a while we still get together with Cliff and Miriam, for instance. And any time we get along particularly well with another couple we may make a point of seeing them a second time.

LEE: No, he’s right, what he’s getting at. We’ll do a repeat once in awhile, but the great majority of times, most of the couples, once is enough. Not that we don’t enjoy the once, but why swing with them again when there’s a whole world full of strangers? There’s only so much sex a person can handle and only so many years to do it in, so what the hell, why not spread it around?

JWW: I can understand your reasoning, but don’t you frequently think back on certain persons with whom you’ve especially enjoyed yourselves and want to get more intimately involved with them?

LEE: What do you know that’s more intimate than screwing? Answer me that. And as for thinking back, that’s what the photos are for, to help you look back and remember.

JUNE: And to look at when we’re too old for anything better.

LEE: That’s a joke we’ve got, mainly because we file all the pictures and hardly ever even look through them. But when you’re busy doing things all the time who in the hell has got time to think? And as for this routine about the same people year after year, hell, that’s like one big happy family. Where’s the variety, for Christ’s sake? I want a change, that’s the whole point. The same stuff year after year, hell, I get enough of that at home.

What Are You Doing After The Orgy?

CLAIRE: One problem with swinging is the way it tends to become your entire life. We found just that happening to us. It was kicks in a lot of ways, but as a matter of fact there really is such a thing as having too much of a good thing. It got so that the only people we ever saw socially were swingers, and we never did go for the idea of a close circle of friends. Instead we would party it up with new people all of the time, and that meant that all we did socially was either talk about sex or do it or watch movies of other people doing it.

KEN: It got terribly one-sided and left us feeling hung up a lot of the time, not for moral reasons as much as with a sense of frustration, as though our lives were one dimensional and empty.

CLAIRE: And the non-swingers we met, we always thought of them in sexual terms. If they appealed, we would try to seduce them, and while we were lucky we took the chance of running into a great deal of trouble. I would say we were within inches of having our whole life turn into one big swing session.

KEN: There are more people who live that way than you might realize. People we’ve swung with over the years have told us about whole apartment buildings where the tenants are one hundred percent swingers. Just one permanent balling session from morning to night three hundred and sixty-five days out of the year. I understand there’s a party there every night, and the parties are something out of this world. But even without the parties, it’s just sex all the time. You meet someone in the elevator and you have a fast feely session on the way to the lobby. Or if there’s time you go to an apartment and make it. I can see living that way for a little while, but can you imagine that way of life on a permanent basis?

CLAIRE: It would kill me within a year, I’m sure. But more than that, those people don’t have anything going for them in life but sex. It’s all they do and all they know and all they think about. I like sex as much as the next person—

KEN: More.

CLAIRE: —but there’s a limit. A person needs a full life, and if you swing all the way you give up everything else.

KEN: So as far as regular swinging goes, we’ve virtually eliminated it. Oh, we have one couple we’re friendly with, and we see them a couple of times a week, but half the time we don’t even have sex, it’s just a social thing. Anyway, we don’t think of it as swinging. More like a four-way marriage.

CLAIRE: And when we’re ready for all-out sex, we make the scene at a weekend orgy. I’d say that in the last year we went to five of them, plus a week-long swinging vacation in Puerto Rico. Those six times were the only real swinging we did all year, and they were just what the doctor ordered. By the time we went to each orgy we were really in the mood, and by the time the party was over we were absolutely exhausted. A weekend of solid sex really lets you get a lot out of your system, and that week in Puerto Rico—my God, we just about screwed ourselves to death. I thought we would have to bury Ken.

KEN: And it would have taken the undertaker a month to get the smile off my face—

•  •  •

While the orgy plays a very real role in the lives of a large portion of swingers, relatively few members of the swinging society make it the focal point of their sex lives. Ken and Claire Whitlaw serve as excellent examples of this variety of orgiast.

A successful young architect who has designed some of the more notable homes in the San Francisco area, Ken Whitlaw is 32 years old. Short blonde hair and an outdoor complexion combine to make him look several years younger. He has been married for the past five years to Claire, a striking brunette of 26 with a svelte, shapely figure and a deep year-round suntan.

Like so many people in their part of the country, the Whitlaws are extremely progressive-minded young marrieds interested in living the good life of the mid-twentieth century. They listen to avant garde rock and roll, make occasional use of marijuana, and believe both emotionally and intellectually in complete sexual freedom for all. Unlike the greater number of swingers, especially in other parts of the country, they did not turn to swinging as an escape from a marital sexual relationship which had gradually gone stale. On the contrary, they began their involvement in wife-swapping when their marriage was less than a year old.

KEN: I’d been around quite a bit before we were married. I scored for the first time when I was fourteen, and it was a good experience for me. From what I’ve heard, I was luckier than the average young kid. I had this job after school delivering catalogs and samples for a Fuller Brush salesman. I would stuff the catalog in the door and ring the bell, and that was about it; I rarely even met anyone. But the standard bit happened one afternoon. This gal about thirty-five opened the door in a housecoat, and she went through the routine of letting the thing keep coming undone to give me quick peeks at her. She wasn’t wearing anything under the coat, and she had the kind of shape to get a kid that age horny as a bull in the rutting season. Really large breasts—and of course that’s all boys think about at that age. She asked me if I’d like some milk and cookies, and when I was inside she started talking to me, asking if I had a girl friend, hell, you can write your own dialogue for that little scene. But the upshot was that she took me to bed and showed me what to do, and I was really lucky—I got excited immediately, but I was so nervous that I couldn’t reach orgasm for the longest time. I must have screwed her for a solid hour before I came.

She wasn’t used to that sort of thing. She told me her husband damn near came on the way to the bed. I spent the whole afternoon with her and the next day I got fired, but that was fine with me. As far as my folks were concerned, I was still working. I went to her house every afternoon and she showed me every trick in the book. It was an education. If every boy that age had an arrangement like that there would be a lot less neurotic men in the country, I’ll tell you that. On top of everything else, this gal gave me twelve bucks a week. Not as payment, exactly, but that was what I had been earning from the salesman and she didn’t want my parents to know how I was spending my afternoons. With the kind of moronic laws in this country, she was actually guilty of statutory rape.

But the point of all this is simply that I started getting it steady at an early age and I had a good education. After she moved out of town it was never too hard to find girls who were willing to put out. I even got an introduction to group sex while I was at college, and by the time I met Claire—

CLAIRE: Tell him about the girls at college.

KEN: I don’t know what it has to do with swinging, but maybe you’ll think it’s interesting. I was going with this one blonde kid, sort of feather-brained but very sweet and pretty and good in the hay, and she kept telling me about her roommate, how the kid was a frustrated virgin and she worried about her. I told her jokingly that I’d be willing to service the roommate, but Helene took me seriously and was all for it.

CLAIRE: But first the roommate wanted to watch. Wasn’t that the way it went?

KEN: Uh-huh. It was a new one on me, but I wasn’t about to argue. We all three went to a motel, and I took turns necking with them, and then the roommate watched while I screwed Helene. I guess she liked what she saw because then she wanted me to do the same for her. I thought Helene would leave. If nothing else, you’d figure that a virgin would want privacy the first time around. But she insisted that Helene stick around and watch, and we made it. She really was a virgin, as it turned out, but she enjoyed herself completely, even had an orgasm. By the end of this I was about ready for the wastebasket, but those two were just warming up. I went to the john and took a shower, and when I came back into the room they were going at it hot and heavy, 69ing like crazy. I suppose I should have guessed they had a lesbian scene going, but my mind didn’t work that way at the time. Still, I wasn’t the kind of guy who was going to object. We kept that little threesome operating for the rest of the semester.

CLAIRE: I was only twenty-one when I got married, so I couldn’t come anywhere close to old Don Juan’s record. I lost my virginity at a beach party about a month after high school graduation. I didn’t sleep around during college, but if I dated a boy and liked him I had sex with him. I’ve always felt very easy about it, that it’s a normal part of living and something two people should do if they want to.

KEN: Or three or four—

CLAIRE: That came later, but the point is that I was always liberal as far as sex was concerned. When I first went out with Ken, he came on very strong and that put me off a little, so I didn’t make it with him until the third or fourth date.

KEN: Note the vagueness. Third or fourth. It was the third, and I could have gotten to you before then if I really pushed it.

CLAIRE: Maybe. We dug each other from the start. We were very good in bed, and we had a great deal in common out of it, not just a great many mutual interests but the way our personalities meshed. We lived together briefly and decided we wanted to make it permanent, and we were married.

JWW: Did you discuss swinging before you were married?

KEN: Not exactly.

CLAIRE: He had told me about his experience with the two college girls, and I’m sure we both were interested in pluralistic sex, but I wasn’t sure he would want our marriage to go in that direction and he wasn’t sure of my attitude, so we didn’t really talk about it. We also discussed wife-swapping, but only in a general sense. We agreed that we could understand why people did it and that there was nothing morally reprehensible about it. We didn’t discuss how we might feel about it personally. I had little fantasies of balling two men at once, there was a passage in a Colette novel that gave me ideas, but that was as far as it went.

KEN: For my part, I hoped we would have a swinging marriage. I thought about it even before we did get married, but it wasn’t anything I intended to force on Claire. If she wanted it, good; if not, I wouldn’t push it.

CLAIRE: As it turned out, he didn’t have to.

JWW: How long after you were married was it before you first got introduced to swinging?

KEN: Four months. And I know that’s a far cry from the usual pattern. Most couples are together for as many years before they take the plunge.

JWW: I gather you suggested it?

KEN: No, neither of us did. We were listening to records at Jeff and Lili Steiner’s apartment. As it happens, they’re the couple we still swing with, our closest friends. I’ve known Jeff most of my life and we’ve always been fairly close. We were in the same class in high school and went through four years at Berkeley together. Jeff handles my legal work, I designed his house, Lili and Claire hit it off together from their first meeting—we were all very friendly.

CLAIRE: Jeff and I had this heavy mock-flirtation going. It was a big joke among the four of us that Jeff and I had this great pash, and that some day we would have a wild affair. I did have a letch for him, naturally. Those gags always have a basis in fact. He’s a beautiful man, very warm and sweet and a positively brilliant mind. But it never occurred to me that I would ever share a bed with him. After all, he was Ken’s best friend.

KEN: Lili and I didn’t play that particular game, but I did find her very attractive. She’s the dark quiet type, a tiny girl with a slim body and a sort of brooding face. Huge eyes, detached manner. The kind of girl who doesn’t draw whistles, but whom every man secretly wonders about, what she’s like in bed and all.

CLAIRE: Get the picture? We were all good friends, and underneath it there was this unspoken lechery going on in all directions. I suppose something would have come of it sooner or later anyway, but one night the mood was just perfect. We were at their place listening to records, as Ken said, and we were all just the slightest bit high on grass—

KEN: Marijuana, in case your readers require a translation. You know how grass works. It’s not a stimulant or a depressant. It’s an intensifier—it makes you go whichever way you’re headed. If you feel nervous it accentuates it, or if you feel introspective it makes you withdraw completely. By the same token, when you’re in a sexy mood to begin with, it can enhance it tremendously, People call it an aphrodisiac, but that doesn’t make much sense, because if you turn on when you’re not in a sexy mood it can make sex absolutely intolerable.

CLAIRE: We were in a sexy mood, as it happens. And Jeff made a remark to that effect, that it was a hell of a thing to feel so much like making love at a time like this. We told him he could drag Lili into the bedroom, that we certainly wouldn’t object. And he said it was the wrong time of the month to drag Lili anywhere. So I said, hamming it up, “Well, I’m available, lover man.”

KEN: Again, just the usual kind of joking. But we got to talking around that general idea, how with the four of us being good friends we should have a cooperative system where a man could ball with the other man’s wife when his own wife was having her menstrual period. It started out as a wouldn’t-it-be-convenient-if conversation, and we talked about whether or not we would be jealous. The conversation started off as a gag, became a serious theoretical discussion, and eventually turned a corner when I admitted that I’d always thought wife-swapping made perfect sense and that I had no objection to Jeff and Claire having a go of it. Jeff said that was great with him, and he took Claire by the hand and led her into the bedroom.

I wasn’t sure whether it was still part of the gag or not. Either way was fine as far as I was concerned. But when they didn’t come out, I knew they were going through with it, and I was extremely excited at the thought.

CLAIRE: The minute we were alone in the bedroom I knew we would do it. I wanted to, and Ken had obviously meant what he said, and whether Jeff thought it was part of the joke or not I was determined to make love to him. So I gave him a very passionate kiss, and then the two of us stood and looked at each other for a moment, and then I began undressing.

KEN: I sat down next to Lili and told her we had better make the best of it. She seemed very detached. Then I kissed her and everything changed; all of a sudden she was turned on all the way. She stuck her tongue halfway down my throat and pressed herself against me. Before I could say boo she had my pants open and my cock in her hand.

CLAIRE: If this is going to wind up in a book, maybe you ought to watch your language.

JWW: No, speak as you wish, it’s all right.

