The Lifestyle (6 page)

A few months after Pearl Harbor, when McGinley was nine, his parents bought a plot in a brown field twenty miles south of L.A. that was then being developed into what McGinley called “the first multiple-house, suburban tract development in the country—a thirty-six-dollar-a-month decent neighborhood where working people could afford a house, a yard, a garage, and live like the rich.” The values and fantasies that were bred in those newly paved lanes of Lakewood, so close to Hollywood and so far from the stars, would be bred in ten thousand other suburban developments built after the war. In the drive-in theaters these good neighbors went to, suburban values like hard work, raising a family, and spousal loyalty were promoted side by side with fantasies of being effortlessly rich and sexually promiscuous. But it was understood by the
suburbanites that it was forbidden (indeed impossible) to combine their fantasies with their values. Most suburbanites wound up in church on Sunday where preachers praised North American values and damned North American fantasies. It would become Bob McGinley’s life’s work to bring the values and the fantasies together, but not until he was past thirty. For all the years beforehand McGinley accepted the message of damnation as the true one.

His mother Mabel, step-daughter of a preacher, and his father Dan, a laborer in the Long Beach shipyards, raised Bob as a Nazarene Christian—a fundamentalist Protestant sect founded on the principle that worshippers should strive to attain the “sinless perfection” of the original Nazarene, Jesus Christ. All forms of nonprocreative sex led one away from the perfection. Nevertheless, Bob maintained he was a “sexually normal” adolescent for the years he attended Woodrow Wilson High School—the same years Kinsey began publishing his revelations about the secret ways Americans were tapping into their fantasies and the first nude pin-ups began appearing in men’s magazines. “By ‘normal’ I mean that, for then, I was acceptably prudish,” Bob told me. “Christian attitudes about sex were generally accepted across America as the right ones for a young man to have. You didn’t talk about sex and you didn’t question that the thoughts and desires that American culture provoked were naughty. You just looked at Jane Russell on a bale of hay in a movie and you wondered, Oh my God, is there anyone else in the world who wants to do with her what I want to do? I must be the only one—better not tell anyone.” The man the vice president of Penthouse International would one day call “the Christopher Columbus of sexuality” became the leader of a Boy Scout troop at fifteen, and at seventeen the leader of a Sea Scout troop. Wearing his uniform, sporting merit badges and chastely sipping soda pop after Sunday school with the girls in their tartan skirts, young
McGinley would have made a good subject for a Norman Rockwell painting.

One of the girls he sat with at the fountain was an evangelical Baptist named Bonnie, a pretty seventeen-year-old too immersed in Bible study to finish high school. The bond between Bonnie and Bob was a religious one, and because of that it became permissibly romantic. They kissed under a laurel tree one evening and that was enough to convince them both they were in love. Bob married Bonnie the day he graduated from high school. That night he had a prim experience of sexual intercourse, missionary style. “When you don’t know what you’re missing, you don’t know what you’re missing,” Bob said.

The Korean War was still on and he joined the Naval Air Force Reserve, which tested his aptitude, found his IQ to be just below that of a fighter pilot’s, and enrolled him in electronics school. Watching the jets screaming above his head gave Bob a thrill and so he specialized in aerospace electronic engineering. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke, he didn’t curse, he voted for Eisenhower, and fathered five children in a row as the government trained him to be a Cold War technician. In 1957, the year
MR
. broke the story about swinging, Bob went to work for Bendix as a civilian organization man: he joined the lonely crowd, wore a gray suit, bought a house in Anaheim and took the wife and kids to church every Sunday and to Disneyland every season.

