Sex in America: New Orleans

Mardi Gras, 1979. You remember: the one they tried to tell you didn't happen.

On the balcony of the Bourbon Orleans Ramada, two girls are obliging a street mob's exhortation to "Show your tits, show your tits!" First they lift their sweaters one side at a time, showing their tits one by one, then finally two by two--in pairs, so to speak. As soon as one girl takes her sweater off altogether, the mob chant changes to "Show your pussy!" She immediately begins unzipping her pants, but her lower parts are obscured by the large dark-blue banner hung over the railing: Wisconsin Mardi Gras HQ., it reads. Suddenly, her boyfriend comes up behind her, jerks her pants down to her ankles and hoists her upside down over his shoulder, giving the crowd a good view of, well, more ass than pussy. Then he spins her around and reappears in more or less the same pose but with his head between her kicking legs in simulated cunnilingus. Crowd most happy.

In the French Quarter, four guys have rigged a costume that amounts to one great big penis. They run around the streets like Chinese doing a dragon dance. The fourth guy is carrying two large, brown stuffed garbage bags--the balls. The dragon cock makes fine sport of charging at a startled woman, then squirting her with a waterpistollike device mounted in the penis head.

On the balcony at the Bourbon Orleans, a man and a woman are throwing plastic beads and doubloons to the crowd. But they do it with a twist: Each bead and each play coin makes a visit to the lady's obviously lubricious private parts before sailing down to the drunks below.

On a private balcony on a side street, one lady gives simultaneous hand jobs to two men standing beside her, facing the crowd: One guy is black, the other white.

On the balcony of the cushy Royal Sonesta Hotel, one thing leads to another until one couple, to the ecstasy of the mob below, actually copulates.

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New Orleans is outrageous--beautiful, brassy, classy, sleepy, snooty, permissive, tacky, filthy, elegant and grand. New Orleans is a whore; New Orleans is a soft drizzle; New Orleans is two guys sucking one girl's tits on a Bourbon Street balcony during Mardi Gras; (text continued on page 124)Sex in New Orleans(continued from page 117) New Orleans is semitropical private courtyards hung with wisteria; New Orleans is oysters and sex.

The sexual climate of New Orleans is 18th Century romantic, Mediterranean macho, New World tropical. New Orleans descends directly from the Colonial concubinage tradition. Unlike most of America, New Orleans is Continental European, not English. Beyond the cultural heritage, there is the sensuous lushness of a city shaded perennially by enormous live oaks hung sleepily with Spanish moss, dotted with palmettos and scented by the overwhelmingly aphrodisiac fragrance of green-olive and tulip trees. With the seething intimacy of the French Quarter, the condo/disco madness of Fat City and the lush grandeur of exclusive uptown Garden District mansions, New Orleans has the makings of a lifestyle more attuned to sensuous fulfillment than to professional achievement; New Orleans is dedicated more than any other American city to the pursuit of pure pleasure. It may have the highest sexual temperature in the country.

The French Quarter is the overt embodiment of New Orleans' exceptionally unabashed sexuality. Sex is the chief theme of Bourbon Street, whose shopwindows are hung with five-dollar T-shirts emblazoned with sexual clichés: If God had not meant for man to eat Pussy, he would not have made it look so much like a taco and four out of five dentists recommend oral sex. Hoarse-throated hawkers promote half a dozen go-go girlie shows (G string and pasties required) and the legendary Gunga Den female impersonators' show, which may, in fact, have the best-looking girls (boys) in town. One go-go joint has a pair of (wooden) girl's legs protruding through the window curtain every two seconds; inside, one of the nearly naked dancers takes a ten-minute turn lying on her stomach, swaying back and forth on a pallet suspended over the bar and surrounded by mirrors. When not swaying or dancing, the girls don see-through tops and hustle drinks and tips ("Wanna give me a dollah for mah dancing, mistah?").

Bourbon Street also includes seven sexual novelty shops owned by Ruth Ann Menutis, who sells over 2500 pairs of pasties every month, "mostly to tourists and conventioneers, but we also supply about 30 strippers." The Ellwest Theater is the street's heart of hard-core porn: 19 large-screen booths in a clean setting attract even couples to watch the rawest things coming out of California these days.

The backside of the French Quarter--from St. Ann Street all the way into the adjacent Faubourg Marigny neighborhood--is the home of one of the most cohesive gay communities in America. No fewer than 40 gay bars, restaurants and clubs (including three gay baths) dot the area, serving a well-organized gay community (estimated at about 100,000 persons). Dancing at the Parade Disco above the Bourbon Pub, cruising for sex at Jewel's on Decatur Street or just surveying the general decadence in tight jeans and leather jackets from the balcony at the Cafe Lafitte In Exile, New Orleans gays intensify the pervasive sensuality of the city where Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote felt at home decades ago.

New Orleans leads a double life. While the French Quarter is blatantly hedonistic, the tradition-minded burghers of the "American sector" who run the businesses west of Canal Street at least go through the motions of propriety and conservatism. Theirs are the stately homes that fill the Garden District and theirs are the sons who sow the wild oats at Tulane University [see box, page 222]. Theirs are the votes that got the Superdome into New Orleans and theirs are the anti-Semitic, antiblack rules that keep the Mardi Gras balls exceedingly exclusive and hierarchical.

