A series about hooking
up through the ages.
Strange as it may seem, the idea that sex is a "private" act is only
a couple of centuries old. Medieval castles had only one bedroom and one bed — the
private factory of the lord and lady for manufacturing heirs. Like a troop of
bonobos, everyone else in the household bunked and fucked where they could. Though
the Church insisted that naughty parts should be kept hidden at all times, sex
in the premodern world, whether it took place between poultry in the barnyard,
dogs on the city streets, or people out in the hayfields, was considered a part
of life.
Public sex could even be public entertainment: When the English
sent a delegation to the Duke of Burgundy in the 1470s, he honored them with
free passes to the local bathhouses — and not so they could freshen up
from the journey. Judging from contemporary illustrations, the Brits would have
found large tubs meant to be shared by several people, together with attractive
female attendants "skilled in the arts of Venus." Three hundred years
later, the Marquis de Sade was regarded as a weirdo by his contemporaries not
only for his habit of sticking crucifixes up his ass, but also because he preferred
to hold his debauches in private or with only his trusty serving-man
present. Proper eighteenth-century libertines, such as the members of Sir Francis
Dashwood's Hellfire Club, considered public sex a form of elite male bonding.
It was the nineteenth-century triumph of the bourgeois family
that pushed sex into the bedroom and closed the door. Victorian morality was
made possible by three things: the idea that the nuclear family should be the
basis for both society and domestic architecture (and that children should sleep
alone until they got married and moved out), the widespread use of coal that
made it possible to heat a house with separate bedrooms, and the increased prosperity
that made the first two affordable. By the early twentieth century, any other
arrangement seemed so unthinkable that Freud insisted that for children to see
their parents in coitu would probably turn them into serial killers.
Still, the idea of public sex remained alive in back
rooms, brothels, bathhouses and bawdy tales of ancient Rome — and, like
any other appealing taboo, it was bound to be broken sooner or later. The swinging
that got started among bomber pilots and suburbanites in the '50s stuck strictly
to bourgeois conventions and usually involved fornicating in private (as is implied
by the idea of the "key party"). But to counterculturists inspired
by
In
the 1970s, organizations like the Sexual Freedom League were organizing
group gropes from Noe Valley to the Netherlands. |
books such as Stranger in a Strange Land and The
Harrad Experiment, group sex was the best thing for smashing conventional
morality since LSD-spiked Kool-Aid. Soon, groups such as Jefferson Poland's Berkeley
Sexual Freedom League and the Amsterdam-based Suck and SELF collectives (whose
expatriate American members included Germaine Greer and Andrea Dworkin) were
organizing group gropes from Noe Valley to the Netherlands. Other believers in
this extreme iteration of free love included revolutionary groups such as the
Weather Underground and communes such as northern California's Olompali.
Yet the mostly white, middle-to-upper-class, college-educated
professionals who picked up on the "group sex thing" in the '70s were
a far cry from the hippies who had started it. As Tom Wolfe wrote in "The
Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening," a 1976 essay, "It is an odd
experience to be in De Kalb, Illinois, in the very corncrib of America, and have
some conventional-looking housewife (not housewife, damn it!) come up
to you and ask: ‘Is there much tripling going on in New York?' " Exclusive
trysting places for the famous and beautiful, such as John Williamson's Sandstone
retreat in California's Santa Monica Mountains, gained national notoriety, and
even Jeff Poland was kicked out of the Sexual Freedom League when he protested
their new policy of charging a cover to get into the orgies.
No piece of real estate better epitomizes how sexual outlawry
could become co-opted by commercialism than the basement of New York City's Ansonia
Hotel — better known as Plato's Retreat. By that time, public sex
The
AIDS epidemic shuttered Plato's Retreat by 1985, but the idea of
group sex never quite died. |
was old hat to the gay community: Plato's was originally
called the Continental Baths, an upscale playground complete with a swimming
pool, coffee shop, massage parlor, steam room and floor show. Bette Midler spent
time as a featured performer at the Continental; when she mentioned the baths
on the Tonight Show in 1970, an armada of straight couples descended
on the place. The gay and straight markets mixed like massage oil and water,
and by 1976 the club's new owner, Larry Levenson, had turned the Ansonia basement
into a straight bathhouse. Before long, up to two hundred couples a night were
forking over a $25 cover charge, plus a $5 six-week membership fee, for an unlimited
buffet of bagels, lox, chicken salad, wine, Scotch (at least until the state
liquor commission shut the bar down) and sex. The rules were simple: No single
men were allowed in, no one had to do anything they didn't want to do, and the
patrons had to enter and leave the orgy room in pairs.
AIDS, declining revenues and the New York City Board of Health
shuttered Plato's by 1985, but the idea never quite died. Pornography had introduced
the idea of sex as performance and conditioned a new generation of voyeurs
and exhibitionists, so the revival of the commercial sex party was all but inevitable.
Events such as London's Fever Parties and the New York-based One Leg Up were
being held regularly by the turn of the century. For the less adventurous,
Group
sex hasn't lost its counterculture badge. |
Cake NYC rented out entire nightclubs to throw lavish
but softcore parties targeting professional women. The erotic and the commercial
had become inextricably intertwined.
Beyond such well-publicized but ultimately banal events, though,
the spirit of rebellion still survives. Even as Rudy Giuliani was turning Times
Square into a family-friendly playground in the late '90s, a reviving subculture
of underground sex parties, such as the Slurp events thrown by Manhattan impresario
Abby Ehmann, were embracing an explicitly non-commercial ideology. "Nothing
is for sale, not even water," Abby told Hustler magazine in a 2001
article on her Slurp parties that regaled the reader with lurid and mostly invented
tales of lesbian BDSM scenes and anonymous blowjobs. (In reality, Abby's parties,
which draw an equal mixture of miscellaneous artists, perverts, Burning Man-types,
amateur pornographers and other beautiful weirdos, hardly ever include anonymous
blowjobs.) Group sex hasn't lost its counterculture badge, proving that some
things will always be too outré for Madison Avenue — which
is probably why, for a new generation of libertines, it has become as normal
and as much a statement of belonging as it was in the eighteenth century.
n°
©2006 Ken Mondschein and Nerve.com.
