They’re Standing up for the Swinger Lifestyle
They’re Standing up for the Swinger Lifestyle
…while also trying to start a business.
Warning: sexual content.
You’re about to learn a new lexicon, a secret vocabulary with symbols that includes “vanilla,” “unicorn,” and an upside down pineapple.
Sex sells, generally speaking, but sex between couples who swap partners doesn’t sell as well as you might think.
I’m a social libertarian. Whatever consenting adults do behind closed doors is their business, as long as they don’t break the law or cause serious injuries. But “swinging” has never appealed to me. I don’t get it. I am what swingers call a “vanilla.”
But that’s just me. A sizable group does get it, inspiring entrepreneurs to create products and services that cash in on the lifestyle.
I worked at WTVJ in Miami in the mid-80s, an era of drugs, riots, and “Marielitos” fleeing Castro. I was a very young reporter, so I did all kinds of crazy stuff. I posed as a prostitute for a story on AIDS. I witnessed someone being disconnected from life support as part of a news segment on living wills. As drugs took over the city, a man cooked up a piece of crack cocaine for me that his mother smoked on camera. And when I pitched a series called “Jobs Nobody Wants,” I profiled a proctologist, convincing one of his patients to let us videotape an exam.
Miami was insane back then. I was insane back then. I mean, look at that hair.
In 1987 I talked my way into a South Florida swingers club for a story I called “Swing Your Partner.” The couples were generous with their time, telling me what attracted them to the lifestyle and why they didn’t think it was adulterous to have sex with someone else’s spouse if your own spouse was playing along. “I’ve been swinging 18 years, there might’ve been, I don’t know, a thousand women in that 18 years,” a man named Jack told me, “but I have never cheated on my wife.”
The story was very provocative, very Miami, and very Jane. What a long time ago! I never do stories like that anymore!
And then…
A year ago, a couple named Dan and Lacy reached out to me on Twitter about a man named Jeff Abraham. I’ve known Jeff for years. He built up a company that sells Promescent, a spray to prevent premature ejaculation (of course I did that story). Dan wanted a little information about Jeff as he and Lacy prepared to interview him for their podcast, “The Swing Nation.”
The WHAT Nation??
I quickly did a little googling and discovered that Dan and Lacy had a TikTok account where they talk about sharing sexual partners. Their videos have accumulated hundreds of millions of views, and I asked Dan why they’re so public about their sex lives. He told me they wanted to fight the stigma attached to their unconventional lifestyle.
“If you’re ever looking to do a piece on swingers and the very real discrimination the non-monogamous community still faces today,” Dan wrote me, “let us know.”
So here I am, nearly 40 years later, reporting on swingers again, but from a different perspective, and with a morsel of maturity. This is the story of how two divorcees discovered swinging, found each other, took to TikTok, got outed, and embraced the publicity. Now they want to make a living at it. Because this is America, and you’re on Wells $treet.
How It Started
“We were both in the lifestyle before we met each other,” Lacy tells me via Zoom as the two were heading to a non-monogamous weekend event they’d organized.
(Dan and Lacy don’t want to reveal their last names or occupations, and they’ll only say they live in the Southeast.)
Lacy was divorced and started dating a guy who told her about a club in Nashville “where you can go and watch people having sex.” It was a swingers club. “That intrigued me,” she says.
So they went and watched. “He was extremely uncomfortable,” she laughs, “but I was all about it.”
They soon broke up, but Lacy joined the swinger community as a single person, called a “unicorn.” She became very popular. “There’s not a lot of single females in the lifestyle,” she tells me.
As for Dan, he also discovered swinging through a post-divorce relationship. “I didn’t have much sexual experience at all,” he says (he’d married his ex-wife right out of high school). “I was super curious.” He, too, eventually broke up with the woman he was dating but continued swinging as a single man. That’s where he met Lacy. They fell in love and got married, dropping their unicorn status to swing as a couple.
The Rules of Swinging
“I made a lot of mistakes,” Lacy says of her early swinging days. “I didn’t understand the rules and boundaries.”
Ground rules vary from couple to couple. In Dan and Lacy’s case, here are a few: All messaging among couples must be done in a group chat; everyone must wear protection; no sneaking off to have sex somewhere else. “We do all of our interactions in the same room,” Lacy says. She and Dan want to be together when they swing. Not everyone does, which is why communication is key. “Talk to your partner to get on the same page,” she cautions. “Make sure everything’s consensual.”
Don’t people get jealous and fall in love with someone else’s partner? Yes, but not often, they tell me. “Swingers are generally better at communicating than other couples,” Dan says.
How They Outed Themselves
Two years ago, Dan and Lacy thought it would be fun to make a TikTok video about swinging. They would keep their clothes on and not show their faces.
“We just didn’t think that people would find us,” Lacy says. However, “Our second or third video hit 11 million views.”
Word got out. Lacy grew up in a small Southern town, and news of her TikTok videos “spread like wildfire.” None of her friends and family knew she was a swinger or that she was bisexual. Everyone was shocked. “It was just like this perfect princess who they thought was a certain person… is not this person.”
