Versatile Ladies: the bisexual option (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Read online

  Within a week of seeing her the second time I had moved out on Leonard and began living with Maggie. It was a mistake from the start but it took a long time for me to realize this. At first it was a whole new way of life that felt like pure freedom to me. No more housework and cooking and caring for children. All of those years as Leonard’s wife and now I was free again. I thought it was lesbianism that was responsible for this feeling but it was the freedom itself, escaping from being a housewife. I could have been living all alone or with a zebra and it would have been the same feeling.

  It began to go bad almost at once. Maggie was not the type to settle down. She got a thrill out of taking me away from my husband but that was not to be enough for her. She wanted to go on swinging, both with and without me for company. Swinging, constant sex, was a way of life to her. Before very long I could not take it any more but still did not consider going back to Leonard. I felt it was still the right life for me but that Maggie was the wrong partner.

  And so I began that age old search for the “right one.” I began to become a part of the lesbian world in the Bay area and had a great many experiences with lesbians who were not swingers but merely female homosexuals. I lived with several of these women and sometimes thought I was in love, or sometimes they thought they were in love with me and I went along with it, and other times it was more because neither of us had anybody else at the time.

  It is no sense rehashing this as it is not very interesting or pleasant either. As you know I ultimately came to my senses and saw the mistake I had made in the proper light. I got in touch with Leonard expecting no chance of a settlement but to my surprise he wanted me back. He said if I had come back to him sooner he would have been unable to accept me, but that he now knew he loved me and could take me back if I was sure I was over this, which I was positive of. And it has been true, as I have had no feelings since then of wanting to be a lesbian, and enjoy relations with Leonard more than ever before.

  Well, that’s about it. Jack old buddy, I didn’t know what I was getting into when I first started writing these insane letters to you. And I’ll bet you didn’t know what you were letting yourself in for either. All of us nuts writing letters and opening our innermost secrets to you. I don’t know if I envy you or not.

  Use these letters as you see fit. You can cut out the parts where I got carried away and wrote dirty or leave them in, it doesn’t matter. And do not worry that Leonard will be able to recognize this as our story, as I intend to show him the letters now. I just did not want him to see them while I was in the process of writing them. As far as other friends who might know who I am, either they already know the whole story or they wouldn’t recognize it, so I don’t guess it is anything for us to worry about.

  Please look us up if you are ever out this way.

  Evelyn

  November 30, 1971

  Dear Jack,

  Thank you so much for your letter, and for the copy of your new book. I wanted to read it right away but will put it aside now and read it when I have finished this letter.

  I didn’t realize that I had “left it open” as to whether or not Leonard and I had returned to swinging after he took me back into the fold. Yes, as it happens we did, and are swingers to this day. I thought we would be giving it up when I returned to him. All I wanted to do was be a good wife and get back in good with my husband and children. For some months Leonard and I had sex only with each other and dropped out of the swinging “scene.”

  Then for many reasons we decided to get back into it and got into it completely. Right back where we were. Including bisexual relations, not only for me but for Leonard also. He had gotten into this during my absence in a threesome with a couple and enjoyed it well enough. So now we are both bi and swing with other bi couples, and sex with another woman is something I enjoy very much but not something that is of special importance to me. Which is how it should have been all along, but for all those reasons I wrote you I went completely overboard and “flipped out.”

  I hope that answers your questions. Thanks again for the book. I’ll read it right now and let you know what I think of it. Not that I’m any great critic, but I’ll tell you my thoughts.

  Evelyn

  P.S.—Here is something that happened this past month that I was thinking about just the other day. It is so easy to be the way Maggie was. Which is why I say bi experiences are dangerous if a woman is not properly prepared for them.

  We swung with a much younger couple and I swung with the wife. Her first time, although it was no seduction by any means. In fact when they wrote to us they stressed that she had been wanting to be indoctrinated into bi sex for some time, so it was assumed this would happen when the four of us were together.

  I found it was a great thrill to be the first with a girl in this way and “turn her on” to something new, or to “bring her out” as lesbians would put it. That same night she took me aside and said she had never been so thrilled with a man as she had been with me.

  Fortunately for her I am no Maggie. I told her briefly what had happened to me, and that it was not a greater thrill for her but that it was something different, and that was why she was reacting so strongly. I believe I straightened her out well enough and she will be able to be bi without going overboard. But I could have done the opposite if I wanted to be like Maggie, and she would have had little defense against me.

  Evelyn

  SIX:

  “Swinging Made Everything Easy”

  Of the people we swing with, all of the women are bi. This doesn’t prove anything in relation to the number of female swingers who are into bisexualism. Since our ads indicate that we are both bi, we naturally receive replies along those lines. But comparing notes with other people, and just reading the ads, you realize that the swinging wife who is only interested in heterosexual sex is very much in a minority.

