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We hardly ever watch television. Paul likes the sports and the kids watch their shows and I look at documentaries now and then, but outside of that we don’t have much use for the TV. Well, a year ago Christmas we replaced our old portable with a color console. Paul bought a really good set and we had a special antenna installed and got excellent color reception. Well, let me tell you, for the first couple of months we found ourselves watching anything that moved. You would think we had never seen colors before, we were that enthusiastic about watching color television.

Admittedly color television is something the squares would never get as nervous about as they do about swinging, but in a sense it was the same situation. We found swinging so exciting that we couldn’t get enough of it, and we had to try everything. It wasn’t because we were getting jaded. It was just the reverse.

JWW: Did you reach a point where you were doing things that seemed too kinky? I know that usually happens sooner or later.

PAUL: It always happens, except for some of the really raving perverts you meet, and brother, you do meet a lot of them if you’re not careful. I mean real maniacs who don’t draw any lines at all. Excepting those kooks, it’s inevitable that you find out where your own particular line is, and you find out by crossing it inadvertently and then stepping back over it again. But it didn’t happen for us at the time, with the Creightons, because we didn’t go that far. I think we might have, sooner or later, but we didn’t.

SHEILA: I thought we did at one point, but then I changed my mind.

PAUL: When was that?

SHEILA: With Jan.

PAUL: You mean the two of you? Oh, of course. You know, that’s funny; that’s been so much a part of the scene for us since then that I’ve almost forgotten that you had a mixed reaction to it at first.

SHEILA: Mixed is the word for it.

JWW: I gather you had homosexual relations with Jan?

SHEILA: That’s right. And this, I must say, was a definite exception to what we said earlier — that all of us looked forward to everything we did. For my own part, I learned early from what I’d read that Lesbian relations seem to be almost universal in swinging.

PAUL: While male homosexual contacts, on the other hand, have always been extremely rare. This isn’t as true as it once was, actually; especially on the West Coast, male swingers are apt to be bisexual. But the proportion of wives who have gay contacts is still far, far higher.

SHEILA: So the books all said. And I read all of this, and I gathered that the idea of Lesbian relations between myself and Jan was going to be brought up sooner or later, and I wasn’t all that certain as to how I felt about the whole thing. I’m being perfectly frank now in saying that I had never in my life had a conscious homosexual impulse, let alone an actual experience. I tried to detect desires for Jan in my mind, and I couldn’t, and then I worried that I was repressing a strong latent streak, and, oh, all the sort of crazy things a person can think of.

When the subject came up among the four of us, I wasn’t surprised. I had been expecting it. But I didn’t know quite how I felt about it, or how I ought to handle it—

Tres Gay

Sheila explains that the idea of Lesbian relations was hinted at or alluded to several times in passing by either Jeff or her husband. One or the other of the men would suggest it half-humorously at times when the male members of the quartet were too exhausted to continue performing coitus. The suggestion was neither meant nor taken seriously. But Sheila characterizes it as a case of “kidding on the square” — i.e., a joke with an undercurrent of seriousness beneath it.

• • •

SHEILA: There was a point, I don’t know exactly when it was reached, when it became obvious that the men were both really interested in getting something started along these lines. As I’m sure you know, most men are fascinated almost beyond belief by the thought of two women making love. I have trouble understanding this, because the reverse just isn’t true at all. Women don’t get turned on by male homosexuality; if anything, the reverse happens. They get utterly turned off by the whole idea.

PAUL: There’s a difference. A man becomes less masculine by having relations with another man — or at least that’s the way people tend to think of it. Whereas a girl doesn’t lose any of her femininity by entering into a sexual situation with another girl. If anything, she becomes more desirable, a more fully sensual person.

SHEILA: Yes, but why? That’s the question...

I don’t know why the men were so anxious to get something started. Paul and Jeff both said at the time that they wanted to watch. I’m not sure that covers the whole thing. Voyeurism and exhibitionism are certainly big factors in all of swinging, no argument there, but I don’t think that’s all there was to it. After things got going, for instance, Jan and I would occasionally fit in a little loving to break up a dull weekday afternoon, and when Paul learned about this he was all for it. He thought it was great. It was almost as if he wanted me to have a gay experience for its own sake, just for the sake of the experience.

PAUL: What does it prove? I’m a latent fag getting my kicks secondhand? I suppose it’s possible.

SHEILA: Maybe there’s no point analyzing it to death. Anyway, I’m getting the story out of order. One night, it was early in the evening before we had gotten anything going, Jeff brought it up. He just asked straight out why Jan and I didn’t have a try at one another. I tried to joke back with him, I said something properly inane, but this time it didn’t work because he didn’t even pretend to be kidding.

And good old Paul here backed him up immediately. He said if nothing else the two of us could just go through the motions while Jeff took some pictures. The way the two of them made it sound, Jan and I had to have sex just to be good sports about the whole thing.

JWW: How did you react to the idea?

SHEILA: I was, oh, very tense. Nervous. Apprehensive.

JWW: Did you have any feelings of desire for Jan?

SHEILA: Not that I was aware of. Except... well, as you know, we had engaged in threesome activity by this time, and in tangles like that you get in rather close proximity to whoever else is involved in the threesome. For example, if Jan and I were both making love at the same time to one of the men, naturally our bodies occasionally came into contact. If you were going to get in the mood enough to relax and enjoy it, you had to be able to have this sort of contact happen without drawing back as if you’d been burned or something. So I had been in physical contact with Jan’s body in situations in which I had experienced sexual pleasure heterosexually. That kind of experience establishes a link in your mind and you become able to regard another woman as a source of pleasure, or at least a potential source of pleasure, if that makes any sense.

PAUL: Not a hell of a lot of sense, but I know what you mean.

SHEILA: And also there’s the fact that if you think about something long enough and often enough... Well, it’s only human to begin wondering. It isn’t even desire so much as curiosity. Everything I had read had a great deal to do with it, of course.

JWW: How do you mean?

SHEILA: Oh, for example, all the books gave the impression that one woman could really give another woman a special thrill in cunnilingus, that it was a very different experience from having the same act performed on you by a man. I couldn’t imagine why this should be so — a tongue is a tongue, after all, and if a man is a good lover you would think he would be ultra-sensitive to your mood and your response. But naturally I wanted to know for certain.