He Who Casts the First Stone

A little over a year ago, Amarillo’s swingers geared up for their New Year’s Eve party at Route 66 Party and Event Rental, a downtown business owned by a prominent couple, Mac and Monica Mead. Few in this conservative, church-heavy city knew about the weekend parties, and the swingers liked it that way. “Everybody in the lifestyle has to be very, very discreet,” says Mac, a leather-skinned truck driver with a shaved head, piercing blue eyes and an earring.

The Meads enforced strict rules at the members-only club: no drugs, no single men, no audio-visual equipment. Most couples, even ones who had been in “the lifestyle” for years, are on a first-name basis only. The location of the club is (or was) “to be kept strictly private.” So imagine the swingers’ surprise when they arrived at their New Year’s Eve bash to find two dozen protesters, local media in tow, holding signs and singing songs. This was a most unwelcome coming-out party.

Some protesters, mostly young men in their teens and early 20s, wore black hoodies and military fatigues. The men, Amarillo would soon learn, were foot soldiers of Repent Amarillo, a new, militant evangelical group that advertises itself as “the Special Forces of spiritual warfare.” Their leader, David Grisham, a security guard at nuclear-bomb facility Pantex who moonlights as a pastor, explained the action. “We’re here to shine the light on this darkness,” Grisham told the Amarillo Globe-News. “I don’t think Amarillo knew about this place. This is adultery. This is wrong. There’s no telling how many venereal diseases get spread, how many abortions.” The goal, Grisham says, was not just to save the swingers’ souls, but to shut the club down.

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