The scene grew to include on-premises swing palaces like Plato’s Retreat and Trapeze, where masses of kindred spirits could do it right there!

As the orgy tribes grew, I migrated from newly discovered clan to newly developing clan to tribal councils. I went to all kinds of different parties:

...which seemed old to me then. There were a few Black couples but this group was mostly Jewish and Italian, from the Long Island and Jersey suburbs who had converted their spare bedrooms and dens into specially designed flocked wall-papered plushly matted wall-to-wall mattress-floored orgy rooms. They would send the kids away for the night or weekend.

This group could be counted on for excellent dirty sex. These people, who otherwise, were leading regular lives believed, nay, loved, the fact that what they were doing was “BAAAD.” This was in contrast to us hippie kids, whose shamelessness was second nature, and who saw orgies as “the way it should be.”

I always attributed this group’s edge to middle-class Jewish-Catholic guilt, two of the world’s strongest strains. These people taught me to never underestimate the erotic power of shame.

They always served tons of food and usually had great deli, but the music was usually lame. Have you ever tried getting an erection to Tom Jones, Montovani, or Engelbert Humperdinck? It’s do-able, but in spite of, not because of.

This was a big disappointment to me, really the only disappointment of the entire orgy milieu. At first I was so happy to finally get into this clique. Finally, I would be able to party with My Own Kind.

The girl, Tina, who brought me into this fold was foxy, clever, sexy, and the best graphic designer I knew. I had hired her more than once when a project I landed was too big for me alone. She was a terrific eager fuck, wore the most wonderfully inventive designy clothes, was great fun at orgies and had the loveliest habit of enhancing my sex experience by squeezing my balls and playing with my asshole while I was fucking another girl. Now that’s a buddy.

I thought I would meet a room full of sexy Tinaesque arty types. There were a few Beautiful People, very few but on the average this group definitely had the least attractive people and, worse yet, the most fraught self-conscious sex of the lot.

These were people who were too intellectual for their own good. They were watching themselves having an orgy rather than having an orgy.

The conversations were way too heavy, often sexual politics, which wasn’t good foreplay for Great Sex And The Wonderfully Bearable Escapes Into The Lightness Of Being that I sought.

We were a randy bunch but not really eccentric -- once you got past the part about having sex with strangers in groups.

This was during the first wave of women’s lib and the infancy of Political Correctness. Instead of just having a grand old fuckfest these people were determined to justify their lust with its political implications. All I wanted to do was fuck.

This was my first foul taste of the totalitarianism of Political Correctness and my first disagreement with Women’s Libbers, who outside the bedroom I had an easy time admiring and backing.

Most of these orgies that I went to were held in a woman painter’s apartment, but I don’t think that her being a woman was the entire problem. I’d been to orgies at female residences before and achieved Zen Nookie.

I could have guessed the problem earlier if I had been more perceptive of the hostess’s paintings on the walls which were skillfully-rendered life studies of copulations and masturbations, mostly female, with classically perfect anatomies, yet every single female face looked as if it was in pain. If you looked just at the faces and had no clue of the rest of the painting you would have thought they were the artwork from memory of a survivor of a South American death squad.   

In just a few parties I was exposed to all kinds of dogma, some institutionalized like “Mandatory Male Bisexuality Tonight” and “This Room For Lesbians Only.”

Plus, there were personality minefields you could step on like the buxom poet who declared to me, “I don’t allow men to be on top.” I got a hard-off immediately with that one. And the one who said, “No sex. I’m just into mutual masturbation.” Right, just what I came here for, a pack of rules.

There was also way too much cigarette smoking. The passing of lit cigarettes is way more non-carcinogenically dangerous in a room full of naked people than nearly anywhere else shy of an oil refinery.

Every once in a while a flesh-searing mistake would happen. It happened to me once, thankfully only to a leg but my cigarette radar went up from that moment on and I would stop whatever I was doing, no matter how involved I was, to point out to the person with a cigarette near me that they were a hazard and a schmuck.

Often, they served only vegetarian slop of the lowest order and more than rock or R&B, they played weird avant-garde jazz in bizarre hard to follow time signatures.

To be fair fun things did happen. I saw my first arty hard-core film there when filmmaker Ed Seeman came over with 16mm sound projector and screened his latest work and one night some straight hairstylist gave each girl a public hair style and cut.

I should have left this clan right away, but I so wanted to be accepted by my peers. After all, I was “creative” and all the other swingers I knew had normal jobs and careers and here was a gathering of copy writers, graphic designers, art directors, painters, writers, film makers, poets and artists.

But I didn’t last long in this group anyway. They threw me out for being, ironically, an “anarchist.”