comments from another culture.
I come from a country where there is no swinger community, no swinger clubs or swinger parties. it's a small country (with 600,000 people living in the largest city) and there are almost no sexual subcultures and communities of any kind, no BDSM, no leather, no general sex clubs even, no nothing. the first and only gay bar in the country opened couple of years ago and the gay people are the first and so far the only ones to have created some kind of a separate community. of course there are swinger couples, but they are doing their thing only in the privacy of their homes, finding partners through personal ads in the few erotic magazines published here and recently the net.
the only exsisting subcultures are based on choice of music or ethnicity: you have macedonian vs albanian places (a segregation I find disgusting) and you have commercial (pop, soul etc) vs rock vs jazz vs folk vs techno places. so that's how people divide themselves and the lifestyle determined by these criteria (ethnicity or music), rather that the sexual preferences, is the defining aspect of peoples' identities in terms of socializing with others. so, when we go out to clubs, bars and house parties, they're all basically vanilla, but there are people with all kinds of sexual preferences. and so, gays try to identify and hook up with other gays there, couples try to find other couples or single women or men there. You get the idea. and although it's more difficult to succeed this way than simply going to a place where you know everyone shares your sexual preferences, I find it more interesting, more sexy, more challenging and therefore more exciting to do things that way.
although I've never done any swinging as part of a couple, I've been seduced and picked up by couples as a single woman many times at these 'vanilla' parties. I've also responded to personal ads couple of times and done all that meet-have coffee-talk things through-than have sex thing and it wasn't half the fun and excitement that the spontaneous experiences were.
so I wouldn't approve of that couple having sex at that vanilla party in front of everyone, but I would certainly approve of swinging couples flirting with and eventually taking home some of the guests at any vanilla party. anyone you meet in any context can be a potential partner for a swinging couple, you just have to read the signs and go slowly and carefully.