KEN: You sure? Well, whatever you call it, she had it in her hand. She played with it while we kissed. Then she began to apologize for the fact that she was having her period, but she assured me that there were still a lot of things we could do and that she would make sure I didn’t get frustrated. I wasn’t really worried. I had the kind of lazy sexy high where I wanted to make slow gentle love forever. We both got undressed. I took off all my clothes and Lili took off everything but her panties, and we stretched out on the couch and necked and petted and kissed each other. I must have spent half an hour just kissing her little breasts, licking and sucking all over. She had an orgasm that way.

When that happened she got this wild dreamy look on her face and told me to lie down on my back. She said, “Ken, this is something I’ve been wanting to do since the first time we met,” and the next minute she was on her knees with my cock in her mouth.

CLAIRE: At which point Jeff and I walked in on them. It was really wild because it never occurred to me that they would do anything, if only because of what Jeff had said about Lili having her period. He and I had plunged right into it with virtually no preliminaries. It was a special sort of excitement and I came the minute he got inside me. I must have come four more times before he had his orgasm. When it was over, the edge was gone from our pot high and we felt very strange, as though we didn’t know exactly how to feel about what had happened. We got dressed and went back to the living room and there was Ken on his back and Lili going down on him.

JWW: How did the sight make you feel?

CLAIRE: I was very happy because I knew he loved it, and he was certainly enjoying himself now. And I was glad, too, because I had been worried at how he would react—well, not him so much, because I knew he had really meant it when he offered me to Jeff. But I really didn’t know how Lili would react. So I was relieved. And also excited, naturally, since it’s pretty exciting to watch anybody make love.

KEN: She had an extraordinary technique. She was able to relax her throat muscles so that she could take my penis all the way to the hilt, and with her hand she massaged my balls.

CLAIRE: At any rate, that’s how the evening went. Jeff and I just watched until Lili brought Ken to orgasm. Then those two got dressed, and we all four sat around talking about what we had done. We decided that we had no regrets and that we felt closer now than earlier, so why not let our relationship continue that way? They had never swung before either, although they had discussed it from time to time. It was a perfect initiation for us all. From that time on, we were swingers all the way.

•  •  •

The Whitlaws’ progression through the swinging society followed a fairly standard pattern, although their initial experience, with a pair of first-timers, was atypical. They continued to swing with the Steiners and gradually participated in group sex with them, the activity including the observation of one couple by the other and threesomes involving two women and a man or two men and a woman. At this stage, no homosexual relations were engaged in.

Subsequently, the Steiners began making other contacts through a correspondence club, and the Whitlaws followed suit. Exchanges with several other California couples led them into the swinging society. They were invited to parties and got involved in more and more orgiastic activity.

•  •  •

KEN: We found out that we really had a hell of an appetite for the far-out stuff. We weren’t moved by bondage and discipline, but all of the forms of straight sex really got to us. It’s my theory that the capacity for enjoying the more outré sexual practices is better developed with imaginative, artistic people. The clods and dullards just want to make do with straightforward copulation, and they think they’re really going into orbit if they try a new position once every six months. But with creative types, different forms of sex have different appeals, and it gets more interesting the more varied it is.

CLAIRE: We went to a lot of parties that weren’t exactly orgies, but they came close. They would have swinging party games, for example. These were originally designed to break the ice, but a lot of the time they became an end in themselves. Some, like strip poker, were exciting during the early days but went stale in a hurry. Others were wild.

JWW: What sort of games did you play?

KEN: A large number of them were types of guessing games. For example, a man would be blindfolded and every girl at the party would give him a turn at eating her, and he would have to see how many of them he could identify by taste, or he would try to guess which one was his wife, and there are any number of variations on that basic game, and you can imagine them for yourself. There was also a swinging version of Spin-The-Bottle; I think you can guess how it worked without an explanation.

CLAIRE: There were also contests. The group would divide up into couples, and all of them would have sex in a specified way. The usual choice was fellatio. The man who lasted longest before coming was a winner, and so was the girl whose partner was the first to pop.

KEN: Her partner sometimes got a booby prize. One rather imaginative host gave out falsies as booby prizes.

CLAIRE: Another game was very popular. We heard it called by a few names—One For All And All For One, Happy Time, Hedonism, whatever. The rules couldn’t have been simpler. One man and one woman were selected by drawing lots, and each gets the simultaneous attention of all of the members of the opposite sex, usually for a specified period of time. Say fifteen minutes, or sometimes as long as a half hour. When I was It, for example, there were six couples at the party. One of the other men was also It and was busy in another room with the five other girls, and I had the other five men to myself. One took me Greek style from the rear, another entered my vagina from the front, a third rubbed himself between my breasts, I used my hands on the fourth man and took the fifth one in my mouth. I think every woman must have fantasies of being the object of several men’s sexual attention. I know I did, and I had always liked to take on two men at a time, but this was the end of the world. The sensation, it was almost too much.

KEN: There’s another version of the same game, where the person who is It makes it with everyone else in turn.

JWW: Everyone of the opposite sex?

KEN: That depends on the group. Usually the stipulation that the person who is It perform oral sex, and this may be on the opposite sex members or sometimes on everyone of either sex. We aren’t that happy with this version, actually. It’s a little too close to the Sadie Mae games where they choose one person as a sort of sex slave. The way Claire described the game, it’s a cooperative venture designed to give the chosen person the ultimate in thrills. But this way is different, it makes one person the butt of a big sexual joke. We don’t care for it.

JWW: I gather that you had gotten involved in homosexual acts by this time.

KEN: Oh, yes. That got started rather early in the game. Even before we went to parties, actually. We swung with another couple. A mixed couple, a white guy and a Negro girl, and we all made it in the same room and worked in some three-way action as well. Then the girl started playing up to Claire, stroking her breasts and grabbing her snatch. I didn’t even think she was serious at first, but then she asked Claire if she swung that way.

CLAIRE: I started to say no, but something made me say I’d like to give it a try. I think the racial bit added to the excitement, and also there was the fact that she was very beautiful and I felt myself responding to her physically. She had skin the color of coffee with cream in it and her figure was magnificent, beautiful large breasts and a tiny waist. Also both she and her husband removed their pubic hair with depilatories, and we had never come across this before.

KEN: This is common, we’ve since discovered. I would say about two-thirds of the girls in our general set remove their pubic hair nowadays. The proportion of men is much lower, but some do. They even have wigs available for the girls, specially made pussy toupees.

CLAIRE: To get back to this girl, I was excited by her, and I had been thinking before about making love with another woman. I’d had urges for Lili Steiner, actually, but I repressed them. Now, though, I let this colored gal go down on me, and it was groovy. I had a wonderful sort of tingling orgasm, and the moment she stopped her husband took her place and began to fuck me, and over his shoulder I watched Ken giving the girl a dose of what she had been giving me. I wouldn’t describe myself as a lesbian, but I certainly enjoy relations with other women.

KEN: They’re a constant fixture in the party scene, of course. The other side of the same coin is a little different.

JWW: I was going to ask about that.

KEN: Well, there’s far less male homosexuality going on. With the party crowd around here, for example, I don’t think there’s one woman in twenty who doesn’t enjoy lesbian relations as a usual part of swinging. In our own case, Claire is an example of a very healthily-sexed woman who enjoys men to the hilt but still never passes up a chance with an agreeable gal. And this isn’t just true at parties, either. She and Lili go down on one another all the time.

CLAIRE: Lili’s French technique is as good with women as it is with men. She’s pretty fantastic.

KEN: But male homosexuality is something else again. There’s quite a bit of it going on, and it’s unquestionably true that certain men get involved in swinging largely because it gives them a chance to have homosexual relations. My own attitude is that I’ll go along with it at a really orgiastic party, occasionally because I want to but usually to make some other guy happy, or to give the girls something to watch. I don’t mind the passive role in fellatio with another male, for example. And I’m willing to bugger a guy if that’s what he wants, and occasionally I’ve gotten a kind of kick out of going down on a man while having coitus with a woman, that sort of thing.

The point is, I can take things like that in the context of an orgy. I’ve never done that when we’ve been with just one or two other couples, however, and I never would. Take the Steiners, for instance—it’s unthinkable that the two gals wouldn’t have sex together, and it’s equally unthinkable that Jeff and I would ever get together that way. The whole idea makes me very uncomfortable, and I’m sure Jeff feels the same way. But with total strangers at a really free-swinging orgy it’s different. All the inhibitions are off and a person is naturally more inclined to do certain things that might rub him the wrong way otherwise.

CLAIRE: That’s generally true, incidentally; it doesn’t just apply to the male homosexual scene, Everybody has a certain sadomasochistic streak, and you’ll see a lot of people let go at an orgy who would never dream of playing Sadie Mae games in an ordinary swap situation. Lili is a good example of this. They were in Puerto Rico with us, and I remember one time she and I were both in the same room. I was involved with someone else at the time, but Lili set things up so that she was stretched out across one guy’s lap while she went down on another guy, and the guy whose lap she was on was spanking her full strength on her bare behind. I was so shocked to see Lili getting her kicks that way that it frankly turned me off and I couldn’t enjoy my scene—

KEN: Really spoiled the week for you, didn’t it?

CLAIRE: Hardly. It would have taken an awful lot to spoil that week. God, when I think of what went on! But the point of this is that Lili really had a ball that way. She had an orgasm, and the way she squealed it was obviously a good one. And when I talked to her about it later on she was embarrassed. She said she could never get a thrill that way ordinarily, but at a scene like that one she could let loose, and things that ordinarily did nothing for her were tremendously exciting.

•  •  •

Earlier, we saw the special role that orgies now play in the Whitlaws’ sex lives. They had progressed with swinging to the point where it was getting out of control, dominating their lives and leaving them with little else. In addition, their swinging had developed to such an extent that it constituted almost all of their sexual activity. This is a self-defeating syndrome not uncommon in the swinging society. All too often couples will employ swinging as first-aid for an ailing marital sexual relationship only to find that in the long run swinging replaces married sex, and the husband and wife almost never have relations alone and in private.

This began to be the case with the Whitlaws.

“It was really ridiculous,” Claire said. “I’ve never had a better lover than Ken, and he’s always said that I’m his favorite sex partner. But we reached a point where we almost never made it together. We were swinging five or six nights a week, either group blasts or couple sessions, and although we would frequently ball together at a session we hardly ever had anything left for when we got home. We were very close, we never felt ourselves drifting apart, but we began to realize that there was something pretty crazy about the whole scene. When swinging begins to deprive you of the most basic sexual enjoyment of husband and wife, then it’s time to take a good long look at yourselves and figure out what’s happening.”

The result of this reappraisal of swinging was a decision to confine themselves to couple dates with the Steiners and occasional all-out orgies every couple of months. This has been the pattern for almost two years, and both Ken and Claire seem quite satisfied with it. They say that they do not regret having gotten as involved in day-by-day swinging—it gave them good insight into their sexual nature and enabled them to choose their present course of action. But they can’t imagine how people can keep going at that pace year after year.

“We originally thought of eliminating the parties and orgies and sticking to couple swaps. We also considered forming a steady group of six or eight couples and limiting ourselves wholly to sex with members of that group, either swaps or parties as the occasion might demand.”

“But that wasn’t what we needed,” Claire cut in. “Because once you learn how exciting a real orgy is, once you find out the kick of cutting loose with a strange group and really saturating yourself in sex, other things tend to become tame. So we realized then what we really wanted—a scattering of real hard-core orgies just far enough apart in time, and nothing but each other and Jeff and Lili at other times.”

JWW: I wonder if you could give me a good picture of what goes on at the average orgy.

KEN: I’m not sure there is such a thing—“average orgy” is sort of a contradiction in terms.

CLAIRE: We could describe the most recent one, if that would do.

JWW: Yes, that would be good.

KEN: It was a three-day affair. We find those about the best. The Puerto Rico vacation was great, a really wild experience, but seven days and nights of constant sex was a bit much. A weekend is much better. Even if you’re a fantastic sexual athlete, three days can drain you pretty completely.

This time we were invited down to Will and Penny Graham’s place. They have this huge monstrosity of a house, one of those imitation Spanish things that some moron of a movie producer built in the thirties. About thirty bedrooms, every conceivable architectural excess—it’s so hideously campy that they love it. Will’s an independent producer who hit it big with a couple of low-budget films a few years back and who’s been riding high ever since, and Penny did a little acting—

CLAIRE: And a lot of fucking.

KEN: She didn’t make it as an actress and was the kind of amateur hooker you find down in Hollywood. We only know them through the party scene. We were invited along with about twenty other couples and a certain number of single guys and gals. I would say there were fifty people there altogether, about half of them connected with the movie industry in one way or another. No Big Names, obviously—when prominent people swing, they don’t let the common herd know about it. But there were plenty of actors and actresses, and I recognized a few of them, mostly from television. There’s one little blonde who’s on television all the time doing detergent commercials, and I get a kick out of seeing her selling soap and remembering the time I had with her. Come to think of it, I made it with her in the shower, so maybe she’s the perfect type for detergent commercials.

CLAIRE: Jeff and Lili were invited also, so Lili got a woman to watch her kids and the four of us drove down together. We started out in the morning and got to the Grahams’ in late afternoon. There were about seven other couples already on the scene and things were already off to a fairly good start. Will met us at the door wearing nothing but a smile, as the old saying goes. We got undressed in the hallway. Lili and I each gave him a kiss and then he led us in to join the others.