  A lot of them will try to give the impression that it’s no big deal for them. That woman-to-woman sex is something they can take or leave. And that they can only enjoy it in a group context, either with the husbands actively participating in a group scene or with the husbands watching. I know this is true for some women but I think it’s a case of them fooling themselves. They can’t enjoy sex alone in a room with another woman because that would mean they were enjoying a completely homosexual experience, and emotionally they’re not ready for that. It would be telling them something about themselves that they don’t want to hear.

  And others really want you to believe that they just do it to excite the men. To put on a show and get the men hot and bothered. Maybe some of them start out this way, but I don’t believe swingers can go on engaging in sex acts that don’t do anything for them. This business of finding an act neither unpleasant nor pleasurable—I’m not saying it can’t happen, but if it did you wouldn’t go on doing it week after week. They enjoy it. If it’s one kind of breakthrough for the average swinging wife to go ahead and have sex with another woman, it’s another breakthrough for her to admit to herself and to everybody else that she just plain enjoys it.

  I don’t simply enjoy it. I require it. I’m fully bisexual and believe I always have been. There was a period of time before I was married when I lived with a lesbian and had only lesbian relations, and before very long I found myself cheating on her with men. And when I was married I found myself missing relations with my own sex to a great degree, and when I started cheating on my husband I was cheating with women. I make love with both men and women the same way I eat both meat and vegetables. Eliminating either one from my diet would mean giving up something very important to me.

  Personally I think this is the way all human beings were meant to be, and I’m sure it’s the coming thing. The signs are there to be seen all around. It’s not just that more and more straight people are opening themselves up to bi experiences. The reverse is happening, too. It used to be that if a woman was a lesbian or a man was a homosexual, once he accepted that he thought there was no more to it than that
. This is less and less the case now. Now lesbians and faggots are beginning to realize that they can have heterosexual experiences now and then without giving up what they already have. In short that they can function as bisexuals. It’s as if the two worlds are coming together and the extremes are breaking down and disappearing on both sides.

  As far as I personally am concerned I think this is a very good thing. I know that I am far happier functioning this way and when I look around me I can only feel that others are happier this way, too.

  But sometimes I wonder if it’s good in the overall sense. Whenever some puritan is sounding off about the new morality and newsstands flooded with pornography and open homosexuality and all the other signs of sexual freedom, you always hear the Roman Empire brought up. And the suggestion is made that sexual freedom and license is one of the trademarks of a decadent society, and whenever morals loosen up, the society is on the way down and out.

  I frankly don’t know enough about history to know whether to be glad or not about the way there isn’t anything more to it than that, it’s hard to know whether or not this applies. If it’s true, and if things are going. I can’t see what swinging and pornography and group sex and homosexuality has to do with a country falling apart. I don’t see how loose morals got us into this mess in Vietnam or screwed up the economy. As a matter of fact, the people who are real hard-line hawks on the war are the farthest thing in the world from swingers, and when you do meet a right-wing swinger they are the ones who are most uptight about swinging itself; their idea of a total freakout is to trade wives and make love in separate rooms with the lights off. So if the people responsible for the mess are puritans, why should swinging be associated with the mess?

  How did I get into this political rap, anyway?

  What I was leading up to was a way in which I’m a great deal different from most of the other women we swing with. Not different in what I am now, but in how I got to where I am.

  In almost all cases, the girls I know got into bisexual relations after they got into swinging. They may have had an experience years ago, and sometimes I think that’s true more often than they admit it. But in a majority of cases they got into swinging for one reason or another—you know the reasons better than I do, I’m sure. And then after they were part of the swinging world for a certain period of time, for one reason or another they decided to give bisexual relations a try.

  With me it was completely the other way around. I’ve been completely bisexual as long as I’ve been sexual at all, and I remained bisexual through the early years of my marriage, even going so far as to sneak around to have sex with other women. When the idea of swinging first came up, it did so because Norm knew about what I was doing and thought this would give me a good outlet for it. And the reason I was attracted to the idea of swinging was very much because of the opportunities for pleasure with members of my own sex. That was what drew me into it.

  Here I was, a woman with what seemed to be a good marriage, and a very good sexual relationship with my husband, and a yen for other girls that wouldn’t lay down and die. I won’t say I was overcome with guilt about what I did. I’ve never been much of a one for guilt. It just doesn’t seem to play a very important role in my life, and I could never see how I was hurting Norm by having sex with other women—or other men either, for that matter—as long as I was always there when he wanted me.

  So I wasn’t guilty, or at least didn’t feel guilty. But even so I didn’t like the sneaking. It’s a pain in the neck to have to be dishonest all the time. I can be dishonest as well as the next liar, but I’d rather be open about things. It’s more my nature. If I don’t feel guilty about something, I have to act as though I feel guilty about it and sneak around ridiculously.

