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

by Lawrence Block

  The magazine excited me. There were so many wives advertising to meet women, either with or without their husbands. I saw that this was exactly what I wanted, that it would supply what I had been looking for.

  Then Norm and I had a long talk about it. We really cleared the air. I learned that he believed in sexual freedom to a far greater extent than I would have guessed. I guess I thought of him as the typical male, placing considerable importance on his wife being his own exclusive property. I thought he would think less of me if I had sex with others, whether male or female. And he in turn confided that he had wanted to swing for a long time, but had never brought it up out of the conviction that I would not be interested, that I was strictly monogamous.

  I’m sure this happens a lot of the time. I’m sure there are any number of husbands and wives who enjoy swinging, who entertain fantasies in that direction and keep them to themselves, because they are taking it for granted that their spouse would not be interested. And so they both keep their true desires a secret and go through life frustrating themselves simply because they are unable to talk to one another. I know that Norm and I were headed in this direction. If I had not confessed my homosexual desires and actions to him, and if he had not taken it from there and brought up the subject of swinging, I’m sure either our marriage would have failed sooner or later or we would have gone through life settling for far less than we wanted, far less than what we both could so easily have.

  In our talks, I learned that Norm desired other women—as I guess ninety-nine percent of the married men in the country do. And I learned that he would not mind if I had other men, or other women, and that whatever I did in this regard he would find very exciting.

  This took some getting used to on my part. I wanted what he was offering me but did not believe it would make no difference to him. It’s interesting how completely American women—or maybe all women—let themselves be sold a bill of goods in this manner. We actually grow up believing that our husbands will think less of us if we have sex with people other than them, when actually, with a sensible and together man, absolutely the reverse is true. In Norm’s eyes, my relationships with other persons, both male and female, made me a more totally sexual being in his eyes. I can’t say that he made me believe this completely. It was more a case of my wanting to swing so much that I was willing to chance his losing respect for me. I just saw swinging as such a perfect solution to my own special problem that I was willing to take the risk. Then, when we did swing together and I saw that his reaction was as he had led me to believe, I was overjoyed.

  The very first swinging date I had was by myself. Not literally by myself, of course; by that I mean that Norm did not come along. It was an entirely homosexual encounter. A woman advertised that she desired to meet women or couples for swinging, and that her husband would watch or join if desired. I wrote her a letter, probably a longer letter than was really necessary, running down my own situation and explaining that I would like to meet with her privately for conversation and perhaps sex if we suited each other, but that in this first meeting I did not want to bring my own husband along and would rather not have hers present, either. She called almost immediately saying she understood my position completely and would be glad to meet with me on those terms. I went over to her apartment during the afternoon and the two of us sat talking for several hours, getting so close conversationally that sex was almost superfluous.

  Then, to prove that sex was not superfluous, we went to bed and made love. I felt as though I was having the first genuinely honest sex with a woman since I had been married. I was being honest to Norman, who knew what I was doing, and I was also being honest to this woman, who knew who I was and knew that our relationship would be casual, with no strings attached to either of us. Because there was no possibility of emotional involvement, I didn’t have to guard against being emotionally attached to her, or her to me, as I always had done in the past. This enabled me to let go of the controls that usually got in the way of my own enjoyment, and the two of us were able to relax and have a very fulfilling and meaningful sexual experience.

  This was an icebreaker. Shortly thereafter we moved on to other things, meeting with couples, changing partners, having sex all in the same room together, getting into group sexual unions of one sort or another. I discovered within myself a capacity for enjoying all of these things that I had never suspected might be a part of my sexual makeup. I found that it thrilled me to watch Norm with another woman, especially if I had made love to that woman, or expected to make love to her shortly thereafter. I found that I could have pleasure with another man without feeling in any way disloyal to Norm. I found that it excited me to be observed or stroked by my husband while having relations with other persons, whether male or female. I found that plural acts were thrilling—two men and a girl, two girls and a man, all four of us involved together in some gymnastic sexual exploit.

  It took awhile for Norm to emerge as bisexual himself. I learned that he had had sexual relations with other males on certain occasions. When he was a boy he had engaged in mutual masturbation with other boys at an age slightly younger than when I was first going to those necking parties. This was completely abandoned much as girls in my set abandoned lesbian experiments when we grew into dating behavior. He also got in the habit of seeking out homosexuals for a brief period of time when he was in the service. He and various friends of his would go to certain areas where homosexuals congregated, and would permit the homosexuals to blow them on those occasions when they were unable to have sex with females.

