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international overseeing body. Lifestylers in California were now declaringthemselves a political force, and LSO formed campaign central. It was headed by a goateed, former aerospace engineer, Dr. Robert McGinley, a sixty-year-old counseling psychologist who was at the time almost universally described in the media as a reckless libertarian and shrewd businessman.
    McGinley invited me to attend his annual convention at Las Vegas’s Riviera Hotel in August and I decided to spend the $350 for the three-day gathering. It coincided nicely with my research for a story I was working on at the time. I was looking for a Vancouver gangleader named Steven Wong whom the RCMP heroin squad believed had staged his own death and cremation in order to escape drug trafficking charges. I appreciated the irony that, in his own criminal way, Wong considered himself a swinger. Though short and dumpy, he had many gorgeous girlfriends who were attracted by his flashy and dangerous lifestyle. The number one woman in Wong’s harem happened to have been connected through marriage to a couple of big shareholders in a luxury Las Vegas casino. The marble tower constantly entertained a mix of high-rolling racketeers who looked out for one another. I thought it might be possible to attend the swing convention and also discover some rounder who had seen the disappeared desperado after his supposed death.
    The convention was a couples-only affair and so I asked my wife to come along. Not being a stranger to people who inhabited subcultures Leslie agreed to join me. By day she may have been an executive director of a communications firm, but by night she sketched nudes at a bohemian studio where many of her companions were in the gay or lesbian lifestyle. She is, in all facets of her life, no shrinking violet. When I first met Leslie in 1970 she worked as New York City’s only female cab driver. Twenty years later columnist Allan Fotheringham, Leslie’s friend and client, nicknamed her “Ms. Giotti,” partly because she has the same accent as the New York Mafia boss,partly because she possesses what he calls “da attitude.” Overall, Leslie and I weren’t just husband and wife: we were best friends, cooperative colleagues, business partners, and good lovers. On the morning of August 17, 1993, when I told her in the airport that I was a pretty lucky guy, she punnishly summed up her willingness to travel where perhaps other wives wouldn’t: “If you wrote about cannibals and needed me for cover, I’d go—just so long as I didn’t have to eat anybody.”
    That afternoon Leslie and I entered a social whirl of three thousand wheatfield North Americans dressed like the stars who all expressed their relief at being in a virtual city-state ruled by the norms of playcouples. Throughout the event the throngs of middle-class swingers were reassured that they weren’t aberrant by nonswingers sanctioned by straight society. Luis De La Cruz, for instance, headed the Erotic Arts Exhibit at the convention and was the facilities director of the Music Center of Los Angeles County and the curator of the Newport Harbor Art Museum. The convention’s keynote speaker was Stan Dale, winner of the Mahatma Gandhi Peace Medallion. Forty seminars were delivered by ten Ph.D.s and other experts on everything from “Sexuality and Spirituality” and “Exotic Play couple Travel” to an “AIDS Update” by Dr. Norman Scherzer, the Rutgers University expert on STDs.
    Most fascinating of all, I encountered a whole clutch of people who were living their lives as out-of-the-closet swingers. Their parents knew, their friends knew, in some cases their kids and grandkids knew. One couple, Frank and Jennifer Lomas, a former bank broker and a business manager, had left high-paying positions to work at LSO because they wanted to be surrounded all the time by people like themselves. They were a gentle, interracial couple in their late thirties, unabashed advocates of partner sharing,