group sex

Very few women at the sex parties were having orgasms. After the men were petered out, the women would all end up in Betty's bedroom playing with vibrators. That got Betty thinking about Bodysex workshops. Something had to change...

Dossie and I met back in the early seventies when I was bicoastal living in San Francisco part time. Our commune on Castro Steet rotated betweeen four to five people who were committed singles. As long as we lived together we agreed to avoid sexually pairing off. Dossie came to a few our communal sex parties. I remember her as a beautiful tiny faun with a mop of curly hair who loved sex. l'm glad to see her book coming out again. The information is pertenent for everyone who realizes that the limitations of monogamy doesn't work for everyone.

An underground hit for years in sexually experimental circles, Dossie Easton's and Janet W. Hardy's The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships and Other Adventures makes the case that we should all enjoy an occasional threesome, foursome, and moresome with friends and strangers. "We believe it's OK to have sex with anybody you love," Easton and Hardy write, "and we believe in loving everybody."

"Many people find their partner advertising unbeknownst to them; people set up anonymous dates and it turns out to be their spouse who answered the ad."

The review in Alternet by Cynthia Fuchs with the revealing title, "Screwing Their Brains Out": Plato's Retreat and the Rise of Swinging showed how little she and most other people know today about the Swinging Seventies. First off, adult group sex took many forms and none of them were anything like Woodstock that was about music, youth and pot. A few young couples got naked and enjoyed having sex together but it was NOT consenting adult couples having sex in a group setting.

Too many uptight folks today want to make group sex out to be some kind of social sickness or that only pathetic people took part in it. But what's been going on under the Bush admin and the Religious Right is today's real sickness with the repression of sexual expression that damages our youth with misinformation.

It's okay by me that my last name was left out of the film and her article. During my extensive interview, I told the film makers I went to Plato's only once and didn't much like it. My favorite sex parties were by invitation only with a core group of my friends. That way the mix of people was by design more like a successful dinner party. But I have no gripe with the suburban out-of-shape married couples who got to have some sexual fun at Plato's. I have always been a democratic fuck and some of these people were hotter than the so-called "pretty people" who were brittle and way too self-conscious to let go and enjoy recreational sex.

American Swing has hit theaters and the emails are pouring in about Betty's remarkable performance.  It's a documentary on Plato's Retreat - the sex club that made Studio 54 look like Wonder Bread.  It was produced by Magnolia Pictures which is my favorite studio and is playing at the Quad theatre in nyc so get your tickets now. Betty and I are going Tuesday.

The Rise and Fall of Plato's Retreat by Kurt Loder

By the mid-1970s, the hippie "free love" notions of the '60s had seeped out into the suburbs. Suddenly there were "swingers": men in the most alarming period finery - disco chains, gull-wing collars, crotch-strangling bell-bottom trousers - and the women who loved them (who loved many of them, in fact, sometimes all at once). These people would gather on weekends to form flesh piles at one another's homes. They had their own rites and recognition signals, their own publications. Finally, one of these plebian hedonists, a burly New York meat wholesaler named Larry Levenson, decided the time had come to take swinging public. Well, heterosexual swinging, that is - the gay bathhouse scene was already in full rut. So in 1977 Levenson rented a hotel basement on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that had once housed a famous gay pleasure dome called the Continental Baths (where Bette Midler launched her career, backed by Barry Manilow in a bath towel), and turned it into Plato's Retreat, America's first straight public sex club. For better and then, later, for worse, things would never be the same again.

Arrived at my friends' party this past Saturday night at twenty-three minutes past start time. I was wearing black jeans, grey turtleneck shirt, a black leather suit jacket, and an Under Armor heat gear form-fitting undershirt. I'd brought a bottle of champaign, strode through the ajar front door, and said hello to an almost empty room. The party hadn't started.

My friends appeared in sophisticated dress. I asked, "Can I help you with anything? They set me to work mincing garlic and putting it together with a half stick of butter. Following that, slicing and toasting bread. People started to arrive. Gradually more people appeared and before I knew it, I was feeling a slight resentment. Just then, a woman came up by my side and offered some help. Then another with curly black hair came up behind me and placed her hands around my stomach. She asked me if I wanted a drink, I said yes, and she returned with champaign. Her hands returned to the front of my stomach. "I love how you feel here. Are you done soon?"

I came back to my lover and her primary partner. She was collapsed over him, breasts pressed against his chest, her narrow rib cage moving up and down with big slow breaths. She told me my attention got her to the edge, then she was moved to climb on top of her man's hard-on and bucked her hips with her hand at her clit all the way to "one of the most profound orgasms of her life." I replied, "See? Teamwork." All three of us high-fived each other.