KEN: Getting undressed was a one-minute operation, because nobody wears more than necessary to an orgy. No underwear, for example. Guys wear slacks and a shirt and girls wear a dress. Otherwise it’s impossible to keep track of your clothing, since no one wears a stitch all weekend anyway.

CLAIRE: When we walked into the main living room, the overall scene was one of relaxed foreplay. Nobody was actually making it but everyone was starting to get into the mood. There were a half dozen conversations going on at once, and people would be talking and feeling each other at the same time. For instance, there was a redhead with really spectacular breasts deep in conversation with an assistant director on the other side of the room. They were talking about a movie that he liked and she hated, and she was absorbed in the conversation, and at the same time a guy next to her was sucking her breasts and she had her hand on his cock and was playing with him. And this sort of thing was going on all over the room, but no one had gotten around to balling yet.

KEN: They got around to it before very long, though. And once things really started to swing it was the wildest. It was a huge house, and when the group in the living room broke up you could just go from room to room and there would be people balling wherever you went. Then there were two special rooms for special arrangements. One was the theater. Will and Penny have a fantastic library of sex films. People in the movie industry don’t have to make do with the usual run of stag films. They make their own, and some of the better ones are done in full color and sound and are as professionally produced as the commercial stuff. Sometimes they’ll even have a writer work up dialogue and shoot the stuff with a couple of cameras. I’ve never seen better films than the ones Will showed, and he had it set up so that they would play non-stop with the projector running automatically. If you felt like it, you could go in there and watch the films anytime you wanted to.

The other room was the reverse—there was a camera there focused on the bed, and if you felt like performing for posterity you could go in there, flick a switch, and let the camera record your great moments. There were black masks available for the shyer types, too.

CLAIRE: It would be impossible to describe everything that went on. I don’t know everything that Ken did, and of course he doesn’t know everything that I was in on. As a matter of fact, I’m sure I don’t remember more than half of the weekend myself. There were stretches where I did nothing but screw for hours at a time, and it would take a better memory than mine to remember just what I did and with whom. But if it would help give you a picture of the whole thing, I could tell you part of it, and then Ken could tell what he remembers.

JWW: I think that would be good.

CLAIRE: Well, let’s see. On the ride down, we agreed that Jeff would have me to start the party going, and that Lili and Ken would make it together for openers, too. We joined everybody in the living room and sort of joined in the general conversation and group grope. I got goosed a few dozen times and propositioned left and right, but first I wanted to make it with Jeff. There was a rocking chair free. He sat on it and I sat on his lap facing him, and when he was inside of me a girl came over and rocked the chair back and forth for us. Then one of the guys who had propositioned me asked me if I’d like to go upstairs with him. We found a room to ourselves and went to it. He had me kneel over the bed and gave it to me Greek style. In the middle of this another couple came in and joined us. The girl got on the bed and spread herself out so that I could get at her orally, and her partner stood alongside her and let her give him the same treatment in return. Then, when the first guy finished, the second man wanted to have either me or the other girl the same way.

She refused, said she was built too small. I was willing but a little frightened because of the size of his penis. It was no longer than normal but about twice the usual thickness and I was afraid he would tear my anus apart. I told him I was willing to try but he couldn’t get it in, so the other girl and I tried everything we could to make him come, but nothing worked. He screwed one of us and ate the other one and kept switching back and forth and couldn’t make it. I guess he was an anal-erotic type and couldn’t make it any other way, and he finally went off to find somebody who was built to accommodate him.

I wandered off to another room where two guys and a girl were partying with Lili. The guys were eating her back and front and the girl was sitting on her face. I fixed myself so that I could take one of the guys orally while I jerked the other one off with my hands. While all of this was going on another guy must have joined the party, because the next thing I knew I was being screwed. He did a good job, finished, and went away, and I never did see who it was.

KEN: At that sort of orgy, you get that all the time. You never have a chance to talk to anybody and you never do know the names of half the people, and a lot of the time it isn’t really a matter of people at all, it’s just organs. Things keep happening and you get too caught up in what’s going on at any particular moment to pay much attention to external circumstances.

In one way, you’re a little better off if you’re a man. You wouldn’t think this would be true but it is. See, you learn over the years, if you really swing hard and fast, how to have satisfactory intercourse without ejaculating. Most men would probably think this is impossible. Once you learn how to manage it, there’s nothing easier. It isn’t so much a question of withholding orgasm as it is a matter of teaching your body to have the actual physical and emotional thrill of a genuine orgasm without emitting any semen. This way you don’t deplete yourself and you can go on for hours on end, getting a complete thrill each time but remaining potent for the next encounter. Thus at a three-day orgy I may ejaculate no more than five or six times a day, which may sound like a lot in itself but which isn’t enough to exhaust a man in good sexual condition. But at the same time I’ll actually have sex with dozens of girls, and each time I’ll have one or more of these non-ejaculatory orgasms.

JWW: But why is it harder for the women?

CLAIRE: Because we naturally come the usual way every time, and you can only stand so much of that. An orgasm is tiring, face it. Another thing that gets to you is the feeling, after the first few hours, that you’re a sex machine that everybody’s been dumping their excess passion in. Despite what Ken said, there aren’t that many men who hold it in. Most of them let it out, and it gets messy. By midnight the first night I had taken three or four showers and I still felt pretty sloppy. Whenever I stood up semen would run out of me, and I had the usual taste in my mouth, and I was already beginning to get a little sore.

KEN: I think you get the general idea, as far as what happens in that type of scene. The thing is, you really don’t remember specific encounters in detail, not the greater majority of them. The whole point is that you immerse yourself entirely in sexual activity, you get caught up in it and live entirely in the moment. Whatever crazy urge you have, whatever you desire to do with whoever appeals to you, you just go ahead and do it.

CLAIRE: At the same time there’s a sort of rhythm to an orgy. Nobody gets to sleep the first night. Besides being high on excitement, it’s standard procedure to use a little speed.

KEN: She means amphetamine.

CLAIRE: Like Dexedrine, for example. It keeps you awake and hops you up a little, just enough so that you concentrate very hard on what you’re doing and your attention never wanders. It’s not a sex stimulant in the sense of making you more easily turned on, like Spanish Fly or ginseng root or whatever, but it improves performance.

KEN: At least it seems to.

CLAIRE: So between the speed and the natural excitement, no one goes to sleep. But after the first few hours of unrestrained sex, a sort of lull will set in for most people. That’s when you’re apt to go sit and watch the movies, for example.

KEN: Or watch other people.

CLAIRE: That’s right. As a matter of fact, I’d say a third of the time is spent wandering around, talking, and watching other people ball. This is all accepted. It’s taken for granted that anyone who wants privacy will go to a room and lock the door, and if the door’s not locked that means visitors are welcome, whether they want to join in or watch.

KEN: Some clowns do nothing but watch. They’ll go to an orgy and never have relations with anyone. Instead they just watch and masturbate. They aren’t exactly in demand on the party circuit, but they’re accepted to a certain degree.

CLAIRE: They don’t subtract from the excitement, certainly. It’s always more erotic with someone watching.

KEN: So the thing is that the weekend runs in spurts—

CLAIRE: No kidding, sugar.

KEN: You’ve got a dirty mind. It runs in cycles and—

CLAIRE: You could even say it runs in spurts and snatches, if you wanted to.

KEN: Cut it out, will you? It’s cyclical, with periods of intense activity followed by stretches of relative calm. Somewhere in mid-morning the second day Claire and I generally get together for a private romp, comparing notes on what’s been going on so far and what we’ve done and with whom, and we’ll make love, and then we generally catch a few hours sleep. We’ll wake up around dinner hour Saturday and start in where we left off.

CLAIRE: And keep it up until Sunday afternoon, with maybe a nap in-between. Saturday night there may be some special entertainment. This most recent time at Will and Penny’s they had a couple of acts that everyone watched. There was a hooker hired for the occasion who was something of a contortionist. She could roll herself up into a ball and lick her own twat—

KEN: I know a limerick along those lines.

CLAIRE: Well, keep it to yourself. She did that, and she also put on a show with her dog. It wasn’t much as animal acts go, but the other bit got everybody pretty excited, and afterward she was available for anyone who wanted to make it with her. I guess Will Graham must have given her a couple of hundred for the evening. Then more of the same all night long with time off for an occasional nap or rest period, and we were back at our own place by nightfall Sunday.

JWW: How do you feel when it’s over?

CLAIRE: Tired, obviously. Exhausted, drained.

KEN: Sore.

CLAIRE: That too, and sometimes it’s no joke. One time Ken’s penis was absolutely raw. He was too embarrassed to go to a doctor—

KEN: Can you blame me?

CLAIRE: —and we abstained from sex for a week before it was healed. But the main thing is that you do feel as though you’ve gotten everything out of your system, so much so that it wasn’t any great hardship to spend the next week without sex, as far as that goes. And you just feel, oh, I don’t know exactly.

KEN: Purged.

CLAIRE: That’s it, I guess. The way it is now, the general pattern of going all out at an orgy and then cooling it for a few months, I think it’s just about ideal for us. But sometimes, to tell you the truth, I wish we hadn’t gotten this deeply involved in the first place.

KEN: I sometimes feel the same way. It’s . . . well, I believe very much in sexual freedom, in individual rights, and I’m not hung up enough on the whole concept of morality to worry that what we’re doing is wrong in a moral sense. At the same time, I can’t help recognizing it as decadent. It’s that if only by definition. The whole notion of swinging is fundamentally decadent, and the orgy is nothing but swinging carried to its logical conclusion.

JWW: Yet you feel swinging is right for you?

KEN: Very definitely. Claire and I seem to be decadent people. And there’s another thing. Once you get used to a new kick, it’s very difficult to get along without it. The sexual system builds up a tolerance much the same as the body develops a tolerance to certain drugs. You read this nonsense in the papers about people requiring stronger and stronger sexual thrills, well, it’s not entirely nonsense. To a certain extent it’s exactly what we found happening to us. Trying to limit ourselves to less extreme acts didn’t work, so we decided to go all-out once in awhile and cut down the frequency, and that works pretty well.

CLAIRE: We’re always ready and anxious when it comes time to go to an orgy, and afterwards we’re always relaxed again, sated. So they do what they’re supposed to do.

Fit To Be Tied

ARNOLD: I don’t know about all this. I’ve read, oh, any number of books on swinging, along with specialized material on bondage and the bondage clubs, and they all have a definite tone.

MONA: They make it sound as though people like us are a bunch of perverts.

ARNOLD: That’s it exactly.

JWW: Do you consider yourself perverted?

ARNOLD: I don’t see why we should be considered perverts, no. As far as I’m concerned, Mona and I are normal people. We lead what is basically a normal life. We’ve been married for eight years, we have three children, we live a decent life in a decent community.

MONA: And we have ordinary sexual relations on an average of three to four times a week. We hardly ever practice bondage at home. It’s almost exclusively reserved for meetings.

ARNOLD: As far as that goes, the meetings themselves aren’t that far out. I’ve read about clubs where people really go off their nut. Whippings and torture, really inhuman activity. As I said, I’ve read about them, but to tell you the truth I’m not sure they honestly exist, or if they do they must be extremely rare. The group we meet with, well, there’s not a member who would have anything to do with that sort of activity.

JWW: What do you do, then?

ARNOLD: We have bondage situations. We’ll have a person or persons selected as the subject for the evening, and that person will be restrained and forced to perform certain sexual acts. But the acts themselves will be perfectly normal—coitus and oral and anal copulation, nothing that isn’t a part of the average marriage, as everybody damn well knows. It’s the acts themselves that are the reason for the group’s existence. The bondage and the punishment aspects are just to provide a little added spice.

JWW: But these aspects are always a part of the meeting?

ARNOLD: Yes.

JWW: They’re never passed up in favor of simply concentrating on the sex act?

ARNOLD: No, I don’t suppose they are.

JWW: Well, I’m sure you see what I’m getting at. I don’t want to use this interview to make you look perverted—as a matter of fact, I’m trying to keep the whole question of what is or is not normal out of this study. But I think you’ll agree that if the club meetings are always focused on some facet of bondage or discipline or whatever you wish to call it, that you have to agree that it’s more than just an added spice.

MONA: That’s true, but—

JWW: And I wondered if you had any ideas why you emphasize bondage in this fashion and to this extent.

ARNOLD: Because it excites us, obviously. And because well, I’m no psychiatrist, but when you’re involved in this sort of thing you do a lot of reading in the field. Even without the training, I suppose I’ll have to say that I have a fair idea of what makes us tick.

JWW: I see.

ARNOLD: And what it comes down to, well, to reverse my direction entirely, I guess you could only call it a perversion of the normal sexual impulses. Which would tend to confirm that we’re perverts after all, which is the opposite of what I was trying to prove a minute ago.

MONA: I’ll tell you what it is. Forget perverted and normal, okay? The thing with all the stuff you read, material about bondage, is you always get the feeling from reading it that these people in the case histories are absolutely nuts. Right?

