Skipping Towards Gomorrah by Dan Savage

country—including clubs in “red” states like North Carolina, Mississippi, Indiana, Idaho, and Utah.
    LSO is the granddaddy of swingers’ organizations, and remains the largest swingers’ organization in the country, with twelve full-time employees, an in-house travel agency (Lifestyles Tours & Travel), and a clubhouse in California. A large chunk of LSO’s Web site is dedicated to answering questions and demystifying the lifestyle, a term the group embraces as passionately as they reject the term wife-swapping . According to its Web site, LSO speaks out “in public and private forums” to advance the “playcouple” philosophy: “Sex between consenting couples is natural, wholesome behavior and to pretend it is not is to encourage physical and mental disorder.” A large chunk of the site is dedicated to Q&A-style fact sheets that seek to reassure couples who might be curious about attending a swing club or a Lifestyles Convention:
    â€œBut we’ve never been to anything like this before. . . .”
    â€œYou won’t be alone. . . . What you’ll find are a lot of people—everyday people just like you—who are only interested in an open and friendly atmosphere where people are not afraid to talk about fantasies. . . . No one gets attacked. No one is pressured to do anything they don’t want to. There’s no rituals, no initiations. There are, however, a lot of people having fun.”
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    â€œF or me the question was, could I be a good Jew and a swinger?” David paused, looked across the table, and opened his hands, palms up, as if he had nothing to hide.
    â€œThere are a lot of ‘shall nots’ in the Torah,” he says. “But it seemed to us that if we were honest with each other, then we weren’t committing adultery.”
    â€œIf you’re lying to your partner, that’s adultery,” says Bridget, David’s wife, nodding.
    We’re eating hot, salty pretzels with yellow mustard in the Tropicana’s coffee shop, a dingy hole in the wall that wouldn’t be out of place in a Trailways bus depot. Tall and muscular, David is an impressive example of Jewish manhood—picture a slightly younger version of former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a head full of dark hair. David has muscular arms and shoulders and was wearing a tank top and a pair of running shorts when we met. Bridget was a red-haired, green-eyed woman of Irish descent wearing blue-jean overalls and a small star of David on a chain around her neck. Bridget’s mother was Jewish and her father was Irish-Catholic; her mom got to pick the faith her children were raised in, while her dad got to pick their names. Bridget has two older brothers, Sean and Patrick, both practicing Jews.
    David and Bridget are in their early forties, but neither looks a day over thirty-five. They’ve been married for ten years but “in the lifestyle,” as they call it, for four. They attend at least two parties a month and sometimes more at one of the nine swingers clubs in the suburbs of Chicago. They have three children, all boys under the age of ten. They keep kosher, attend services at least once a week, and are giddy with anticipation about their boys’ impending bar mitzvahs. Before meeting me in the Tropicana’s lobby, David and Bridget spent an hour in their hotel room reading the Torah.
    â€œThe Torah talks about deception being part of the offense when someone commits adultery,” says David, when I ask how they reconcile their conservative religious beliefs and their liberal attitudes towards sex. “So is adultery having sex with someone who isn’t your spouse? Or is it hiding that sex from your spouse?”
    â€œWe realize we’re doing something that would be frowned upon in our moral community,” says Bridget, “and that it may be a contradiction. But people are complex.” Bridget