Swingin’ Sex? I Don’t Think So. .
It all started the way it always does: innocently enough. I was sitting in my apartment, having a sensible lunch of crackers and sardines, when I got a call from an acquaintance. A friend of his had just gone to Le Trapeze, a couplesonly sex club, and was amazed. Blown away. There were people naked – having sex – right in front of him. Unlike S & M clubs, where no actual sex occurs, this was the real, juicy tomato. The guy’s girlfriend was kind of freaked out – although, when another naked woman brushed against her, she “sort of liked it.” According to him.
In fact, the guy was so into the place that he didn’t want me to write about it because he was afraid that, like most decent places in New York, it would be ruined by publicity.
I started imagining all sorts of things: Beautiful young hardbody couples.
Shy touching. Girls with long, wavy blond hair wearing wreaths made of
Grape leaves. Boys with perfect white teeth wearing loincloths made of grape leaves. Me, wearing a super-short, over-one-shoulder, grape-leaf dress.
We would walk in with our clothes on and walk out enlightened.
The club’s answering machine brought me back to reality with a thump.
“At Le Trapeze, there are no strangers, only friends you haven’t met yet,” said a voice of mdeterminate gender, which added that there was “a juice bar and a hot and cold buffet” – things I rarely associate with sex or nudity. In celebration of Thanksgiving, “Oriental Night” would be held on November 19.
That sounded interesting, except it turned out that Oriental Night meant
Oriental food, not oriental people.
I should have dropped the whole idea right then. I shouldn’t have listened to the scarily horny Sallie Tisdale, who in her yuppie-porn book, Talk Dirty to Me, enthuses about public, group sex: “This
is a taboo in the truest sense of the word. . . . If sex clubs do what they aim to do, then a falling away will happen. Yes, as is feared, a crumbling of boundaries. . . . The center will not hold.” I should have asked myself, What’s fun about that?
But I had to see for myself. And so, on a recent Wednesday night, my
Calendar listed two events: 9:00 P. M., dinner for the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, Bowery Bar; 11:30 P. M., Le Trapeze sex club, East 27th Street.
MESSYWOMEN; KNEE SOCKS
Everyone, it seems, likes to talk about sex, and the Karl Lagerfeld dinner, packed with glam-models and expense-accounted fashion editors, was no exception. In fact, it got our end of the table worked up into a near frenzy.
One stunning young woman, with dark curly hair and the sort of Seen-It-All attitude that only twenty year olds can pull off claimed she liked to spend her time going to topless bars, but only “seedy ones like Billy’s Topless” because the girls were “real.”
Then everyone agreed that small breasts were better than fake breasts, and a survey was taken: Who, among the men at the table, had actually been with a woman who had silicone implants? While no one admitted it, one man, an artist in his mid-thirties, didn’t deny it strongly enough. “You’ve been there,”
Accused another man, a cherub-faced and very successful hotelier, “and the
Worst thing is. . . you. . . liked. . . it.”
“No, I didn’t,” the artist protested. “But I didn’t mind it.” Luckily, the first
Course arrived, and everyone filled up their wineglasses.
Next round: Are messy women better in bed? The hotelier had a theory.
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