ARNOLD: Yes, that’s the whole thing. See, John, when you write this up, that’s one thing you don’t want to do. Don’t make us look like we’re a bunch of nuts falling off a tree. You know the story of the guy in the insane asylum, and somebody asks him how much two and two is, and he gives the right answer? And then he says, “Look, I may be crazy but I’m not stupid.” It’s like that. We may be abnormal or perverted or whatever you want to call it. The average bondage fan makes a big thing about how normal it is, but I think we all of us know better than that, and those of us with a certain degree of insight could even make some pretty good guesses as to why we operate the way we do.

MONA: The beatings you got as a kid, for example.

ARNOLD: That’s one example, I could think of plenty of others. The hell with that. The point is, John, like with the nut in the asylum. Let the people know that we may be perverted, whatever that means. But we’re not crazy!

•  •  •

The mild forms of sadomasochism are extremely difficult for the average person—swinger or square—to comprehend. While almost anyone can understand the basic appeal of wife-swapping, however repugnant the idea may be personally, it is far more difficult for someone with no strong sadomasochistic bent to understand why bondage and discipline have so many adherents. And, at the same time, the vile sexual crimes and tortures of the aggressive sadist make an odd sort of sense to most people—they simply characterize these acts as the natural desires of a warped mind. But when sadomasochism takes a milder form, when its devotees find sexual fulfillment by acting out involved master-slave relationships, by administering mild spankings or flagellating one another moderately, or by tying partners prior to copulation, the average person is unable to understand the attraction of the sport.

Thus it becomes a simple matter to write of people like Arnold and Mona Carter as, well, nutty.

A closer look at the Carters, along with some of the other members of their bondage group, reveals that their practices gratify a great many desires which would otherwise be impossible to fulfill. In a great many cases, bondage and/or discipline permit the practitioner to rationalize acts and desires which, owing to his personality, he is unable either to accept or to suppress. In other cases, an individual’s sexual attitudes will have been shaped, probably in childhood, to a point where sexual pleasure is permanently associated with pain, humiliation, punishment, or whatever.

Mona Carter, a plump 26 year old blonde with innocent blue eyes and a ready smile, is an excellent example of the former type of bondage fan. Mona grew up regarding sex itself as basically evil and any variation from the most common form of sex as vile and perverted. Although she later learned otherwise, at least in an intellectual sense, it is almost impossible for most people wholly to unlearn the sexual attitudes acquired early in life.

Thus Mona has always had considerable difficulty in enjoying sex, and has never shown an experimental attitude toward marital relations; even slight departures from the norm upset her. In bondage situations, however, she is able to gratify her strong desires for several forms of sexual activity which would otherwise be beyond the pale for her. Oral sexual relations with both men and women particularly appeal to her in a bondage situation, just as such relations are particularly taboo in any other setting. It is the combination of desire and inhibition which has this ultimate effect, as we shall see.

Her husband Arnold, on the other hand, typifies the opposite sort of moderate sadomasochist. Arnold, a skilled toolmaker of 29, first experienced sexual excitement as a child while being punished. The associations of childhood, affecting the personality at a time when the whole concept of sex is developing, are almost impossible to displace. They are demonstrably responsible for an inordinate quantity of sexual deviations, and are almost invariably at the root of fetish behavior, in which such objects or materials as shoes, leather, fur, and the like are endowed with almost mystic sexual importance.

The Pavlovian concept of the conditioned reflex helps explain this phenomenon. Pavlov, of course, was the Russian psychologist who rang a bell every time he fed a group of dogs. The dogs quickly learned to associate the ringing of the bell with the experience of being fed, to the point where they reacted to this sound as to the stimulus of food itself—i.e., they began salivating when the bell was rung whether or not food was offered.

To understand the way a conditioned reflex could establish a sexual fetish, one might conceive of an experiment in which, through the proper placement of electrodes in the brain, subjects were induced to reach orgasm immediately after being presented with a normally non-sexual stimulus. For example, they might be shown pictures of hummingbirds. Once the pattern of hummingbird-picture-plus-orgasm was established, one could disconnect the electrodes and expect that the sight of a hummingbird would continue to elicit a strong sexual response from the subject.

It is thus that fetishes develop, and it is thus that sex for Arnold was strongly associated with guilt, punishment, and physical pain. He witnessed an act of coitus between his parents—an act which, out of childish ignorance, he even interpreted as one in which his father and his mother were hurting each other. He was then scolded, was told he was a dirty child for sneaking in on his parents, and was soundly spanked by his mother, who stripped off his pants and held him across her naked lap while spanking him with the palm of her hand.

All of the excitement of the scene, combined with the indisputable fact that slaps upon the buttocks stimulate sexual nerve-endings, engendered extreme sexual excitement followed by orgasm. And, since one can no more easily train a person to desist responding to a given stimuli, than one can train a child to dislike a food he has grown to enjoy, so the connection between sex and pain and punishment remained with Arnold, reinforced over the years by sundry additional incidents.

While the manner in which both Mona and Arnold acquired their present sexual orientation is of more than a little interest, it is by no means unusual and parallels cases documented time and time again in psychoanalytical literature. The reader who wishes to pursue the matter further might consult other works dealing with such subjects. Dr. Benjamin Morse’s The Sexual Deviate covers this and other subjects comprehensively and gives a good picture of the way these mechanisms operate; Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, while largely dismissed by present-day authorities as superficial in certain respects, does present an exhaustive survey of the various forms which fetishism may assume and is most valuable in that regard. The reader with an incomplete acquaintance with Latin should take care, though, to avoid buying an older edition of this work; earlier publishers seemed to feel that candid material was obscene unless presented in a dead language!

While Arnold and Mona are both interesting as cases of sexual development, we are here concerned less with how they acquired their particular sexual feelings as we are with the way swinging, via their bondage club, has come to provide them with a means of satisfying these feelings. For this reason we will omit a discussion of their early years and will instead concentrate on their sexual life since marriage.

•  •  •

ARNOLD: I suppose it’s unusual in this day and age, but when Mona and I were married we didn’t have enough sexual experience between us to amount to much. I had actually had intercourse just once, and it was pretty much of a disaster. I had been dating this girl, and she actually seduced me. She wanted to sleep with me and I told her that I didn’t want to do this because I respected her. I suppose this is a pretty obvious cop-out, but I really did believe it at the time.

We had been petting, and when I said this she got absolutely furious. She got her hand on my scrotum and started to squeeze, and she told me if I didn’t make love to her she would crush my testicles. I don’t know if she meant it or not, but either the pain or the threat or something got to me, and I became excited enough to go through with it and had coitus with her. It wasn’t much good for either of us. I tried to date her again but she didn’t want to have anything to do with me.

And Mona, believe it or not, was a virgin on her wedding night

MONA: I guess it is hard to believe, isn’t it? You know the story they tell about unicorns, that they use that horn to violate virgins—well, they also say that the reason there aren’t any unicorns any more is that there aren’t any virgins, either. But I was one. I had plenty of opportunities for sex, but I always managed to stop myself before I went too far. I used to think that sometime sooner or later I would lead a boy on too far and I wouldn’t be able to stop him, that I would wind up getting raped. Maybe it would have happened eventually, I don’t know, but it hadn’t happened by the time I was 18, and then I met Arnold and we were married.

ARNOLD: One good thing was that from the beginning we were able to discuss sex together. We both admitted that maybe we were undersexed and that it didn’t mean too much to us. We were wrong, but that was what we both honestly believed at the time. And although our honeymoon wasn’t the kind of wild orgy people talk about, it worked out well as far as we were concerned. The first night we didn’t even attempt to have intercourse, We just held each other and petted. Then the second night we managed it, and we had intercourse on a fairly regular basis from then on.

MONA: Our sex life was low-keyed, but it was normal.

ARNOLD: That’s about the best way to describe it. Sex was just no big deal for us. A certain percentage of the time I wouldn’t be able to get an erection, or Mona would tense up and wouldn’t get excited at all, and I suppose either of us would have been a damned unsatisfactory partner for anyone else, but we were fine for each other.

MONA: Partly because we happen to love each other very much, for one thing. When you have a real love for each other, it’s more than sex. It’s the tenderness you feel for each other, and that’s more important than having sex so many times a week or whatever.

JWW: Then I take it you were satisfied with your sexual relationship?

ARNOLD: Well—

MONA: You could say that we thought it was as good as it could be. For us, I mean. We realized that other people got more intense pleasure out of sex than we did, but we didn’t know that we could do any better than we were doing.

JWW: What made you change your minds?

ARNOLD: It was a fight we had. I don’t even know what we argued about but that’s really beside the point, isn’t it? Whatever it was, it was a real rip-snorter. We’d been married about three or four years at the time and we had just recently begun having some very bad arguments. They always worked themselves out and at the end we kissed and made up, and usually made love.

MONA: Sometimes I think we had those fights for the fun of making up again. And our lovemaking was at its best afterward.

ARNOLD: This one time, we were really screaming at each other. Mona said something that got to me, I forget what, and I told her that I felt like taking her over my knee and walloping her. She told me I wouldn’t dare, and I was just mad enough to take the dare.

MONA: I didn’t really believe he’d do it. But I suppose I must have secretly hoped he would, because as soon as he started spanking me I got a very funny feeling. It wasn’t just sexy, it was different from anything I could remember feeling before. I thought how strong he was and how he could do anything he wanted with me and I was powerless to resist him. And this was a very stimulating line of thought to me.

ARNOLD: You made it pretty obvious. I was paddling her pretty hard—I got carried away, see—and the next thing I knew she was on her back with her knees up screaming “Fuck me, fuck me” at the top of her lungs. Excuse the expression, but the thing is that that’s what she said, and Mona was not the kind of person to say a word like that. There’s a saying that a person wouldn’t say shit if she had a mouthful, and that’s a perfect description of Mona. I don’t think I ever heard her say damn before, and here she was saying this, and it was crazy. I got this sudden spontaneous erection like never before and the next thing you knew we were going at it like a couple of dogs in the mating season. She kept on using obscene language and calling me dirty names and telling me to do it to her as hard as I could, and for my part I was just completely carried away, terribly excited in a way that was different from anything that had ever happened in the past.

MONA: It was almost too much for us. I had a really unbelievable orgasm. I hardly ever had reached orgasm before, and when I did it wasn’t that powerful, but this was fantastic. And afterward we didn’t know what to make of it. We couldn’t exactly talk about it. We were both embarrassed and ashamed, but at the same time we had enjoyed ourselves tremendously. It was . . . odd.

•  •  •

Experiences similar to the one described above will often lead a couple to incorporate some sort of sadomasochistic ritual into their foreplay in order to enhance their sexual relationship. One might have expected that this would be the case with Mona and Arnold, but things did not turn out this way. Although they could hardly deny what had happened, they found it difficult to accept the implications of their discovery. Each felt that their love for each other was clean and tender, and that the new sides of themselves which they had uncovered were evil and generally undesirable.

•  •  •

MONA: It was a very frustrating time for both of us, and I often found myself wishing that the whole thing had never taken place, however good it had been at the time. I found myself having these thoughts of being raped or spanked all the time. I imagined Arnold forcing me to do certain things, such as fellatio. When I had these thoughts it made me passionate, but it also made me feel very uncomfortable, and very guilty and dirty.

ARNOLD: Mona used to try to pick fights just so that they would end with a spanking. If we had been a little denser than we were this might have worked out fine, but we were able to see what we were both doing and it disturbed us. It was a vicious circle. Like Mona, I was having fantasies of bondage and domination, and on the one hand I wanted that sort of sex and at the same time I felt it would have a bad effect on our marriage.

MONA: So we reacted in different ways. I kept acting very bitchy, and lover boy went out and found himself a whore.

ARNOLD: It was really an experiment. I felt I could do anything with a prostitute and it wouldn’t matter. Things that would be degrading with Mona I could do with a prostitute. I got a girl’s phone number from a fellow at work. I went to her place and explained what I wanted her to do. I thought she would get angry or disgusted, which would actually have pleased me. Or else she might have laughed at me. But she didn’t react at all. I guess girls in the business get every kind of odd request, and this at least was something she could do with no trouble.

I had her tie my hands together behind my back. Then I knelt on the bed and she spanked me on the buttocks. At first nothing happened, and I was ready to call it off and go home when all of a sudden something just plain connected, and I was suddenly very excited. I had her go on spanking me while I performed cunnilingus on her. I had never done this with Mona, I had thought about it but never mentioned it, and now I found it terribly exciting. I had a powerful orgasm from doing that, and from the spanking she was giving me. Then afterward I felt terribly guilty about it. I spent three sleepless nights brooding about it before I finally gave up and confessed everything to Mona.

JWW: What was her reaction?

MONA: I was furious, and we had a terrible fight. I slapped Arnold and called him a fairy and a pervert and a cheat and everything else in the book, and he hit me back, and we wound up making love, and once again it was this wild thing like before. After that it was time for both of us to face up to some facts. We talked about seeing a marriage counselor but both of us decided it probably wouldn’t do any good and that it was sure to be embarrassing. So we talked it out and did some reading on the subject, and it seemed as though the best thing to do was act out our fantasies in sex play.