“Tell you a funny story that happened in 1960 on Edwards Air Force Base, show you how ignorant I was,” Bob said. “There was a tech sergeant on the base attached to my office, and he invited me and Bonnie for dinner. So he and his wife—who was a very attractive person by the way—they asked us if we’d like to join the base’s key club. I had no idea what a key club was. I thought they were talking about a club where you had to be an elite person to get the key to the door, and I’ve
always been opposed to elite organizations. I was raised to treat the guy who delivered groceries the same as the doctor who delivered babies, I was dead against prejudging someone based on their station in life. So I jumped in and said, ‘Absolutely not! Who the hell do you think you guys are trying to get us to join a key club?’ And I started lecturing them both that we would never attend any key club in our life! They, in turn, thought I was talking about swinging, and that I was attacking them for being swingers. They were mortified. ‘Oops, wrong couple.’ It didn’t dawn on me what they’d been talking about until a couple of years later.”

During those two years, Bob’s Christian faith and his marriage began to collapse in tandem. He was turning thirty, a time of reassessment in most men’s lives. Bob’s belief in religion had always been based on the unquestioning acceptance of the Bible’s stories about miracles. For years, however, McGinley had been manipulating the properties of the physical world to produce machines that performed seemingly miraculous functions, but without violating the laws of physics. The miracles in the Bible violated those laws, offering no explanation of how they came to be. If the laws of physics were set by God, McGinley wondered, what was the mathematical formula God was using to violate the laws? Was it a different formula for each miracle? Rereading the Bible, Bob discovered that almost all the miracles either punished people because they were enjoying sex or rewarded people who swore off sex.

“Sex was at the heart of it. That was one of the most significant realizations of my life,” he told me. “It was not just a self-serving deduction, it was actually frightening. I basically sat bolt upright and saw the Bible as a sex manual written by people who didn’t want other people to have sex except in the way they wanted people to have it: married and in the missionary position. When you open that lid of your mind, there’s no putting it back again. It was very confusing for me. I entered a
period of spiritual and emotional crisis. I had five kids, I wasn’t about to have an affair, but with my new awareness I had a great appetite for sexual experience—oral sex, whatever. At the same time, my desires were offensive to Bonnie. We began to fight, and then we had no sex at all. So much for experience.”

He was shipped to Japan as an instructor for Bendix and was assigned to train fighter pilots in the landing systems he’d helped develop. Bonnie came along with the kids and kept up her Bible study with the Christian wives. For two years, Bob progressed in the other direction. “For a man casting about spiritually and sexually, Japan was like the promised land. The formal acceptance of pleasure as a part of life, God not being this angry person who hated you for wanting pleasure—all that was a revelation to me.” He experienced sex with a geisha—the first time he’d enjoyed what would later be called “total body pleasure.” He also heard lots of talk about key clubs by the pilots and now he knew what they meant. He returned home with Bonnie in 1965 to find skirts were shorter and the Pill was on the market. The music was entirely different than when he’d left, full of sexual allusion and throbbing experimentation, and the words “sexual revolution” were beginning to be used in the media. He became absolutely convinced that he’d been denying a normal part of his life, and made a 180-degree turn from his Christian faith. He read
Playboy
at home, grew a beard, and stopped off at strip shows with his colleagues. “Bonnie was raging against everything that was happening at that time in California, and I was totally open to it,” he said. “Not the drugs, of course, but the free thought, the freedom of thought. She began to openly hate me, accused me of having an affair, which actually I wasn’t although I was close. She’s not a bad person, but she had a temper. One day I just said, ‘This is it. The end.’” Bonnie agreed: she filed for divorce, and Bob immediately took the fateful step of answering the swinging wife’s ad.

He kept the ensuing troubles with the Air Force over his correspondence a complete secret from Bonnie, and stayed at home right up until their divorce came through in 1966, just after he lost his security clearance. “I thought about fighting her on the custody issue, but in those days the woman always got custody of the kids. We arranged I’d see them on week-ends, and actually, when they got old enough, some of them began moving in with me. Now three of them work for LSO on and off, but none are swingers. They’re just free thinkers.”

