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I agree that visibility is important. I'm bisexual too as is my fiancée, and we both have the challenge of being out despite being in a heterosexual relationship, and neither of us ever having a homosexual relationship in our past. While's it's unfortunate, cultural ingrouping is a real thing and prejudice correlates positively to a lack of exposure. What does that mean? People tend to seek the company (romantic and platonic) of people similar to themselves, and we develop prejudices against people we don't have contact with. It follows simply that developing prejudice against people unlike ourselves is a natural occurrence. The facts that racial prejudice is much better than it was in the 1950s and that we hammer home the point to children in their formative years that skin color doesn't matter are not coincidental. Asking about whether we should be out as swingers to increase our visibility as a community begs the question of what the goal is of being out. I'm bisexual. I'm denied quite a few state and federal rights depending on who I fall in love with. Swingers aren't in the same position. We aren't disenfranchised of rights. What do we have to gain by being more visible? I post to a fetish-themed site this debate comes up quite frequently in. Personally, I recognize that we don't have much to gain through visibility in the practical sense. We don't face disenfranchisement. If me an my fiancée want to have sex outside our relationship there aren't any legal barriers preventing us from doing so. The only ones that I can think of don't count as disenfranchisement because they affect people in vanilla relationships equally- laws regarding prostitution, public exposure, consent, etc. However, I belong to a religion that has as its first pillar the need to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. I don't have the data on hand to back up the assertion, but a quick look at the media demonstrates that societal acceptance of co-marital relationships is low. Yet swinging isn't an uncommon activity. In 2005, the Kinsey Institute estimate that there are 4 million swingers in the US. Another more recent source (2011) on CNN Health estimated the number to be as high as 15 million Americans. That's a significant number of Americans- in the same ballpark as how many Americans are BLGT-identified. There are currently 319M Americans- 15M swingers would make us about 5% of the population. But that number is probably low when you think about what's going into it. The 319M Americans includes children, who I'm going to assume aren't included in the swinging population number (their sexual proclivities be damned) as well as the elderly (you're not swinging if you're no longer sexually active). Remove those two age groups and the percent share of Americans is higher- similar to being BLGT or African-descended. Yet while those two groups have mainstream moral acceptance- even if true egalitarianism remains a work in progress- I don't think we do. It's odd, too. We don't look down on single people who have active sex lives, even though slut shaming exists. We don't look on married couples who go to strip clubs. And a lot of men would get a high five from a buddy after saying they went to a massage parlor and got a happy ending rather than moral indignation. And that last one isn't even legal! So why should we as a community- a community that's a real cross-section of the country and world as a whole, not be treated the same? Why shouldn't I get a high five from a buddy when we share how our weekends went and I say I watched some hung dude bang my SO while I had sex with his wife? Of course, I'm not necessarily advocating a world where people openly discuss their sexual achievements and exploits (though it'd be nice). I'm saying that we should have a world where we're respected for who we are- moral, law-abiding, job-holding, tax-paying, family-oriented people... who happen to enjoy things as diverse as reading, water-skiing, long walks on the beach, movies, bars, and yes, co-marital sex. I realize that I can be part of the problem or part of the solution. I'm a young professional. I work with a lot of people my age in a very liberal community. I'm an upstanding, clean-cut, and generally respected person in my community. I don't run any particular career risk for having my close friends know that I'm a swinger. I'm out as bisexual to my immediate but not extended family. I'm relatively good at controlling where information goes by being selective and deliberate in who I give it to. I recognize that some people can't be open about swinging, and that's fine. But I can. I don't have to be, but I can. This is how a culture changes. My deal with my fiancée is that we have discretion to be out to our peers about swinging. If they're peers that are strictly in her or my social circles (when you live 1,400 miles apart, you don't know most of each others' friends), we can use our own discretion. For shared friends, we need to consult each other first. But the point is that we've agreed this isn't something that by necessity must stay hidden. I've told one person so far. Her response? "Ok." It wasn't a big deal.

Which we all know is never going to happen. To summarize what I wrote on the blog: - Labels are a tool for communication and identification, not to "define". - Labels are fluid - Nobody agrees on most labels - People pick their own, and we should respect them where possible - "Progressive" sounds political, but everything around sex can be considered political these days. - LoTSS never meant to demean anybody with their self-assigned labels Ok? Now, lets hug it all out!