JWW: Did this work?

MONA: Yes and no. It was exciting that way, but we felt badly about it afterward. As though we were soiling our marriage and giving in to desires that weren’t worthy of us.

ARNOLD: Then I picked up a magazine on the newsstand with an article about bondage clubs. That got us on the right track, although it was a long time before we did anything about it. But we began buying books and reading them and we actually knew a great deal about the entire swinging scene before we actually got involved in it.

MONA: We finally decided that it was something we had to try. I was very nervous at the thought of our having sex with other people. I didn’t know how we would react to it. We felt, though, that it wouldn’t kill us to try it, and that it might work out well.

JWW: How did you first make contact?

MONA: We used one of the clubs and answered a few ads. We had done enough reading so that we knew how to pick the right ads. Some of them came right out and used key words like bondage or discipline, and others were a little more subtle. Couples and singles would describe themselves as being in need of training or fit to be tied or students of the history of punishment. If you knew what you were looking for, it wasn’t hard to find out what couples were tuned in on our frequency.

We were really very cautious about the whole thing, too. We used false names and a Post Office box in another city, and we exchanged several letters with a few couples until we found one we felt we could trust. We knew to do this from what we had read.

JWW: Were you afraid of postal authorities?

ARNOLD: That was part of it, but not the whole thing. What we were most anxious about was getting involved with some kooks and weirdoes.

MONA: Maybe that sounds funny coming from us—

ARNOLD: I guess we should be broadminded about everything, since our own kicks are off the beaten track. It just goes to show that everybody’s pretty much prejudiced against anything that isn’t his own kick. Still, what we had to avoid was getting mixed up with the extreme Sadie Maes. There’s a big difference between our kind of bondage and the wild stuff that some people go for. As far as I’m concerned, they can play their games all they want and more power to them, as long as they leave us out of it.

MONA: Amen to that.

ARNOLD: But the trouble is that they don’t leave you out of it, not if you have the bad luck to get mixed up with them. In our crowd, if somebody really draws the line at a particular sex practice, he or she is excused automatically from it. We aren’t really cruel, although we’ll act out cruelty in order to enhance things at a club meeting. But some of these people get their kicks from out-and-out sadism, up to and including true torture. Get involved with them and there’s no way out. The fact that you really don’t go for that scene only makes it more exciting for them.

MONA: This really can happen, and when it does it’s enough of a nightmare to turn a person off swinging entirely. Tell them about the Fosters, honey.

ARNOLD: That’s a perfect example of what happened to two members of our group. They answered an ad and went to join this group, and from the ad and the correspondence it seemed to be just an ordinary bondage group. The wife was selected and tied up, and then instead of a little harmless paddling they really went to work on her. This one woman came out wearing high-heeled boots and a tight leather corset and began lashing her on her bare breasts with a cat-o-nine-tails. The husband tried to break this up, and he was explaining that this wasn’t the way they got their kicks. It wasn’t that these jokers didn’t believe him. They were delighted—the less our friends enjoyed it, the more of a kick it was to these disgusting animals. They tied him up, too, and then they really went to work on both of them. I don’t want to go into much detail because to be frank it makes me sick to my stomach to think about it. They burned their genitals with lit cigarettes, they forced objects into their rectums—it was a nightmare, that’s all, like something you’d read in a book by the Marquis de Sade.

MONA: When I heard about it I couldn’t understand why they hadn’t gone to the police afterward. Some of those people did things that would have gotten them twenty years in prison. Or a lifetime sentence to a hospital for the criminally insane. Why, it was just luck that no permanent damage was done, and as it happens Peg Foster has a few scars that still haven’t faded. She may carry them for life.

But she said that they couldn’t very well go to the police without exposing themselves in the process. After all, they had gone to that meeting expecting to participate in illegal sex activity, and those sadists could even have claimed that the Fosters went along with everything and then decided to go to the police after it was all over.

ARNOLD: In spite of this, Bill Foster still wanted to report those bastards. Even if it meant losing his job and having to move to another city, he felt it was worth it. What scared him was the possibility that the group would take revenge. He said he had the feeling they wouldn’t draw the line at murder, and he didn’t want to risk his life or Peg’s. And he got nightmares at the thought of what those criminals would do if they got their hands on their children—

Well, that’s outside of our own experience, thank God. But the point is that we were very wary of what we were getting into. But after we had exchanged several letters with George and Ethel Lemm, we felt we had a good idea of what their group was like and that it was what we were looking for. We arranged a meeting with them, not to have sex but just so that we could get acquainted with them and learn some more about the group, and also so they could look us over and decide whether we were the type of people they wanted to add to the group. We met them and hit it off marvelously, sat and talked with them for hours. It was interesting how closely their own experience prior to joining the group paralleled ours. We felt that if this had worked so well for them it would probably be worth trying, and the upshot was that they invited us to the next meeting of the group and we accepted the invitation.

MONA: There were just five other couples at that first meeting, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt the way I did that night, nervous and excited all at once. One thing I discovered was that I didn’t even think about the sexual acts that might happen. They didn’t come to my mind, and if I tried to think about them in advance my mind just wandered off to something else. I suppose this was what you would call a defense.

ARNOLD: It was much the same for me. We all had a few drinks to break the ice, and during this time everybody was very friendly and relaxed. They were anxious to get to know us and put us at ease, and this helped a great deal. Then we all went downstairs to the basement recreation room where the actual club activities were going to take place. George Lemm announced that since we were going to be initiated, we would be the subjects for the evening. He told us we would both have to strip immediately. I took off my clothes at once, but Mona refused.

MONA: I didn’t want to. I just couldn’t help it.

ARNOLD: All I could think was that they would send us home. All this planning and everything and for nothing. But I think they sensed what they had to do. A couple of the men took hold of me and tied me up. They had me bend over a piano stool and tied my wrists to the legs of the stool, and then they tied my ankles together. While I was like that, they took hold of Mona and immobilized her so that they could strip all her clothes from her. We learned later that if she had really put up a fuss they would have released her immediately with an apology. That’s the tricky part of the whole bondage scene, of course. A lot of people—Mona is a perfect example—will always resist, but in the hope that they’ll be forced to obey. So you have to be able to tell when a person is acting out a desire and when the resistance is real. It’s not always easy to make that distinction.

MONA: It was really very strange for me. I put up a struggle, but at the same time a part of my mind knew damn well that I would be heartbroken if they didn’t force me to go through with it.

ARNOLD: Fortunately everything worked out perfectly. They tied Mona up and explained the initiation procedure. We were the slaves and would have to perform whatever sex acts they told us to, and if we refused we would be punished. Mona was to be initiated first and I had to watch throughout, and if I didn’t keep my eyes on her I would be punished, too. Then it would be my turn, and Mona would watch.

MONA: After they explained this, they all took turns examining us and touching our bodies. I really felt like a slave on the auction block as they handled me and either praised or insulted my features. Then they told me what I had to do. I was to have oral relations with every one of them, men and women both. Of course I refused.

JWW: Then what happened?

MONA: First of all, they all stripped completely, except that some of the women wore their high-heeled shoes. A lot of the men find that exciting. Then George Lemm came over to me and ordered me to take his penis in my mouth. I refused again, and his wife immediately called me a filthy slut and slapped me three times on my bare bottom. She’s a big women and she can really hit hard. I knew that I would have to do what was asked, and I did.

JWW: Had you ever performed the act before?

MONA: Of course not. I didn’t even know what I was supposed to do exactly. George told me exactly what to do, and whenever I failed to please him he would tell Ethel and I would get walloped again. I must have been pretty poor at fellatio because I got spanked a lot, but even so I was good enough at it to make it good for George.

When he ejaculated I had an orgasm and also got sick to my stomach. I thought I was going to throw up and I was afraid that if I did they would be horribly insulted and would probably beat me terribly. Fortunately I didn’t vomit.

Then I did the rest of the men, and I guess my performance improved as I went along, because I didn’t get slapped nearly as much. Each time it would be the wife of the man I was servicing who would give me the spankings. Also, each time I had a quiver of orgasm the instant the man ejaculated. Then they made me do the women, and the husbands were the spankers. I knew it was awful and unnatural to have relations with women but I was tied up and had no choice and so I was able to go through with it. I was able to bring every one of them to orgasm that way, and I had it with them, although it was not as strong for me as it was with the men.

When it was all over they untied me and were very gentle with me. Ethel Lemm took me to the powder room and I had a shower and freshened up, and when I returned to the room all of the men and women took turns hugging me and kissing me on the lips to welcome me to the club, and to show that the initiation ceremony was over and that their real feelings toward me were friendly and not harsh or sadistic at all. Then it was Arnold’s turn, and I found it very exciting to watch this. And because my initiation was over and I was a regular member he had to service me along with the others, and I thus had cunnilingus performed on me for the first time while one of the men whacked Arnold on the behind with a paddle, and this was very exciting for me and I had a fantastic climax—

•  •  •

Arnold’s initiation was essentially the same as Mona’s. He too was required to perform orally upon all of the members, both male and female. It is not unusual for bondage clubs to give male homosexuality a prominent role, and Arnold, who had a strong bias against such acts, participated readily; he found it wholly compatible with the role of slave in which he had been cast.

Indeed, the desire to perform forbidden homosexual acts is very commonly a strong motivator for participation in bondage activities. While this was more notably the case with Mona than with Arnold, he admitted that he derived definite pleasure from certain homosexual practices which would have revolted him in any other set of circumstances.

Once initiated, the Carters were immediately accepted as full members of the group and became enthusiastic participants at all group functions. It so perfectly satisfied their sexual needs that they were never tempted to make contact with any other swingers, nor did they ever have private sessions with other group couples. The regular meetings of the group, held two or three times a month, constituted their sole extramarital sexual outlet and fulfilled all their requirements in this regard.

ARNOLD: The meetings were just what we needed, tremendously exciting and satisfying for us. But we found that the group activity had a very positive effect on our own life at home.

MONA: But don’t get the impression that we’ve let our private sex life together become unnatural.

ARNOLD: We haven’t. But it’s true that we’ve changed some of our attitudes to a degree. There are acts we perform that we didn’t used to do, like oral sex. And once in awhile one of us will tie the other up and we’ll have relations in that way, perhaps with some spanking as a sort of love play. But we only do that on rare occasions for a special treat.

MONA: The important change is just that we’re sexier together. I guess the memories of group activity play a role, and also as we’ve come to realize our own sexual potential we can respond more completely to obvious normal stimulation. It’s as though the group teaches us how to become excited, and our bodies learn at the meetings and remember how to get with it when we’re home together.

JWW: I see. And as far as the meetings themselves are concerned, is the program generally the same as it was that first night?

ARNOLD: The general idea is the same, but that first night was special because it was an initiation. In the course of the usual evening, several men and women will have a turn as victims, and they’ll be restrained one way or another and disciplined and forced to perform various acts. Or once in awhile a man and woman are selected as master and mistress for the night, and then all of the rest of us are slaves and have to do their bidding.

MONA: Just last month we played a version of Spin-The-Bottle. A person would spin it, and whoever it pointed to had to perform whatever act the spinner demanded. Then after the victim paid his forfeit it was his turn to spin.

ARNOLD: Other times, too, the focus is more on punishment than on forcing the victim to perform sexually. Almost all of the club members are capable of reaching a climax just by being spanked. It has to be done just right or it won’t work, but we’re all good at administering the proper sort of spanking. You have to start slow and gradually increase the speed and the violence of the spanking, and this has to be done without inflicting excessive pain or that takes away from the pleasure. This is hard for some spankers to control, because they get excited themselves in the course of administering a spanking and they tend to get carried away. But no one has ever been badly injured, and for the most part things work out perfectly.

MONA: Just for the record, there will be times at the meetings when people have sexual relations without any Sadie Mae element at all.

ARNOLD: That’s absolutely correct. Of course the atmosphere is always there, but not the acts themselves. I think this is a good effect that the group has had on us, too, because before we started I don’t think we could have had sex in a normal way among a group of people and found it satisfying. So although the natural reaction would be to say that our activities in the bondage group have turned us into a couple of roaring perverts, committing all sorts of acts that the average person would never do, I think that you could honestly argue that it’s helped us adjust to sex in a more normal way than before, because originally we were repressing so many impulses that we couldn’t loosen up and enjoy any sort of sex to the fullest extent, and now we’ve learned to overcome a lot of that.

MONA: From what I know about psychology and psychiatry and all the rest, which admittedly isn’t too very much, I understand that one method of therapy is to find a way to act out the problems and hang-ups that are bothering you, that once you get them out in the open you’re much better off, and with luck you can even reach the point where they no longer influence you. I know I’m getting all the words wrong, but isn’t that a principle of some kinds of therapy?

JWW: Yes, it is, and when a less realistic sort of acting out is desired much the same thing applies verbally—the patient is encouraged to talk out fantasies and wishes in order to get them out of his unconscious mind. The theories vary tremendously, of course. There are so many different schools of thought. But I can appreciate your point, that this sort of activity has a therapeutic function.

ARNOLD: I don’t think there’s any question about it.

