Of course, the film also depicts "oral sex, reggelar sex, all kinds of sex," as Wild Bill enthuses, but the camera lingers longer, more immodestly, on homescapes featuring couples hanging drugstore-bought decorations in their suburban manses, placing padding under the sheets to "sop anything up," debating the merits of gas vs. charcoal grills, firing up hot tubs and delivering orgiastic paeans to finger food. ("We're having pizza rolls, taquitos, just a wide variety of different foods. People always like hot appetizers and different things at parties.")

In fact, the swingers' Wal-Mart-swathed corpulence suggests that, for the most part, they indulge all appetites with equal abandon. ("The most important lessons we learned on the road," says Cogan, "No. 1, it's impossible to get a meal outside the major cities without a lot of cheese on it; No. 2, bring your own salad dressing; No. 3, when at all possible, buy your own salad.")

Schisgall's research revealed that every state but North Dakota has a group sex club. Robert McGinley, president of the Lifestyles organization and one of the film's subjects, estimates that North America has at least 3 million swingers: "So it's enough," he says in the film, speaking from his office in Anaheim, "that if they all thought alike and all voted together, hey, we would elect a president."

Considering how many of them live in Orange County, they already have. Though they also may have helped to keep a Democrat in office. As Schisgall later tells me, "I showed the film to Pat Cadell [former Carter pollster and advisor, and a backer of the short-lived Warren Beatty presidential bandwagon] and afterward he said to me, 'This explains why Bill Clinton didn't get impeached.'"

Schisgall first became aware of the lifestyle while researching topics for an application to be an intern at Harper's magazine. He came across a swingers magazine in a porn shop in Boston, and was deeply impressed by it. The magazine -- pictures from which are included in the film -- showed suburban couples with their eyes blacked out standing proudly in front of their colonial-style houses with nothing on between them but one necktie.

"I grew up in the suburbs, so the idea that there were people who were like my parents who were doing this really struck a chord with me. I always felt, growing up, that there were the normative suburbs, the 'should' suburbs, and then there were the suburbs that I knew -- in which there were all kinds of weird and wonderful, crazy things going on."

Convincing the swingers to talk about their lifestyle on camera was a hurdle Schisgall surmounted by telling them that his would be "a warts and all portrait, but they would be portrayed in their own words and their own actions," without voice-overs, experts or network newsmagazine-style "balance." Many of those who agreed to be interviewed objected, however, to the film's inclusion of "Wild Bill" Goodwin.

"People were like, 'Why are you talking to him?' because Bill is a working-class guy. Their feeling was, 'We don't want to be associated with the working-class swingers.'" Adds Cogan, "They thought he would give swinging a bad name because he's white trash."

Schisgall says he and Cogan were at first constantly looking for the dark side of swinging. "We kept saying, when are we going to see the psychological torture, the coercion, the sex with children, the STDs, the violence, the drugs? When we didn't find it, we accused ourselves of not looking hard enough."

After about two years of spending enormous amounts of time with swingers in their homes and clubs and with their families, Schisgall says he came to realize that looking for the lifestyle's dark side "was a form of prejudice, and that my intense desire to believe that this practice would always lead to the destruction of the individual was prejudiced."

"Where I felt it was appropriate to criticize them, I did," he explains. "There's racism in the lifestyle. The lifestyle is banal. But from the swingers' perspective, they had always been vilified as child-molesters and deviants and drug addicts and carriers of disease."

Perhaps the most shocking thing about "The Lifestyle" is that it accomplishes Schisgall's stated goal of making a film that had "a very new, radical depiction of sex between humans" by displaying images of uninhibited sex between people who may be overweight, middle-aged and otherwise "deviant" in terms of what the entertainment industry considers sexy.

"Because swingers are attracted to you no matter what you look like," Cogan says.

"Say you're a woman, you're 50, you don't feel very sexy, your husband wants to have sex with other women, which makes it even worse," says Schisgall, explaining how couples get drawn into the lifestyle, and why they tend to stay. "So for whatever reason you agree to go and check it out, and suddenly you're at this party with all of these people who you recognize as your neighbors and the men are very attracted to you because you're the new girl. They're very solicitous and flirty and attracted to you in ways that you have probably not experienced since you were very young. And that, women report, is very gratifying. So the canard in the swing clubs is that the guy drags his wife in at 8 p.m. and drags her out at 8 the next morning. And I think there's some truth to that."

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