Yet the city's aristocracy is obviously not immune to the sensuous lures of New Orleans. The pillars of respectability have traditionally been among those patronizing such legendary French Quarter madams as Norma Wallace, who retired in 1965 after 40 years in the business. It is the community leaders who take their clients to the barstool ladies at the Carousel Lounge in the Monteleone Hotel on Royal Street and to Lucky Pierre's on Bourbon Street. And it is the newly rich who today maintain private trysting places within the maze of courtyard apartments in the French Quarter.

The complex sexual kaleidoscope of New Orleans includes the "free people of color"--the city's inordinately large community of fair-skinned, educated, middle-class blacks. UN Ambassador Andrew Young descends from this world, and so does Ernest "Dutch" Morial, the city's first black mayor. Like the whites, a strikingly large proportion of New Orleans blacks are Catholic, well married and fathers of large families (Morial, for instance, has five children). Yet, like the whites, the blacks fancy themselves bearers of the macho standard in the Mediterranean South. Stories of prominent blacks patronizing the white ladies of the evening in Lucky Pierre's (and in the ranks of political election-campaign volunteers) are legion in New Orleans. "The light-skinned blacks are the sexiest men in town," says one young white woman flatly. Music to their ears.

Singles

New Orleans is an all-night town. When Atlanta and Miami are beginning to shut down, New Orleans is just waking up. The bars that close at all close at four A.M. "I just put a pillow over my face for 30 minutes, then I'm ready to party," explains David Marcello, a young bearded man in corduroys. He is sipping whiskey at midnight in a funky live-music bar called Tipitina's on Tchoupitoulas Street in a dingy wharf district outside the French Quarter. Marcello just happens to be executive counsel to Mayor Morial. During the heat of last winter's police strike, Marcello was a principal negotiator for the city team. Yet no one thinks it at all amiss that one of the city's top lawyers, after a 12-hour stint in the office, should be out drinking at midnight. "They know they can always reach me at Tipitina's," laughs Marcello. "Sex in New Orleans? Sure, it's everywhere: polymorphous perversity!"

"If I arrived in Dallas at two in the morning and wanted some sex," explains Eddie Sapir, New Orleans' only long-haired, cowboy-booted municipal judge, who drives a white Cadillac convertible, "I would have to get out my address book and start making calls. In New Orleans, everybody is still out at two." Sapir is telling me this during a pleasant crawl that begins at 11:30 P.M. in a posh, dual-discoed bar and restaurant called The Forty One Forty One, continues to the fancy digs of Georgie Porgie's disco in the Hyatt Regency Hotel opposite the Superdome, onward to La Boucherie, a crowded second-floor bar and disco in the French Quarter, which gives free drinks to the ladies on Thursday nights. The marathon finally ends near four A.M. with one more round at the superhooker watering hole of Lucky Pierre's. Lucky Pierre's is where even those not looking for ladies come for an after-hours meal. Breakfast on Lucky's patio is said to be better than brunch at Brennan's, but Lucky's closes at seven A.M. We are not looking for ladies: Sapir, also a boxing promoter and pal of Joe Namath, Billy Martin and the like, has on his arm tonight one of the finest examples of pulchritudinous Southern womanhood not yet in the movies.

(continued on page 218)Sex in New Orleans(continued from page 124)

Playboy's Telephone Survey discovered that New Orleans is a night crawler's paradise--22 percent of the people we contacted cited restaurants and bars such as Pat O'Brien's, Caesars East, Cisco's Club and Spankey's as the places to meet people. Another 42 percent said that just walking through an area like the French Quarter was enough. City law allows revelers to carry their drinks from bar to bar in paper cups; the streets are an all-night party.

A reasonable question would be whether or not people in New Orleans have any energy left for sex after all the partying. They do. Consider Betsy, 29, a lady of good figure and fine upbringing, who keeps a pair of antique shackles attached to the foot of her four-poster bed. Betsy and her lover, a wealthy businessman from a small Cajun town an hour's drive from New Orleans, are into mild S/M. She shackles; he masturbates. Betsy's is a classic New Orleans situation: a small house in the French Quarter, crummy and shuttered on the street side but elegant and open on the back, where it is faced by a bricked courtyard and two-story slave quarters--all the amenities of a Parisian pied-à -terre, the ideal trysting place with her lover, a happily married Catholic who pays for the dwelling.

"I have had the most fantastic sexual experiences in my French Quarter apartment," says another New Orleans lady who nominally lives in the suburbs but has a "kept" apartment with a wrought-iron balcony overlooking Royal Street. "There is something incredibly romantic about making love there--the mustiness of the rooms, the high ceilings, the brass bed. When my lover comes to visit, he rings the buzzer on the gate, comes into the courtyard and by the time he's up the stairs, I'm ready to tear his shirt off."

"You have to remember the traditions of the French Quarter," says a local newspaperman with a fine sense of history. "In the old days, when a boy from a wealthy family turned 18, it was traditional for his father to give him a horse, a quadroon and a cottage on Rampart Street." A quadroon, in case you don't comprehend the checkerboard ethnic history of southern Louisiana, is a person--they always meant a woman--with one fourth Negro blood (an octoroon is, in turn, one eighth black). Rampart Street, the northern boundary of the original Nouvelle Orleans, is now the fringe of the French Quarter. One block away, across Basin Street, stood Storyville, for 20 years (1898--1917) the leading legalized red-light district in America--teeming with elegant bordellos, razor-wielding whores, fugitive murderers, professional gamblers and other "sports" who made the sin district live.