JWW: Speaking of questions, here’s one. I gather you feel quite strongly that the group is right for the two of you—

ARNOLD: There’s no question about that, either.

JWW: —and yet at the same time I get the impression that you hope the group serves a therapeutic purpose to the point where you won’t need it any longer. Is that the case?

MONA: Yes and no.

ARNOLD: We’re certainly not counting on it, or even expecting it, but we have considered the possibility.

JWW: So how would you sum up your feelings about the particular sexual adjustment you’ve made?

ARNOLD: Well, that’s kind of tough to put into words. The thing is, all anyone can ever do is just do the best he can, and we’ve done that, and things have been working out pretty well for us. But even so, well, if you remember earlier we both got pretty defensive on the whole topic of perversion. First we denied that we did perverted things and then we denied that the things we did were really perverted and then we said that the bondage and discipline weren’t that important to us, and all in all we were evading things, weren’t we?

JWW: It’s perfectly understandable.

ARNOLD: Well, my point is that I think almost anyone who recognizes that his sexual drive is out of the normal channels, especially if he begins to understand how it got that way and all, would rather have things be normal. I’ll say this now and put it out of my mind later on, but I’ll still say it—we both know that by all rules we’re perverted. And given the choice we’d rather have it different.

MONA: The children.

JWW: You wouldn’t want your children to know—

MONA: Oh, that goes without saying, but that’s not what I was getting at. What I mean is that a person may insist that a certain way of life is normal or healthy or whatever, and the test of how you really feel about it is whether or not you would want your children to grow up the same way. Once you look at it that way there’s no question.

ARNOLD: We have never spanked our children and never will.

MONA: They get away with murder some of the time, but that’s one rule we made for ourselves that will never be broken. Not that it’s so much a matter of spanking but of the whole sexual attitudes they develop in every respect. We want to raise our children so that they grow up with a healthy feeling about sex. They say that no matter what you do a kid will have some sexual hang-ups, that there’s no such thing as a perfectly adjusted human being, and I guess that’s so, but we’re doing what we can to make it as easy for them as possible. I don’t want any child of mine growing up scared of sex or insatiable or sadomasochistic or anything else, and we feel an open attitude and a really loving stable environment is the best guarantee that they’ll grow up sane. And do you want to know something? That’s where the group has done us the most good. Because it brought our own problems into the open and let us face them thoroughly, and because we did that we’ve been able to understand our attitudes and know just how kids get twisted up sexually, so that we can keep that from happening to our kids. If we got nothing more than that out of the group, it would still be worth every moment we’ve given it.

The Secret Swinger

In an earlier chapter we saw how Marcia Duffy found it no problem at all to function in the swinging society as an unattached female. Her male counterpart, the single man, has a much harder time of it in almost every respect.

For one thing, he is far too abundant. The sexual revolution notwithstanding, the fact remains that the average American male is considerably more likely to accept free-wheeling sex as desirable and legitimate than is the average American female. For any number of reasons, it has been a truism since the dawn of human civilization that virtually any woman, whatever her appearance or manner, can readily find a man who is willing, even anxious, to make love to her, while men cannot locate sexual partners with anything approaching the same degree of certainty. It is quite possible that this is a universal biological law—throughout the animal kingdom, it is males who compete for females, with every physically healthy female certain of sexual attention. A single ram will service every female in a flock or die in the attempt, while if there are two rams, the weaker will have to settle for seconds if indeed he gets any sexual succor at all.

The evolutionary advantages of this state of affairs in terms of species survival are fairly obvious, but they do little to comfort the unattached man who wants to join the swinging society and finds himself frustrated in the attempt.

A glance at any of the correspondence club magazines tells the story vividly enough. It is standard procedure for clubs to run advertisements with names and addresses omitted, and to charge those replying to ads a fee, usually one dollar, for each letter forwarded to an advertiser. Indeed this is the major source of income for most clubs, and often the ads themselves are run at no charge in the hope of forwarding revenue.

However, many club publications contain a section in which advertisers may give their names and addresses so that correspondents may contact them directly and save forwarding fees. The advertisers in this section are almost invariably single males who desire to meet single girls, couples, groups, or whatever, and who express their willingness to participate in any act that their correspondent may have in mind.

It is rare for many of these men to receive any bona fide replies at all. In contrast, advertisements placed by single women—usually placed by women seeking lesbian contacts, and occasionally run by postal inspectors playing the happy game of entrapment—draw very heavy reader response.

In order to be accepted in the swinging society, the single man usually tries to find a steady partner with whom he can attend parties and orgies or meet with other couples. Once he manages to make such a connection he ceases to be a single man for all practical purposes and manages essentially to engage in extramarital sexual relations without the burden of marriage.

As a matter of fact, more than a few marriages have grown up out of such swinging relationships. This is most often the case with second marriages. Swingers, like everyone else, are apt to get divorced, though it is hard to say whether the divorce rate in their ranks is higher or lower than the national average. Some swingers, too, find themselves widowed. When this happens the newly-unmarried swingers most often wish to remain in the life and are quick to choose a partner from the available swingers of the opposite sex. Remarriage is often the ultimate result, and in at least one case the happy couple demonstrated their wholehearted commitment to the cause of extramarital sex by taking along a half-dozen friends on their honeymoon. The unblushing bride was treated to a highly unusual wedding night, to be sure.

Of all the single swingers, however, the one who has the most difficult time is the secret swinger of this chapter’s title, the married man whose wife is unwilling to participate in swapping, and who is thus forced to go it alone. His problem is not a simple one by any means. Almost invariably he must live several lives at once. On the one hand, he must hide his extramarital activities from his wife, who would presumably be less than thrilled to learn of them. At the same time, he must keep his swinging colleagues from discovering that he is married.

It is interesting, I feel, that when partners have different attitudes toward swinging, it is most often the husband who is anxious to join in the fun and the wife who finds the whole idea unpleasant. It has long been a truism that husbands are more apt to be jealous, that wives can more readily overlook or even tolerate the infidelity of their mates. A possible explanation may lie in the fact that some of these secret swingers may really want to enjoy extramarital sex but do not want to let their wives reciprocate, and thus never attempt to convert their wives to swingers. And yet this cannot explain all of these cases.

Whatever their precise circumstances and motivations, the secret swingers have a difficult situation and approach it in any of several ways. One very common tactic, and one which is much despised by other swingers, is the ploy of posing as a couple, sending photos of some attractive stranger who is purported to be one’s wife, and ultimately arranging dates with a couple for a swap session.

“You wouldn’t believe the number of guys who do this,” a veteran swinger told me. “They’ve gotten to be a running gag in some circles, but they’re really a pain in the neck. You’ll have this solid correspondence going with some clown, and he’ll send along a picture of himself and another of his ‘wife,’ and of course the wife is always a pretty gal built like a brick shithouse—and why not, since nude pics of pretty girls are sold all over the place.

“So you go to the trouble of setting up a meeting with him. You set aside an evening and lick your lips over the picture of the wife, and zero hour rolls around and the doorbell rings and there’s good old whatchamacallit all by himself, no wife at all.

“Some of the time they come right out and admit it was a load of crap and ask if they can knock off a piece with your wife just for auld lang syne or whatever. But most of them have a hell of a good story ready. Mary just happened to rush off to her sick aunt’s bedside, or Mary’s down with terminal dandruff and has to spend the next six months in an oxygen tent, or Mary suddenly got her monthlies, or missed her plane, or whatever else they can dream up. Some of them are dillies. There was one slick son of a bitch with a hell of a nerve. He would show up on your doorstep crying his eyes out—poor old Mary was dead, God rest her soul, and he hadn’t wanted to leave the house at all but he was just so shaken emotionally that he needed to be with people. Well, hell, a guy hands you a story like that, you can’t kick him out on his ass. You have to drag him inside and set him down next to the fireplace with a drink in his hand, and the chances are maybe ninety-nine out of a hundred that he’s going to screw your wife before he leaves, because how can you say no to the poor broken-hearted bastard? This one guy ran up a hell of a score before the word got around.

“It’s gotten to the point where there are so many married men with square wives pulling this sort of routine that you have to be very careful who you set up dates with. Granted, most of the time all you’re wasting is time, but time is too valuable to waste that way. We have learned to take certain precautions. On pictures, we prefer it if the husband and wife both appear in the same photo—that makes it a little harder to fake, at least. And we insist on telephone contact in advance, and if we don’t get to talk to both a man and a woman we scrub the whole project, just wash it out and find somebody else.

“And I don’t know which is worse—the guys who play this game or their hopeless frozen-assed wives who would rather sit home with their legs crossed than help their husbands develop a swinging marriage for the both of them. I guess it’s a toss-up—I can work up a lot more sympathy for those husbands, but at least the wives don’t make such godawful pests of themselves.”

•  •  •

Jack Gebhardt has never worked what swingers call the Missing-Mary trick, but he has often considered it. An attractive and financially successful executive in his early forties, he has been swinging as well as he can for almost three years now. He would probably have all the sex he could handle were it not for the fact that his wife will have nothing to do with the swinging life.

•  •  •

JACK: Not that Ruth would have them lining up in the street for her anyway, understand. She’s by no means a bad-looking woman, but about ten years ago she stopped taking care of herself and started putting on weight and dressing like a prosperous version of Mother Hubbard. I don’t know how she does it, but she’ll spend two or three hundred dollars on a dress and manage to pick out one that looks like something Mrs. Khrushchev would wear to do her housecleaning in.

And the woman just doesn’t care about sex any more. It isn’t just that the whole idea of swinging leaves her cold. But cold has been a full-time temperature for her for five or six years now. She’ll let me make love to her if I insist, but why in the hell should I insist? Who wants her? She’d just as soon go the rest of her life without sex, and as far as I’m concerned she’s entitled.

JWW: Does she have any idea of your own involvement in swinging?

JACK: She knows I run around. I’ve had all kinds of affairs over the years, although I must say that I never once stepped out on her until she turned into a one-woman cure for summer. But she knew I was having affairs, and one time she told me that I could have all the nasty little flings I wanted just so long as I didn’t throw them in her face. I wanted to tell her just what I’d like to throw in her face, you better believe it. Anyway, that’s her attitude.

So the upshot of it is that I have to get my sex away from the house, but I have to do it discreetly. That more or less makes it impossible for me to get anything going with a single woman the way a bachelor might. I can’t take a girl out and show her a good time because I might be seen in public, and that wouldn’t do. And I didn’t want to develop a real relationship, either. I’ve known guys who let little affairs get out of hand. They wind up breaking up their homes. I may not give a damn about Ruth, but I’ve got kids and I know the effect of divorce on children. Say what you will, you can’t get away from the fact that kids from a broken home are in for a hard time.

Besides, the way the alimony laws work I’d be lucky to have pockets in my pants after a divorce. So I didn’t want to get involved, and at the same time I wanted a normal sex life. Hell, let’s not kid around—I wanted a lot better than a normal sex life. I wanted a swinging sex life, When I first started playing around, about the only safe and convenient way was hookers. I’d pay some frigid call girl twenty-five or fifty dollars for an hour of sex. They were pretty girls and they’d do anything I wanted, but I wanted them to enjoy it, and that’s not something you can buy. And the whole idea of paying for it, putting down the dollars and getting the tail in return, it’s not for me. Not that the cost makes any difference. The hell, I figured it out once, and counting all expenses it costs a lot more to make it with a swinger than it does to score with the most expensive call girl in town, when you average out the ads and the post office box rental and all.

It’s not the cost. It’s what you get for it. With a hooker, any hooker, what you get is a fancy jerk-off. That’s all it is, masturbation. The only difference is it costs more and you use a twat instead of your hand, but otherwise it’s the same thing, and it’s not for me.

Then I read a few books on wife-swapping and I got terribly excited at the thought of it. The whole idea was just what I wanted—real passionate sex with no secrets, everything out in the open and all. I tried the idea on Ruth just to see if there was a chance she’d go for it, and there’s a better chance of water running uphill, so I never brought up the subject again. Why knock my head against the wall? No percentage in it.

So I figured I was in a bind. This whole notion of wife-swapping was just what I wanted, and there I was with nothing to swap.

•  •  •

Like many married men, Jack began answering a variety of advertisements by posing as a couple. He never continued the deception, but in several instances he wrote follow-up letters to swinging wives, using a different false name and suggesting a private meeting without their husband during an afternoon.

“I didn’t get a single reply,” he said. “It seemed like a good idea, but I learned that those girls just won’t play that way.”

His next method was more discreet. He began writing to couples who advertised to meet with other couples, explaining that he himself was married to a non-swinger but had her permission to do as he pleased. This was a slight exaggeration but not far from the truth. He went on to say that he was both sincere and discreet, and that he was available for couple sessions if they could locate an extra girl or would be glad to participate in threesomes if they liked, or would meet privately with the wife if the husband had no objection.

“Swingers are basically thoughtful people,” he told me. “I had to write a hell of a lot of letters to get any action, but a good number of couples did appreciate sincerity and would take the trouble to reply even if only to tell me that they weren’t interested. They did say, most of them, that they would be glad to swing with me any time if I could round up a girl as a partner. And a few men wrote offering to try to help me convince my wife, and there was one really sweet girl who sent along a letter for me to show my wife, a really sincere letter telling my wife why she should swing along with me instead of being a frigid bitch for the rest of her life. But I knew it wasn’t worth the trouble of showing it to Ruth. It would make her mad and it wouldn’t do any good.”

