Versatile Ladies: the bisexual option (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  In Leila’s case, the worry that she was basically homosexual, that homosexual acts rendered her performance abnormal, did not vanish instantly. In later conversations it became evident that some of this anxiety persisted for a period of at least a month. As repeated contacts with other women in a swinging context continued to be pleasurable and did so without rendering heterosexual relations less enjoyable, this anxiety gradually withered away and disappeared, presumably entirely.

  It is interesting to note that Ron himself experienced a certain amount of anxiety over his wife’s relations with other women, anxiety which came as a complete surprise to him and which he hesitated to voice. He had earlier become familiar with the bit of folk wisdom which holds that no woman who has ever experienced lesbian lovemaking will ever again be truly satisfied by a male. This is a very persistent myth and one that he could not completely dismiss, although he had very much wanted his wife to have sex with other women, perhaps because of his desire to watch such activity, perhaps because of latent homosexual impulses of his own, perhaps too because he wanted her to be able to experience new avenues of pleasure. Whatever the reasons, he did very much desire to see Leila have homosexual relations, enjoyed seeing her do so, found the experience exciting and pleasing, found that his wife became a more exciting woman in his eyes by virtue of this new role—and yet, somehow, worried that she would enjoy lesbian acts to the point where she no longer enjoyed lovemaking with him.

  When his fears failed to materialize, his anxiety dissipated accordingly.

  Since then, bisexual relations have been a standard component of swinging for Leila. In the ads which she and Ron run, they describe her as bi and express a preference for meetings with couples who are similar to themselves in this respect. When they answer ads, they select only those in which the wife is so described. They have participated in a number of trios with bisexual girls but have found such encounters somewhat less satisfactory for one reason or another.

  They have also had a certain number of encounters with couples in which both husband and wife are bisexual.

  • • •

  The first time this came up, it was at a group scene. There were three other couples. One of them we had swung with previously, and they invited us to a party with these two other couples whom we had not met before. There was the usual group sex, and then one of the other husbands went down on the host and frenched him while the host was doing the same for one of the girls. This was the first I had seen of male homosexual relations, and it was a surprise although I won’t say it shocked me.

  Later in the evening the same man asked if he could french Ron, and Ron just said politely that it was not his scene, and it was left at that.

  We discussed it afterward and he said that the presence of male homosexual relations at the party did put him off slightly, but that he was hardly going to moralize about it and didn’t really mind as long as he was not required to participate.

  Then another time we met a couple through the mails, and both were bi although this was not mentioned in correspondence, just that she was. We were all in the same room and I had made love with the man and Ron with the wife, and we had been in a group thing in which the other girl and I ate each other while the men screwed us, which is a very exciting thing and very common when you have two couples and the girls are bi and the men are not. And then, I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but Ron and I were both petting the other wife and kissing her breasts, and the other man began to play with Ron’s penis. Ron didn’t say anything and then the man went down on him and began to suck him, and Ron stopped what he was doing to say that it wasn’t his scene.

  The other husband said he wasn’t exactly bi but could relate to another man in a group situation, and that he would like to do this to Ron, and what difference did it make if it was a man’s mouth or a woman’s mouth that was frenching him, that he could just relax and enjoy it and there would be no question of him frenching the other man in return.

  Ron let him go ahead, mainly because he didn’t want to make a big thing out of it and also out of curiosity to see how he himself would react to it and wondering if a man would perform the act differently from a woman. He said he concentrated on making love to the wife and not thinking about the fact that it was a man who was frenching him, and he did have an orgasm eventually.

  After that there were several occasions in which more or less the same thing happened. And there was another occasion where Ron suggested that he have anal intercourse with the other wife. I don’t enjoy this but Ron does and will do so with other women if they happen to enjoy it also. The other wife did not but the other husband said that he would be glad to have Ron fuck him in the ass if he wanted, that he was not regularly bi but enjoyed it now and then if he could be having sex with a woman while it was going on. So I frenched the man while Ron had anal intercourse with him.

  We are at the point now where Ron not only feels it’s normal for a woman to be bi but that it’s normal for a man also, but does not think he can really relate to another man enough to do it. He will permit a man to perform fellatio on him but has never performed it on another man in return, and does not know whether he wants to do so or not. He says he is of two minds about it. On the one hand he would like to try it because he thinks he might enjoy the act itself, but on the other hand he thinks it is something he can enjoy in fantasy but that it would put him off completely in actual practice. That he cannot think of another man as a sex object in the way that he can think of a woman, and also that he cannot think of himself as someone who could make love to another man.

  In a way you might say that he is going through something similar to what I went through, except that it is different because of the different ways people think of bi males and bi females and of there being more shame and guilt connected with a man engaging in that sort of thing.