Storyville is gone (a neat, red-brick public-housing project now stands on the spot), but the French Quarter remains as a kind of unofficial legalized sin center of the South. Ninety percent of New Orleans' 100--200 prostitutes operate in the French Quarter. All the skin shows are on or near Bourbon Street. Most of the wide-screen, no-holds-barred peep shows and adult moviehouses are in or near the Quarter. During Mardi Gras, it is in the Quarter that you may see gays flashing their cocks in front of leather bars or a college girl walking down Bourbon Street raising her T-shirt for amateur photographers. It is in the French Quarter that the gentry make assignations for a trip into adultery and fornication.

"It is part of the fiber of this city that we allow everything," explains Bonnie Crone, former editor of New Orleans Magazine. "And the French Quarter is an aphrodisiac."

Natives of New Orleans tend to write off both the French Quarter and Mardi Gras as something for the "college kids and tourists." The police like to say that most visitors to Mardi Gras "come here with five dollars and a shirt and never change either one."

The fact is that Mardi Gras sets the tone for the city for 11 months of the year; and if the French Quarter is filled with tourists, there's always Fat City.

Fat City. Action Central. Ten miles northwest of the city, a few blocks off the interstate on your way from the French Quarter to the airport. Two hundred seventy-seven acres, about 12 blocks square, with 60 liquor outlets, one massage parlor and one of the city's few X-rated motels. Seven years ago, Fat City was just flat swampland. Now there is an apartment complex where 2057 units house 4650 people--mostly young, single and horny.

Fat City is also the hub for suburban shopping, but at five, the tone of the malls changes. It's happy hour. Just ask around and find out where ladies' night is and follow the crowd.

"You have to move fast," explains one young attorney. "Free drinks for the ladies stop at ten at most places and if you haven't scored by then, you have to be sure you don't get stuck buying drinks for some chick who's going to tell you to get lost at midnight."

The action in the discos doesn't even begin until about ten P.M. Then the beat takes over at The Godfather and Night Fever for the young professionals, while the college crowd swings at Guess What's Coming and Rumors. For live entertainment, there's The Place. But a lot of the action is on the sidewalks and in the streets, where the crowds mill around à la Bourbon Street. Paul, a systems analyst with a large computer company, explains the Fat City lifestyle: "I'm only interested in casual sex. I've had it with marriage and responsibility. I often sleep with five different girls in one week. They are usually between 19 and 35. I find that young girls are most liberated."

We watch a young woman with a mane of blonde hair hanging out the window of a Pinto. "You wanna have some fun?"

Paul checks out the body behind the voice and the brunette behind the wheel. "Sure, why not?" he says with a grin and hops into the back seat. The girls live ten miles away, in a quiet subdivision, but never mind. They've taken a hotel room for the weekend. It's Fat City.

Jack Dunn, a local lawyer, describes the scene: "I've handled 300 divorce cases in the last two years. People still get married--and divorced. I see a lot of young couples who have married right out of high school, and then the fast life slows down and they get restless.

"It's not that everybody who lives or works in Fat City goes out and tries to score every night. It's that you can if that's what you want."

The city's double standard accounts for a certain frustration on the part of single women in New Orleans. "This is not considered a good woman's town," says a striking, brown-haired model who lives in the Garden District, New Orleans' paradisiacal residential section just west of downtown. "The men aren't serious. It's very hard to find a substantial person with a good income who is predictable. It's different from Houston--there the guys are into settling down."

New Orleans is a distribution center whose revenues from tourism come in second only to the income from its Mississippi River port (chiefly Midwestern grains and petroleum products). It is a family-conscious society with ethnic clannishness (Catholics, Creoles, WASPs, Italians) whose stratification is expressed in the rigid social structure of the krewes, or Mardi Gras clubs. At the pinnacle of nearly 100 krewes stand Comus, Rex and Bacchus, whose annual Mardi Gras fetes are a cross between New Year's Eve blowouts and fancy debutante balls. While the king of each krewe (a tightly held secret) is always a moneyed man of high standing, the queen is always a fine-featured 18- or 19-year-old nubile from good family who has been groomed for years to be a Mardi Gras queen. The Louisiana State Museum in the magnificent cabildo beside St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square memorializes the gowns and names of past Mardi Gras queens. For a daughter of New Orleans gentry, it is almost better than getting married.

Prostitution

"I only do hundreds--hundred-dollar tricks," says Mary. "I treat a man nice, which is why I have so many old customers still coming back to me. Some of them have sent their sons to me. Most of my business is local--that's the best business in the world. They bring their clients to you. I'm 50 years old. I had a face lift, but I'm really making it on bullshit and personality. I'm not stingy about how long they stay; most of it is spent talking and drinking, anyway. Occasionally, I'll do two in one day, because I don't like to turn down an old friend. But don't forget: Whores are whores and they're greedy. As long as there's a nickel, they'll try to get it."

A semiretired hooker who stayed out of jail and put three kids through college during her years on Bourbon Street, Mary now does a thriving one-trick-a-day business out of the modest home she purchased on the fringe of the Garden District. Her white clapboard house with wall-to-wall carpeting looks no different from any of the other middle-class homes on her shaded street not far from stately St. Charles Avenue. "My neighbors are good friends," she says. "They probably don't even know the meaning of the word hooker."

Mary works the nice part of town, receiving visitors in her home between 4:30 and 7:30 P.M.