Finally, however, he began to get a few favorable responses. One husband agreed to Jack’s meeting his wife for a private session, and several couples told him they were interested in threesomes.

•  •  •

JACK: Naturally I thought a meeting with the solo wife would be the best way to start things off. We had exchanged photographs and all, and finally one morning I got my nerve up and gave her a call on the phone. I’m used to meeting people and breaking the ice with strangers, but it takes a special knack to call a woman on the telephone, a total stranger, and arrange to meet her at a motel. She was very charming over the phone, though. She had a husky Lauren Bacall voice. We made all the arrangements, and just as I was getting ready to hang up she dropped her voice even lower and told me she hoped I liked getting a blow job because people told her she was a real artist at it.

I practically came in my pants. I needed a drink in the worst way, but I figured it might be a bad idea to start drinking because I didn’t want anything to cramp my style at that motel. That’s another thing, see—I really worried about being sexually adequate. Swingers aren’t like ordinary people. They have a hell of a lot more sex and take the trouble to learn how to be good at it. So I was a little bit terrified that I would get there with this gal and not be able to give her a good time. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to get it up, or that I wouldn’t last long enough, or I don’t know what.

Well, as it turned out I didn’t have a thing to worry about. I took the motel room as planned, and five minutes after I checked in there was a knock on the door and this stacked blonde came in and gave me a kiss that had my ears ringing. “Hi, Jack,” she said. “You’re better than your picture. As a matter of fact you look good enough to eat, and I think I’ll do just that. I bet my husband ten dollars that I’d make you pop four times this afternoon, and I certainly hope you’ll see to it that I win the bet.”

It was the kind of afternoon I’d spent years dreaming about. She wasn’t beautiful by any means, but she had one hell of a body and she knew some wild things to do with it. Best of all, I was able to show her a damn good time myself. She won her bet with room to spare. I got my rocks off five times in the space of three hours, believe it or not. Up till then I was strictly a one-a-day man—one good screw and I was finished. But a scene like this was something brand new to me. It was as though I was discovering for the first time what a good lover I could be. And she knew more tricks than any of the hookers I’d ever been with. But she was totally different from hookers, because she was there for exactly the same thing I was—good clean sex. There was no crap about love or any of that, just straightforward screwing with each of us intent upon making the other one have the best time ever. And with both of us succeeding, too.

I wanted to see more of her, but she was cool to that. She said that she and her husband rarely repeated with couples, and she knew he wouldn’t want her to repeat with singles. They believed in complete sexual freedom but wanted to make sure they didn’t get emotionally involved with any of their contacts. I was sorry I wouldn’t get to her again. Still, I had to agree that there was a certain amount of sense in what she said.

•  •  •

Shortly thereafter, Jack managed to make contact with several husband-and-wife teams interested in threesome activities with a single male. While such activity was his chief involvement in swinging for a short stretch of time, he had several disagreeable experiences with it and realized before long that it was ill-suited to his needs.

•  •  •

JACK: It’s a strange thing, but relatively few couples want to go for threesomes with single men, and on the other hand almost any couple is very anxious for threesomes with girls. The ones that do go for it, there’s usually something a little screwy about them. They don’t fit into any particular bag, but I would say that three out of four of them will have ideas that I would call nutty.

One seemed normal enough at the time. This fellow and I took turns making it with his wife in their bed. It was kind of odd to be involved in that kind of deal, but the woman was extremely good-looking and hot stuff in the hay, so I didn’t let the oddness of it get to me. Then a week later I got a letter in the mail, a picture of me going down on the wife and a hand-printed note demanding five hundred dollars for the negative or the photo would be sold to my wife.

I can’t imagine anybody being enough of a schmuck to fall for it, but there are some pretty stupid people in the world. As far as I was concerned it was about the weakest version of the badger game that I ever heard of. I got mad at first, but then all I could do was laugh. I wrote the guy back saying that I didn’t want to buy the negative so he might as well try to sell it to my wife, but that I could use a nice 8” x 10” enlargement to put on my desk, and I would pay five bucks for that if he was interested. And I enclosed five bucks. The really hysterical part is that he sent me the enlargement; I guess he took me seriously. I filed it away somewhere because I’ve never been able to figure out what the hell else to do with it. If you’ve got any use for an 8” x 10” glossy of a guy giving some head to a broad, you’re welcome to it.

Then there were quite a few guys who would want me to make it with their wives while they watched. I don’t know whether they were impotent or fags or what exactly, and once the novelty wore off I decided there had to be a better way for me to swing than to put on a show for these creeps.

With others, they wanted threesome activity of one sort or another, either the two of us taking turns with the wife or both of us putting it to her at once. This was very enjoyable, but I learned to be careful not to get involved with couples who figured that homo action should be part of the program. The first time that happened it was the shock of my life. This doll was kneeling on the bed and I was giving it to her dog style, and there was certainly nothing wrong with that as far as I was concerned, and it seemed to be fine with her, too. Then the next thing I knew her nut of a husband was spreading my cheeks and trying to give me an enema in a brand new way. They were both sorer than hell when I let them know I wouldn’t go that way, and it put a damper on the whole affair.

What I really wanted was one of two things. Either I wanted to meet female swingers alone, or else I wanted to have a girl of my own to join me for swinging sessions with other couples. So I saw that I’d have to go about things in a different way.

JWW: What course did you take?

JACK: First off, I began running ads of my own all over the place. I spent a fortune on advertising, and to make the ads more attractive I guaranteed to refund the dollar forwarding fee to anyone who answered my ad and enclosed a photo and phone number. I didn’t get tons of mail at first but I kept tabs on all the ads and gradually learned which ones pulled the right kind of responses and which ones were relatively stiff.

At first my pitch was to single girls, and I found out that this was not productive at all. I got occasional replies from prostitutes. At least I assume they were prostitutes because they offered to go with me for money, but now that I think about it I can’t imagine any professional hooker wasting her time answering ads. Some of the pros run ads of their own, however. What I think these women were is amateurs, swinging wives who liked to turn an occasional trick for extra money and also for the thrill of pretending to be prostitutes. I never found out for certain because I never replied to any of them. I had had enough of a taste of real swinging so that I couldn’t get any thrill at all out of the idea of paying for it. Swinging really spoils you that way.

JWW: Did you get any bona fide replies from single girls?

JACK: Oh, a few. Some of them got their kicks out of reading and writing letters. They’d write the filthiest letters you can imagine, all full of stories about how they wanted to do this and that, and they’d beg me to write back and tell them about my own sex experiences and what I would like to do to them, and to describe everything in detail. And of course they never committed themselves to a meeting. They kept stalling. Finally I learned the score and stop answering that kind of letter.

Then there were a few girls who wanted to swing. A few were real dogs, middle-aged women with faces that would stop a calendar, let alone a clock. And of the rest, I would say that almost all of them had certain perversions that they had to have or they couldn’t enjoy sex. Some of them wanted to tie me up and whip me. I did try that once, and it just wasn’t my thing, not by any stretch of the imagination, so I decided the hell with it. And others, quite a few of them, wanted me to act out domination or spanking fantasies with them. One real sweet kid dressed up like a teenager and kept calling me Daddy, and the thing was that I was supposed to give her a spanking and then rape her. She told me her own father had done this when she was twelve years old, but whether it really happened or whether it was her pet fantasy, that I couldn’t say.

JWW: Did you go through with it?

JACK: Oh, yes. Not because it was my idea of fun, really, but more because—hell, this may sound a little crazy.

JWW: Go ahead.

JACK: Well, the thing was, I’d had a few years of hell with Ruth, and I had a pretty good idea of what it was like to have a sexual hang-up. It can be rough, and after you’ve gone through it yourself you become very tolerant of the same thing in other people, and you want to do what you can to make them happy sexually. Incidentally, this is one thing I’ve found that the vast majority of swingers have in common. I would say that they’re more concerned about making the person they’re with have a good time than in getting their own jollies. The average person thinks of everybody in the swinging society as out for his own brand of kicks and devil take the hindmost, and I’ll have to admit that was certainly my attitude when I first got involved, no question about it. Once you get going, though, you realize that if all you want to do is have an orgasm it’s easier to stay home and use your goddamned hand. If that’s all you’re after, hell, masturbation is quicker and cheaper. The real thrill of sex is giving. To find someone you like and provide her with sexual pleasure, that gives a better feeling than just getting your rocks off.

It’s like Christmas presents. When you’re a kid all you want to do is get, but when you grow up you find out that the real charge is buying the perfect gift for someone you care about. And with swingers, the bulk of them I would say develop the same kind of mature attitude. Maybe it’s just as selfish at the bottom—you do it because it makes you feel good—but that’s still the way it works.

JWW: So you would participate in your partners’ fetishes.

JACK: As long as they didn’t actually turn me off, that is. But this still wasn’t what I would call my ideal, and I gradually began to realize my mistake.

JWW: What was that?

JACK: First off, it was a mistake to pitch primarily to single girls. The single women who want to swing don’t have to answer ads. Unless they’re either very hung up or absolute dogs they’re a good bet to have all the sex they can handle. It’s married women with clods for husbands who are real candidates for swinging action.

JWW: In other words, women who were in the same position as you found yourself.

JACK: That’s exactly the point. Women who weren’t getting satisfaction from their husbands and who still didn’t want to break up their marriages, so they couldn’t go running around town picking up studs in bars. They had to be discreet and had to connect with a discreet man. I advertised to them in the swinger publications, but I also realized that a lot of women in this position, well, they just wouldn’t be apt to come into contact with these club magazines. I used some of the standard tabloids, and then I got the idea of running ads in what they call underground newspapers. These are papers published by the hippies and that element, and along with articles that I wouldn’t understand in a million years they also print a few columns of personal ads. Here, this is an example of the ad I run regularly, the one that gets far and away the best results:

NO WOMAN

should be left unsatisfied. Discreet French masseur offers to help you find the fulfillment that is every female’s birthright. Age, race, marital status not important. Confidence assured. No fee—your pleasure is my sole reward.

JWW: I gather you feel it’s necessary to stress that you don’t expect financial remuneration.

JACK: Yes, because there are some male prostitutes who advertise themselves as masseurs. I always mention French because I’ve found that a large number of the women who respond to the ads desire cunnilingus and don’t get it from their husbands. Some of them have told me that they had themselves eaten by other girls years ago and never got over wanting it, and either they haven’t let their husbands know about it or the husbands don’t like to do it, or are lousy at it. Can you imagine somebody being such a clod that he wouldn’t go down on his wife if that was the way she got her kicks? But it takes all kinds, I guess.

JWW: What sort of women are most apt to respond to the ad?

JACK: That’s hard to say. All kinds, really. The typical woman is in her late twenties or early thirties, married and with a couple of kids, and of course sexually frustrated. Some of the time it’s been a case of the marriage going stale, and afterwards I usually try to convince those gals to get their husbands interested in swinging.

Just bringing the subject up conversationally could turn the trick, because I’m sure there are plenty of cases where both the husband and the wife would go for it and they’re each of them afraid to mention it to the other. I’m positive that happens more often than anybody realizes . . .

Other times, though, it’s a case of a woman who hasn’t really gotten any pleasure out of sex in her life, and now she’s heard people talking and she’s read books and she’s beginning to get some idea of what she’s been missing. It may be that her husband ejaculates prematurely and doesn’t do anything to arouse her first—just on and off and roll over and go to bed. Or else the woman would like to experiment sexually. Oral sex is the most common thing that they want. Cunnilingus especially, and a lot of them have a great urge to perform fellatio. This again is something that most people don’t realize, and that’s that so many women have a great desire to suck and are scared to admit it to their husbands.

JWW: So you would say that most of these women are married?

JACK: Did I say that? Because although it may be true, there are certainly a great many who are single. The thing is, by running ads outside of the club magazines I reach a lot of women who’ve never before been involved in swinging. You could say that I’m their introduction to the whole world of it. And so I get all kinds. I’ve had lesbians who want to learn to make it with men but who are scared they won’t like it, and in order to try it they want someone who they know will be gentle with them and who will let them beg off if they change their minds. You may not believe it, but I’ve had virgins. So I would say that the frustrated married women are the bulk of them, but that’s not the whole story by any means.

JWW: I get the impression that you think of yourself as performing an almost holy service for these women.

JACK: Well, that’s a little way-out, isn’t it?

JWW: Perhaps, but—

JACK: Still, I get what you mean. Let me put it this way. I don’t kid myself. I know I go with these girls because I can have one hell of a fine sex life this way. No question about it. But even so I have to admit that I am doing them a favor. I’m turning them on to sex, and if I say so myself I’ve become a master at knowing how to excite a woman and bring her to orgasm. In addition to the techniques I have certain special equipment, everything from French ticklers and special powders that increase excitement to some electrical massage equipment. There’s this motorized thing that you strap onto your hand and when you switch it on your whole hand vibrates like crazy. When I use that and give a gal a finger wave, it almost always gets results. It’s a physical thing—even if she isn’t in the mood emotionally, even if she’s got all the psychological blocks in the world against getting aroused, even if she’s colder than Kelsey’s nuts, it is just about certain to get her hot. And once you can get her going and carry her through all the way to a climax, it’s easy for her to learn to respond in the future.

