I went to a swingers club in the West Midlands on a Saturday night expecting to feel deeply out of place. I expected lasciviousness, a certain seediness, an atmosphere that would make me want to leave after twenty minutes. I expected the club to look like I imagined it would look, which is to say something between a nightclub in a 1990s film and something considerably worse.
None of that happened. What happened was considerably more interesting and considerably more ordinary.
Getting there
The club is in a trading estate. This is apparently standard. You follow a postcode to what looks like a light industrial unit, park among other ordinary cars, and walk through a door with no signage that identifies what's inside. The discretion is total from the outside. From the inside, it's a licensed bar with warm lighting, decent music at a manageable volume, and about sixty people spread across two floors.
The people. This was the first thing that surprised me. I had expected a particular type. What I found was something much closer to the general population of a Saturday night in any UK town. Couples in their thirties, forties, and fifties, mostly. People who looked like they had jobs and mortgages and opinions about the cost of living. Not a room full of people who looked like they'd arrived from a fantasy. A room full of people who'd simply decided to spend their Saturday evening somewhere different from most of their neighbours.
The social part
The first hour was genuinely just socialising. People at the bar, in the lounge area, on the sofas. Conversations about where people had come from, how long they'd been doing this, what they thought of the venue. The couple I ended up talking to for most of the early evening, a teacher and an engineer from Coventry, had been coming to this club for three years. They were warm, funny, and entirely normal in every way that mattered.
The teacher said something that stuck with me. She said the thing that most people don't understand about the lifestyle is that most of the evening is just being with people you enjoy. The other stuff, she said, is almost incidental. What keeps them coming back is the community.
I thought about that for most of the rest of the evening, because the more I observed the room, the more accurate it seemed. The conversations weren't charged with obvious purpose. They were just conversations. Good ones, actually. The shared context of why everyone was there seemed to produce a particular ease and directness that you don't often find in ordinary social settings.
The other parts
The play areas were on the second floor. I went up once, briefly, out of journalistic obligation rather than personal interest. It was dim, it was quiet, it was people who had found each other and were entirely focused on each other. Nobody paid any attention to me. There was no performance. There was a privacy to it that I genuinely hadn't expected.
What struck me was how little resemblance it bore to the pornographic idea of what these spaces look like. It was quieter. More human. More intimate, in the literal sense of the word, than I had any framework for.
I went back downstairs and had another drink with the teacher and the engineer.
What I actually found
The UK swinging scene, at least in this particular corner of it, is not what its coverage in mainstream media suggests. It is not desperate or seedy or populated by people with broken relationships looking for something to fill a gap. It is populated by people who are, by most measures, doing rather well: in secure relationships, with stable lives, who have made a considered decision about how they want to spend some of their time.
The stigma attached to it, which is considerable, seems to have almost nothing to do with what it actually is. The harm that's supposed to exist is largely absent. The community functions, by its own lights, with more explicit attention to consent and communication than most social environments I've spent time in.
I left around midnight. The couple from Coventry said goodbye warmly. A few other people I'd spoken to waved. It felt, more than anything else, like leaving a social event among people who'd looked after me well for an evening. Which is, apparently, what it was.
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