She admits that she brought it on herself by going on TikTok, but she wishes she’d been able to tell her parents first. “It wasn’t so much that I was ashamed of being a swinger, because I wasn’t,” she says. “I was living my true authentic self for the first time in my life.”
So Lacy and Dan kept making videos. Sometimes their accounts would be taken down, and they’d have to start over. Dan says he was reported to his bosses because of his lifestyle, and Lacy quit her job when the workplace environment became “toxic.”
Rather than becoming quiet, though, the couple got louder. Dan and Lacy have become the public face of explaining the swinging lifestyle. They’re advocating for understanding and fighting discrimination. For example, they’ve supported a GoFundMe campaign to help one couple facing a child custody battle. “People are trying to use the fact that they’re in the lifestyle against them to prove that they’re somehow unfit to be a parent,” Dan says.
Lacy fears losing her own son from a previous marriage. She and Dan say they’ve shielded the boy from their activities, but as he gets older, Lacy has started to explain her marriage in vague terms. She’s told her son that she and Dan “support alternatives relationships,” and that “mom is kind of TikTok famous.”
I wanted to know how often they swing. “I get that question all the time,” Lacy laughs. “I think people think it’s a free for all, like an orgy every day.” In reality, Lacy and Dan say they swing about once a month. They also claim they never go to any swinging events in the town where they live, because they don’t want to run into someone they know.
THE BOTTOM LINE: How They Started Making Money
As much as I find Dan and Lacy’s backstory fascinating, this is allegedly a business newsletter. (Whoever said business is boring is living off someone else’s paycheck.)
As their TikTok audience grew, Dan and Lacy began thinking about how to monetize their new-found fame.
They started doing live Q&A’s on TikTok, but they kept answering the same questions over and over as people popped in and out of their “room.”
Someone suggested they launch a podcast where they could talk about issues in depth, and that sounded like a great idea. Maybe they could get sponsors! “We didn’t know anything,” Lacy jokes. “We had to Google how to hook up a microphone.”
They watched Youtube videos on how to start a podcast — because you can learn anything on Youtube — and spent $3,000 on high-quality equipment. A year and a half ago they launched “The Swing Nation.” They describe the podcast as “by swingers, for swingers, where we look to shed a positive light on the underground world of swinging, push back against the negative stigmas associated with the lifestyle, and give an insider’s perspective on what it’s like to be a consensual, non-monogamous couple in the 21st century.”
Their logo is an upside down pineapple, traditionally a symbol for swingers. Why? Dunno. (It makes me think of pineapple upside down cake, which I LOVE.)
Their podcast quickly became one of the most popular programs on swinging, as the two hosts mix true tales of living the lifestyle with discussions about protecting their community from backlash.
“There are a lot of people who are curious about this lifestyle, and there’s just not a lot of information,” Dan says. “We tell you everything you want to know, and we’re not gonna sugarcoat it.” Their chats can be R-rated, but I’ve never heard them go into NC-17 territory. (Yes, I’ve listened to a couple of episodes… for research purposes.)
But they’re not making much money yet. “Monetizing a podcast is a very difficult thing to do,” Dan admits. He and Lacy successfully landed sponsors who pay them a small royalty off purchases made through their endorsements. The couple has built a website, and they’re organizing swinger gatherings in cities like Nashville and Orlando through a second company called Swinger Society, where they also offer paid memberships.
Last year they bought out all the rooms at one venue and resold them at a slight premium. “Now we can turn that money and do it again and again,” says Lacy.
However, they can’t make money on the platform where they have their biggest audience, TikTok, because of the sexual content — even though there’s no nudity in their videos. “Constantly getting banned has definitely hindered our progress,” Dan tells me.
Still, he and Lacy are now earning enough from their pineapple passion to cover the bills, and Dan plans to retire soon from his day job. Then the two can focus full-time on their swinging side hustle.
More than anything, though, maybe even more than making money off their enterprise, Dan and Lacy would like people to cut them some slack. “Our whole community is in fear of someone finding out about them, which is crazy,” Lacy says. “People can cheat, and people can do horrible things, but we are consenting adults slipping away for a weekend here and there, and that makes people nervous.”
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Sooooooo. Whatd’ya think? Leave a comment, and I’m always looking for unusual business stories — email jane@janewells.com.
I was discussing polyamory and open marriages with my millenial daughter because she has some friends in an openly polyamarous marriage. She said they talk about it all the time and complain about the discrimination they face because of their lifestyle. Then, with an eye roll, she said, "Oh my god. Nobody cares."
I tolld her there was nothing new under the sun. My generation, and every generation before me had people who had certain "agreements" with their partners when it came to their sex lives. The difference between now and then was that previous generations kept it to themselves.
She told me that she would never say it publicly, but people in her generation get on her nerves sometimes because they seem to look for ways to draw attention to themselves so they feel special instead of just living their lives. That made me laugh.
Another lovely article on a wonderful topic - with a business angle. And you did not knock the lifestyle, without trying the lifestyle, Jane. Splendid!