Swingers in Florida

Hillsborough County sheriff's detectives say they shut down a swingers club in a Seffner rental house and arrested four people.

Complaints from neighbors about the home resulted in a six-week investigation by police and the state Division of Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco.

Neighbors said cars would turn up their dead-end street on weekend evenings and head directly for the very end, pulling into the 150-foot driveway lit with tiki torches behind the white picket fence and gate. The unassuming two-story white house has red trim and sits well off a street lined with single-story ranch homes.

Inside, policemen found three bedrooms lined wall to wall with beds. The living room was equipped with a dancing pole, a spanking table and large-screen televisions playing pornographic movies.

Four people have been charged with operating a sexually oriented business without a license and operating a bottle club without proper zoning and licensing. All four were released on bail.

Policemen said they witnessed various numbers of people inside the house and saw as many as 50 people inside at one time. Couples were allowed into the club free, and single men and women were charged various fees to enter. Anyone entering was allowed to bring their own bottle of alcohol and could share with others.

The Pleasure Palace is a place where sexy is the dress code and where the world comes to play, according to its Web site.

Hillsborough County code enforcement officials use more succinct language, calling the Tampa business  a sexual encounter center and a swingers club.

A hearing on Sept. 3 will determine if the Pleasure Palace is in violation of the county's ordinance restricting sexually oriented businesses.

Under the law, an adult entertainment business and its employees must have licenses to remain open. The Pleasure Palace does not.

First Amendment lawyer Luke Lirot represents the Pleasure Palace and said the business is a private membership club that caters to people with more progressive sexual viewpoints. The business, open for seven years, has managed to avoid the county's definition of an adult entertainment establishment in the past, Lirot said.

Hillsborough sheriff's Maj. Paul Davis said his agency investigated the club this year and said that other than the code violations, no criminal activity has occurred at the Pleasure Palace.

The Sept. 3 quasi-judicial hearing will decide if the business is illegal and needs to be shut down, Davis said.

It's obviously not everybody's cup of tea, Lirot said. But these are human beings. It's an ideological issue, not an environmental or zoning issue.

A Florida judge has all but ended the state's cases against 17 people who were arrested last year in two controversial raids at Broward sex clubs.

Upholding a lower court, Circuit Judge James I. Cohn ruled that someone other than an investigating police officer has to be offended in order for the crime of lewdness to occur at a swingers' club where notices were posted telling the squeamish to stay out. It was a further indication that the state's case, which attracted national attention, is rapidly collapsing.

It came one day after another Broward judge dismissed lewdness charges against the co-owner of one of the most popular of the clubs, Trapeze II.

Defense attorney Daniel Aaronson - who has four Trapeze defendants as clients and another person arrested during an earlier raid at the now-defunct Athena's Forum in Pompano Beach - said This is the nail in the coffin, and this should dismiss all these cases.

A total of 50 people were arrested at the two clubs 18 months ago by armed and masked Broward sheriff's deputies. Some defendants have had their charges dropped, others paid misdemeanor fines, but 17 men and women resolved to fight it out.

Melanie Dietrich of Chicago's Loving Couples Club said the Broward case is a landmark: People in the Lifestyle who were afraid no longer have to live with this fear because now they know that what they love to do is legal. There is no doubt now, as long as they have sex in private and do not bother anyone.

But nutters were predictably wound up.

Barbara Collier, chairman of the Christian Coalition of Broward County, said swingers are lewd because lewdness means they are preoccupied with sex and outrageous and indecent behavior.

The legal process was at fault, Collier whinged, because attorneys were able to strike off the list of jurors people with a strong sense of morality. There were not any moral people on that jury,  she said, reacting to comments made by jurors about what they felt was the state's inability to prove lewd behavior after a judge gave a directed verdict of acquittal in the case against Dennis Freeland, co-owner of Trapeze.

Collier said she felt that an apparent lack of public outrage at swingers' clubs operating in Broward - which has Florida's largest concentration - was reflected in the court's rejection of the state's case.

City code enforcement officials have ordered a controversial underground swingers club to stop hosting sexually themed parties by the end of Thursday or face fines of up to $250 a day.

Melbourne officials and an irritated landlord want to close the Hunt Club which is based inside a house in the rustic Oak Groves subdivision, nestled among acre-lot estates, horse stables and backyard fish ponds.

Club operators Richard Spalding and Kirsi Page face $250 daily code enforcement fines if they host swingers' parties after Thursday.

Recent examples of their events have been Naughty Girls, Ice Cream and High Heels Social, a pajama party and a paper-mask masquerade, according to various Web sites.

In a Tuesday e-mail to Code Enforcement Administrator Dan Porsi, Page contended that her club is a private group, not a business, Local 6 News partner Florida Today reported. She stated that Melbourne officials were making up ridiculous fines and singling out a few people to persecute. Fully grown adults will not tolerate being told who they can and cannot have sex with. Twisting existing laws or making up new ones to punish people for their sex lives is not only arrogant and misguided, but also corrupt in the sense that you are using your political position to impose your favored sexual practices on someone else.