PAUL: Don’t forget Swing.
SHEILA: I’d just as soon forget it, if you don’t mind. You know the game, don’t you, John? It’s sort of Monopoly for swingers, a commercially available board game that lends itself to a swap situation. Different cards order players to remove an article of clothing, or kiss all the other players, or race off to the bedroom with someone. Maybe ninety percent of the swingers we know have played it at one time or the other, and except for a few novices no one has been much impressed with it.
PAUL: It’s supposed to be funny.
SHEILA: And it doesn’t quite make it. But as far as that goes, humor isn’t always what you want to set the stage for an erotic evening, is it? The funny thing, though, is that a lot of nonswingers seem to own and play the game. It’s sold by mail order, you see, and the various ploys are vague enough so that I suppose if you weren’t a swinger you could just interpret them as risqué. I guess the same kind of people play the silly game as listen to those tacky party records, Belle Barth and the red-haired one, I forget her name.
PAUL: Rusty Warren.
SHEILA: That’s the one. You know the type — the very worst kind of nonswinger.
PAUL: We’ve heard — or maybe we’ve read — that the game is occasionally used for seduction purposes, either when a swinging couple wants to get a nonswinging couple in the mood or when somebody wants to get a civilian social group oriented in a swinging direction. Frankly, I have a hard time believing that this ever happens. I don’t despise the game quite as much as Sheila does because it doesn’t offend me. My charming wife has a tendency to take things personally.
SHEILA: All it offends is my taste.
PAUL: You’re just letting your experience show, honey. People who are new to swinging get a kick out of things like that. It’s largely a matter of kicking over the traces, I would guess. Everything that normal society would regard as outrageous becomes desirable for that reason...
We discuss the use of games in two-couple situations. Sheila remembers a young Southern couple whose entire approach to swap situations was humor-oriented, to such an extent that an evening in their presence was composed more of laughs than of sexual relations. We talk of the possible use of games and contests in the wild-party or orgy situation, and Paul says that they do not fit in there; if such a party is effective it works spontaneously, and if it is not, games and contests will not help it. We then turn to the subject of games and contests in the context of the swap-club experience. The Gordons belonged to a club in Louisville after a pair of bad mail-order experiences made them leery of meeting with strangers. Their club met two evenings a month at the home of one of the members. Total membership ranged from eight to twelve couples during the relatively brief period of time that Paul and Sheila belonged.
PAUL: The club had been in existence for well over a year by the time we were invited to join. By that time, incidentally, we had become acquainted with more than half the members. As I understand it, two couples started the club and gradually enlarged it. I don’t know how one would go about starting a club, or how the various ground rules would evolve, as everything was in operation by the time we got involved.
The basic operation was simple enough. Member couples took turns hosting the meetings, with us and another couple excused from this duty because we had no way to get the kids out of the house for an entire evening. The rest of the couples either had parents around town who would have their kids over for the night or, in some cases, had no kids at all to worry about. In ordinary swap situations no one worries about a sleeping kid in the house, but with a dozen couples on hand it’s a different story.
Meetings began promptly at eight-thirty, and you can rest assured that no one made a point of getting there fashionably late. That’s one thing about swingers — they somehow lose interest in some of the more senseless social conventions... Dress also seems to be of less significance to swingers, probably because you don’t keep your clothes on for very long.
A typical meeting would begin with up to an hour of general socialization, with light drinking and conversation. At this particular club there was an unspoken rule that the conversation during this early period would not be centered on sex. Anything else was a suitable topic — religion, politics, anything but sex. I think the object was to let the excitement build, and also to let people know each other in more than a purely sexual sense.
SHEILA: It was a particularly good idea, too. Especially for the second reason. From what other people have said, clubs can be absolutely deadening over a period of time when there’s nothing between the members but sex. What happens is that you have the anonymity of an orgy week after week without the excitement of strange bodies. You ball the same strangers every week — that’s what it amounts to. And that’s the main reason most clubs fall apart in a very short period of time.
JWW: I thought quite a few clubs lasted for long periods of time.
SHEILA: Some last for ten years or more, and those are the clubs everybody knows about. But they make up only the smallest minority of the clubs that come into existence. There are literally hundreds of clubs organized every year all over the country. It’s very easy to organize a club, you know. There’s nothing easier. Sometimes a single man will put a club together because it’s the easiest way for him to make contact with swingers. You wouldn’t think it would work, but it does. He runs an ad announcing the formation of a club in a given area and balances out the replies so that he has the same number of men as women, and he’s in business. It’s nothing to start a club, but I would guess that nine out of ten clubs don’t stay together for more than three or four months.
PAUL: Our Louisville club was a particularly good group, as groups go. I don’t know that it’ll last ten years, but it was well set up. As I said there would be up to an hour of general conversation. Then around nine the entertainment section started.
This could take any of a number of forms. It was the responsibility of the host and hostess to organize things, and they had all the leeway in the world as far as innovation was concerned. As I’m sure you can imagine, each couple tried to put on a better program than the one before, and the results were worth the effort. It was the same sort of unstated competition that civilian hostesses have to prepare the most exotic hors d’oeuvres.
The most common form of entertainment was movies, at least at first. When we first joined, it was evidently quite difficult to come by stag films in the Louisville area. The few films that were readily available were yellow with age. Then someone made contact with a distributor in I think Cincinnati, and we were able to get quality films, occasionally in Technicolor and once with a sound track.
The films were good up to a point, like everything else. We learned not to let a film show go on too long, because once we were conditioned to handle that kind of vicarious stimulation, an overlong show merely became a drag for everyone. The main function of the films, really, was to focus everyone’s attention on sex and let the tension build a little.
SHEILA: It also created an opportunity for a group grope. A little mutual fondling was perfectly permissible all around. Of course you weren’t supposed to get carried away.
PAUL: Or else you wind up with the film watching the audience.
SHEILA: It’s not hard to avoid when you’re experienced in that type of situation.
PAUL: There was a point, during our own first few months in the club, when good stag films were becoming available at a steady rate and there just wasn’t a meeting without one. Then one of the original members hosted a meeting and introduced an innovation. He had us all take seats for the movies, then rolled up the screen and put it away. We had just selected our partners, he explained; each man was then coupled with the girl on his left.