Philadelphia Sex Diaries: I Was a Sex-Party Devotee
Collage by Kevin Burzynski
There was a time in my life when all my sexual adventures and misadventures originated in one way or another at the Rittenhouse Square outpost of La Colombe. Such was the case with my descent into the world of swingers parties.
My girlfriend at the time had the hots for one of the baristas, a real femme-fatale type who suggested we all go to a Halloween party together. But this wasn’t just any Halloween party. It was a full-fledged swingers party, the first of many we attended as the “throuple” we became.
Swinging may seem like some bearskin-rugged, lotioned-up practice from a bygone era, part of Uncle Ned and Aunt Myra’s past that you’d rather not know about. But the truth is, the scene is still going strong. From South Philly to the Main Line to Center City, there are swingers parties, sex parties and all-out orgies happening in warehouses, private homes and suburban motels. You don’t have to look very hard to find one.
And it’s not just older men with mustaches populating these things — although there’s always a guy sporting a big ol’ Burt Reynolds. At the parties in the city, which skew younger, there are plenty of experimental millennials you’d swear just waited on you at Standard Tap.
It’s common for a young couple to show up — the woman obviously dragged there by her boyfriend — and after 30 minutes of total abandon, he’s suddenly jealous of all the attention she’s getting but she can’t be pried away.
When we were at these parties, it was mostly voyeuristic. Oh, the three of us would have sex with each other, sometimes right next to other people engaged in other libidinous activities. But we weren’t into just randomly having sex with whoever walked into the room, although there were plenty of people more than willing to do just that.
Take, for instance, this one Eastern European woman in her late 40s, a married suburban schoolteacher with three kids — and the most enormous, snow-white breasts I’d ever seen. While her super-suave husband was getting a seemingly endless blow job on a couch (and man, what he had between his legs would make almost any guy feel inferior), we watched as on all fours, she went to town with six men (six) at the same time. Outside of porn, I had never seen anything like it before.
As our throuple dissolved — they always do — so did my excursion into that world. And I was happy to leave it. It’s difficult enough to sexually gratify one partner at a time, and relationships between just two people are plenty complicated. I’ll take the good old traditional one-on-one. But thanks for the memories.
*Some names in this essay have been changed.
