Skipping Towards Gomorrah (10 page)

Americans don't gamble because we're greedy for money, but because we're greedy for reality, for a sensation that isn't a palliative, for the real deal, a real risk, a risk that's our own and not Brad Pitt's. We gamble because we want a cliffhanger of our own. I don't think it's a coincidence that gambling exploded in the United States at the end of the Cold War, when our daily lives were no longer lived in the shadow of nuclear war. Nor do I think it's a coincidence that America's casinos were empty in the days and weeks after September 11, 2001, when we felt like our lives were filled with risk. And I don't think it's a coincidence that Americans returned to casinos just as soon as the war on terrorism became another television show, another thing we watched on TV that was so much more exciting than the lives we actually live.

—William J. Bennett

—Molière

 

 

T
here were a lot of wedding bands on a lot of left hands at the Tropicana Hotel one recent weekend in August. Thousands of married couples from dozens of states were strolling in and out of the hotel's casino and convention center. Couples were saying hello to friends they hadn't seen since last year's convention, comparing tans, and gathering in even-number clumps to gossip and catch up. Most of the couples in the hotel were holding hands or engaged in some form of PDA. Couples strolling through the casino would 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 and expectations of daily life were supposed to fall away. Over the next three days, the couples planned to dress up, drink, gamble, and dance.

Oh, and commit adultery. For while the couples at the Lifestyles 2001 convention at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas were most decidedly married, none were off-limits. (I know, Las Vegas again. But, come on, it's a book about sin. More than one trip to Las Vegas was inevitable.) Married heterosexual swingers, aka “playcouples,” had descended on Las Vegas and taken over the hotel.

Lust was in the air.

As you might recall from the first chapter, lust is one of two “natural” sins (gluttony is the other), and to explore the dynamics of lust, I decided to hang out with adulterers, people who give in to this natural sin. Selecting adultery, of course, had one big perk: I would have to commit adultery myself, and my boyfriend couldn't really complain, since it was, you know, my job.

“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?”

Faced with a relationship crisis grounded in a theological debate, I decided to call on a member of the clergy to settle this dispute. My boyfriend and I are not regular churchgoers and we don't know any priests or ministers, so I called a prayer line I saw advertised on a Christian cable network. A very nice Baptist minister working from his home in North Dakota explained to me that it was impossible for me or any gay man to commit the sin of adultery.

“You aren't married and you never will be married and that means you can't come together in a holy sexual union that pleases God,” my prayer partner explained. “Only man and wife can do that. What you do is fornicate, and fornication is a sin. God hates all fornication, and all fornicators are sinners. Fornicating with another homosexual does not make you an adulterer. It's only makes you a fornicator.”

Which I already am?

“Which you already are.”

I asked my prayer partner if God would prefer that I be monogamous, even if I was being faithful to a man.

“I'm trying to be clear here. On Judgment Day, God isn't going to say, ‘Oh, I see here that you fornicated with only one man.' God doesn't care if it was one man or one thousand men. All fornicators go to hell.”

And a little extra fornicating isn't going to make the lake of fire any hotter?

“Fire is fire,” my prayer partner warned me.

Much to my boyfriend's delight, adultery was a sin I could only observe, not indulge in. Crap.

 

W
ife-swapping
was first mentioned in the media in the mid- 1950s after a small group of military officers in Southern California gave birth to the modern swinging movement. In swinging circles, 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 1960s, particularly in the air force, is well-documented and routinely denied.) Nonmilitary swing clubs started popping up in the early 1960s, first in arch-conservative 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 1 million people—half a million couples—were involved in organized swinging.

The host of the world's Lifestyles 2001 convention in Las Vegas, the Lifestyles Organization (LSO), grew out of a California swingers club called WideWorld, founded by Robert and Geri McGinley in 1969. Their club, according to LSO's Web site, was founded “to provide recreational opportunities to couples who yearned to lead lives free from archaic religious and political restrictions.” The group held its first convention in 1973, which was attended by 125 couples. The convention I attended in 2001 attracted more than three thousand couples—six thousand men and women wearing color-coded plastic wristbands that identified them as swingers. Most of the men dressed in conservative sportswear—chinos, polos, bolos—while most of the women were dressed more revealingly. There was an awful lot of cleavage on display. Some of the couples were young, some were old, but it was always the woman who was on display.

LSO's founder Robert McGinley is widely regarded as the father of the modern swinging movement. In his brief history of swinging, he cites an unnamed (and unpublished) report by “two well-known sociologists” that predicts 15 percent to 25 percent of all American married couples—some 22 million people—will become swingers at some point in their marriage, a statistic that should be taken with about a hundred thousand grains of salt. But it's impossible to dispute McGinley's claim that organized swinging is going on all over the United States. The Internet has emerged as a powerful tool to facilitate swinging, and a quick Internet search turns up swingers' clubs in every corner of the country—including clubs in “red” states like North Carolina, Mississippi, Indiana, Idaho, and Utah.