  So on the one hand he will submit to frenching and will use another man’s anus, or at least did so the one time, but on the other hand he has a desire to know what it’s like to go down on another man and what it’s like to be fucked in the ass, but he has trouble getting himself to the point where he will go through with it. I expect he will try it one of these days when the time is right, especially he will try sucking a man, but whether he will enjoy it or not and how he will feel about it afterward I don’t know.

  As far as how I myself would feel about it, there again I do not know since you can never tell in advance how you will feel about something. You really never know ahead of time what will go through your mind when something does take place.

  I don’t think that I will think less of Ron if he does this, and if he enjoys it. I have noticed my reactions to other bi males and do not think less of them for it. The fact that Ron is my husband should not enter into it in this case, I don’t think. But I will not get a thrill out of it, either. By this I’m referring to the fact that Ron gets a particular thrill out of watching me making it with another woman, and I am sure I would get no comparable thrill in return. I would enjoy it, just as I enjoy watching him with another woman or just as I enjoy watching any sexual act, for that matter, but there would be no special thrill in it being a matter of watching two men together.

  In one way I will be glad when he crosses the line and becomes completely bi. I guess by the way I just said that it shows that I think this is what will happen. I believe that is the case, that sooner or later he will try it and that he will like it.

  And the reason I will be glad of it is that then it will not be such a big deal, whether to do it or whether not to do it. This business of standing on a threshold is a nuisance because it usually means that you attach too much importance to something that later turns out to be not all that important at all. You do it and either you like it or you don’t and at least you know one way or the other.

  Also, I suppose I have the feeling inside me that it is more natural for both the husband and the wife to be bisexual than for just the wife to be. I don’t know whether you w
ould call it women’s liberation or you would say that what was sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander. But it seems to me that what is normal for the woman should be just as normal for the man. Although here again I am stressing something that does not really matter that much to me either way, and again it is because of this business of being on the verge, which keeps things on your mind all the time.

  As it stands, I have no regrets for the way our lives have turned out. There was a time when I did have one particular hesitation, and that was when I worried that sex was simply playing too great a part in our lives. I guess that happened shortly after my first bi experience. It was a new world for us, and as a result we were swinging two and three times a week, and spending the rest of our time talking about it. As you know we have no children, and thus we have a lot of free time on our hands, and it began to seem as though all of that free time was being devoted to sex, which is to say to swinging.

  Of course that was nothing to worry about, because as the novelty wore off somewhat we found it easy to put swinging more in its proper proportion. I don’t know what would be proper proportions for everyone, but for us it means once a week. Generally Saturday night. We might occasionally swing more often, on an occasional Friday night for example, and on summer vacations we generally travel so that we can see various swingers along the way, but as a general rule it is a once-a-week thing for us and we have found that it works out best that way.

  THREE:

  “Fit To Be Tied”

  I never actually thought I could talk about this with anyone. There were times when I wanted to go to a psychiatrist and see if I could work things out with him, and I have to admit that the thing that kept me from going was that I knew I could never bring myself to come right out and talk about myself. As a matter of fact I did go to a psychiatrist once. I told him I was depressed and having trouble sleeping, and I waited for him to draw the story out of me, and I thought it would work out but it didn’t. He asked me questions but I just answered them with short and simple answers and completely left out what bothered me. The swinging and the bondage, I never mentioned a word of it. And he wound up writing out a prescription for me for something, tranquilizers or anti-depressants, I don’t know exactly what they were because I never got the prescription filled. I paid him the twenty dollars in cash. I couldn’t write him a check because I made the appointment under a phony name, just to show you how nervous I was about the whole thing. I paid him the twenty dollars and left his office and threw the prescription away as soon as I was out of there. I didn’t see any point in taking the drugs. I hadn’t gone there for drugs and I wasn’t really so depressed and didn’t have trouble sleeping either. It was just something I made up to tell him, to give me a reason for being there.

  Anyway, even when I do have trouble sleeping I don’t like to take drugs. I’m basically a fanatic on the subject. I would rather stay up all night than take a pill to make me sleep. I don’t even take aspirin when I have a headache. I don’t believe in alcohol or drugs or tobacco. It’s funny how firm I am about not being a slave to any of those things, when in sex it’s being a slave that turns me on.

  When I wrote you I never expected to hear from you in return. I guess if I had thought of you as a real person I never would have written, but I thought of you as the author of a book and that made you sort of unreal for me. I mean I had this particular image of you from your book but didn’t see you as a real person in any complete way.

  Then when you wrote back and said you wanted to interview me I felt very weird about the whole thing. I felt that I could trust you and that it was possible I would be able to do myself some good by talking with you, but still I was worried about the whole thing, that I would just clam up completely and you would be wasting your time coming here.