"I have one fellow who likes to be hung up. He's the captain of a ship. He's real nice, always brings me a bottle of booze or some cigarettes. What he does is, he cuts a deck of cards and whatever number comes up, that's how many minutes I'm supposed to leave him hung up. He brings handcuffs and I hang him on the shower rod. Once when I still lived in the French Quarter, another girlfriend and I went off and left him and turned another trick while we were out."

Down at Lucky Pierre's, they serve a straighter trade--your basic traveling businessman who will buy a girl a drink or two, then pop for $50 (minimum) or $100 (tops) to take her to his hotel room for 30 minutes. The standard service is "half and half"--half blow jobs, half straight sex. When Lucky Pierre's turns on its glitzy chandelier and opens the doors at nine P.M., the working girls drift in and position themselves singly at small empty tables or alone at the bar, but not around the piano, which is too distracting for business. Their mission is apparent even to visiting chicken farmers from Mississippi, who, incidentally, are a favorite clientele among the whores. "Those chicken farmers are always nice, and they never haggle over price," clucks Rosene, who spent ten years working the bar at Lucky's before giving it all up for marriage to, of all people, a cop. "The local businessmen are the worst," she says. "They think they should get a discount just because they're from here." Hookers also speak highly of the growing numbers of Oriental businessmen coming to New Orleans. "The Japanese have plenty of money--and they're so clean," said one prostitute. "They'll take a shower before and after a trick. And if you go again, they'll shower again."

The rest of the hooking trade is not so nice. After midnight, Iberville Street in the French Quarter is lined with black streetwalkers and an astonishing number of transvestites who will take almost anything, down to $10--$20 for a blow job in the car. Along Decatur Street, they frequent the Greek bars and hustle the increasingly inebriated lonely guys working hard on their general frustrations. Business turns rough after three A.M., when the vice squad quits work. "That's when the muggings, wallet snatchings and key thefts really pick up," says detective John Auster of the vice squad. "That's why we have to keep a certain amount of heat on them all the time."

Some of the nastiest of the streetwalkers are the transvestites. "They wear a gaft--a kind of jockstrap that pulls their stuff down," explains Auster, current record holder in arrests made during the past 12 months. "Some of them are knockouts--they look better than the real girls. And the customer is so drunk, he fucks the guy in the ass and doesn't notice the difference. After he's been mugged and beaten up, if we catch the whore, he'll say, 'Yeah, she's the one.' I say, 'That ain't no she, pal.' He calls me a liar. He swears he fucked a chick."

Gays

Sunday night is beer-bust night at Jewel's. For one dollar at the door, you get a stamp on the back of your hand and all the beer you can drink from six until nine. A rough-cut spot on a shabby stretch of Decatur Street, Jewel's is an unremodeled former seamen's bar that caters blatantly to blue-jeaned gays in search of sex. You can meet a happily outgoing cross section of New Orleans' large gay community, have your crotch felt a time or two as a friendly passing gesture and watch a shirtless volunteer dancer doing disco steps on a barreltop get his cock sucked by a gay passer-by.

Thursday night, you go to TT's West, the gay community's other "hard-cruising" bar in the French Quarter. TT's, as it is called, is host to the Knights D'Orleans, a gay motorcycle gang-cum-Mardi Gras krewe. The theme at TT's is hard leather. If you don't have a rig, you can buy it right there. TT's has a trinket store on the premises: motorcycle chain belts (for your pants and, maybe, your ass), leather harness for assorted fun, a 20-inch curved double-headed dildo (presumably for fucking two asses at once) and a 16-inch dildo in the shape of a fist instead of a penis. All in a night's sadism. TT's also has the proverbial back room, where more or less anything goes.

"Sex is so much easier between men," says Mark. "You just climax and that's it." Mark and his lover, Alan, are protectively leading my guided tour of gay night life in New Orleans. "There's no question of whether a man puts out or not--I mean, that's a silly question."

New Orleans has for decades been the chief Southern stop on the national gay circuit. Truman Capote was a frequent visitor. Tennessee Williams wrote A Streetcar Named Desire in a small room at the Maison de Ville (then a boarding-house, now an expensive hotel) on Toulouse Street. Some gay bars go back 20 years. Because of the city's laissez-faire attitude, it was one of the first to come out of the closet. "New Orleans is Continental and has a more tolerant attitude," says Alan. "The rest of the country is English and more restrictive."

The gay community in New Orleans has the advantage of occupying an almost self-contained part of town that begins in the residential half of the French Quarter, runs eastward through the Faubourg Marigny and culminates in the next neighborhood, the Bywater. There are enough gays concentrated in one place that an excellent gay newspaper, Impact, publishes 15,000 copies a month. It is distributed free in the several dozen men's and women's restaurants and bars.

There are three bars within one block of one another on Bourbon Street that form the axis of social life in the gay community. The Cafe Lafitte In Exile is a three-sided sitting-and-looking bar with stools lining the walls. It is the social headquarters of the community and less of a hard sex hangout than, say, Jewel's. To put the make on a man you like at Lafitte's, if there is no one around to introduce you, you do the same thing you might do for a pretty woman in the Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel in New York: buy him a drink. The only woman ever seen in Lafitte's is the dusky, bare-breasted Creole whose dignified portrait hangs over the bar. On Lafitte's second floor, young hustlers who may be on the line between their straight pasts and their gay futures take on all comers at the pool table. One wall contains a print of a branded male ass, a drawing of one man going down on another and two deer heads.