JWW: Do the women always reciprocate?

JACK: I don’t get you.

JWW: Do they always make certain that you are sexually satisfied?

JACK: I get it now. I was going to say that they always do, but now that I think about it I would have to qualify that. Now and then a girl will want to be eaten, that’s her kick, but she’ll stipulate that she doesn’t want to do anything in return. Nothing at all, just go down and go home. Once when this happened I told the girl that I didn’t like to eat and run. Still, if that’s what they want, it’s all right with me. If I can have a sexual experience with a woman that makes her happy, that’s more important to me than having an orgasm. Frankly, the way things have been lately I have more action than I can handle, and it doesn’t really hurt me to pass up an occasional lay.

Still, here we’re talking about only a small percentage of the women. For the most part what they want is to have a good time themselves and to please me. Remember, a woman who thinks she is frigid feels inadequate, and so it’s as important to her to please a lover as it is to be satisfied herself.

•  •  •

While the particular niche which Jack Gebhardt has found for himself in the swinging society is certainly an unusual one, there are more than a few men who have found it a way of getting a foot in the door. Ads much like Jack’s appear in quite a few underground newspapers. If his own story is a good indication, these advertisers draw a sufficient response to assure them a satisfactory number of sexual partners.

One does not require too much insight in order to understand the appeal which his particular role holds for Jack. Although he has taken the position that his wife is solely at fault for the decline in their own sexual relationship, it is fairly obvious that her lack of interest in sex left him with serious doubts regarding his own capacity as a lover. He thus found it necessary to prove himself, to demonstrate beyond any shadow of doubt that he could provide women with full satisfaction.

As a sort of sexual angel of mercy ministering to neglected wives and frigid misses, Jack has found the perfect means of proving his manly prowess. I have no doubt that he is the skilled lover he says he is, not only because of his great interest in sexual technique but also because he has become something of an amateur psychologist—only an aversion to punning prevents me from describing him as a lay analyst. He knows how to put his women at ease, knows how to determine the elements which prevent them from finding satisfaction, and knows finally what remedy to employ. Most of all, he is certain to be a good lover because he wants so much to do just that. He is quite sincere when he says the woman’s climax is of greater importance to him than his own. Whether his motive is personal ego-gratification or sheer generosity scarcely matters; the effect is unchanged.

Further discussion also led me to the conclusion that his present sexual adjustment, while quite satisfactory for him for the time being, will not suit him indefinitely. Jack described an occasion that revealed a desire to participate more extensively in some of the more orgiastic aspects of swinging. One of his partners, a housewife in her middle thirties, enjoyed herself with him and expressed a desire for pluralistic sexual relations with another couple. He arranged such a meeting by corresponding with another couple and presenting the woman in the role of his wife.

•  •  •

JACK: I had a pretty good idea what it was that she wanted. With me, her main thrill was cunnilingus, and I suspected she wanted to have this with another girl but didn’t want to admit she was a lesbian. Still, I had been anxious all along to get in on a couple scene, and she was anxious to play. Her husband traveled a lot, so we picked a time when he would be out of town and had this other couple over to her house. It was crazy in that I was pretending to be the husband and here I was in another guy’s house, but I don’t think they ever caught on to the whole bit. Fortunately the kids never woke up, which would have ruined things but good.

We swung all night, all of us in the same room, and I’ll tell you it was wild. When you come right down to it there’s only so many things that you can do when you’re limited to two people, but get four together and it’s a different story. My “wife” was wild stuff herself, a bottle blonde with jugs like pillows, and the other wife was a slender little thing and a perfect contrast. We all had a wild time, and of course the two girls 69ed themselves into a coma, and if I’d had any doubts before that cleared them up, because my blonde went absolutely into orbit the minute she got her mouth on the other doll’s snatch.

I’ve got some more correspondence going with other couples, and her husband has a business trip coming up again in a month or so, and if everything goes right we should be able to make the scene again. I’ve heard of guys so anxious to swing that they hire prostitutes to pose as their wives, which when you come to think of it is pretty goddamned ridiculous. But I’ve never before heard of using somebody else’s wife. You’ve got to admit it’s pretty wild—

•  •  •

You’ve got to admit it’s pretty wild.

As I look back on the months I spent with the swingers, the few whose stories have appeared in the foregoing chapters and the many whom I spoke to and interviewed but could not include in this present volume, I have to admit just that it is pretty wild—and despite all the convenient comparisons with other sexual customs which prevailed at other points in history, today’s swinging society comports itself in a manner which has no real precedent in the annals of human sexual behavior.

Whether all of this is good or bad, right or wrong, sane or sick, are questions which I would not propose to answer for the reader; he may ponder them himself. I am somewhat more interested in guessing at the probable future for the world of the swingers.

They themselves are inclined to regard their sexual subculture as the wave of the future, and more than a few of them will wax grandiloquent on the subject, visualizing themselves as the advance men of a brave new world. In an opposite vein, those who hold swinging in low regard take it for granted that the practice is a phenomenon deriving primarily from the moral chaos which predominates in contemporary society; from their viewpoint, swinging will fade away completely when social change leads to a more stable society with clearly defined values and standards.

I would be hard put to guess who will be proved correct. One may make a good case for either side. It is hard to believe that the basic principles of sexual relations as a function of marriage, a constant tenet of Western thought since the beginnings of recorded time, should be permanently relegated to the dustbin of history. And yet, to be sure, it is every bit as hard to deny that a variety of permanent changes, not only technological advances in contraception and the like but also improved knowledge of the nature of sex, can fail to leave a permanent mark on our sexual nature.

One may only speculate on the ultimate result. Students of sexual behavior centuries from now will either be astounded to learn that there was a time when married couples traded partners to indulge in group sex—or else they will be equally astonished to learn that there was a time when people did not do so.

In the meantime, the swinging life continues to wax in popularity like a snowball rolling downhill. Like all trends, it gives every appearance of being likely to continue forever. Whether this will be so, or whether a reversal will set in soon, only time will tell.

The End

About the Authors

Lawrence Block has been writing best-selling mystery and suspense fiction for half a century. A multiple recipient of the Edgar and Shamus awards, he has been designated a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, and received the Diamond Dagger for Life Achievement from the UK’s Crime Writers Association. His most recent novels are A Drop Of The Hard Stuff, featuring Matthew Scudder, and Getting Off, starring a very naughty young woman. Several of his books have been filmed, although not terribly well. He's well known for his books for writers, including the classic Telling Lies For Fun & Profit, and The Liar's Bible. In addition to prose works, he has written episodic television: Tilt! and the Wong Kar-wai film, My Blueberry Nights. He is a modest and humble fellow, although you would never guess as much from this biographical note.

John Warren Wells emerged in the mid-1960s as a writer of sexological nonfiction, and produced twenty books in the ensuing decade. His works, in the main, consist of compilations of case histories selected to illuminate a particular theme, and topics range from female bisexuality (Women Who Swing Both Ways) and troilism (Three is Not a Crowd) to the evolving lifestyles of a decade of sexual liberation (The New Sexual Underground and Wide Open: The New Marriage). His groundbreaking work, Tricks of the Trade: A Hooker’s Handbook of Sexual Technique, was especially successful, and may have inspired Xaviera Hollander to write The Happy Hooker.

One particularly noteworthy book, Different Strokes, consists of his screenplay and production diary for the pornographic feature film of that name, which he seems to have written and directed, in addition to playing a key role. His column, “Letters to John Warren Wells,” was a popular feature in Swank Magazine. The dedications of several books would seem to indicate that Wells carried on an extensive on-again, off-again relationship with Jill Emerson, herself the author of Threesome, A Week as Andrea Benstock, and, more recently, Getting Off. All of JWW’s books have been out of print for thirty-five years; that they are now available to a new generation of readers may be attributed to the technological miracle of eBooks and the apparently limitless ego and avarice of their author.

Contact Lawrence Block:

Email: lawbloc@gmail.com

Blog: LB’s Blog

Facebook: LB's Facebook Fan Page

Website: www.lawrenceblock.com

Twitter: @LawrenceBlock

John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior Ebooks

3 Is Not A Crowd

Beyond Group Sex: The New Sexual Life Styles

Come Fly With Us

Different Strokes: Or, How I (Gulp) Wrote, Directed & Starred in an X-Rated Movie

Doing It!

Eros and Capricorn

The Male Hustler

Older Women and Younger Men: The Mrs. Robinson Syndrome

Sex and the Stewardess

The Sex Therapists

Sex Without Strings

The New Sexual Underground

The Taboo Breakers

Tricks of the Trade: A Hooker’s Handbook of Sexual Technique

Versatile Ladies: Women Who Swing Both Ways

Wide Open: The New Marriage

The Wife-Swap Report

Beyond Group Sex:
The New Sexual Life Styles

John Warren Wells
Lawrence Block

copyright © 1972, 2012, Lawrence Block

All Rights Reserved

Introduction

In the following pages, you will make the acquaintance of a rather unusual assortment of men and women. You will meet and listen to:

A young woman with a passion for personal privacy who enjoys watching other people have sex, and who runs an ad to that effect in underground newspapers . . .

A small-town minister who has discovered bisexual group sex . . .

A man who seduced an eleven-year-old girl and maintained a monogamous relationship with her for seven years . . .

A brother and sister who went through a marriage ceremony, live together as man and wife, and participate in group sex with strangers . . .

A man who has spent the past thirty years having sexual relations with his mother, his father, his brother, his sister, his wife, his sons, and his daughter . . .

An executive who spends a substantial portion of his income on prostitutes . . .

And a few other persons whose sex lives are similarly at variance with “normal” standards of behavior.

What you are reading now is at once an introduction to a book and to a group of individuals. Indeed, these individuals are the book. It is their words that comprise the greater portion of the text, either through the re-creation of interviews or the verbatim transcription of their letters. I have tried to keep my own comments to a minimum, butting in when necessary to summarize or interpret.

These introductory remarks, too, ought to be kept to a minimum. Let me just say a few words on how this book came about, how it was written, and what point I like to think it serves. Then I’ll get off the stage.

•  •  •

For quite a few years now I have been writing books on various aspects of human sexual behavior and what is called variously the sexual revolution and the new morality. In the course of this I have interviewed innumerable persons at greater or lesser length and have engaged in a good deal of correspondence, some of it brief, some of it quite extensive. Not surprisingly, I possess an insatiable curiosity about the manner in which different persons come to terms with their sexual desires; without this curiosity I would be well advised to get into some other line of work.

Only a small portion of these interviews and correspondence leads to anything that winds up in print. I consider an interview sufficiently productive if it does no more than enlarge my own understanding. A while ago I realized that I was closely familiar with several case histories that would make excellent chapters—the only trouble was that they didn’t much fit into books. They didn’t come under any of the usual headings.

I suppose a similar state of affairs once prompted the invention of succotash.

Thus I decided to put these various bits and pieces together. As I outlined the project, I realized that there was a common factor uniting these chapters. Each concerned an individual who, for one reason or another, had come to possess (or be possessed by) urges and desires that he himself readily recognized as abnormal. Each ultimately elected to do his own thing, to march to the beat of that different drummer. And each has come to terms with his conflict, some with more success than others, but all in a way that ought to be relevant to the overall topic of today’s sexual mores.

The chapters are complete in themselves and can be considered by themselves. But I would hope that the reader would tend to regard them not only individually but also in terms of one another—i.e., as different views of men wrestling with demons.

•  •  •

A discussion of method may be useful. Material is presented in each subject’s own words, but it is by no means a verbatim transcript—except in those chapters where letters are quoted. Over the years I have grown out of the habit of using a tape recorder. I have found not only that it puts some subjects off—although most people get used to it after a while—but that it gets in the way of conversation because one has to stop periodically and change reels. Furthermore, the process of having a tape-recorded interview typed is both difficult and expensive, and leaves one with a massive sheaf of typescript, much given over to trivia, and very hard to put in order.

I have found it more useful to remember what is said to me, and then to re-create the conversation at the typewriter, reproducing both the factual matter and the tone and style of the subject’s speech. With that reservation, and with the presumably obvious fact that I have carefully changed the names of all people and places and any data which might render any person identifiable, all of what follows is precisely what was said to me.

•  •  •

Introductions are curious things. The reader hits them at the beginning of the book and then goes on to the book itself. The writer gets the whole business backward, first writing the text, then walking out front and introducing it. You’ve just now sat down with this book; I’ve been sitting with it long enough to hatch an ostrich egg. There’s one point where I trust we’re in agreement, however; we’d both like to get this introduction over with as soon as possible, so that you can listen to the voices of some very fascinating men and women, and so that I can go around the corner for a beer.

So be it. You may be charmed or disgusted with the people you are about to meet. You may think that some of them ought to be locked up. But I don’t think you’ll forget them very quickly.

I know I won’t.

New York City
January 1972

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