I, being colorblind, am frightened beyond belief at reading that website.
Puce is a color?
Celery seems safe enough. Someone buys you brunch. I like brunch.
The “my little pony” will get you flagged as a child molester.
Combining electrical tape and a teddy bear gets you an introduction to FBI agents, with dark red hankies worn on the left, trying to solve a child kidnapping.
(Mentally picturing clown pulling out the endless string of multi-colored hankies tied together, while smiling and nodding suggestively.)
In the beginning, the hanky code was very useful, and only involved the more common acts that most of us engaged in. But you know gay guys, we couldn’t just be serious about a thing like that. So guys were constantly adding tongue-in-cheek colors (and other objects) to the list. So most of the more extreme things were added just for humor.
Not necessarily that nobody ever did those things, though. 
Oh, and to add to the confusion, guys on the East Coast used the opposite pocket as guys on the West Coast. I guess going home with someone in the “Heartland” could involve some serious surprises!
(And other things in cheek)
Actually it isn’t. Given the stuff that people regularly fall for on the Internet, there is no reason to believe someone who comes flouncing in and grandly announces, “Well, back in the '70’s my wife and I moved to a new apartment complex. We’d both always been opened minded…blah blah blah.”
And I’m curious as to why you purport to speak for Czarcasm? I would guess that he’s a big boy now and can speak for and stick up for himself, but that impression looks to be wrong.
And more broadly EVERYBODY’s burden/definition of valid/certified proof is going to be different.
The fact that the key party scene in The Ice Storm wasn’t a garagantuan, huge or even tiny shock to either the nation or wider world at large is evidence and proof enough for many including those who grew up in the 70’s like me that key parties were an actual thing that has taken place in the past and continues to take place, of course with various differences as time passes.
Interesting.
Probably but if you have a group of people willing to “indulge”, the randomness of the pairing via keys could be less stressful than almost any other way which could leave someone “last picked”.
It woul be just my luck to end up with the Yugo.
No, it’s evidence that stories of such shenanigans had been going around since the 70s, and so showing an instance of those shenanigans in a movie set in the 70s didn’t shock anyone. The movie didn’t introduce the trope to the public, the trope had been around for decades.
Like, if you made a movie with soldiers getting back from Vietnam, and hippies were waiting at the airport to spit on them, that wouldn’t confuse anyone because everyone is familiar with the trope of hippies spitting on Vietnam vets. That doesn’t mean it such things actually happened regularly. Or at all. It just means that this was a story that was going around at the time, and says more about the people who repeated the story than it does about actual hippies, or Vietnam vets, or airports.
So key party stories go around, not necessarily because everyone was having key parties, but because they liked telling and hearing stories about key parties. Did you hear what those hedonists are up to? Isn’t it shocking? Isn’t it horrible? Isn’t it delightful? What other horrible, disgusting, interesting things do these people do?
Allan Sherman (the funny song guy – “Camp Grenada” and many others) in his book The Rape of the APE, wrote about it as an actual social phenomenon. It had a name (which I can’t now recall – it was the name of a town) and was featured in a song. Sherman was a pal of Hugh Hefner’s, and a frequent guest at the Mansion, so you’d think he knew whereof he spoke. But I can’t back it up with anything more definite than that.
- The titular APE was the American Puritan Ethic. Sherman’s book was a long, humorous history of the loosening of American Sexual mores in the first 3/4 of the 20th century. Worth a read, if you can find a copy.
Sorry, but I didn’t know I was supposed to be following your every posting.
Anyway, to answer your question- what he said.
It’s one of my top ten books for re-reading.
My wife and I were swingers 1988-2005ish until we got old. We never, ever encountered a key party. I think they are mostly fiction.
Why? The reason is simple. If you are top couple why risk chance? Why not have your choice and let the others scramble?
Everyone keeps talking about key parties and the 1970s, but I’m pretty sure I saw references to key parties in copies of Mad magazine in the 1960s too.
Perhaps it’s for sex with celerity.
Some people may have mistaken it for celibacy . . . not a frequent occurrence back then.
A friend of mine with connections to the lifestyle mentioned something similar to this when we were watching a movie set in the 70s which featured a Key Party - basically, an important factor in swinging was you were supposed to be comfortable with the other person and generally wanted to have at least some idea who they were, and being able to politely say “No thanks” is a fundamental rule. Randomly picking keys out of a bowl doesn’t strike me as conducive to that.
Personally, I’ve always figured Key Parties were in the same category as the “Jelly Bracelet Code” - an urban legend or incredibly rare event blown out of proportion to create a moral panic. That’s not to say no-one anywhere has ever held a Key Party, but like most of the other posters in this thread I doubt they were a widespread thing in the 70s (or any other era).
Jelly Bracelet parties are real. I have a friend whose younger sister recently graduated high school on Long Island, and he claims she said these things really happen.