  I also wanted to be able to have lesbian sex without getting involved. I wanted it to be casual. Not completely anonymous, a quick gobble on your knees in the toilet of a gay bar. That’s not my kind of scene at all and I prefer any kind of sexual union to be with someone I can talk to and enjoy and relate to as a human being. Male or female, I want to be able to be friends with my lover. But I don’t want it to be more than friends. I have a husband and he is the man I love, the person I love, and our marriage is such that each of us is the most important person in the other’s life. The only important person in the other’s life, when all is said and done. As far as extracurricular activity is concerned, I want it to be casual and recreational, friendly but no more than friendly.

  During my cheating period, before we got into swinging, this was a difficult balance to strike. The girls I met in gay bars wanted either more or less from me than I wanted to give. Either they just wanted to score with me in a completely anonymous way or they wanted to fall in love with me, and hoped I would fall in love with them. And for the most part they absolutely refused to believe I was bisexual. In their eyes I was an all-out lesbian, and I was making a mistake in maintaining my marriage because I could only be fulfilled in a relationship with another woman. No matter how I denied this, they went on thinking this way. They argued that I was just fighting myself, that I stayed with Norm because I was unwilling to face what I was.

  You might think that they made me worry about myself, but this didn’t happen. If this had been my first venture into homosexuality I might have taken their arguments seriously. But I had been there before and I knew I needed both men and women so I didn’t let their talk shake me up. The only thing bothersome about it was that I couldn’t have the kind of scene with them that I wanted.

  In fact I reached a point, although I don’t know if this attitude came about before or after we started swinging, where I felt that they were as incomplete in their own way as a person who has only heterosexual relations is incomplete. And I saw that the kind of woman-to-woman sex I wanted was with women like myself, women who were fully bisexual and had a generally similar sexual orientation.

  Swinging made everything the way I wanted it. It gave me the sexual variety of having other men as lovers, which was something I had had a yen for but had not even considered doing anything about. It gave me the opportunity of having sex with other women, other bisexual women, and in such a way that no relationships that I did not want could form, either with these women or with their husbands. And on top of it, it gave me something I had not even taken into consideration, and that is the pleasure of group sex. The pleasure of watching people make love, of making love with more than one person at a time, of doing all the things swingers do. I’m a very highly sexed person, as I guess you’ve figured out, and I’ve been lucky enough to grow up without as heavy a dose of hangups and inhibitions about trying the unusual and enjoying it once I’ve tried it. I never got into anything elaborate like that before, threesomes and foursomes and moresomes, but I knew in advance that I would enjoy it and I wasn’t disappointed in the slightest.

  When Norm first brought up the subject of swinging, I must admit, I didn’t foresee all of these benefits and advantages. I had a one-track mind, and what I saw was that I could have genuinely bisexual experiences with no hassles or hangups, and that was enough for me. Everything else followed from that decision.

  And all down the line, swinging made everything easy.

  • • •

  Joanne is thirty-four, tall, dark-haired, well-proportioned with a high forehead and well-spaced brown eyes. She has been swinging for four of the seven years of her marriage. Her husband, Norman, is a certified public accountant with business interests in several of the firms whose accounts he keeps. Joanne manages a style boutique and dresses the part.

  I found her an excellent subject. While she did not know me at all, she was able to open up conversationally from the beginning. Although she had a slight tendency to go off on conversational tangents, these tangents were generally interesting in and of themselves.

  She was not reticent about her childhood, but neither did she feel that her early years played a significant part in the formation of her sexual nature. She was the third of four c
hildren. Her older brother and sister are both married and live far away from her, one in Oregon and the other in Southern California. Her younger brother lives in the Midwestern industrial city where Joanne grew up. Her father died a dozen years ago, and her mother has since remarried and moved to Florida with her retired second husband. Joanne maintains cordial relations with her mother and her siblings but sees them only on their infrequent visits to New York. She says she has never felt close to them, that she always felt herself a loner during childhood and adolescence and that there was little genuine communication among any of the members of her family.

  She had no sexual experiences in childhood beyond occasional games of Doctor with other children in the neighborhood. This juvenile sex play was never discovered by adults and died off harmlessly of its own accord. She was very interested as a child in the growth of her older sister’s breasts and several times tried to spy on her in the nude, but was not successful in getting a good view of the older girl. The motive here seems to have been simple curiosity, and Joanne was never aware of a sexual “crush” on her sister, if in fact such a crush existed. Nor did she report anything which would indicate sexual overtones to her relationships with her brothers or parents.

  Joanne discovered masturbation shortly before the onset of puberty. The discovery took place in the course of bathing, but unlike Archimedes she did not then run nude through the streets shouting “Eureka!” She merely found that it was quite pleasurable to soap certain parts of her body, and that the more industriously she soaped these areas, the greater her pleasure became. She generally masturbated when taking a bath, and occasionally before going to sleep. This activity was enjoyable but did not then lead to orgasm. Her first actual orgasm occurred in the course of petting with a boy; afterward, she strove to reach orgasm in masturbation and almost immediately learned how to do so.