Rather than fix television sets Bob sold real estate in the lucrative Southern California market, put some money together and drove up to San Francisco to launch an appeal of the Air Force decision. He stayed on a few weeks to attend meetings of the newly formed Sexual Freedom League in Berkeley, founded by an iconoclast named Jeff Poland, who’d legally changed his name to Jeff Fuck and then had taken the telephone company to court when they wouldn’t publish it in the directory, a case he won. The wide open spouse exchanges, foursomes and group sex at the SFL meetings convinced Bob that the sexual revolution was a literal fact, not just a phrase—or a phase. He told me he was overwhelmed by what he called the “uninhibited enthusiasm of the wives. I just had no idea a woman could show the same sex drive as a man. These were middle-class ladies, like from Oakland, not hippies up from Haight-Ashbury.” As he would write years later in his Ph.D. thesis, he believed that what he was seeing was “recreational social-sexual sharing”—not the wife swapping he’d been reading about in the press.

Alfred Kinsey was then being cited in the media reports as having declared swinging a convenient way for men to have extramarital sex, so Bob went to the source—the first time he looked into a textbook on sexuality. What he found was that critics of swinging were ignoring Kinsey’s finding that most of the husbands wanted to give their wives the opportunity for
additional sexual satisfaction. Instead, the critics quoted Kinsey’s findings about the other husbands who were essentially bartering their wives. “That’s why when I wrote my thesis ten years later on swinging I called it, ‘Challenge to Published Reports,’” Bob said. “Sure—some women hated it; some men flipped out that their wives loved it; you saw the occasional bad scene and jealous fights. Couples dropped out and there were a few drinkers, uncouth types, bigots, a few hippies, some unstable personalities. But the majority were just like everyday couples. When I read about swinging in the press, though, there would be the miserable ones, and there would be Kinsey selectively quoted.”

He theorized that the observers were purposely ignoring the majority of swingers because they wanted to warn people away from the activity by reporting its worst side, much as homosexuality was then being reported as a perversion. “No one wanted to give gay men permission to have sex with each other and no one wanted to give couples approval to swing,” he explained. “In those days there were some homosexuals who attended the parties. We got to talking about what they’d gone through, and what I’d gone through, and they told me something that has always stuck with me: ‘Now you know how we feel.’”

In 1968, at one of the SFL parties, Bob met a swinging woman with a charming accent named Geri, from Biloxi, Mississippi. Geri’s husband had got her involved in swinging the year before but he’d wanted everything to stay the same in their relationship thereafter—in what she calls his “dominator role in our marriage”—so she was then divorcing him. “Bob certainly had no interest in being my dominator,” Geri told me, laughing. In fact, Bob was beginning to scribble theories in notebooks about the reasons men possessively dominated women and about the possibilities of combining what he called “an emotionally monogamous married life” with a
sexually-sharing swinging life: in other words, combining American values with American fantasies. That fit right in with what Geri wanted. “I wanted the sexual freedom of that culture, but I wanted the conservative element, love, and romance, and a permanent relationship, from which to enjoy the freedom. Bob’s ideas touched all the right chords in me. He was politically and emotionally conservative, he believed in one country, one main partner, and one love, but he was sexually and spiritually radical.”

They both reaffiliated themselves with religion, the New Age type, Earth Church of the Pacific. Bob eventually became an ordained minister of this church and was licensed to perform weddings and officiate at funerals. A year later Geri and Bob got married in a full-service wedding—gown, tux, flowers—attended by fellow swingers at the Wayfarer’s Chapel, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, a maverick for whom Bob had infinite respect. As a symbol of their marriage and lifestyle, they chose Frank Sinatra’s “I Did it My Way” for their wedding march. They moved to the treeless flats of Orange County, not far from where LSO is located now. When Bob won his appeal against the Air Force—a precedent-setting case for swingers as well as for gays and lesbians—he went to work at Douglas Aircraft, but it wasn’t the same. “I wanted to be my own man,” Bob said. “Just as important, Geri and I wanted to help people who were just getting into swinging.”