Swinging subcultures

By Kath Albury

Published 20 July 2007

They congregate at semi-private, underground parties, held anywhere from inner-city five star hotel rooms to suburban McMansions. They use pseudonyms, mailing lists and personal ads to meet new partners. They participate in casual pick-ups, group sex, exhibitionism and voyeurism. Some call themselves ‘perverts’.  Some have lost their jobs when their secret sex-lives were exposed. Who are these closeted adventurers? It’s difficult to offer a definitive definition, but they constitute a loose coalition of heterosexual swingers, BDSM (a term potentially encompassing bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sado-masochism) players, bisexual and ‘bi-curious’ couples, and there are hundreds of them in Australia.

The Australian Study of Health and Relationships[i] found that fifteen percent of heterosexual men and over eight percent of heterosexual women surveyed had multiple sexual partners in the 12 months prior to the survey. Additionally, nearly five percent of all men and nearly three percent of all women had concurrent sexual partners. Respondents who identified as bisexual tended to have more partners than those who identified as heterosexual, and bisexual-identified women had more partners than lesbian-identified women. Nearly 60 percent of all heterosexuals who had casual sexual partners reported unprotected sex.

Unsurprisingly, the NSW Department of Health has recommended that ‘sexually adventurous’ adults who do not identify as gay or lesbian (specifically swingers and bisexuals) should become priority groups for targeted sexual health promotion over the next five years. The big question is how this might be achieved, given that there is little information available regarding these groups’ social networks, attitudes and beliefs; and more importantly, their current understanding of safer sex practices. To date, only one study[ii] has explored non-gay and lesbian sexual subcultures, and the study itself only addressed print media.

While epidemiologists and social researchers in Australia have had great success accessing gay men and lesbians through community events such as Mardi Gras Fair Days, it’s almost impossible to simply rock up to an ‘alternative’ heterosexual or bi-friendly event with a clipboard and a questionnaire. For one thing, you have to know where the party is in the first place. Unlike the gay and lesbian community, alternative or subcultural heterosexual social events are currently organised predominately through formal and informal media networks, such as magazines, e-lists and online classified and dating sites.

While sexually adventurous heterosexuals and bisexuals participate in a wide range of sexual activities, from BDSM, to fisting, to group sex; relatively few seem to identify with a formal ‘alternative’ subculture. While there are regular private events and public nightclub style parties (particularly for the swing and BDSM community) in most Australian capital cities, the majority of communication within and between various individuals, couples and groups seems to occur online.

This reflects the second impediment to researching alternative communities – they’re extremely cautious when it comes to communicating with ‘outsiders’, especially researchers and journalists who might potentially ‘out’ group members. It’s not unreasonable for those who practice unconventional sex to be extremely cautious in protecting their identities – there’s considerable anecdotal evidence to suggest that swingers, bisexuals and BDSM players in both Australia and the US have been heavily discriminated against on the basis of their sexuality. One Australian male swinger who appeared in a women’s magazine feature on ‘alternative lifestyles’ was subsequently sacked from his job as an under 13s swimming coach, presumably on the basis that his non-monogamous relationship made him a potential sexual predator.

Consequently my colleagues and I, Clif Evers and Catharine Lumby from the University of Sydney, propose to collaborate with the Family Planning NSW Health Promotion team on a research project that will begin by mapping existing ‘alternative’ sex media networks, and seeking one-to-one interviews with those we’ve termed ‘community gatekeepers’. These are the nightclub promoters, contact magazine publishers and webmasters and mistresses who are currently the most ‘public’ face of non-gay and lesbian sexually adventurous subcultures. These interviewees should be able to provide subjective overviews of current beliefs, attitudes and practices, particularly in regard to sexual negotiation and safer sex. Following these interviews we’ll devise an appropriately worded anonymous online survey for rank-and-file community members, which, we hope, will be introduced to groups via email invitations forwarded by our ‘gate-keeper’ interviewees. The final aim is to produce a targeted safer-sex and sexual health resource that addresses the particular needs of alternative sex subcultures, and can be distributed through existing media networks.

What do we think we’ll find? Our preliminary conversations with subcultural ‘gatekeepers’ have been greeted with nothing but enthusiasm and helpful suggestions. As a result of both our formal research and these informal conversations, we expect to find that there’s a lot of same-sex contact between women who have male romantic and/or domestic partners, and may outwardly appear to be ‘heterosexual’. Some of these women may identify as bisexual or bi-curious, but others may have sex with women only in a recreational or experimental context. We currently suspect that only a minority of these women (and their male partners) will have any affiliation to queer communities, and that subsequently their knowledge of safer sex and sexual health will be on par with that of the general ‘heterosexual’ population.

As a consequence, we expect to find a lot of unprotected sex, between men and women, and women and women. We also expect to find only a basic knowledge of general sexual health, in terms of sexually transmitted infection (STI) symptoms, tests and treatments. This is to be expected, given that the majority of members of sexually adventurous subcultures are heterosexually identified men and women in their late 20s, 30s and 40s (the median age at a recent Sydney sex party was 34[iii]) who haven’t been targeted by sexual health promotion campaigns since they were in their teens.

We’re betting that this research project will raise more questions than it answers. But with the increasing popularity of online dating sites, and the current boom in experimental non-gay and lesbian sex cultures[iv] there’s no doubt that it’s time to think about straight sex in different ways.