A Lust Archive—Cuckolds, Cuckbulls, And The Women They Love — 1984 - 1985

Item #659

This small archive (it fills a manila envelope about an inch-and-a-half thick) functions as a sort of guide to swinging and cuckolding. It contains odd bits of ephemera, phamplets selling various pornographic publications (Nurse In Rubber and The Love Pavilion, to name two) a few color snapshots of a partially-clothed woman (who may be Bonnie Lee Blakely), a black & white snapshot of a penis (suitably erect), an eighteen page, hand-written short story about a young woman sent to a French finishing school where lesbian sex seems to be the only subject, a number of empty envelopes, several with a return address but no mailing address, some with an uncancelled stamp, some with a code of numbers and letters which let swingers, or wannabe swingers, connect through magazines like Mature or Sinners without revealing their identities. A number of notes respond to an ad which the compiler of the archive has placed in one of the swinger magazines. Both literally and figuratively, the archive is all about making connections.

The heart of the archive consists of around 80 pages of letters (about 20 are photocopies), one of which runs to seven pages, most describing the escapades of either Ray and Delores, a married couple (perhaps they are married) who live in Chicago or Donna and Dave, a couple in Columbus, Ohio. Correspondence intended for Ray and Dolores is addressed to a company called “Restorations Unlimited,” which may have been a real company, or may have been a convenient dodge to disguise their identities. One might describe the archive as a poor man’s Les Liaisons dangereuses, where the less-experienced Donna and Dave are schooled in the ways of cuckoldry by the more experienced Ray and Delores. Ray does the writing on his end and Dave does the replying from Columbus, though Ray’s letters are more frequent, and since most of the letters are undated, the sequencing of the correspondence is unclear. Ray’s letters are handwritten; Dave sometimes types his letters. Donna and Delores play their roles quite willingly (at least in their partner’s telling), but they do not write the letters (the short story about the finishing school is typed and unsigned so its author is unclear). How both ends of the correspondence ended up with Ray is never explained.

Ray seems to love everything about the process of being cuckolded. The fun begins with the hunt for a willing third party (A male who cuckolds another man by having sex with his wife is known colloquially as a “bull,” or in modern parlance a “cuckbull”). Ray and Delores find their partners in bars and restaurants and jazz clubs, on buses, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, at the gynecologist’s office. Sometimes they discover a new consort unexpectedly—the innocent-appearing salesman at the shoe store, for instance, may not be quite so innocent, at least after Ray and Delores get finished with him.

A cloud of unknowing hovers over the archive: what is fact, what is fiction? Ray describes a swingers’ party that apparently takes place in a penthouse in Chicago. A young woman, the wife or partner of one of the men at the party, does not want to participate. Soon enough, she is physically constrained and initiated into the swingers’ world. The story shows up twice in Ray’s letters, but is it true, or is it the product of Ray’s imagination? If true, Ray is describing a rape. But what the truth is is lost to time, a mystery that will stay a mystery.

In his letters, Ray plays the role of the willing cuckold, always an observer, never a participant, while another man has sex with his wife. though his arousal leads inevitably to his own solitary sexual satisfaction. And apparently his cuckoldry, and his wife’s adultery, greatly enhance their own sexual relationship. The letters report these intimate encounters in exhaustive detail that manages to be repetitive and unimaginative, yet utterly fascinating in its obsessiveness.

And then there are the photographs, seven in total (not counting the penis snapshot). The woman in three of the photographs seems to be Donna, since they are in an envelope which bears a Columbus return address (with no name attached), and in a brief note, says that if the recipients (Ray and Delores) are not interested, “please return our photo.” The woman in these three photos bears a close resemblance to the woman in the other four photos, which are contained in a blank envelope. Where things get complicated, or mysterious, is that the woman in all seven photos bears a striking resemblance to Bonnie Lee Blakely, the woman allegedly (and almost certainly) murdered in Los Angeles by the actor Robert Blake. Adding to the intrigue is that both the time frame and the modus operandi fit Bonnie Lee Blakely’s story. Born in 1958, she was a scam artist of the first order. The archive dates circa 1984, and the woman in the photos looks about the age Blakely would have been at that time—26. Blakely would advertise in swinger publications and send off pictures of herself, semi-naked, hoping to establish a relationship of some sort with an older man whom she then conned for money. Apparently, many, if not all of these cons took place without any meetings in person. Nevertheless, Blakely managed to marry ten times (Blake was her tenth and last husband). She was arrested several times for relatively minor offenses. Once, in 1998, “she was arrested in Little Rock, Arkansas, for possessing five driver's licenses and seven Social Security cards with different names” [Wikipedia]. Not being a specialist in facial recognition, this writer can not pass judgment on whether the woman is Donna, or Bonnie, but the possibility of the latter is intriguing.

Though much of the archive is inadvertently humorous, one digressive tidbit stands out. Ray is so enamored of the practice of droit du seigneur that he makes a slapdash interlinear translation from a French text describing the ritual. Elsewhere in the archive, he traces the lineage of droit du seigneur all the way back to Homer and Helen of Troy. One wonders if Ray would prefer being the new groom, or the father of the bride, when the lord of the manor comes knocking. Knowing Ray, the answer is probably “both.”

One hesitates to use the word “unique.” There may well be other cuckold’s archives extant. In the meantime, this one more than adequately fills the space.
The letters are a bit out of order and about 25 letters are photocopies, as noted above.

Price: $1,500.00