The great thing about Mathew Kaufman and Jon Hart's documentary American Swing, about the New York "swingers' club" Plato's Retreat and its owner and public face, Larry Levenson, is that it puts a warm, human face on a time and a subculture that, seen from today's not-so-distant perspective, could easily be treated as a visit to the Bizarro World. The time is the late 1970s and pre-AIDS 1980s, when the values of the counterculture and the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s had trickled down to more conservative and apolitical members of the middle class--people who saw themselves as basically stable members of traditional society but who saw other people casting off such societal constraints as pre-marital abstinence and post-marital monogamy and felt that they'd been missing out. They wanted a little hedonism in their lives. Originally located on Manhattan's Upper West Side, in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel--the same location that had previously housed the Continental Baths, the gay bathhouse that achieved its measure of immortality when it was decreed that every article ever written about Bette Midler would mention that she got her start there--the members-only club had a sauna, a jacuzzi, a swimming pool, a buffet, and a dance floor with a live DJ. Because it was conceived as a "straight" equivalent to the bathhouses and other places in the city where gay men were hooking up, its policy prohibited sex between men, though women were cordially invited to go nuts.

What makes this scene seem liberating, in the movie's telling, is how friendly it all was, and how nonjudgemental everyone seems to have been in their attitudes towards their fellow swingers. Plato's, one witness says, revived the concept of the orgy and made it a reality for "the man on the street." Imperfect bodies were tolerated, even embraced, while men paraded around nude but for their socks and shoes, achieving what someone calls "that stag film look." The movie includes first-hand reminiscences from several Plato's regulars, including a few celebrities, including Buck Henry (who says that he went more often than he would have if friends weren't constantly flying in from the West Coast who demanded that he take them there, presumably because they'd already seen the Statue of Liberty) and Melvin Van Peebles, who fondly remembers the warm reception accorded to an overweight couple who took to the dance floor nude and who were so heavy that they made the DJ's turntable bounce. Professor Irwin Corey, looking like Renfield at ninety, claims to have never seen any ugly people at Plato's, which is clearly a judgement call. It would be easy to make fun of some of the people seen here talking about how they let their hair down at Plato's, but the movie treats them very tenderly. They certainly come across better than such defenders of civilization as Phil Donahue, David Susskind, and Stanley Siegel, who are shown in vintage TV clips, doing their best to grill Larry Levenson and get him to break down and admit that he was sent here by the devil to tarnish our precious Judeo-Christian nation and all it stands for. Levenson's affable candor and eagerness to be understood--listening to these shrill folks denounce him, he looks a little hurt when he doesn't look bewildered, as if he were wondering if they know that tbe target of their vitriol is right there in the room with them--just makes the TV hosts look borderline insane. They'd have gotten more traction grilling Barney Fife about his role in the assassination of JFK.

If a tragic hero can also be a sweet schlub from the outer boroughs, then American Swing makes a pretty good case for Levenson as a tragic hero. The "king of swing" was a big, beefy guy with a toothy smile and the air of someone who might at any minute ask you to tell him about the rabbits again. Plato's homey air seems to have been a direct emanation of Larry's personality. He comes across as a completely uncynical, even romantic guy who had a roving dick and no capacity for hypocrisy. (Someone says that Larry would fall in love with every woman he had sex with even if he had sex with ten women in one night, and he was perfectly capable of having sex with ten women in one night.) Fred J. Lincoln, a porn film entrepreneur who played Weasel in the original, Wes Craven Last House on the Left, and who took charge of the club as it turned, he says, from a grocery store to a supermarket, breaks up as he recalls "that horrible food" at Plato's and shakes his head as he thinks of Larry: "He was so proud of his buffet." Larry's home touch is evident in the hilarious commercials that were made to air on local TV. In one, Larry and a blonde stare at an off-screen cue card that must have attached to the side of a giant tortoise and race through their lines like zombies on speed. Another boasts the official Plato's Retreat jingle, which has lyrics about how "the pleasure and fun/ will keep you feeling young", which are suitable for a McDonald's. It's with no small degree of evident pride that one club member recalls that when the club changed locations in 1980, it was directly across from a McDonald's.

Things had to go bad, and they did in pretty much all the ways you'd expect, starting with Larry's relationship with Mary, his steady woman friend in the early days of the club. In the time-honored tradition of people trying to keep a doomed relationship alive until it turns into what they'd prefer it to be, Mary did her best to play the queen to Mary's king of Plato's, even though she, unlike Larry, had no special quarters to which to retreat; when she'd hook up with some guy or guys, Larry would wander around, muttering that she was "upset" about something. Larry, meanwhile, was going on talk shows and explaining that although he loved her and considered himself to be faithful to her so long as he only had sex with other women while inside the club, there was no way that one woman could give him everything he needed, while Mary sometimes sat beside him, her face cracking. (This is probably Larry's real low moment, though his blindness to Mary's unhappiness seems to be a product more of lack of imagination than of cruelty.) Things went into a tailspin when Mary had an affair with her chauffeur, lighting a fuse that ended with Larry in the hospital after a mysterious physical assault and Mary on the road to a sanitarium. Some time after that, the IRS came calling, and when their agents asked to see the books, the bookkeeper promptly forked them over. She says now that she didn't know that the nice visitors were IRS agents, implying that she was just being neighborly and would have shown the books to anyone who wandered in and asked politely. When she finally did figure out what was going on, she reacted by blurting out, in front of the agents, "We're dead!", indicating that she'd be a lot of fun to play poker with. While the IRS prepared its brief against Larry, the bookkeeper and her husband disappeared. Larry's bodyguard says that he assumed that they were on the run and in fear for their lives, then tears up laughing as he recalls that he turned on the TV one say and saw them competing on the game show Card Sharks.

Larry wound up doing a stint in the pen and returned to his throne at Plato's, but the magic was dying out, with "dying" being the operative word. The swingers' philosophy seemed increasingly out of step with the coming age of Reagan, but it was the AIDS virus that really tolled the bell for Plato's. As Dian Hanson, the porn magazine editor who appeared in Terry Zwigoff's Crumb puts it, it got to the point where "the people who cared about their lives stopped going to sex clubs." Those who kept going tended to be the hard-core, scary, and desperate to a nihilistic degree. Meanwhile, without the stabilizing influence of a steady girlfriend, Larry was falling prey to, in Al Goldstein's words, "All the women who wanted him for the money he didn't have and the drugs that he did have." He was also going on TV and assuring people that Plato's was a healthy environment, at one point playing Mr. Science and insisting that "because of the smell of chlorine in the air at Plato's Retreat, the AIDS virus doesn't have a chance." In the footage from this era, Larry shows the desperation of a man on the verge of losing the identity that's given his life meaning. On New Year's Eve, just as 1986 was about to arrive, Mayor Ed Koch's health department shut down Plato's, partly, says someone, so that the crackdowns on the gay bathhouses wouldn't appear discriminatory. Stripped of his king of swing crown, Larry seemed unable to move on while retaining his happy memories, like his former members who appear in the movie. Instead, he gained weight, started driving a cab, and expired of a heart attack in 1999, when he was 62. He might have been the only person to have ever stepped onto the premises at Plato's who thought that it could go on forever. "I think Plato's kind of died a natural death," says Annie Sprinkle, with a shrug. "Maybe it had a little help."