The Lifestyle (48 page)
Authors: Terry Gould
It is in fact inevitable that more and more straight people will run across these ads—sexuality being of interest to many who peruse cyberspace—and many will feel safe enough in the virtual world to plug in and play. Thousands will certainly find their way to clubs no one suspected of being up and running within a fifteen-minute drive from home—these clubs
tastefully but erotically advertised on the Net so as to encourage inquiries, with forms to fill out and appointments for screening interviews easily arranged.
And, of course, anyone on the Internet looking for swingers runs into LSO and its tours, conventions, clubs, dances, and philosophy—which have contributed to the growth of lifestylers in the nineties and will probably contribute to its growth in the future.
For this, oddly enough, McGinley finds himself criticized in the media for “commercializing” swinging, for keeping it “tightly organized,” as if the media had no inkling of Love-boat holidays for straight couples—or, for that matter, the entire romance-based travel industry, the largest industry in the world as well as the most commercialized. As McGinley says, he provides a service—one that every year books hundreds of couples at a time to clubs in the hot places. Today playcouples are given the royal treatment in transit to their destinations by conveyors like Jamaica Airlines, and they are met at the airport by smiling representatives of national bureaucracies like the Jamaican Travel Board. Swinging makes people money, and that, I suppose, is another reason it will keep growing.
All these factors, coupled with the new, slightly more respectful attention of the media, seem to point to future “substantial growth” of the lifestyle. My feeling is there will almost certainly be a backlash to this growth; the raids will probably continue; some state or provincial government will reach a boiling point and act as if to save civilization itself from this detrimental, dangerous, and just plain tacky behavior. The weathervane media will probably sway whichever way the wind seems to be blowing at the time. If there is a single murder in a single swing club, it will probably make international headlines and the experts will be trotted out to say “I told you so.” But playcouples will keep on playing, the swingers among
them will keep on swinging, and lifestylers overall will keep on living in their own style.
In one form or another, people have been living that way for thousands of years.
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