  Norm told me that he and his friends in the service did not regard such acts as homosexual on their parts. At least they all kept up the pretense of not regarding them as homosexual, although he could not avoid thinking of them that way in retrospect, and felt that the other men may have felt the same way privately although they did not express their anxieties on the subject. As far as what they pretended to believe was concerned, they all agreed that this was something they did only because no girls were available, and that it was a way to get physical relief. Of course they could have had the same relief by masturbating, and the idea that it’s homosexual to go down on a man but not homosexual to let another man go down on you, that idea is a pretty silly one. Although you will occasionally find women new to swinging who act by the same standard—they will let another woman do things to them, but will not return the action, not because they don’t want to but because they cannot accept the desire within themselves. Some people tend to regard such girls as selfish, thinking that they want the fun of being eaten without the work of eating. This makes no sense unless you have the very immature attitude that sex is pleasurable only for the person on the receiving end.

  Maybe some of these girls are selfish, but I don’t think that’s what it is. I think they really want to find out what it’s like to eat another girl but they’re afraid of it, afraid it will be an active homosexual act as opposed to the passive one of just lying there and enjoying it. Most of the time, it’s just a stage that they go through. As they become more experienced, they take the next step and play an active role, and generally find out they like that side of it as much or more.

  Norman is a very perceptive and analytical person. He has remarkably few hangups and is very good at facing them when they do turn up. He was very good at facing my problem head on and coming up with the solution of swinging. As far as he himself was concerned, he told me that he thought he would probably turn out to be bisexual himself, and that we would wait and see what happened.

  Our first swings were with couples where the girl was bi and the husband was not. Norm felt we ought to take one thing at a time in this respect. On about the third date, the other husband turned out to be bi and told Norm he would like to ball him if Norm wouldn’t mind. Norm said he would pass for the time being, but a couple of weeks later we called the same couple again and got together with them, and this time Norm had a complete bi experience. The other girl and I sat there cuddl
ing while we watched our husbands take turns sucking each other off.

  Norm found out he enjoyed this. He can only relate to another male as a love and sex object on very rare occasions, but can enjoy the acts themselves fully almost all the time. In this sense he is not bisexual to the extent that I am, since I relate fully to women and men in very much the same way. Norm, on the other hand, would never kiss another man on the mouth or feel the sort of tenderness one normally feels toward a sex partner. But he can get terrific pleasure out of performing fellatio or being fucked anally. In anal intercourse, he says he is able to understand better than ever before how it feels to be a woman in intercourse.

  • • •

  Swinging seems to have been an unqualified success for Norm and Joanne. Both are very much at ease about it and very much at ease with each other. They do most of their swinging as a couple, but each occasionally swings as a single with no jealousy stemming from such incidents. Joanne now and then meets privately with wives who want to make the transition into bisexualism; interestingly, female bisexualism is so nearly universal among swingers that women who are not bi are increasingly apt to regard themselves as abnormal, and to actively seek initiation into bi experiences.

  Some of Joanne’s thoughts on swinging in general, its future and its implications, appear below.

  • • •

  When a group of swingers get together and talk about it, the conversation usually reaches the conclusion that sooner or later everybody in America is going to swing. That this is the direction our society is taking and there’s no stopping it.

  Of course those of us who are into swinging have a somewhat special perspective on the subject. And when a group of us are talking it up, there’s all this group reinforcement to make us all more positive on the subject. Even so, I think there are real signs that this is not only more than a fad but that it is becoming a real part of American life.

  For instance, a couple of weeks ago the Times devoted almost a full page in the second section to group sex. Honestly, the New York Times! Now something like that could never have happened before. The Times would have taken the attitude that maybe this sort of thing was going on, but it certainly wasn’t something decent people were into, and news about it just didn’t come under that old heading about all the news that’s fit to print. You could interpret it as a sign that the Times is loosening up a little. I think it’s more of a sign that the whole world is loosening up a little.

  I think there’s more involved in all of this than just swinging. All of the old values are being held up and examined, and the ones that no longer fit the times are being dropped by the wayside. The young kids today are simply refusing to buy the standard American dream, the house in the suburbs and two cars in the garage and all-electric kitchens and all the rest of it. They look around and realize that the American dream worked out fine for a long period of time, but now it translates into pollution and prejudice and war, and a lot of them are bold enough and idealistic enough to want a life style that’s more suited to life itself.

  They start communes and try to get back to the soil. They give up the idea of the traditional family and live in a tribal arrangement. They pattern themselves more on the Indians who used to live here than on the white settlers who drove out the Indians and carved up the land.

  If I sound very sympathetic to these movements, it’s because I am. And sometimes Norm and I feel like phonies because we share a lot of these kids’ values but look at the life we lead—all caught up in the system. Norm an accountant helping companies dodge taxes and me running a shop selling people expensive clothes they don’t need. Our life is comfortable and it suits us, and yet we periodically have the urge to chuck the whole thing and go back to the land ourselves. I don’t know if it will ever happen, but I think it might.

  Swinging—I can’t see the pattern changing in the near future. So many of the people we’ve been with have said that this was something they never thought they would consider, and for one reason or another they tried it and found it was what they had been looking for all along. Not everybody makes it as complete a part of their lives as we do, of course, but I don’t know of anyone who tried it a few times and then gave it up altogether.

