Six people arrested at swingers party in Wichita

Five women and one man were arrested for performing sex acts just after midnight Sunday at a west Wichita club. Click to read more.

Sex Swingers As Seen By Naomi Harris

Sex Swingers As Seen By Naomi Harris

Most Europeans see the United States under the ultra-conservative administration of George W. Bush as a prudish country, where millions of citizens are outraged by a fleeting glimpse of singer Janet Jackson’s nipple during a live TV broadcast, where there is an ongoing struggle to ban the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in schools, where exhibitions featuring provocative works are censored, and where a growing number of young people voluntarily maintain sexual abstinence before marriage. However, there exists a different United States – a country of a flourishing pornographic industry, a United States of sex clubs behind whose doors the wildest erotic dreams are made reality, a United States of millions of swingers, people who swap sexual partners and voluntarily have sex in front of an audience at a variety of parties and camps.

It is this part of America that the thirty-four year old Canadian photographer Naomi Harris depicts in her cycle Swingers, which is to be brought out in book form in 2008 by the renowned Cologne publishers Taschen, with a foreword by the famous US artist Richard Prince. In 1997 Naomi Harris, a graduate of art and psychology at York University in Toronto, enrolled in a nine-month course of photojournalism and photographic documentary at the International Center for Photography in New York, and since that time she has lived in America’s largest city, where she makes a living largely from photographic work for a variety of periodicals – her pictures have been published for instance in the New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, People, Sports Illustrated, Out, and Vanity Fair; in 2001 she was short-listed for the Eugene Smith Award. Alongside work on commission she also pursues her own work, mostly portraits and documentary projects. Among the best of those is her cycle Haddon Hall, capturing the inhabitants of a hotel of that name in Miami Beach, who are spending their retirement years under the Florida sun. Her sharply colored images are unflinching in showing the wrinkled skin, thick layers of make-up and affected smiles, and yet the cycle does not come across as sarcastic or mocking, since the artist’s sympathy for these people who do not give in to infirmity and old age, instead wanting to enjoy life to the full, is palpable.During her sojourns in Miami Beach, which she revisited over the course of two and a half years, Harris began taking photographs at the local nudist beech, becoming alive to the fact that even the most banal activities when conducted by people stripped of their clothes often look comical. This she later confirmed in her most extensive cycle so far, Swingers. The exchange of sexual partners and group sex at various swingers parties, swingers conventions, or Miss Swingers USA or Canada, are more widespread than most local citizens suspect – according to the North American Swing Association there are around three million swingers in America. Many of those live neither in Manhattan nor in Hollywood, but in somnolent suburbs, among regular, middle class folk. As Naomi Harris describes them thus – they are your schoolteachers, your doctors, your bank clerks, your cops. They are not perverts or porn stars. You pass them every day in the supermarket, on the highway, in an airport, in the post office line. These very same inconspicuous and ordinary people every now and then leave their kids at home and set out on wild parties and weekend revelries, where they realize their sexual longings with a number of different partners.Looking at these people, often neither young nor attractive, as captured by Naomi Harris in situations evoking scenes from porn films, we may ask how is it possible that the photographer ever gained their consent to be photographed and even have the images published. Though most swingers are possessed with a powerful degree of exhibitionism, many – and in the vast majority the younger ones – in fact refused to be photographed. Sander-like in composition, the portraits of the people in the center of the image staring directly into the camera are reminiscent of the photographs of Diane Arbus, incidentally an artist whom Naomi Harris holds in great respect. The people in front of the camera believe they look attractive and dignified, while in fact they strike the viewer as bizarre, grotesque, and often also desperately lonely. This impression is frequently assisted by their ridiculous costumes, designed to gain attention at theme-oriented parties. Even more absurd, however, are the images of various sexual acts, in which the artist pointedly juxtaposes parallel actions (e.g., a supine woman is being orally aroused, while another woman looks on, cleaning her teeth), or action and environment (sexual revelry in a swimming pool with a floating plastic duck). The people in front of the camera know that it is there, yet they ignore its presence; so great is the trust that Naomi Harris has succeeded to win, and so scant is their sense of shame, overridden by their pride in their sexual prowess and ability to carry out the wildest of fantasies. The visual qualities of Swingers also play an important role, with their imaginative use of color and natural lighting, as well as compelling composition, which often present but a fragment of the dramatic action, leaving wide open space for imagination. Naomi Harris claims that in her photographs she does not want to pass judgment, merely to document this fast growing yet so far little publicly presented phenomenon of contemporary American life, so full of sexual gymnastics, and so devoid of eroticism.

