Free The Lifestyle by Terry Gould

paradises as Hedonism II, Bracco, and Club Lido; in Mexico, LTT booked couples to the Caribbean Reef Club, the Eden Resort, Pepi’s Retreat, and the Qualton; in the South Pacific they patronized a private island called the Paradise Club and Fiji’s Treasure Island. Like Club Med, LTT rented tall-masted vessels and sent dozens of couples on its windjammer cruises throughout the Caribbean, and organized twice-yearly tours of Europe, with stopovers in the big clubs in France, the Netherlands, and Germany. By 1996, LTT was running twenty tours, pulling in $1 million, and booking thousands of couples. In 1998, bookings were up by 25 percent and Air Jamaica and the Jamaican Tourist Board signed on as paying sponsors of the Lifestyles convention.
    “We’ve actually invented and proved profitable a whole new concept in the travel business,” McGinley told me in hisoffice. “Playcouple travel
is
the playcouple lifestyle. We’re not talking swinging anymore. We’re talking people who accept open eroticism and sensuality. At every swing-club party you find a certain percentage of couples who aren’t swingers.” That included McGinley and the nonswinging Jan: they were a playcouple and Bob hadn’t swung for years. “I never argued for a minute that every couple should adopt the lifestyle,” he said, tapping the edge of his Ping-Pong table-sized desk piled high with page proofs for the latest booklets on NASCA and the convention. “It was always
the possibility
I fought for, the freedom of thought and expression—so that if it was for you, and you wanted the experience in your relationship, it was a dignified option, a
mainstream
option. My message is: you can be responsibly married and free to responsibly enjoy your dreams with your partner, if that’s what you want; and here’s where you could do that and be safe. Just look how we’ve grown. Just look how we
can
grow. Doesn’t that tell you something?”
    As he made his case, I reflected that McGinley now had a local base of several thousand regulars who patronized his year-round activities at which many, like David Alexander, just wanted to dance. I knew that every Saturday night Club WideWorld drew couples from Santa Barbara to Long Beach. McGinley ran big, Friday night theme dances at hotels like the Holiday Inn and Day’s Inn, plus two giant bashes at Halloween and Mardi Gras that attracted about five hundred lifestylers, most of whom stayed over at the hotels he’d booked. He had an international PlayCouples Club, with thirty-two thousand member-couples who received all his mailings as well as a pin to advertise that they were in the lifestyle, and which was growing by about two thousand couples a year. And McGinley had the most sophisticated Web site in the swing world, with eight separate home pages for all the various arms of his corporation—each page providing links to thousands of browsing opportunities, including PlayCouples On-Line,Lifestyles-America Mall (a shopping center for erotic businesses), Lifestyles Tours and Travel, and NASCA International. He was even planning to open a Lifestyles clothing boutique on the floor above his office.
    “You put all this together,” he said, spreading his arms, “and that’s what I mean when I say we’re mainstreaming the lifestyle. What we’re about now, and have been about since we branched out from the club and started this whole concept in big events and travel, is that a playcouple just accepts that they’re a sensual and erotic couple—and accepts that acting openly erotic can help them feel that way, too, whether they swing or not.”
    That, McGinley suspected, would sound dangerous to some, considering its mass appeal to the suburban middle class. “I don’t know which Cronin-type is going to pop up out of the woodwork, or what my next pebble’s going to be,” he said. “But I know the future of this lifestyle is going to be damned close to what you experienced in Mexico last month, and what