Naomi Harris
Over the past five years, Naomi Harris has been photographing swingers having big group-sex parties all across the United States. And then there was that very photogenic crock-pot filled with gravy on the table next to a pile of biscuits on a paper plate which she photographed as well. It’s totally understandable, after watching all that writhing flesh, that gravy is what starts to look good through the lens.
–Gabrielle Paluch
L.A. CityBeat: Your new book America Swings is published as an art book by Taschen, but in a lot of ways it seems like what you’ve produced is an anthropological study. Which did you mean to do?
Naomi Harris: My intention with this work was to give people who don’t really have much of a voice some visibility. According to what we see in the media, the only people who have sex are young, attractive, and affluent, and that’s simply not the case in real life. People are old and wrinkly or fat, people have weird kinks, and that’s sex too, and those people deserve a voice as well. I’m not passing judgments, saying this way of life is good or bad, I’m simply trying to show this other side of American life that is just as American as what’s visible in the mainstream. The images have sexual content, but this isn’t erotic art, and the photos are not meant to be erotic – in that sense the concept does have an element of anthropological study.
What did you learn about human emotions like jealousy and love from the swingers you photographed?
Swingers say if you’re a jealous person, then swinging just really isn’t for you. I’ve learned from this that I’m really not capable of just shelving my jealousy like that, but when you talk to poly-amorous couples they’ll tell you that swinging keeps their relationships together. Sometimes, you’ll hear them say things like that, and a year later you see them again and they’re getting divorced, but not always. And then, you can’t even really say that the jealousy and swinging is ultimately what drove the couple apart. Swingers’ relationships are still fraught with all the same problems we see in conventional relationships, but who’s to say that there was no jealousy? I bet the Dalai Lama gets a little jealous sometimes, and there’s just nothing he can do about it. In the end you can really only talk about your own emotions, and the only conclusion I can really draw from going to these parties for five years is that I’m a very monogamous person, and that it’s not for me. I think jealousy is a very basic human emotion that all mammals experience, and it’s really impossible for a human being not to feel that way sometimes. It’s natural. In a way, swingers are saying that they’ve been able to evolve beyond jealousy. They often say they feel they’ve been able to go beyond the restrictions of conventions of marriage as something that’s sort of been put upon society. For me, seeing that much sex all the time just really kills my libido.
What about diseases?
There seems to be a relatively low incidence of sexually transmitted diseases at these parties. You’d think it would be rampant, especially because a lot of these people don’t always use protection; somehow it doesn’t really seem to come up that often.
Is there a lot of drug abuse?
It really varies depending on the group and the age. Some of the people I saw at these groups were getting extremely intoxicated beforehand, and some not. There was pretty much always booze around at the parties I went to. My opinion with swinging is that it’s like with karaoke – if you can’t do it stone cold sober, you shouldn’t be doing it. It kind of also makes me think that maybe some of the people who swing maybe aren’t entirely comfortable with it after all, that it’s more about the fantasy, thinking it would be cool to try rather than actually going through with it. Or maybe they try it once and it’s really great, but then when they try it a second time it’s not really OK, but they do it again anyway hoping it’ll be as fun as that first time.
Any special, fun swinger-lingo you learned?
There are phrases to denote how far people will go, soft-swap versus full-swap, for example. Or if someone doesn’t like to swing they call them vanilla. Then there are unicorns, which are unattached, single women. They call them unicorns because they’re like the holy grail of conquests for swingers – attractive and rare.
You profiled an all-black male group in Florida, who have group sex with married white women while their husbands watch, called Mandingos. What interests you about this particular kink?
I think it’s fascinating because I don’t think it’s just about sex. I think the guys do it because they’re taking something back, sort of like they’re “sticking it to the man,” but through the woman. There seems to be a twofold motivation behind it for the white people who do it. These people are generally in their ’40s or ’50s, people who grew up in a time when interracial couples, especially in the South, just really weren’t permissible. So to them it seems perhaps quite avant-garde, or outrageous. The cuckolding phenomenon is the other aspect. A cuckold is in a relationship where the woman openly had affairs to humiliate the husband. Now it’s taken on a more extreme form where the husbands are actually present, and it’s still about humiliation. They’re being humiliated by watching their wives being pleasured by half a dozen men, and on one hand they think it’s exciting, but on the other hand it’s also humiliating. I was at one party I wasn’t allowed to photograph where, after encouraging the Mandingos to ejaculate on his wife’s face, the husband then took her to the bathroom and licked her face clean. So I think that’s pretty much about as humiliating as you can get.
Is there ever an exchange of money in these situations?
I’m not really sure, I think it may be by donation.
Like a yoga class?
Maybe a similar concept, I don’t know.
Published: 11/06/2008
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