The Lifestyle (46 page)

As the first of the early-bird swingers were landing in the Palm Springs heat, California’s deputy attorney general, Dana Cartozian, argued before the Los Angeles Federal Court that
the Palm Springs Convention Center was in violation of state laws barring liquor-license holders from allowing exhibitions depicting nudity; therefore, the art show should be banned. If not, the ABC should be allowed to revoke the Convention Center’s liquor license. The ABC fully anticipated a victory that day and from there it would have been an easy step to shut down the entire convention with the threat of suspending the liquor licenses of all the host hotels. It had good cause for optimism. The district judge hearing the case was Dickran Tevrizian who, according to the
Washington Post
, “has a reputation as a hard-line, anti-pornography jurist that grew when he raised a fuss over an anatomically correct statue—called the ‘New World’ and described by Tevrizian as a ‘shrine to pedophiles’—that was erected outside his federal court building.”

Bob McGinley did not attend the hearing, opting instead to hang tough with his cell phone in the Wyndham where he tended to the thousand-and-one details in the last twenty-four hours before the official opening of the convention. One of these included fighting the Wyndham’s paranoid insistence that all people entering the pool area show their proof of majority regardless of whether they looked seventy years old. “These ABC Gestapos have got everyone so sick with fear, the whole state is shaking,” he told me at the pool gate. “Every convenience-store owner, every bar, every hotel that sells beer and
Playboy
is waiting for the knock at the door.” Because of that fear, for the first time since its appearance at Lifestyles conventions in the seventies, the Evening of Caressive Intimacy—including the Car Wash—would not go ahead: ABC agents had made it clear to the Wyndham that this sort of mass body rub was impermissible in the State of California, no matter what the judge decided about dirty pictures or dirty trade fair products.

“What happens if you do lose this, Bob?” I asked him. “Where are all the people going to go?”

“I can’t even think about that,” he said. “Right now, I’m just hoping Luis is in there doing his stuff.”

In fact, right about then Luis was “reviewing the whole thing for the judge,” as he would later tell me. Fortuitously, for the first time since 1990, Luis’s responsibilities at the Los Angeles Music Society had prevented him from curating the 1997 show, which permitted him to testify before Judge Tevrizian as an expert witness. “One of the fundamental characteristics of today’s erotic art is that it represents a movement of liberation,” he submitted to the court, echoing the sentiments he had uttered to
Penthouse
eighteen months before. He emphasized the numerous women artists in the show and he could have been defending the interests of women like Jenny Friend and Jodie in his formal written submission: “For some women, erotic art is a rebellious attack on repressive institutions of family, marriage, and monogamous and compulsive heterosexuality; for others it is an important source of pleasure and liberation.” It was a show for all, nonetheless. “Erotic art is an important outlet for artists who have led closeted lives, especially for gay artists.”

At about three in the afternoon the call came through from Paul Murray. The judge ruled that the ABC was aggressively misusing its authority in order to suppress free speech. Tevrizian pronounced that although he personally had no taste for erotic art, “this is a heavy-handed tactic. ABC has no business revoking a liquor license for this type of activity.” He slapped a restraining order on the ABC and told it to let the Lifestyles convention proceed without harassment.

“Hot dog! I told you!” McGinley came striding up to me in the lobby with his hand out and his face filled with a lifetime’s worth of good news. “They picked the wrong guy! But this, my friend, is for everyone! They
can’t
get away with this in our country. Now they know!”

The next day there was jubilation among the four thousand swingers in Palm Springs, most of whom had decided they would show up for this convention, banned or not. “I told Eddy, they ban us,” a lady in her thirties from Portland told me as she stood in line to register, “we’re gonna camp out on City Hall and party in the desert.”

That night, at the Marquis Hotel’s rooftop lounge, McGinley made an official announcement to the sexy throngs. “By now everybody in the world knows,” he said. “We tried to keep it quiet, but if you’ve been watching television at all or reading the newspaper, we’ve been having a momentous battle with the California Alcohol Beverage Control board. And it’s one thing we could not have walked away from: we felt that because what they were trying to do was so dangerous to any lifestyle, not just ours here at the convention—but to the gays and lesbians and Latinos they were oppressing—to
all
the citizens of California, that we felt obligated to charge ahead with it. We are the first citizen group that is forcing the ABC to actually obey the law, something they’ve never been asked to do before. Incredible!”

The crowd went wild with cheers and applause. Somebody gave the best vocal imitation of the Seventh Cavalry bugle charge I have ever heard in my life. “You get ’em Bob!”

I was standing beside Earl and Pia, the physician and nurse I’d met at New Horizons, who had just entered the lifestyle back at the “Lifestyle and You” seminar, but who in the last year had paddled up the rivers of the subculture to its most remote and steamy reaches. Over the winter they had gone all the way in and come all the way out to their grown kids, and were thinking—just thinking—that if public acceptance increased, they might like to come out generally. This victory was a good sign.

When the huzzahs died down, McGinley went on, soberly: “But—we have to obey the law, too. Now that we’ve cleared all
the issues they brought before the court, we want you to have a heck of a lot of good old fashioned adult fun. But I want to caution you not to get carried away. I’m sorry to put it this way—but particularly the women—”

The crowd exploded into uproarious laughter. They were in on a joke the world hadn’t yet caught onto—except, that is, when it was presented in the form of some glaringly erotic and self-confident ladies called the Spice Girls.

