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

by Lawrence Block

  Oh, John Warren Wells, I should tear this up and not mail it. Writing words like that. But I have to admit I got a kick out of it. I am sitting at the typewriter shaking like a leaf. I am excited writing things like this and excited at the thought of you reading it. Is that a new kind of perversion I wonder? Probably not as there’s nothing new under the sun.

  I suppose either I am boring you to death with all of this or else you are sitting there laughing your head off at this stupid woman who puts thoughts like this on paper to a total stranger. I will stop for now. Please let me know if you get this letter or not. And if you think there is any point in going on with this. All of this writing and there is nothing about lesbianism and my experiences with it. But I can put that in other letters if you are interested.

  Evelyn

  November 10, 1970

  Dear Jack,

  Is it all right if I call you Jack? That is how you signed your letter.

  Speaking of your letter, I am glad you think what I wrote was worth your time and that you were not offended by anything I wrote. I told Leonard about the “dirty part” and how it excited me. He wanted to see the letter but I told him I did not make a carbon of it, not wanting to show it to him for various reasons. I will probably show him all the letters sometime in the future. But if I wrote with his reaction in mind it would keep me from speaking my mind frankly.

  So here I am writing back quickly before you change your mind about looking forward to hearing from me! You did say to be as frank as I care to. Well, I don’t know that I care to be as frank in this letter as in the last one but we will see what happens. The kids are off to school and I am here at this typewriter and it is better than morning television at the very least.

  To take up where I left off. From that first time onward I was a swinger. None of what I feared came to pass and Leonard and I were closer together than ever. Also I was pleased to know that he would now have no need of other women. That is to say that he would not be sneaking around on the sly but would have his cake while I had mine. I couldn’t believe I was the same person who could not understand why a woman would ever want to make love to anyone but her husband. We women must really let ourselves be sold a bill of goods when we believe that.

  We swung no more than once a week because of the difficulty of baby sitters. Because of the children we never had people to our house, although other people with small children did not always take this precaution. As a matter of fact we were at someone’s house and I was in the bedroom upstairs with the husband and had his hot stiff cock halfway down my throat when his four-year-old walked in wanting a glass of water or some such thing. He acted completely casual about the whole thing and told the child to go back to bed and he would bring him the water in a few minutes. I was blushing purple but he told me to go back to what I was doing, and after I sucked his balls dry he got up and gave the damn kid his damn glass of water.

  Well, Jack, I guess I am being pretty frank in this letter after all. If you ever put this in a book I will probably get hot and bothered reading it. Unless you change the words and I suppose you will have to.

  Oh, my, Evelyn, you will just have to learn to control yourself . . .

  On some occasions when we swung with a couple in the same boat we would all go to a motel together. I suppose the best thing would be to bring up your children so that it would not be necessary to hide things from them, but you would have to start from an earlier age than with our three.

  To get to lesbianism finally, you may find it hard to believe but we were swingers for four years before anything happened that way. I suppose you would have to say that we were pretty square swingers and wound up running with a pretty square crowd. We did tend to see the same people over and over although we would also enlarge our circle of acquaintances by meeting new people who various swinging friends of ours had recommended.

  I would not go so far as to say that there was no lesbianism among the people with whom we swung at the time. The thing is that people do not bring the subject up in such a way as to announce that they are bi unless they are pretty certain the person they are with is bi also, or is at least leaning in that direction. I am sure I did not give that impression because a bisexual experience was the farthest thing from my mind.

  The subject did come up from time to time when the men suggested it. Often there would be stag movies shown and there is almost always lesbian action in those movies as you must surely know. The husbands were always excited by this and would sometimes try to get one of us to do things with the other, but this was always laughed off. We would say that there would be plenty of time for that if we ever got tired of men or make some joke along those lines.

  I remember one such an occasion that one wife of a couple with whom we had swung many times admitted that she had had a recent bi experience. The other wife on that occasion was bi and said she would like to french her, and with both husbands encouraging it she finally gave in and permitted the other woman to suck her juicy cunt. She said the bi woman did not expect anything in return. I said that personally I thought my skin would just run cold if a woman did that to me. Leonard said I could always close my eyes and what difference would it make if it was a man’s or woman’s mouth. But I said the difference would still be in my mind.

  Thinking back later, I expect the girl who told me that story was hinting that she might like to have a bi experience with me. I think what she had in mind was that if I was bi and enjoyed eating girls, this was her way of letting me know she wouldn’t mind being eaten, but that she would not want to give me anything in return. Perhaps I am reading too much into it but I am not sure. Anyway I don’t think it is really important.

  I don’t know whether I changed myself or whether things just began to change around me. I know that we were loosening up in our swinging in certain ways. As time went by we found ourselves more and more often all having sex relations in the same room, and it was a rare occasion when we would swap partners and go to separate rooms. This only happened when we were with newcomers to swinging, or so it began to seem. I believe you wrote that most swingers go through something like this, as they are more or less evolving from swapping to group sex. This happened with us, although it may have taken us longer than most. Especially considering that here we are in sunny Southern California, where swinging is supposed to be far more freewheeling than in the rest of the country.