One block down the street, the Bourbon Pub and Le Bistro face each other at the corner of St. Ann Street. Le Bistro is known as a pickup place for older gays looking for young chickens (gay jailbait from the suburbs), while the Bourbon Pub is noted chiefly for the nonstop dancing in its upstairs disco, the Parade. Most of the dancers are males, but one sees occasional straight couples visiting the Parade for its good music and lively dance floor.

Like the straights, the gays build their lifestyle around bars and restaurants. "In New York, even if you live on Christopher Street, a lot of gays are really trying to make it professionally--in the theater or whatever," explains Alan. "Here, gay life is mostly social. People resist even getting involved politically."

Yet the New Orleans gay community is already regarded as an organized political force within the city. An estimated 32,000 gays are registered to vote. Morial actively cultivated the gay vote during his successful election campaign--adding gays to the classic new coalition of blacks and liberals that is putting black mayors into city halls around the country.

"I sometimes fuck men, but only for political reasons." She is blonde, strong-featured and, judging by the action beneath her loose-fitting knit dress, well built. She is a sometime writer and political activist. She is also gay, semi-closet. She is nice. One could gladly imagine being one of the men she fucks, but she has already announced that it would be a purely political act.

"I get wet," she admits. "But I don't come. I come only with women."

New Orleans is like that. The lady has obliged more than one man of political prominence and is presently entertaining an offer from a judge of some notoriety to join him and his wife in the conjugal bed. "He wants me to sleep with her because he thinks she is gay," she explains. The rationale for her lifestyle: "I figure I can do more good for the gay community by living as a quasi straight."

"Women, gay or straight, are just less promiscuous than men. I think it is a matter of temperament." This is a gay woman, a feminist to boot, speaking, who still, for the rather sobering fear that she will be booted out of her profession, has one foot in the closet. In the French Quarter, she has the other foot out. The lifestyle of female gays is not only less flamboyant than that of gay men but even more conservative, it seems, than that of straight women. There are only three "women's bars" in New Orleans, and none of them is a true cruising bar. "People come to my bar for talk or a drink after work or to dance later on," explains Charlene Schneider, barkeeper and outspoken gay columnist in Impact. "But it is not really a pickup place."

"For years, we had no place to go in public," explains one gay woman. "So we got into the habit of having private dinner parties. That's where I meet other women." Parts of the lesbian community are so exclusive that they are never seen at Charlene's or even at other French Quarter dinner parties. One such well-to-do uptown set is known among other gay women as "the River Ridge dykes."

A more common sight in the gay bars is of girls in their late teens who are just now coming out. "We call them baby dykelets," laughs one gay hospital worker.

While the men's gay community feels its strength enough to get away with just about anything, the lesbian community still feels threatened a bit not only by the straight world but by gay men as well. "They don't much like us in their bars," says Alan, "because they think if a lot of men come, we'll take over." Charlene's chief concern is keeping away predatory straights, especially couples cruising for a gay woman to join in a threesome. During Mardi Gras, a sign on her door read: If you ain't gay, you can't stay. Charlene controls the traffic flow with seven electronic remote door buzzers distributed around her bar. She can examine people at her front door because it consists entirely of one-way mirrors. If she doesn't like what she sees, no buzzer. Inside, Charlene maintains order with three rules: "No fighting, no fucking, no dope." She explains: "I make you a deal: You don't smoke dope in my bar and I don't shoot your kneecaps off."

Swingers

What Kim is looking for is the ultimate orgasm, a communal coming that flies fearlessly beyond the boundaries of Erica Jong's zipless fuck: "I would like to have three guys come inside me at once," says Kim, smiling that broad-toothed Oriental smile that gives a man some strong ideas about which part of her he might like to be in at the time.

Kim, a Korean, and her American husband, Clinton, run a circle of young and old swingers whose chief joy seems to lie in multiple orgasms. "This is what I've been looking for all my life but couldn't find," explains Peggy at a swingers' mixer with free buffet in a suburban bar just off Interstate 10. She recently had the experience of making it with five men in one night, this at a new on-premise swing club she visited near Washington, D.C.

While New Orleans swingers generally look askance at the impersonal, mindless, mob-scene orgiastics of a large swing club such as Plato's Retreat in New York, plans for a very private, on-premise club in New Orleans are already a gleam in the eye of Ben, Peggy's swing partner and the man primarily responsible for organizing New Orleans swingers into the Crescent City Couples Club.

Swinging is just reaching the take-off stage in New Orleans. According to Playboy's Telephone Survey, only 4.7 percent of the people in New Orleans have been to swingers' parties. That figure may change. Thanks largely to the efforts of Ben and Peggy, Orleanians are now in a position to look over their potential bedmates for the night before the negotiating has reached an embarrassing stage. "We used to have to put ads in the paper and then tell another couple we would meet them in a dimly lit bar with a red carnation in my lapel," recalls Ben. "You'd show up and sometimes they turned out to be people you wouldn't sit next to on a bus." The move away from swingers' ads in the newspaper came just in time, too; last year, the underground weekly Figaro canceled its "Companions" section of the classifieds and refused to accept any more swingers' ads. Ben now places a general "couples ad" in the underground newspaper Gris-Gris every week.

As in many other cities, organized swinging in New Orleans appears to be the belated awakening of conservative middle-class nonprofessionals who have recently decided they wanted something more out of their sex lives than their own mates or occasional unconfessed adultery. They are part of what appears to be the second American sexual revolution: people over 35 who lead otherwise perfectly straight, suburban lives and who missed out on the youthful upheavals and new sexual freedom of the Sixties. Now it is their turn.