LSO is the granddaddy of swingers' organizations, and remains the largest swingers' organization in the country, with twelve full-time employees, an in-house travel agency (Lifestyles Tours & Travel), and a clubhouse in California. A large chunk of LSO's Web site is dedicated to answering questions and demystifying the
lifestyle,
a term the group embraces as passionately as they reject the term
wife-swapping
. According to its Web site, LSO speaks out “in public and private forums” to advance the “playcouple” philosophy: “Sex between consenting couples is natural, wholesome behavior and to pretend it is not is to encourage physical and mental disorder.” A large chunk of the site is dedicated to Q&A-style fact sheets that seek to reassure couples who might be curious about attending a swing club or a Lifestyles Convention:

“But we've never been to anything like this before. . . .”

“You won't be alone. . . . What you'll find are a lot of people—everyday people just like you—who are only interested in an open and friendly atmosphere where people are not afraid to talk about fantasies. . . . No one gets attacked. No one is pressured to do anything they don't want to. There's no rituals, no initiations. There are, however, a lot of people having fun.”

 

“F
or 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.

“There are a lot of ‘shall nots' in the Torah,” he says. “But it seemed to us that if we were honest with each other, then we weren't committing adultery.”

“If you're lying to your partner, that's adultery,” says Bridget, David's wife, nodding.

We're eating hot, salty pretzels with yellow mustard in the Tropicana's coffee shop, a dingy hole in the wall that wouldn't be out of place in a Trailways bus depot. Tall and muscular, David is an impressive example of Jewish manhood—picture a slightly younger version of former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a head full of dark hair. David has muscular arms and shoulders and was wearing a tank top and a pair of running shorts when we met. Bridget was a red-haired, green-eyed woman of Irish descent wearing blue-jean overalls and a small star of David on a chain around her neck. Bridget's mother was Jewish and her father was Irish-Catholic; her mom got to pick the faith her children were raised in, while her dad got to pick their names. Bridget has two older brothers, Sean and Patrick, both practicing Jews.

David and Bridget are in their early forties, but neither looks a day over thirty-five. They've been married for ten years but “in the lifestyle,” as they call it, for four. They attend at least two parties a month and sometimes more at one of the nine swingers clubs in the suburbs of Chicago. They have three children, all boys under the age of ten. They keep kosher, attend services at least once a week, and are giddy with anticipation about their boys' impending bar mitzvahs. Before meeting me in the Tropicana's lobby, David and Bridget spent an hour in their hotel room reading the Torah.

“The Torah talks about deception being part of the offense when someone commits adultery,” says David, when I ask how they reconcile their conservative religious beliefs and their liberal attitudes towards sex. “So is adultery having sex with someone who isn't your spouse? Or is it hiding that sex from your spouse?”

“We realize we're doing something that would be frowned upon in our moral community,” says Bridget, “and that it may be a contradiction. But people are complex.” Bridget feels the Torah is on their side. “This is something we feel helps our bond as husband and wife. Torah says a man should leave his parents and cleave to his wife,” and David and Bridget feel that swinging brought them closer together, that is, it helps them cleave.

God forbids adultery in the Sixth Commandment. In the Jewish tradition, sin requires an action. “Judaism doesn't legislate thought,” says Bridget. “Even coveting requires an act in furtherance of the desire.” In the Christian tradition, however, adultery isn't just a sin in deed alone but also in thought. Wanting to commit adultery, according to the Christian God, is every bit as bad as actually committing adultery. It may seem harsh that God would condemn millions of straight American men to eternal torment for, say, wanting to fuck Jennifer Aniston, the actress married to Brad Pitt, but, hey, who are we to question God? (As God points out to Job, we weren't around when he was hanging the stars, so who the fuck are we and what do we know about anything?)

Early Christians believed that the act of lusting after someone was not only a sin on the part of the luster but also potentially the
lustee
. “Someone who consciously seeks to induce lustful thoughts (or actions) in another is guilty of sinning,” according to Mícéal Vaughan, a professor of English at the University of Washington and an expert on the liturgy of the Catholic Church. “Sin in Catholic tradition is only the result of one's personal thoughts, actions, and consent to them, so a person who is the object of lust is not thereby guilty of sin. It's on other grounds entirely that the object of lust becomes guilty of sin,” such as behaving or dressing in ways that they know make others lust after them. Which means, of course, that Brad Pitt, Heath Ledger, and Tom Cruise—all three appeared shirtless on the cover of
Vanity Fair
—have sinned grievously, as their actions inspired lust in my heart and the hearts of millions of other straight women and gay men. When someone's dress (or lack thereof), actions, or words tempt others to sinful thoughts or deeds (or both), “[that is] what is called making one's self an ‘occasion of sin,' and there is potentially some guilt incurred by that,” added Vaughan.

Since Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt make themselves the “occasion of sin” about as often as I make myself toast, Jennifer can expect to roast in hell for prancing around on
Friends
in her underwear, and Brad will burn right beside her for splashing his abs all over the cover of
Vanity Fair
.