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1971 — 1985
The coverage era: What the postwar press called "wife swapping" became a national magazine subject at the turn of the 1970s. Time treated it as a cover-worthy behavior story on February 8, 1971, under the title "The American Way of Swinging," and Nena and George O'Neill's Open Marriage (1972) put negotiated non-monogamy on the bestseller lists — the book the era's couples cited, and its authors later said was widely misread. The scene the magazines described was suburban and couples-based, organized through magazines, correspondence clubs, and private parties rather than storefronts.
The club era: The storefront version peaked in New York. Plato's Retreat, opened in 1977 by Larry Levenson — first in a hotel basement on East 23rd Street, then in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel on Broadway, and from 1980 in a warehouse at 509 West 34th Street — was the country's best-known heterosexual swingers club, a couples-only membership house whose fame made "swingers club" a fixed phrase in American English. The AIDS crisis ended the era's public phase: New York ordered its sex clubs and bathhouses closed on public-health grounds, and Plato's Retreat was shut on New Year's Eve 1985. What survived the 1980s was the private form — membership clubs in unmarked buildings, drawing regionally, advertising little. That is the form, and the only form, in which the scene ever surfaces in Fort Wayne's record.
Sources:
- Time, "The American Way of Swinging" (February 8, 1971) — the era's defining magazine treatment.
- Nena O'Neill and George O'Neill, Open Marriage (1972).
- Kurt Loder, "The Rise and Fall of Plato's Retreat," MTV News (March 27, 2009), and American Swing (documentary, 2008) — opening, moves, and the New Year's Eve 1985 closure.