"I have been married for 15 years," says Jim, who drives two hours every Saturday from Biloxi, Mississippi, with his stunning blonde wife, Karen, 34 going on 25, to join other couples at the swingers' mixer. "For the first five years, I didn't do anything. Then for about seven years, I started going out with my buddies and screwing around--without telling Karen. You'd think screwing around with your best friend would be great, right? But it wasn't. One day I said, 'Why not screw around with your really best friend?' That's when I got Karen into swinging. Now it means more than ever, because we're closer than we were before."

New Orleans swingers most frequently use motel rooms or, occasionally, private homes for their get-togethers. Every two or three months, the club organizes what it calls a social in a larger hotel or country club outside town. To the unwitting, the 20 to 24 couples who show up for the event appear to be just another trade association or private club having a weekend cocktail hour. What they don't know is that the group has reserved an entire floor of the hotel, and that half the mattresses have been dragged into one room, turning it into a wall-to-wall sexual playground. "We make sure to get the mattresses back in our rooms before the maids show up in the morning," laughs Ben.

There is an almost religious zeal in the voices of some of the swingers, including a handful of surprisingly young couples, who have converted to swinging like taking up a new faith.

"It's inspiring," says Gretchen, an interior designer. "It's so inspiring that the man can get off sometimes six, seven times in one evening. I mean, this is for a guy who normally can go only three times in a night at the most."

"The thing you like is seeing your lady get satisfied," says Ryan, her lover.

Lonnie and Brock go to the club during the winter but favor a local nudist camp in the summer. Although it's nominally a family camp, a number of couples hit it off so well on the volleyball court that they have taken their games into the privacy of the bedrooms. "You have to be very discreet," says Brock. "It's all behind closed doors. But you can always tell the other swingers by a certain look in their eyes. And at the camp, the nice thing is that you can see exactly what you're going to get beforehand."

Light drug use is popular among New Orleans swingers, who favor marijuana ("Everybody smokes," says one) or homebrewed MDA, the renowned "love potion." "The nice thing about MDA is that it lasts four or five hours and gets better toward the end," says one swinger. "On the roll-off, you feel incredibly sexy." Cocaine, they say, is rarely used.

Swingers in southern Louisiana are at great pains to keep their lifestyle a secret. Most of them are the last people their friends and colleagues would suspect of swapping their wives or girlfriends every weekend. Some are Government employees, others small businessmen, another in the Navy, and so forth.

Nonorganized swinging seems to be the more common pastime of people with money and names to protect. "We don't ever talk about swapping," explains a wealthy New Orleans businessman who keeps a cottage and a girlfriend in the French Quarter. "Everybody just gets loaded and it happens."

•

Ultimately, New Orleans is an orgasm waiting to happen. As a city, it is the San Francisco of the South--devoted to the twin pursuits of hedonism and style. It is a city of limited material ambitions, which partially explains why Houston (to the west) and Atlanta (to the east) have bypassed New Orleans as commercial hubs of the New South. "Achievement is the one thing nobody here gives a shit about," says one medium achiever. "Partying is what is important to us." Yet it is for the same reasons an urban place that retains the beauties and benefits of that lifestyle, with equal parts of history, comfort and modernization combining to produce an easy pace, a sensuous atmosphere and sufficient money to enjoy them both. It is a town, says one young New Orleans woman, "where you can be whatever you want and people will still leave you alone."

Welcome to New Orleans.

"When not swaying or dancing, the girls don see-through tops and hustle drinks and tips."

" 'It's part of the fiber of this city that we allow everything. The French Quarter is an aphrodisiac.' "

(Text continued on page 222. "Sex and the Law in New Orleans" follows on page 220.)

Sex and the Law in New Orleans

Historically, New Orleans has always had an enlightened attitude toward commercial sin. The city fathers were the first in the nation to wrestle with the notion of a legalized red-light district. In the late 19th Century, prostitution was so generally tolerated by a corrupt police department that it flourished and spread throughout the residential districts of the city. Outrage eventually turned to outcry: It was left to a city alderman named Sidney Story to introduce an ordinance that restricted "bawds and houses of assignation" to a 20-square-block area along Basin Street. To Story's everlasting dismay, the area became known as Storyville. (Years later, Boston would adopt the same strategy of restricting commercial sex to an area known as the Combat Zone.)

For exactly 20 years, Storyville prospered as a combination sin pit and fun house for the Middle South. Eventually, Uncle Sam intervened. Storyville was declared a hazard to military men during World War One and laws were introduced to banish prostitution. The lasting legacy of Storyville is its contribution to American jazz--some 200 musicians, including Jelly Roll Morton, performed nightly in large whorehouses. The combination of sex and showbiz infiltrates the legal code.

For example, one law declares that "Any courtesan, bawd, lewd woman or similar inmate of a bawdyhouse, house of prostitution or assignation, brothel or house of bad reputation or any woman convicted of prostitution or loitering in a house of prostitution who shall be employed singing or dancing in any bawdyhouse, in a public or private place or resort ... shall be guilty of a misdemeanor."

Section 63-18 of the Municipal Criminal Code forbids "an entertainer wearing the clothing of opposite sex mingling with the public attending any place of entertainment." In short, New Orleans has laws against various forms of behavior where most cities don't even have behavior.

