There were a lot of wedding bands on a lot of left hands at Las Vegas’s Tropicana Hotel. Thousands of married couples from dozens of states were strolling in and out of the hotel’s casino and convention center. They were saying hello to people they hadn’t seen since last year’s convention, comparing tans, and gathering in even-numbered clumps to gossip and catch up. Most of the couples in the hotel were holding hands or engaged in some form of PDA. Wandering through the casino they’d suddenly stop and kiss–and, really, why shouldn’t they? This weekend was a long-planned, much-anticipated romantic getaway, a time when the normal pressures of daily life were supposed to fall away. Over the next three days, the conventioneers were going to dress up, drink, gamble, and dance.
“We’re not technically married,” my boyfriend pointed out when I explained to him that the terms of my book contract obligated me to cheat on him. “Can unmarried couples even commit adultery?”
I asked him if God would prefer that I be monogamous even if I was being faithful to a man.
Wife swapping was first mentioned in the media in the mid-1950s after military officers in southern California gave birth to the modern swinging movement. Legend has it that a tight group of cold-war-era military men shared their wives to cement their bond. (Organized wife swapping among military officers in the 1950s and ’60s, particularly in the air force, is well documented and routinely denied.) Nonmilitary swing clubs started popping up in the early 1960s, first in archconservative Orange County, then in San Francisco, Hollywood, and Los Angeles. Clubs started out as gatherings in members’ homes, then certain bars began catering to swingers. In 1971, social scientist Gilbert Bartell claimed in Group Sex: A Scientist’s Eyewitness Report on the American Way of Swinging that one million people–half a million couples–were involved in organized swinging.
“For me the question was, could I be a good Jew and a swinger?” David paused, looked across the table, and opened his hands, palms up, as if he had nothing to hide.
“The Torah talks about deception being part of the offense when someone commits adultery,” said David when I asked how they reconcile their conservative religious beliefs and their liberal attitudes toward sex. “So is adultery having sex with someone who isn’t your spouse? Or is it hiding that sex from your spouse?”
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Women can do just about anything they like at a swingers dance or in a swingers club–they can be aggressive, demanding, passive, and casually bisexual. The same isn’t true for men. Men who touch women without permission are shown the door, as are drunk or obnoxious men, and there’s a taboo against casual same-sex play among men. “I doubt that all the men in this hotel or at parties are straight,” said David, tearing apart another pretzel. “That just doesn’t seem likely–not with so many of the women being bisexual. Male bisexuality is seen as a threat by a lot of straight men, and male bisexuality is seen as a threat to women, since bisexual husbands are likelier to have HIV than husbands who only want to watch their wives and other men’s wives.”
