Swap meat

We're told to get married, have children and deny ourselves nothing in terms of sex -- and the conservative suburbanites of "The Lifestyle" have always played by the rules.

By Carina Chocano

Apr 21, 2000 |

"We're having a barbecue, bring your own meat."

Jim and Sheryl, Littleton, Colo.

A genuine Reagan-country cowboy, "Wild Bill" Goodwin lives in Costa Mesa, Calif. -- just down the freeway from the John Wayne Airport, the Nixon Memorial Library and that happiest place in Anaheim: Disneyland. The conservative, congenial, prejudiced and extremely horny septuagenarian, who enjoys hanging weights from his penis in his spare time, resides alone amid blinking garlands of heart-shaped lights and inert clusters of ceramic panthers in a house he calls a "real swinger's haven."

The kind of guy who describes his hobby as "sport-fucking" and says things like "gangbanging was given a bad name by those black bastards up in L.A." is probably not the kind of guy you normally empathize with. Which is why when he says that Dottie, his wife of 20 years, "went through heck" before dying of cancer in his arms five years ago (under the rotating disco ball in their front room), the euphemism unexpectedly breaks your heart. Goodwin and Dottie lived "the lifestyle" together. Now that his soul mate is gone, "Wild Bill" is lonely -- and no amount of group sex can change that.

Welcome to the bizarre world of David Schisgall's "The Lifestyle: Group Sex in the Suburbs," a new documentary that explores the huge, secret, all-American world of suburban swingers and finds that it does not resemble a '70s porn movie in the least.

The film, which debuted in March in New York and Los Angeles and will open in 15 other cities later this month, elicits as mixed a bag of emotions as you are ever likely to experience at once -- from the shock of witnessing uninhibited group sex among the elderly (not good), to the amazement of witnessing uninhibited group sex among the elderly (good), to the novelty of putting "born again" and "butt plug" in the same thought, and a lot of other funny feelings in between.

Schisgall and producer Dan Cogan spent three years traveling across the country in search of groups of retirees who have decided to ease ass-first into their autumnal years as if into their scalding home spas. What they found was a world in which married, homeowning, boat-buying, barbecuing couples (former schoolteachers, sales directors, Marines and ministers) get together, eat lots of shrimp and bonk each other's spouses in the family room.

"With the possible exception of their participation in the lifestyle," says one of the film's characters as he prepares to take his boat out of dock, "swingers are about as Middle America as you can get." Then correcting himself, "successful Middle America."

Schisgall says he wanted to show what was going on in the suburbs and in "our picture of the people we think of as sort of rock-ribbed Republicans of Orange County or Simi Valley," and maintains that "they are in their own way radicals who have a very positive image of what their freedoms allow them."

The lifestyle exists far underground; its members never discuss or acknowledge it in the presence of others. That Schisgall and Cogan were able to convince couples to open up in front of a camera, let alone allow a camera into a party, is remarkable -- and partly due to the filmmakers' willingness to shoot in the nude (while graciously but firmly declining, on the grounds of journalistic integrity, to "party" with the swingers).

Schisgall's affection toward his subjects is apparent both in the film and in conversation. Their trust in him is also evident on-screen. But when he panegyrizes, as he does at length, about the social and political significance of swinging, it's easy to get the impression that (ideologically at least) Schisgall has gone native.

"My patriotic impulses towards a better union, towards more liberty and freedom and better forms of political and social organization are aroused when I'm at a swing party," he says. His playful word choice is duly noted. But whether Schisgall (a self-described "card-carrying Democrat" whose idea of a perfect sexual experience is "a Sunday afternoon with the woman I love") truly sees his subjects as "frontiersmen, rebels and revolutionaries carrying out their revolution along conservative principles," the film doesn't exactly come across as an endorsement.

"Those conservative principles can take you to things that are very radical and avant-garde," he says. But of course, "One can make a revolution that ends in banality."

And it's precisely the banality of the American way of life -- and not the sexual seditiousness of individual characters -- that "The Lifestyle" most effectively criticizes. Though we are treated to fleeting visions of what at first appear to be tableaux vivants by Heironymus Bosch with casting by Botero and sound effects by the Spice Channel ("I didn't want to make a film that turned people on," says Schisgall, and he has splendidly succeeded), the film consists mostly of warm, friendly interviews, scenes of domestic catatonia and trite suburban landscapes (glinting car dealerships, rippling flags, planned communities on planned hills) of an almost ethereal, vaporous emptiness.

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