New Orleans has laws on the books that could, if the need arose, be used to harass and arrest fledgling sex businesses. For example, it is against the municipal code for massage parlors to lock their doors during business hours. The obscenity laws define nudity in such a way as to eliminate most of what you see on disco dance floors: "Nudity is defined as the showing of the human male or female genitals, pubic area or buttocks with less than a full opaque covering or the showing of the female breast with less than a full opaque covering of any portion thereof below the top of the nipple or the depiction of covered male genitals in a discernibly turgid state." If you get excited, guys, don't show it.

The city statutes against obscenity are quite detailed: "Hard-core sexual conduct is the public portrayal for its own sake and for ensuing commercial gain of: (A) ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual, simulated or animated, whether between human beings, animals or an animal and a human being...." If Mickey Mouse ever makes a move on Minnie, it will be against the law in New Orleans.

But law and enforcement of the law are two different things. As soon as Uncle Sam left New Orleans, the local police readopted the community standard that had condoned Storyville. Today, virtually all of the city's commercial sin--from prostitution to phony massage parlors to peep shows--is localized in the French Quarter. It is as though one passes through a curtain when crossing Canal Street, North Rampart Street or Esplanade Avenue into the Quarter.

Bar girls are relatively free to ply their trade. But heat on street-corner hookers has increased--in part because of the epidemic in prostitution-related crimes such as mugging and assault. The New Orleans vice squad keeps systematic pressure on the corner trade--mostly on Iberville and Decatur streets--while leaving what one deputy police chief calls the "honorable professional" alone. How do officers enforce the law?

To make a case, as the cops call it, an officer must be propositioned, undressed, exchange the money and let the hooker try to start making love to him. At that point, he flashes his badge and calls in his vice-squad partner, who can then testify in court that he saw both the girl and the other cop naked together. The funny part is deciding just when to flash the badge. In New Orleans, the police like to let the girls try to begin a blow job so they can be charged with section 14-89--"crime against nature"--which is a felony. Simple prostitution is a misdemeanor. By nailing the girl for trying to have oral sex with him, "we get the girls in a position where they will usually plea-bargain for the prostitution charge," explains police department information officer Lieutenant Frank Hayward.

"It is important that the officer stop the girl just before she goes down on him," says a former vice detective. "Otherwise, he becomes a principal in the case. Once we asked an old judge what it would actually take to get the 'crime against nature' conviction. He thought about it for a few minutes and then said, 'Oh, about three sucks should do.' "

Actually, no number of sucks will do, according to the guys running the vice squad today. "As a felony, a crime against nature requires trial by a six-person jury," says Sergeant Danny Lawless of the vice squad.

"And what you can't do in these cases is give the jurors anything they can identify with," says vice-squad detective Wayne Jusselin. "We once tried someone for a crime against nature and she was acquitted. When we make cases against pornography stores, we try not to show the jurors books or movies that they can watch and start thinking, Hey, I'm going home and try that tonight myself."

"Our attitude is that there is no such thing as victimless crime," explains Hayward. Yet the realities of life in the country's most sensuous city have forced police to practice a certain double standard. While over 300 prostitution arrests were made in New Orleans last year--many of them violence-prone transvestite streetwalkers--only 60 cases made it to court.

In keeping with its own macho spirit, however, it apparently never occurred to New Orleans authorities to arrest men as well as women in the act of paid sex. While the vice squad has included female cops, they are never sent out as decoy hookers on "John patrols" to nab unsuspecting horny men, as has been the practice in such grim antisex campaigns as the Miami Police Department is waging.

New Orleans police are trying to bring a steady pressure onto the porn trade, but with only moderate success. "We are trying to get to the suppliers and distributors," explains one vice cop, pointing out that the center of the wholesale action appears to be in Atlanta. You can see and buy almost anything you want in New Orleans--except kiddie porn, where even the smut-minded draw a line of respectability. "One guy who runs an adult bookstore told me that when he receives a box of pictures showing children doing it, he returns it without even taking them out of the carton," says vice-squad detective Rickey Bruce. "He knows that would go beyond the community standard and we would have a case against him."

Sex and the Sons of the South

"We have a saying around here," says a scraggly bearded junior in the Zeta Beta Tau house at Tulane University. "The only reason to fuck a Newcomb bitch is because you're too lazy to whack off."

"Newcomb pussies all smell."

"How would you know? You've never fucked one!"

This is the tenor of the conversation in a crowded bedroom at the ZBT house on Broadway. It is early Friday evening and sex is on everybody's mind and lips. Not because it's Friday, mind you. In Tulane frat houses, where the sons of the South (and their brothers from the rest of the country) major in the fine art of partying, they think of sex seven days a week. Most of their general frustration is directed at Tulane's 3658 coeds, known among the college's 5975 men as Newcomb bitches because they are technically enrolled in Newcomb College, a part of Tulane. The bearded brother sets the tone:

"I'm into butt fucking. But you definitely ain't gonna find any on this campus. Back home in Charleston, you give a girl a 'Lude, you can damn near do anything you want."

"If you can get her to take the 'Lude."

"Yeah. Give a girl coke and she'll just disco all night."

The Zebes, who are not even regarded as the leading animal house, have a special dispensation: Any freshman who makes it with a Newcomb bitch in the telephone booth on the first floor of the house during rush can become a brother without passing through the dread initiation rites. "Last year, a couple of guys misunderstood the rules," says one brother. "They went downtown and got this black hooker and fucked her in the phone booth, right in front of everybody. We didn't make them brothers, but we did name the telephone booth after them."

