The lights are low. Couples stand, embracing each other, eyes on a dark-haired man and his partner—a blond beauty with fake breasts—in the middle of a circular bed. He is on his back as she hovers over his body, rocking back and forth. They are fully aware they are the center of attention. The man, especially, gets pleasure from making eye contact with all who are watching. Although he orgasms a few minutes later, their motions are fluid. Now it’s her turn. As the woman peaks, she holds her breasts and moans, moving her hips quickly back and forth. Soon their bodies relax and the crowd releases their breath. The show is over.

The room smells of sweat and sex.

This is a typical Saturday night at Twist, a large, two-story warehouse in North Beach, where couples go to swap partners or to simply watch others be intimate.

Lana and Yuri, owners of the club, moved to San Francisco from Russia ten years ago and are not only swingers but artists as well. They create their art on canvas and transfer it onto a thin, almost see-through material to make dresses and shirts in colorful, abstract designs. The canvases and clothing adorn the walls and racks of Twist’s first floor. The round bed takes much of the space on the second floor.

“This is a big city with a lot of swingers,” says Lana, a petite and curvy forty-year-old woman with short, platinum blond hair, “and we thought, ‘Wow. Let’s do something.’” Her fresh face and sincere smile display enthusiasm. “We knew what to do, how to make people happy, and how to organize everything.”

Each Saturday night, the racks of clothes are moved away and the mannequins are pushed up against the walls to make room for a dance floor. Strobe lights and a smoke machine add a club-like touch to the storefront while a DJ switches disks and sets the mood. A silver pole, normally not there during the week, has a place off to the side. Drapes are pulled down over the windows to keep nosey passer-bys from having a look, and a movie screen takes up most of the back wall where the silhouette of a naked girl gyrates to the music. Couples begin to trickle in a little after ten p.m.

Among the first to arrive are long-time friends of Lana and Yuri, another Lana and her husband Ron. They met at a sex club ten years ago. Ron was in another relationship at the time but broke it off to be with Lana. Living the swinger lifestyle is something they will never stop doing, they say.

“We don’t hook up with just anybody or everybody, every time. We are very picky about the couples we like,” says Lana. “But we mainly come to the parties because we have friends here.” Ron and Lana are parents to a baby boy and don’t have time to attend as many parties as they used to, but they do manage to make it out once every couple of months.

There is a second Ron at the party. He’s fifty-one and married to a thirty-six-year-old. He has been a swinger for fifteen years and feels it’s “cheating without cheating, because you always go home with the partner you came with.” He reasons that since most couples are going to be unfaithful to each other at some point in their relationship, why not be honest about it and have fun at the same time.

There are swinger parties taking place all over San Francisco at a variety of venues every week. The website MySwingClubs.com lists twenty-three places in the city and some in the surrounding Bay Area. Some are on-premise parties where the socializing and “sexcapades” take place at the same location, like Twist. Others are off-premise hosted at clubs or bars, which leaves it up to the people to organize their own activities elsewhere if they choose. The number of actual swingers in San Francisco is hard to pinpoint since not all are registered with an online swinger database and many are not outwardly comfortable with addressing their lifestyle. Swinger websites have slogans like, “Thousands of swingers in the Bay Area!” but that could mean anywhere from three thousand to nine thousand, so it’s hard to say.

Being a swinger in this society usually comes with a negative connotation., because it goes against tradition, monogamy and God. But the couples at Twist don’t feel this way.

Being swingers made Yuri and Lana’s relationship better. Much better in fact, according to Lana. Yuri complements Lana with his warm blue eyes and a slightly wrinkled face—probably from fifty years of laughing. His hair is graying but there is a youth and passion about him. Together they are vibrant and feed off each other’s energy. The words “jealousy” and “envy” don’t have a legitimate place in their vocabulary.
“When I see Yuri like somebody very much, what I really feel is happiness,” says Lana, her blue eyes shining. “It’s like ‘Wow! He likes somebody, somebody likes him.’ When you’ve been together for a long time, you see each other in one angle. But this [swinger lifestyle] is an opportunity to see yourself and your partner from another side, in a new light.”

Yuri asks Ivan, his friend and coworker at Twist, to reword what he’s trying to say. “To show my jealousy is insulting,” Ivan translates from Russian. “It’s also shameful, not because I feel it, but because it is inside of me. It’s my weakness to be jealous.”

People of all ages, sizes, and looks can be found at Twist. On this night, the youngest is twenty-two and the oldest is over fifty. A younger couple is dressed in all black and sits on a bench along the wall, holding hands and looking scared. It’s their first night at a swinger party like this, although they admit to previously going to the Power Exchange. “It felt much darker and grittier there,” says Angie in a softly, barely audible voice over the loud music. “He made me go,” she nods to her boyfriend, Cris. Last week at the Power Exchange, Angie and Cris were having sex in one of the rooms. They were facing the wall and didn’t notice the crowd of ten people watching them until they were done. Although Cris says he’d only swap if she were okay with it, Angie admits she is nervous to do a complete swap.

This is the case with many couples—they are not necessarily full swingers just because they attend a party.

For some, they prefer to invite a single woman into their relationship to mix it up now and then, while others like to watch people having sex because it arouses them as a pretense to intimacy later in the night. Mainly, the environment at Twist’s Saturday night parties is warm and inviting. People can dance and mingle downstairs, sip on drinks, and make friends. If they connect on some level and choose to become intimate, they are allowed upstairs. However, only couples are allowed upstairs, and no alcohol is permitted. Even the drinking is kept to a minimum during the parties. Since Twist is not licensed to serve alcohol, people bring their own, which is kept with a bartender who mixes the drinks as needed. Drugs are definitely not permitted, and anyone acting too intoxicated or being inappropriate is asked to leave immediately.

Unlike some swinger clubs in the city that have the reputation for selecting their members based on looks, Twist does not do that. “Some parties do face control,” says Yuri. “I don’t like to judge people. People know better than me what to do. That’s why I just make the environment for them and let them select themselves.”