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The mostly white, upper-middle-class, college-educated professionals who engaged in swinging were a far cry from the sex radicals of the counterculture. Swingers' groups met in split-level ranches for buffet dinners and well-mannered wife-swapping, careful not to park in the neighbors' driveway and to clear out by 2 a.m. Books (such as William and Jerrye Breedlove's Swap Clubs, Gilbert D. Bartell's Group Sex, and Paul Rubenstein and Herbert Margolis's The Groupsex Tapes) and films (such as 1969's Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice) spread awareness of the lifestyle. Jeff Poland, the founder of the Sexual Freedom League, was thrown out of his own organization when the sex parties started charging a cover and political concerns disappeared.
Yet swingers were eminently "organization men" (and women), and unwilling to abolish the institution of marriage. Clubs such as Plato's allowed them to play "swinging singles" without endangering the privileges of married middle-class respectability. As Plato's late-night public-access commercials promised, "the pleasure and the fun will keep you feeling young."
When disco died, Plato's was already in decline. (In 1979, the club hit a publicity nadir when a would-be porn star named Tara Alexander had sex with eighty-six men, then her husband, in the orgy room.) The Ansonia's owners paid the club $1 million to move into less-intimate digs on Thirty-Fourth Street. The endgame was a double whammy: Levenson's 1981 conviction for tax evasion and the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. At the behest of AIDS activists, the New York City Health Department outlawed sex in public places.
Today, swing clubs are far lower-key than Plato's. |
Though Plato's enjoyed a brief revival after Levenson was released after serving forty months of his sentence, it was closed by the Health Department on November 22, 1985. Patrons of other sex clubs, such as the BDSM-themed Hellfire Club, saw their activities severely curtailed. The Age of License had officially ended. Levenson wound up driving a cab, dying of a heart attack in 1999 at the age of sixty-two.
Today, little of the Plato's legacy remains. There are some 3,000 swing clubs in the United States and, according to the Kinsey Institute, about four million swingers. However, even in liberal Manhattan, swing clubs such as Checkmates are far lower-key than Plato's, and would never dream of advertising. It's only in Europe that the public sex club still survives — there are about a dozen in Paris (not surprising, given the French national fetish). But organized group sex , such as the late, lamented Lusty Loft parties (the inspiration for John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus) and Palagia's heavily screened One Leg Up soirees, has been limited to private affairs. The days when a full-time sex club seemed a profitable use of Manhattan real estate are long gone.
If anyone knows of any other past, present, or future NYC sex parties that I could write about for an upcoming column, drop me a line.
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©2008 Ken Mondschein and Nerve.com |
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