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| I'm almost afraid to learn what Ed Wood means by those words. |
NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).
The article: "Swing Loose." Originally published in Wild Couples (Pendulum Publishing), vol. 3, no. 1, April/May 1971. No author credited.
Excerpt: "When the single shows go on we watch and get a boot out of it. Like Margie trying to masturbate herself and she was giggling all the time and couldn't pop her nuts to save her life, so she jerked off her own husband. But when the combined action goes on we're all too busy making the scene with our own partner, or partners as the case may be. We double up in threesomes and foursomes a great deal of the time."
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| The hot toddy: Ed Wood's drink of choice? |
Reflections: As I've mentioned before, Bob Blackburn has organized the articles in When the Topic is Sex into themed chapters. I'm currently making my way through Chapter 7, devoted to Ed Wood's alleged "man on the street" interviews. For the uninitiated, these are bogus, contrived "conversations" in which the respondents are fictional. Ed simply asks and answers all the questions himself. This makes for some of the most fun, entertaining material in When the Topic because Ed abandons the dry, encyclopedic tone of many of his sexology articles and writes in a more colorful, slangy way.
It only recently occurred to me that these mock interviews also allow Ed Wood to format his articles more like screenplays. The one I'm reviewing today, "Swing Loose" from 1971, even has what I'd call parenthetical stage directions. This time around, Ed portrays a reporter from Wild Couples magazine who travels to a remote "country town" to chat with Paul and Ida X, two married "swingers" who take part in orgies every weekend. Eddie must've been in a giddy mood when he wrote "Swing Loose," because he barely tries to make the article plausible. Paul and Ida, for instance, are said to be from "Pneumonia, Michigan." (Haw, haw.) Throughout the interview, Eddie reminds us that he and his hosts were downing hot toddies the entire time and getting pretty blitzed in the process.
Before he sits down with Paul and Ida, however, Ed gives us one of his trademark rambling, oddly-formatted introductions. He free associates about Julius Caesar and square dancing (?) before reminding us that swingers may participate in various and sundry homosexual acts but are "not necessarily homosexual" in nature. Again, this harkens back to Glen or Glenda (1955)—that eternal Rosetta Stone of Ed Wood's career—and its famous dictum: "Glen is a transvestite, but he is not a homosexual."
Like most of Ed Wood's imaginary interview subjects, Paul and Ida are remarkably forthcoming and unselfconscious when it comes to discussing their sex life. (I guess Dolores S. from "College Interview" tried to maintain a smidgen of dignity, but most of these characters don't bother.) There's not too much to do in Pneumonia, where the only movie theater shows dull Disney flicks for months on end, and Paul and Ida had even grown bored with each other. "We'd belly-fuck," Paul laments, "and I'd know every move she was going to make before she did it." Ed Wood often criticizes the missionary position, but I think this is the first time I've seen him describe it in these exact terms.
Anyway, the couple's fortunes changed when Paul spotted an ad for a dictionary of sex terms in an adult magazine. This is how he found out about swinging. One wonders how people found out about it in Ancient Rome, since such dictionaries weren't available yet. Maybe people were more creative back then. In any event, attending orgies every weekend has made Paul and Ida better lovers because they've learned so much from getting it on with other couples. A swingers party is sort of a skills exchange workshop, except everybody's naked.
To maintain the conceit that this is an actual interview, Ed asks Paul and Ida a few, uh, probing questions. Does Paul become jealous or angry when he sees his wife engage in sex acts with other women and men? No, because he's also engaging in sex acts with other women and men. There's also quite a lot of discussion about menstruation and how it affects Ida's participation in the orgies. I will not dwell on this material, but rest assured, this topic gets ample time.
One distinguishing characteristic of "Swing Loose" is that the interviewer himself gets more characterization than usual. He tells us that he is divorced and paying "a lot of alimony." So our crusading journalist is not exactly a stand-in for Ed Wood. Toward the end of the article, Paul basically offers Ida to the interviewer, but the latter demurs. As Ed explains:
He simply made minor chit-chat, had a couple more hot toddies, wished he could have taken pictures of the handsome couple and their completely comfortable home, then left to brave the continuing snow storm and made his way back to the hotel where he typed and filed this report.
I guess that's Ed Wood's nod to journalistic professionalism. Never have sex with your interview subjects, no matter how much you might want to. Remember: you're there to report on orgies, not participate in them.
Next: "When in Rome" (1973)