“Ain’t nobody’s business if I do!” Pia curled her hands around her mouth and called, a changed woman from the one who had folded her fantasies into little squares on her lap at New Horizons.

“Yeah, whose convention is this, anyway?” said Earl beside her.

The LSO’s lawyer, Paul Murray, took the mike, smoothed the rebelliously long hair he wore over his suit collar, rolled his head back as if raising his nose through water to air he hadn’t breathed in weeks, and inhaled a breath that could have filled the lungs of Moby Dick. For two months he hadn’t had a day off. Word by word he proceeded to state what lifestylers believe is their ultimate due.

“What we are about,” he said, then paused, surveying the line of spicy women in the front of the crowd, and their proud husbands holding them around, and the sides of the room packed with couples standing high-heeled and barefoot upon tables, and the back of the room crowded with people sitting on the bar, and the patio filled with couples leaning in. Murray raised a hand in the air, “What we are about,” he said,
“is liberty!
Maybe this isn’t the kind of liberty that everybody
things
of as liberty, but it is liberty. It’s the right to express ourselves in the medium that we enjoy and understand. A medium that is offensive to other people and that possibly isn’t afforded to other people because of their personal tastes or inhibitions. But it is our medium, our expression, and we want to preserve that
right, and continue to be treated in the public press in the same unique and positive light we have just been treated,
which has never to my knowledge been so favorable and respectful
. And we want that to continue!”

He waited a long moment for the cavalry-charge bugle calls and the applause and the victory cheers to die down. He waited, in fact, for silence, and then again held his hand in the air.

“Now,” he said. “I need your help. Dr. McGinley needs your help and this is what I am going to ask of you.
NO PUBLIC SEX!
Absolutely none! We are going to be watching because one couple,
one couple
, could undermine everything we’ve been fighting for months. I will make a confession to you right now. Are you ready?”

This time the crowd waited.

“I LOVE PUBLIC SEX!”

That released the crowd again, as hard to stop as an avalanche of beer barrels fallen off a truck on a steep hill. Murray didn’t try and stop the racket. He just shouted over it.

“I like to watch it; I like to participate; I like to see it,” he said, and order was restored, mostly out of curiosity, shared interest. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “the ABC wrote a report about this convention last year and there were thirteen citations of public sex. And in my office we came up with a game: ‘What number public sex do you want to be?’ ‘I want to be number nine.’ Public sex is a wonderful thing and I think that’s a big part of what all of us are. But you cannot do it. As much as you want to, you
can-n-not
do it!”

Fifteen minutes later, when the speech-making was over and the getting-to-know-you party had commenced, I sat down for a beer with Pia and Earl not far from the triads and tetrads grinding out on the dance floor and asked them what they thought of this—the enormous numbers, the California glitter crowd, the ABC victory haloing them all. Earl repeated
almost verbatim what the New Brunswick woman had told me beside the pool at last year’s convention. “It’s like a gay person coming out.”

“And it isn’t even so much any actual physical thing,” Pia said. She looked around at the crowd. “Obviously no one’s having sex
all
the time. It’s not having to hide who you are naturally—with women, with men, with your partner—being able to relax and share it and not be tortured by guilt about it.”

“How long do you think it lasts for?” I asked. “In marriage—that happiness in release?”

“In sharing? Why not forever?” Earl said.

On the night of the Masquerade Ball, Dr. Robert L. McGinley, Minister of the Earth Church of the Pacific, married a couple who couldn’t have been more than in their mid-twenties. The wedding took place at the height of that wild last evening of this politically triumphant gathering of swingers—long after the packed news conferences and endless string of TV interviews in the lobby and at the pool and at the dinners. It was held, thanks to the victory over the forces of sexual concealment and secrecy, in the Palm Springs Convention Center Ballroom, where both Bob Hope and Ronald Reagan had been honored in the past.

The couple were Rachel and Michael, and he—tall, square-jawed, and very handsome—marched though the carnival crowd to the stage in a tux, flanked by a best man and friends also dressed in black and white. The veiled Rachel, on the other hand, wore a metallic, silver-sequined bikini, high heels, and a garter on her left thigh; she marched down the aisle with friends wearing matching bikinis of gold. They were embarking on a marriage in the playcouple lifestyle—young
for that, but they were doing it—and these days they are featured on Lifestyles promotional literature for conventions.

“Let me have your attention, please,” the tuxedoed McGinley called, hoarse after three days of shouting at dinners and dances and news conferences. “Rachel and Michael and all who are here! All come! Michael and Rachel! Let this be a day of gladness, thanksgiving, possibilities, and great good fortune for all!

“Michael and Rachel,” he went on, as this year’s batch of media camera crews wove and ducked to record the event, “we have come together this evening to demonstrate the wonder of love through the celebration of marriage! We all live in the hope of loving and giving love,” McGinley stated in sincere belief. “Michael and Rachel, therefore, we give thanks—for sweet happiness. Their enthusiasm,” he turned to the crowd, “their loving and their belief and destiny for love is inspiring! And their
great
expectation!” he said in wonderment, which must have caused a few members in those media crews to wonder what sort of bizarre expectations this couple had for their wedding night.