Also “NO ONE ADMITTED FULLY DRESSED” and “WHEN THE FEMALE LEAVES THE MATS, HER MATE WILL BE ASKED TO LEAVE.” More on “the Mats” shortly. Such a couple arriving at Plato’s was made aware of the rules at the door. Plato’s, Levenson said, was a “couples club.”
His sincerely held rationale was that no man was monogamous, and that swinging would replace cheating. He was outspoken on this subject, saying he was bringing to the straight world the liberty of the gay clubs. As New York’s sex-oriented spaces were traditionally for gay men, Levenson was aware that offering a venue for public straight sex was breaking new ground. Until 1974, it had been home to the Continental Baths, a gay club where Bette Midler launched her career and a place where even Chubby Checker performed. Soon, Levenson was attracting such a following that the same year he moved his business into a more ample basement uptown, in the Ansonia Hotel, a handsome building on Broadway between West 73rd and 74th. His skills developed to such an extent that in 1977 he opened a space for swingers to mingle (and get down to it) in the basement of a small hotel on East 23rd Street between Lexington and Third Avenues. But after being plunged into the swingers’ milieu by a woman he met in a bar, he quickly decided he had found a calling that suited both his talents and his inclinations: swing parties. STRICTLY PLATONIC: Levenson in a bathrobe at Plato’s Retreat in 1980Ī friend of Goldstein’s from high school in Brooklyn, he had been working mundane jobs such as selling sodas in Coney Island and managing a McDonald’s. Larry Levenson was more than ready to ride this wave. In 1974, Goldstein launched the cable talk show Midnight Blue, and “porno chic” - a phrase coined that year by Ralph Blumenthal of the New York Times - was surging. The following year Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door opened, making Linda Lovelace and Marilyn Chambers, their key players, cross-culturally known names. Germaine Greer, a Suck stalwart, was involved in a landmark event I attended in Amsterdam in 1971 - the second iteration of the Wet Dream Festival, a showing of international porno movies. Al Goldstein founded Screw magazine in 1968, and Suck, the radical feminist mag, was launched in London the following year. Going naked was like waving a defiant flag in the ’60s counterculture, as at muddy Woodstock.