  People will talk about the possibility of a puritan revival. Sometimes you hear about the resurgence of fundamentalist religion among the college kids, and someone will suggest that they will rebel against our generation by becoming very rigid and straight about sex. I suppose anything’s possible. I don’t believe it, though. I don’t believe there are many kids in that bag, and I don’t believe the trend—if it’s big enough to be called a trend—will be with us for very long.

  Of course there was a time when people said that about swinging.

  I think everybody is basically promiscuous and everybody is basically bisexual, and I think this has always been the case. But now, for the first time that I’m aware of, people are not only beginning to realize this but to accept it as normal and desirable. So I don’t worry much about the comparisons to the Roman empire. I think our generation may go down in history as the last one with sexual hangups, the pioneers who showed the way past those hangups to the promised land.

  I get a little carried away sometimes. But I really believe it.

  SEVEN:

  “Why Not A Book On Bi Men?”

  In Three Is Not A Crowd, I dealt with the topic of the ménage à trois, specifically the permanent troilistic ménage consisting of two women and one man. The book consisted of my own introductory remarks followed by the case histories of four such arrangements with which I had become closely familiar. The four situations were quite different each from the other. One involved a man, his wife, and the wife’s sister; another comprised a married couple and the wife’s college roommate and former lover; a third a married couple and the husband’s sister, with whom he had had a sexual relationship during childhood and adolescence. The fourth was not strictly speaking a permanent ménage at all, but consisted of a couple who swung exclusively in threesomes with an extra girl, whom they shared sexually. (Their ideal situation is precisely that of Monica in the fourth chapter of this present volume; she wants to meet a couple who will serve as symbolic parents, while they want the sexual love of a symbolic daughter.) While they had not achieved a permanent arrangement, this was their ultimate goal.

  The great differences in these relationships notwithstanding, there were also certain similarities which seemed to illuminate not only troilism and female bisexuality but certain general truths about human sexuality as well.

  The book has been selling well, and has drawn rather more reader response than usual. (This may have been partly a result of my including an address for the first time. Readers are often nervous about writing in care of a publisher, although letters to me are always delivered unopened.)

  Many of the letters were general, seeking the usual sort of information on swinging and how to get started with it. Two were from couples specifically interested in a ménage with an extra female, as described in the book. Two others stressed the other side of the coin and were related to male bisexualism, in one case specifically relating to the threesome, in another case more general.

  A clergyman in his early fifties wrote that he took issue with the idea that most couples preferred a threesome with a second woman, adding that he personally thought it would be especially gratifying and exciting to share his wife with another male. He wrote at some length of the pleasures to be gained from watching his wife and another man engage first in mutual oral-genital contact, then in “dogstyle” coitus, a position his wife particularly enjoys and one which would afford him the best opportunity of watching her vagina penetrated by the extra man’s penis. While he did not mention any desire for contact with the other male, the bisexual implications of his fantasy are not difficult to detect.

  The other letter ran as follows:

  April 16, 1971

  Dear Sir:

  Having read your book Three Is Not
A Crowd I find it most interesting. May I make a suggestion? Why not a book on bi men? Their frustrations, loneliness. Their continual search for the right one. The love of a woman who is bi herself and understands his or her mate. I frankly believe it makes for a better marriage.

  I am a man of fifty-one, divorced, two grown children, and have had a little experience with two women and myself, a couple, and various different men. That’s what is bothering me—men. I enjoy it. But I enjoy a woman, too. Especially if there are two or more people present besides myself.

  I have a terrific sex drive and have all kinds of dreams about men and women. Out here in New Jersey I find it very hard to meet people such as myself who like sex in all shape, manner and form. I have answered ads in some of the underground papers but frankly some calls left a bad taste. Such as wanting me to whip them. Ugh! I have thought to place an ad but got cold feet. I even have cold feet writing you but feel you are more or less a writer who has discretion and is interested in what makes people tick on the sex bit.

  Respectfully,

  Eddie

  In my reply, I wrote that I did agree that male bisexuality deserved rather more coverage than it generally received. It seems likely to me that the disproportionate attention paid to female bisexuality is more than a reflection of the larger role of the phenomenon in our society. This plays a part, but another factor would seem to derive from the fact that a certain amount of the popularly available literature in the field of sexual behavior is written more to titillate the reader than to inform him, with purely fictitious case histories so styled as to present particularly vivid sex scenes in as erotic a manner as possible. Books of this sort follow a principle which has been a constant in Western pornography ever since the invention of movable type; i.e., highly-sexed women are portrayed as bisexual, while male homosexuality is omitted almost entirely. The theory has evidently been that the typical reader of pornography, the heterosexual male, is turned on by lesbianism and turned off by faggotry. (The obvious exceptions—De Sade, various homosexual writers—do prove the rule. They took their work very seriously and, whatever their merits, are in an altogether different category from pornographic hacks.)