sexual revolution

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.