Be warned that if you go to American Swing expecting sordid tales and salubrious images, you won’t be disappointed. The documentary—opening today at the Quad Cinema in New York City, and in Los Angeles on April 3—spins the tale of Plato’s Retreat, a heterosexual sex club for swingers that first opened its doors in 1977.

The venue combined aspects of Studio 54, with disco dancing and wild performances, along with those of a public bathhouse, with sweaty naked bodies in intimate interaction. But as several interviewees point out, at times, it also could resemble a bar mitzvah with its free (with admission cover) all-night buffet of ribs, fried chicken, potato salad, and cole slaw, among other delicacies. The buffet is an apt metaphor for the different individuals (or rather, couples, as singles were not allowed in the club) who congregated at the venue looking for connection. Their memories of Platos’ Retreat are generally warm and nostalgic for a lost time, a utopia of sorts in which “nobody made fun of you.”
 
At its center was founder and owner Larry Levenson, a middle-class young man who believed that he fell in love with every woman with whom he slept, even if it meant falling in love several times a day. He was a charismatic ringleader, a Barnum of Babes, and his main babe was Mary, credited with working all the logistics of running the space and of creating its iconic logo. In the film, Mary is an interesting subject—the tension between her public persona as Larry’s muse and partner and her private inner conflict about wanting a traditional relationship finally surfaces when her jealous lover, their chauffeur, allegedly has Levenson beaten up. Levenson survives, but Mary eventually suffers a breakdown and is hospitalized at Bellevue. 

In media appearances, Levenson made a good case for swinging, and, to his credit, never claimed it was for everyone: “Swinging and Plato’s Retreat will not save a bad marriage.” Screw magazine publisher Al Goldstein’s insight on Levenson is keen and called him “boring because his whole life was sex and he never read a book or had a thought.” Levenson’s self-crowning as the “King of Swing” betrayed a simplemindedness that eventually would be Plato’s downfall as the IRS gets ahold of its shady accounting and he’s carried off to prison for tax evasion.

One of Platos’ utopian aspects was its seeming egalitarian ethos. It was the “poor man’s Playboy mansion.” Women in particular were to be empowered by freely expressing their sexuality and being encouraged to be aggressive in pursuit of partners. But there’s more than a hint of the enforcement of a compulsory heterosexuality that allowed for women to “play” with other women, but no such luck for men who wanted to experiment with men. Male homosexuality only appears significantly when AIDS arrives in the 1980s and nails the final coffin to Plato’s Retreat. When gender and sexuality lines are so firmly delineated, is this really a case of patriarchy subverted—as many of the documentary subjects assert—or reinforced? This was a place where people came to forget who they were and to reinvent themselves as desirable and beautiful, where they were accepted no matter what they looked like or did for a living. Did the openness and generosity within Plato’s Retreat somehow translate outside its doors? Also, the archival footage show a space that was overwhelmingly white. In fact, the same photo of a single African American man appears three times in the course of the film, whereas little other archival material repeats. 

Filmmakers Mathew Kaufman and Jon Hart have done a fantastic job of finding and interviewing Platos’ participants and staff. (In particular, Annie and Charlie, Plato’s managers, are a hoot.) The breadth of interviewees is vast and they conjure up a nostalgic memory of a magical place. No one in the film has any regrets, and it’s remarkable when our media doesn’t punish people—especially women—for being sexual.