Vladimír Birgus FOTOGRAF 10/2007

Swinging's their thing...

By MIKE STROBEL
Wed, February 6, 2008
Swinging's their thing ...

We should all pile in the family wagon and see what the heck is going on down in Viagra, I mean Niagara, Falls.

The Cheese Capital of Canada never fails to amaze.

Where else in the world can you imagine a daredevil in a barrel surviving the plunge only to drown in a heart-shaped bathtub?

Where else are wax figures and whack-a-moles the biggest ethnic groups?

Where else could an army of swingers, and I don't mean Tarzan, take over a major hotel and convention centre?

Charles Blondin, meet Sexyboots.

Both acrobats, but in different ways.

Blondin walked a tightrope across the Falls.

Sexyboots, well, she just walks a tightrope.

"There's a fine line between love and lust," she tells me down the line from her home in Barrie.

"I can love my husband, but lust after someone else."

And vice versa.

Sexyboots is not her real name.

"We're where gays were 50 years ago, when if you admitted it, your career and family and social life were ruined." So, Sexyboots it is. Let me guess.

"It'd be obvious if you saw me in a club," she says. "I have a large collection of 'hooker boots.' "
I hope the carpets at a certain Niagara Falls hotel are up to the challenge.

Two hundred couples will convene for a Valentine's Day weekend called Take A Bite Of The Apple (TABOTA).

This is not for the faint of heart.

The exact location is hush-hush.

(I'm sworn. But it's not Motel Sex ... um, Six.)

And single men are NOT welcome.

"It may seem like a double standard," says Sexyboots, 37, "but we find single men far too pushy. A lot of couples don't like that. They feel pressured.

"There's also the 'creep' factor. They're single for a reason."

By the by, don't call it "wife-swapping" or risk a face-slapping.

"Swinging" is still okay, but "The Lifestyle" and "lifestyler" are preferred. Rita DeMontis will be tickled, I'm sure.

The bumph from TABOTA organizers says this is the first hotel "takeover" by swingers in Canada.

A Super Bowl of group sex, with teams from the many clubs that dot Ontario, even bedroom communities like Barrie.

"A whole hotel works better," says Sexyboots. "Otherwise you might have a floor of swingers next to a floor of peewee hockey players.

"What I do in my bedroom is my business, but I have no right to expose my lifestyle to others.
"We won't be making out in the halls."

Mind you, the promo does promise "a hedonistic and sexually charged atmosphere."
Seminars include erotic photography and tantric sex.

The pool parties, speed-dating and theme dances sound like fun.

So do the group sex and bondage rooms. Gives "smoking floor" a whole new meaning.

Sexyboots will be there with her hubby, a computer guy who goes by Mr. Boots.

They were college sweethearts and have two kids.

She works for Queen's Park.

Five years ago, after he'd been hinting for months, she said, "Let's do it," and they went to a swingers' Halloween party dressed in army fatigues.

Isn't this adultery, Sexyboots?

"My definition of cheating is doing it behind your spouse's back.

"But I'm not. He's right there with me."

"Playing," swingers call it. As in: Listen, I'll play with Buffy over there, you play with Lars and Sven, and later we'll play Simon Says with Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, play a little Flying Burrito Brothers on the hi-fi and if we have any energy left, maybe play some Scrabble.

As the promo says: "What do committed couples do to relieve the seven-year itch? Scratch it together!!"

"Wha...?!" says Niagara Falls Mayor Ted Salci, just back from a chili cook-off.
Your honour, that's a real swingin' town you got down there.

"This is the first I've heard of it." He laughs.

"They're local people!?"

From all over. The hotel's not exactly broadcasting it.

"If they're law-abiding, I suppose it's fine."

Even in a God-fearing place like the Falls?

"Well, I won't be cutting any ribbons for them."

Too bad. There goes the swing vote.