it was quite a twelvemonth-- with everything from the beautiful people taking it off in discos to the pro-football brass blowing its cool over our uncoverage of those rousing cheerleaders
Every Time we get to thinking the sexual revolution has been won, something happens to make us conscious that there are people out there who don't even know the battle has started. How else can one interpret what happened in 1978, a year in which everybody, but everybody, in the jet set vied to appear in the most outrageous costume, or lack of same, in the latest chic discos; in which nude sun-bathing became virtually common-place; in which eternal starlet Edy Williams stripped not only at the Cannes Film Festival but in the middle of a boxing ring (as a prelude to the Muhammad Ali-Leon Spinks fight that proved rather more interesting than the title bout itself); and in which live sex clubs put orgies within every man's reach? It was also a year in which the powers that be in the National Football League, after having titillated the public with rump-wiggling, bosom-bouncing displays of femininity, reacted in holier-than-thou horror when a few of the ladies, inaccurately known as cheerleaders, actually took off some of their clothes for Playboy. The performance smacked of the hypocritical, particularly in the case of the first cheerleader fired for her pose: a young lady who had held the title of Miss Nude California and was first runner-up for Miss Nude U.S.A. long before she caught the recruiting eye of the San Diego Chargers. By the time the dust clears, there may be no pro-football "cheerleading" squads left, which would be too bad: Maybe somebody should hire Edy as a sort of traveling one-woman half-time entertainment squad. For the most part, though, sex in '78 was fun--which is exactly as it should be. Read on, and enjoy. What differentiates discomania from most of its predecessors," wrote Albert Goldman in Esquire, "is its overt tendency to spill over into orgy." Below, New York's Studio 54, where the Beautiful People get it on
