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Bad, Swing Clubs! Bad! (II)
by Emory Mellistos [This is the second part of a two-part article on the joys of prosecuting Swingers' clubs. You can read part 1 by going to our archives. But to get you started, here's where we left off:]

"Yes. It's the law. But wait. Later in the same article, New Times reporter David Holthouse writes, "Hays seemed to enjoy himself in several stormy depositions preceding the March 4 [1999] hearing, as he prodded club owners to explain precisely what message sex acts in their businesses deliver."
Club owner Dutch Van Brunschot admitted to having sexual relations with his wife at the club, and Hays kept pressing him to tell the court what message such an act might be sending."

[And now for the exciting conclusion:]

Finally, Van Brunschot answered, "That I enjoy doing it."

As you read the wording of the Phoenix ordinance, you have to imagine devoted civil workaholics, confined in power suits in hardwood and leather office environments, as they struggled to ensure that the wording of this ordinance would be precise. What a fun, titillating day of work they must have had:

"Oral sexual contact means oral contact with the penis, vulva or anus. Sexual intercourse means penetration into the penis, vulva or anus by any part of the body or by any object or manual masturbatory contact with the penis or vulva."

(Can we please say "penis" and "vulva" one more time? It just feels so good, I mean right.) It takes so many devoted civil servants to make a good morality campaign fly, we have to pause and give thanks.

Now the case of Deena Luce, who was operating the Forum Adult Social Club out of her Gilroy California home, was a bit different, since the state of California deems sex clubs legal. When Luce moved into her new neighborhood, her "business" got some press coverage in the sleepy community paper, and from there, things heated up. The city started out by citing her, 20 times (almost weekly), for operating a business in an "open space zone." (Luce contends that the zoning did allow her business.) When citations didn't shut her down, the city council passed an ordinance that prohibited a business around "sexual encounters" in any zoning district. Two months later, Luce left that home and (mistakenly) moved not so far away. This time her neighbors took up the cause and decided to get her out. Reportedly (San Jose Metro, February 27, '03) the neighbors (eighty strong) waged a concerted battle that included taking down license plate numbers of members who attended the Forum, hiring private investigators to check out the members' backgrounds, videotaping, photographing, shouting at patrons as they left the home after a party (Luce only held parties on Friday and Saturday evenings from 9 pm to 3 am). So how did these neighborly folk spend their Saturday nights again? "Let's get the kids to bed early, Martha, so we can run next door and see what we can see -- I mean, see what we need to protect the kids from."

You have to wonder -- all that photographing and videotaping -- if they happened to capture something live, lewd or nude, would they keep a copy for their private collections? Would they ever just take a peak at the images themselves, now and again (and again)?

Nah.

Are the people raising these morality issues simply people who, as Freud would have it, are fraught with repression, wishing like hell they could be in the bad guy's shoes? That's not this article's contention. The proposal, here, is simply to wire them up for clinical study and let the biometrics tell all. Let's grant that their psychological motives are of the highest and most honest intent. Ahh, but the body. That pulse, that heat under the collar, that rush of blood to the genitals with its little internal beating that makes us feel alive. Mightn't the physical charts of those people lurking outside Luce's home at 3 a.m., waiting in the dark to catch a glimpse of some half-naked partygoer, start to look a lot like those of the folks on the inside, having sex?

In any event, the county finally got Deena Luce and the Forum out of the neighborhood by putting the squeeze on her landlord, citing him for zoning violations and threatening him with further action. That did it. Luce moved again, and is currently in the process of taking the county and her landlord to court.

For swingers who find all this troubling, there are organizations who keep watch over anti-sex issues across the country and offer support. And even those who love to donate their sexual acts to uplifting the law, it's probably a good idea to be on top of things. In the Metro article, International Lifestyles Association's Bob Hannaford says that over the last two years, 30 swingers' clubs have been shut down or are in court under threat of being shut down. His organization, the ILA, offers watch dog bulletins, conferences, educational courses, and legal assistance for its swinging individual and business members. So does the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, a similar organization.

But these instances are the exception rather than the rule. Few locations where swingers gather generate this much controversy. The ILA currently lists only 3 swinger-related "trouble spots" on their site -- Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, and Phoenix). Other than that, kick back and enjoy.

It's just that in some communities, there's so little sex to go around. It's surprising how many reporters (a class of workers well-known for high productivity, deadline pressure, and stress) cover these swinger club arrests by visiting the club and doing one of those first-person narrative kinds of pieces "on a recent night when this reporter visited the sex club…" The night's work probably turns out to be rather uplifting for such harried writers.

So for this reason, it seems anti-sex laws are a good thing. They are made to help people who work too hard -- patrolmen, lawmakers, lawyers, reporters, talk show hosts -- get off while working. How can we begrudge them? It's also why the happy hedonists of swing clubs should be commended -- for serving our hyper-productive work force. They step up to the plate to titillate the overworked and under-expressed by volunteering their free, sexual moments at these clubs so that officers can ogle, lawyers can ask salacious questions, legislators can say "penis" and "vulva" to their hearts' content. And if we look at the people our morality laws serve" the Kenneth Starrs (how media business boomed under this rising Starr), the Phoenix city attorney Jim Hayses, the teeming TV shows on the Broward arrests and their mega-ratings, and at angry, videotaping neighbors, we will have to say that our wonderful anti-sex system works very well indeed.