  Being in a group sex situation made it easier for lesbian activity to rear its head. Also bi practices must have been spreading like wildfire at this time because the subject was always brought up, and not so much with hints. Girls would come right out and say that they wanted to have sex with me, no ifs ands or buts about it. This would happen with a couple we had met for the first time. Once for instance I was having sex with a man and his wife came over and began touching me. I felt a chill come over me and I asked her to please stop. She gave me a funny look and took her hand away. She said she had more or less taken it for granted that I was bi because she knew Leonard and I were experienced swingers, and she had found that with experienced swingers the wife was invariably bi.

  It also happened on several occasions that the wives of couples we had swung with and who had been completely straight before had become bi. They didn’t necessarily come on to me but would admit that they had tried it and discovered that they liked it. I thought they meant they liked receiving oral sex from a woman as well as from a man—the old idea about what difference does it make whose mouth is frenching you—but they surprised me by saying they liked to do it as well.

  I was very confused about this and began to go through conflicts. Leonard was no help as he still wanted very much for me to be bi. I told him if he was so keen on bisexual experiences he had my permission to have some of his own, but he said this was not something he was ready for. This was not the way he would have put it in the past. I asked if this meant he thought he might be ready for it some day, and he said he wasn’t ruling it out.

  This gave
me something of a shock, as I could not truly imagine my husband having sex with another man. I thought of him as manly and of such sex as not a manly thing to do. I began to wonder if he wanted me to be bi so that he would have an excuse to be bi himself.

  At group parties, which we began to go to quite regularly at this stage, there was always lesbian activity. Either it took the form of a show that two of the wives would put on for the men or else it would be something two girls might do when none of the men were sexually “in the mood.” During such times I very definitely felt left out. It was understood that I was not inclined to participate and I was rarely teased for this, but I could not help feeling that I was regarded as a prude. Also I did not know what to do, whether to watch or not to watch. Whichever I did, I could not help feeling awkward about it.

  Before I had always felt that a lesbian was less a woman than a normal woman was. Now I was being re-educated in my thinking, and I was beginning to get the impression that a girl who was not bisexual was a less sexual person than one who was, and that I was thus missing something and not a full woman as were the other wives.

  Soon I began to wonder how I really felt about it. I worried that I was staying away from it because I was afraid of what it would tell me about myself. And I had dreams in which I had sexual relations with other women. I found myself wondering about the act. To the point of every time a man went down on me I wondered what it was like for him, and thus what it would be like for me to french another woman . . .

  Well, Jack, you will have to forgive me for getting carried away and writing such a lot about a little. I can picture you shaking your head and saying, “Boy, this girl sure has problems, doesn’t she?” Well, not anymore, but they certainly come into focus writing these letters and remembering what I was going through. It’s very funny, because when I talk about that stage of the game with people now, I simply say that I thought about trying a bi experience for quite awhile, and then I went ahead and tried it. But that is not the whole story by any means, because when I stop and think about it, it comes clear how much will-she-or-won’t-she agony I went through at the time, trying to decide what to do.

  I suppose if I just went ahead and tried it the first time it came up, then I suppose that it might have been completely different, without having built it all up in my mind and out of proportion. But that is the way people are, Jack, making a mountain out of a mole’s hill. And that’s enough for one letter before my fingers get sore typing this.

  Evelyn

  November 16, 1970

  Dear Jack,

  You are not much of a correspondent, are you? I empty my heart out and get back three sentences. Well I guess I write long enough letters for the two of us.

  “My First Lesbian Experience.”

  Time to get down to brass tacks. It happened with a couple from the Bay area whom we were meeting for the first time. They had come to Los Angeles for the weekend and had a hotel suite in Beverly Hills. They had gotten our phone number from mutual friends and we met them for dinner and then returned to their suite with them.

  I must explain about them. Their names were Maggie and Bill, although it later turned out that Bill was not his real name. It also turned out that they were not married although they passed themselves off as a married couple and none of their swinging partners knew the actual truth about them. As it happens Bill really was married but to a woman who did not swing. He met Maggie at a party and the two of them teamed up for swinging. This was just a matter of convenience for both of them. They were not interested in each other to any great degree and would swing independently, but would team up in order to swing with other couples. Also they made it a point to pretend to be married, as many married couples do not like to swing with singles as I am sure you know. The reason is simple jealousy. You feel that singles will have nothing to keep them from getting involved, having nothing in the way of a marriage to lose, and so it can be dangerous, or at least people think it can be dangerous. At any rate, all of this was something I learned later, believing at the time that they were what they pretended to be, a married couple.

  Maggie was thirty-three. Bill about forty, but when they were together she seemed the older of the two because she was more forceful. In fact it was possible to believe that she was his wife and that he was henpecked in the bargain!