College kids are full of such wondrous tales. Members of Beta Theta Pi pride themselves on an annual party where they force their dates to crawl through a maze in the basement. Mattresses and boxes of condoms are located at strategic points in the dark. Beta Theta Pi holds current title to the leading animal house at Tulane, chiefly because the rich and celebrated Dekes (Delta Kappa Epsilon) are "off-campus," or on probation. Among other traditional atrocities--such as forcing pledges to fuck a goat, trying to work Tabasco sauce up a girl's panties with one's toe during dinner and surprising an outcoming deb by placing one's member over her shoulder during a dinner party--it seems a pledge was seriously injured a year or two ago.

Not everybody at Tulane lives in an animal house. Many of the women live in Butler Hall, which is reserved for freshmen and thus known as virgin territory. The guys across McAllister Drive in Phelps Hall have got the southern flank of Butler plotted on a grid; they train their telescopes on the windows at night and pass out coordinates whenever anybody scopes a good show.

Last year, Jambalaya, the school's yearbook, took a sex poll. Two hundred randomly mailed questionnaires produced 35 respondents--17 female, 18 male. Three of each gender reported themselves to be virgins, a somewhat lower figure than conversations with students would lead one to believe. The consensus at the Beta and ZBT houses is that 80 percent of the Tulane women are as yet unspoiled.

"Due to the shortage of females," says Jerry Pepper, former director of advertising for the school newspaper, the Hullabaloo, "you sort of get an unstated, unwritten agreement among the guys that you share. Just because the numbers are against you, if your roommate has a girlfriend and he goes away for a weekend, well, you might get to know her really well...." Pepper, like many well-heeled Tulaners, lives in an apartment offcampus.

The girls favor guys with offcampus apartments, where privacy is assured and some fairly fancy sexual acrobatics can be practiced. "One weekend, my roommate broke a chair, a coffee table and even a crystal vase on the mantelpiece," says one astonished student: "They got it on everywhere."

The drugs of choice at Tulane, besides alcohol, follow the national collegiate pattern: marijuana for general use, Quaaludes for sex ($3.50--$5 a pop) and, because of the extraordinary affluence of the school, a fair share of cocaine.

Then there was the fellow with the bag of nitrous oxide slung over his shoulder at last year's zany Beaux Arts ball at the school of architecture. "He had it rigged to give people little hits from a tube he had running between his legs," laughed one coed. "To get a hit, you had to bend down like you were giving him head. It was nice."

(Text continued on page 226. "Playboy's Telephone Survey" follows on page 225.)

Playboy's Telephone Survey

The natives of New Orleans do not have a high regard for the rest of the country. When we asked 545 randomly selected people between the ages of 18 and 40 to rate the sexual temperature of their city against that of five other cities, we discovered an interesting division: The people who answered our survey gave themselves a fairly high temperature of 75 degrees (and 59 percent thought that it was on the rise). In contrast, they ranked Los Angeles a mere 60, Miami a modest 63, Chicago a 69, New York a 77 and Las Vegas an 84. The average of their ratings (71) is lower than the average rating we obtained in Chicago (74) and much lower than the average rating we obtained in Miami (83).

Most Orleanians liked their city: 86 percent thought there was a lot to do; 38 percent thought it was a great place to live. They were backed by 41 percent who thought things were good. When we asked the citizens to agree or disagree with certain statements about New Orleans, we found that natives had a relatively pristine view of their city. Fewer than half of the respondents (48 percent) thought that New Orleans had become more permissive in the past five years.

Fifty-seven percent thought that organized crime had a free hand in the New Orleans area.

Seventy-four percent thought that drug use had increased over the past five years.

Seventy-one percent thought that if a person wanted to gamble in the New Orleans area, he could find some action.

Forty-nine percent thought that there had been an increase in the number of adult bookstores.

Eighty-two percent acknowledged the existence of gay bars in the area.

Fifty-seven percent knew of places where prostitution was openly practiced; 44 percent thought that the police were closing their eyes to the oldest profession.

Those figures are the lowest to date in our survey of American cities. Local politicians claim that most of the sex in New Orleans is for the tourists, that the natives of the city are a fairly decent crew. Perhaps. What we can say is that they are rather restrained in their support of the sexual revolution. When it came to erotic movies, porn or prostitution, they were less likely than the citizens of the other cities we surveyed to think that such activities should be allowed, to know someone who engaged in such activities or to engage in them themselves.

Adult Movies: Fifty-eight percent of the people we polled thought that adult films should be allowed in the New Orleans area. Sixty-two percent knew someone who had been to an X-rated flick, while only 35 percent had gone themselves. Slightly more than a third of those reported that they had enjoyed the experience.

Pornography: Only 48 percent of the people with whom we talked thought that adult bookstores should be allowed in New Orleans. Forty-six percent said they knew someone who had visited a porn shop, but only 26 percent reported having browsed in one. While a relatively high percentage of those (42 percent) reported having purchased erotic material, an even higher 50 percent found those purchases stimulating. And only one out of four of the people we polled had ever opened a sex manual such as The Joy of Sex.

Prostitution: Only 33 percent of the people thought that the oldest profession should be allowed to practice in the streets of New Orleans. A significantly higher percentage (52 percent) thought massage parlors were OK. Twenty percent knew someone who had been to a prostitute, but barely one percent had been themselves.

Homosexuality: Fifty-seven percent of the people we interviewed thought that gay bars should be allowed to exist. Thirty-four percent knew someone who had been to a gay bar, while a surprising 17 percent had gone to one.