The great thing about Jon Hart and Matthew Kaufman'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."

Read More...