  We had a nice dinner and all swung. Then we began talking generally about bisexual experiences, and it came out that I had never done this. This got Maggie very interested. Without making a pass she began talk very seriously about how I ought to do this once and for all just to find out what it was like. That I owed it to myself to do this. That I was very beautiful and sexual and would enjoy it, or else would discover that I did not enjoy it and would have it off my mind. She seemed to know without my saying so how much it had been on my mind these past weeks and months.

  I thought she was building up to making a pass at me and had more or less made up my mind to go along with it, because the time was right for me. And for all the reasons she had said plus some reasons of my own. But she surprised me by dropping the subject completely and we swung some more and then Leonard and I went home to our own house.

  In the next few days I was highly disturbed and began having fantasies about Maggie. We had made no plans to see them again and I wanted to see them again but was also afraid. I did not discuss any of this with Leonard, who had had a good enough time making love to Maggie but nothing special. Also he did not much care for Bill, who was sort of dull and wishy-washy, nor had I myself enjoyed sex with Bill very much.

  Then out of the blue one afternoon the phone rang and it was Maggie. This was almost two weeks after the night we met them. She said she was in L.A. unexpectedly and would like to come by and have a cup of coffee. I told her to come over. She came over and it happened as I knew it would happen. She made a big pitch for me and told me how attractive I was and began kissing me, and of course we wound up in bed.

  Jack, let me tell you. I shake when I think about it. She was just another woman, no prettier than most. But it was like going to bed with the devil.

  That is what it was like.

  I don’t know why this should be so. I lost my head over this woman and left my husband and children for her and lived with her and thought I loved her. And I still do not know why it should be so. She did nothing to me that I had not experienced before. She went down on me, well hundreds of men have gone down on me. And it is true, if you closed your eyes you would not be able to tell if it was a man or a woman. They say women are much better at this. Well I do not know if this is so and I must say I think it is not. Maybe in the days when men did not go down on their wives and then the woman would have sex with another woman and it would be a completely new experience. Or with men who were not swingers and were thus bad at oral sex due to lack of experience or not enjoying it. But an experienced swinging man can do the same things as any lesbian in the world. The only difference being that it is a woman doing it and there is a difference in your mind about it as a result of that fact.

  But Jack, I would have to say that she hypnotized me. That this woman hypnotized me. If she told me to jump out a window I would do it. At the time, I mean. I would jump out a window on her say-so.

  She made me come a dozen times. With her hands and her mouth and with vibrators she had brought. Nothing I had not done so many times but it was like experiencing all this for the first time. Perhaps because it was forbidden and there were no men around etc. Perhaps because of how it had been built up in my mind. But also because she knew just what to do and how to do it so far as I was concerned, and in no time at all she had me eating out of her hand.

  As a matter of fact she had me eating out of her cunt. Her wet tight hot cunt. I would have done it myself but she took my head in her hands and pushed my face down between her legs and told me what to do and I did it. Oh God how I enjoyed it! How I loved it! The most important thing in the world for me was to make her come, and when I succeeded I felt like
I was on top of the world on a string. Oh I felt like God and the Devil in one.

  She owned me. Body and soul that woman owned me. I was years older than she and I felt like her daughter. She could do as she wanted with me because I belonged to her.

  Of course I told nothing of this to Leonard.

  That weekend we swung again with another couple, and the wife was bi as I had learned when last we swung with them. This time all I could think about was a bi experience. To see if it was the same thing again. And I said I had finally decided to try it, if she wanted to, which she took as a matter of course but which surprised Leonard no end. And she ate me and I ate her and it was not as it had been with Maggie but tremendously good all the same.

  And with the other husband I felt nothing. And also with Leonard I felt nothing, and that night I lay trying to sleep and thinking of nothing but Maggie.

  I called her several times in the next two weeks and at last went to Oakland to see her. And it was the same as the first time, and by the time I returned home to Leonard I had decided what I was.

  It sounds silly to write of it now. To think of it now. Because I managed to convince myself that I was a lesbian through and through. Not a bisexual at all but a lesbian. I decided that it was because I must have known this deep down inside that I had resisted so long and so hard. Because I knew I was the kind of woman who once she had another woman would never be satisfied with a man again. Maggie helped me think this way by telling me that she could only really enjoy herself with other women. That she enjoyed the power she had over men but only really felt equal in sex with another woman. And that she swung with Bill as a partner because it gave her an opportunity to get at other women through their husbands.

  She liked it best when the other wife had no bi experience. Which was why she made the effort with me. This I learned gradually through living with her and watching her operate. Her thrill was not lovemaking so much as seducing. That was what she wanted, the thrill of turning a girl on to lesbian relations for the first time. Although I was ultimately to live with her and to become far more skilled at lesbian practices, I never thrilled her as much as the first time I went down on her, since it gratified her lust for power so greatly the first time my virgin tongue touched her cunt.