  I talked about it with George and he was very much in favor of me talking with you. He pointed out something that I realize myself, and that’s that I’m completely at ease with other couples that we swing with. This is not always the case; a lot of people who are into the same sort of scene as we are very nervous about talking about it, even when we’re all together. I’m not like that. George says it’s as if I’m two different people, one who’s enormously nervous and secretive about herself with other people, and another who’s absolutely at ease about the entire thing when she’s with other people in the same scene.

  But you know, it’s a very funny situation. Swingers are either into bondage and discipline or they aren’t. It’s like there’s no middle ground. With other things, people may do them once in awhile or not like them too much but tolerate them at a group session. But B-and-D is something else. People will say in their ads “no B-and-D.” Meaning that they absolutely don’t want to get involved in it and don’t want to have anything to do with people who are into it. So on the rare occasions when we swing with people who aren’t into bondage, I never let the subject come up. Because if you do, people stare at you as though you’re some kind of a freak. And I don’t know for sure how I feel about it myself. Sometimes I think that I am some kind of a freak, and other times, when I’m with people who groove the same way I do, I feel as though the entire situation is the most natural thing in the world.

  One nice thing is that you’re amazingly easy to talk to. I am also glad that you met George last night, and that the three of us sat around and talked, and that I’m meeting you alone this time, because it’s always easiest to talk with someone when there are just the two of you. Because I have this feeling that I can say whatever comes to mind in front of you, and that you won’t judge me or disapprove of me, and of course you don’t really know me and never will, so I can talk to you and at the same time in a way I’m basically talking to myself.

  • • •

  Pauline is a small, intense, birdlike little woman. Her hands flash and expressions play over her face as she talks. She bears a remarkable facial resemblance to Joan Didion, the author.

  She is twenty-eight and has been married for four years to George, who owns and operates an electrical appliance store in upstate New York. It is a second marriage for both of them. George, thirty-four, was divorced six years ago after several years of marriage. His ex-wife was granted custody of his two children and has since moved to the West Coast. Pauline was married first at seventeen and divorced within two years. She and George have had no children, and do not plan to have any.

  I received the following letter from her in response to a book of mine:

  Dear Mr. Wells:

  My husband and I read Three Is Not A Crowd and found it very enjoyable, although that is not our particular scene. I have been wondering if you ever wrote anything about bondage and discipline, which is of special interest to us personally. I know that in so many books on these subjects they tend to put down B-and-D as something for kooks and freaks, and by the way you are generally sympathetic to people I thought you might write something which would show that there is not necessarily anything abnormal about people who happen to enjoy this scene.

  I do not think that I am a masochist in any way. I think it is a mistake to think of bondage and discipline in terms of masochism. Of course a great many people do get their kicks out of it in that way but there is a great deal more to it as well. For example I have no particular desire to be spanked, although it can be exciting in a sexual context. But I find it enormously exciting to be held in restraint in one way or another. For example to be tied up, and in that position to be forced into various sexual relations. I suppose it is a hangup in certain ways but I also know that it makes sexual acts very exciting which I would otherwise not be able to enjoy.

  I suppose you must think I am crazy to be writing a letter of this sort to a total stranger, but then you must be used to getting kooky mail in your business, probably a ton of it. Besides you suggested in Three Is Not A Crowd that people write to you.

  I am twenty-eight, married, no children. My husband and I have been swingers for almost two years . . .

  Well tha
t’s about it. Just wanted to tell you I liked your book, and to find out if you’ve written about bondage and if so is it possible to buy a copy? If not, I think it would be a good subject for you . . .

  I wrote back saying that I had written about bondage on several occasions but had not yet gone into the subject in any great detail, never having devoted an entire book to it. I added that I did intend to deal with the practice at somewhat greater length and would be interested to know more about her own experiences. I suggested that we might manage this through correspondence or, since her home was not that far from New York City, that I would be pleased to come up and visit her and her husband if they were agreeable to the idea.

  I received no reply at first and expected that this would be another case of a promising initial letter with no follow-up. Then, almost a month later I received a short note from Pauline in which she expressed a tentative interest in being interviewed. She furnished her phone number. I called her the same day and made arrangements to interview her the following weekend.

  The first night I sat up for hours with the two of them. The evening was spent more in general conversation than in any real interviewing. (This is often the case when one talks to more than one person at a time. In conversation, if not in group sex, the presence of a third party has an inhibiting effect upon the other two.) We did get along well, however, exchanging anecdotes and doing total damage to a quart of Teacher’s. Perhaps it’s as well that nothing too vital came out in that evening’s talk, as my memory was spotty in the morning.

  The following afternoon I went to their house again as arranged. George was working at the store and I was able to spend several hours talking with Pauline. I stayed for dinner and talked with them both for awhile longer. The bulk of Pauline’s discussion here derives from the time I spent alone with her.