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swinging and going to the parties. They didn’t rob banks, their fantasies don’t include anything that’s illegal—like involving children and that sort of thing—and it looked very consensual.”
    I told him that the swingers I had met claimed that women drove the lifestyle movement.
    “Well, you know,” he replied, “there’s a point at which that becomes true, once they become involved. Their husbands get them into it, of course, but then they find things about it they really like—being the glamorous queen bee and that sort of thing. The women were on all these committees arranging events and the like—they were quite enthusiastic.”
    I reminded him that back in 1989 we had both been concerned that HIV/AIDS could explode in the swinging community the way it had in the gay community but that, despite the million or so couples who had been going to clubs for years, I’d heard of very few cases of HIV-infected swingers in North America. Darknell had also heard of only a few cases andattributed the lack of an outbreak of the disease in the subculture to various “co-factors.” His opinion was that while HIV/AIDS could spread in swing clubs, the co-factors were probable explanations for why it hadn’t.
    Contrary to the lifestyle’s “anything goes” attitude toward adult sexual fantasies, bisexual contact between men is taboo behavior in swing clubs, as is drug use. In 1986, after the Centers for Disease Control reported in its journal that two female members of swing clubs in Minnesota tested positive for HIV after having anal intercourse with bisexual men, “Greek” between swinging men and women became frowned upon as well. These days, statistically, we know that the rate of transmission of HIV is roughly one in two thousand per act of unprotected vaginal intercourse if neither partner has another STD, and ten times that if one partner does have a venereal disease. One poll of attendees at the Lifestyles ’96 convention would eventually show that 92 percent of 312 respondents believed swingers “should” be using condoms, and that 77 percent had had HIV tests. Thus, many lifestylers (not all) probably use condoms. In addition, the screening process at almost all clubs helps keep members to middle-class couples who probably maintain their health in typically bourgeois fashion, running to the doctor at the slightest sign of venereal disease. To say the least, the statistics regarding the heterosexual transmission of HIV are not a sanction of freewheeling partner exchange, and almost all health experts agree that people should be using protection when having sex outside of marriage, straight or swinger. (I concur with this view.) That has not kept millions of straights—nor, I can tell you, some lifestylers—from going ahead and having unprotected sex anyway. *
    When Darknell returned from the 1989 Lifestyles Convention he collated his preliminary findings and submitted them to his university for a research grant that would enable him to complete his study. He was turned down, for reasons he felt in part could have had to do with the general distaste in officialdom for what they saw as “wife swapping.” “I talked to John Money,” Darknell told me, referring to the Johns Hopkins University sexologist, “and he predicted I’d never get the grant, not for an ethological study on the sex practices of swingers. So be it.
    “Basically,” he went on, “what I found was that the main concern of swingers wasn’t health but whether to come out of the closet. Swingers justify themselves in exactly the same way homosexuals do, and I suppose we have to respect their right to do so. They don’t want to get fired from their jobs if they’re exposed, or have their clubs shut down. But if they come out they risk that.”

    In May 1993, when I got in touch with the Lifestyles Organization in Anaheim, I learned that eliminating the threat of a backlash was one of the main concerns of the lifestyle’s