Polyamory in the 21st Century: Love and Intimacy With Multiple Partners (12 page)

“works” any better than open marriage or group marriage has never been done, the data we have indicate that there’s no significant difference. I strongly intuit that each works some of the time for some people, with no one option being better than any of the others when it’s a good fit for the people involved. We’ll explore this topic more thoroughly in future chapters.

Dr. James Ramey was another first-wave proponent of alternatives to monogamy whose work is still amazingly contemporary. Jim sought me out in the mid-1980s, and his generous encouragement, advice, and networking until his death in 1995 helped build today’s polyamory movement. His book
Intimate Friendships
12 is still an important resource for researchers and therapists alike, and he and his wife Betty participated in the Kirkridge Conferences described previously. Jim once told me that he’d been involved in intimate friendships, as he preferred to call consensual
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extramarital relationships, since 1953 and that his research had turned up three line marriages,* one of which had been around since 1815.

Jim first discovered an intimate network in 1952 in Houston, Texas, long before the sexual revolution made such social experiments fashionable and allowed them to become visible to the general public. Unlike many other pioneers of twentieth-century polyamory who came from either academic or religious backgrounds, Jim’s career as a self-employed business consultant and his brilliant and original mind gave him the freedom and means to pursue this line of research at a time when such endeavors were risky for those dependent on institutional support. Jim’s forty years of research and writing on the topic of alternatives to monogamy and the nuclear family, including two unpublished novels, is an invaluable legacy.

The late twentieth-century Kerista commune, based in San Francisco, California, seems to have been profoundly influenced by Oneida, although the Keristans, as they called themselves, were more inclined to trace their lineage to the Israeli kibbutz movement. However, they were well known for creating the “balanced rotational sleeping schedule,”

which was designed to prevent pair bonding, and for encounter-style

“Gestaltorama” groups, which paralleled Oneida’s intense group process.

They used vasectomies rather than nonejaculation to prevent unplanned pregnancies, held all property in common, and created their own religion that preached
polyfidelity
(another term they invented) as a pathway to worldwide utopia.

Kerista started out in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury in the aftermath of the Summer of Love as a triad comprised of ex–New Yorkers. The vision held by Brother Jud began to materialize when he was joined by two talented and dynamic young women who adopted the names Even Eve and Blue Jay Way, or Way for short. Eventually, this urban tribe grew to thirty members in three different group marriages, or
best friend identity clusters

*A line marriage is a form of group marriage that appears frequently in Robert Heinlein’s novels and in one of Robert Rimmer’s as well. In this form of group marriage, new partners who are a generation younger are added periodically, keeping the marriage “alive” and stewarding its assets indefinitely.

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(BFICs), and lasted for about twenty years. While the rules of polyfidelitous engagement prohibited sexual contact of any kind outside of the BFIC, membership status in the BFICs could change almost overnight.

Kerista was perhaps the most visible, the most colorful and long-lived of the many communal experiments that grew out of the sexual revolution of the 1970s. It was also the most rigid and inflexible to the best of my knowledge and rapidly fell apart on Jud’s departure. I visited their San Francisco house several times and stayed in contact with some of them after the commune disbanded in 1991. Like the Oneidans before them, many former Keristans opted for monogamy, although some chose to continue in smaller group marriages.

Way once told me, “I paid my dues! If anyone is entitled to monogamy, it’s me!” Rather than seeing the choice of monogamy as an indictment of polyfidelity, which was an admittedly challenging practice, especially in the early days, I view this newfound interest in monogamy as natural curiosity on the part of people who had known nothing but polyfidelity as young adults and wanted to explore another way to love.

STAN DALE AND THE HUMAN AWARENESS INSTITUTE

No history of American polyamory would be complete without mention of Stan Dale, who founded the Human Awareness Institute (HAI) in 1968 after a successful career as a radio personality. Like Bob Rimmer, Stan had experienced another approach to sex, love, and intimacy while serving overseas in the military, but in Stan’s case, he was exposed to the traditional geisha practices of Japan. I first met Stan in the early 1980s at the northern California home that he and his long time wife Helen shared with Helen’s mother until the latter’s death. At the time, Stan’s other wife Janet had her own home in a nearby city. Stan and Helen were part of the extended family of another group marriage. This group consisted of a core group of four people who’d been living together for about fifteen years at the time, and I was also part of this extended family, which included maybe two dozen people. Every year, there would be a family “reunion” where the entire extended family was invited to gather for all or part of a month devoted to connecting with each other.

Both Stan and I were profoundly influenced by this remarkable group, who’d created the most synergistic relationship of any size I’ve ever had
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the privilege to get close to. Much of what I know about love, intimacy, and polyamory I learned from them. And as a result of their contact with Stan, his Sex Workshop evolved into the Love, Sex, and Intimacy Workshops that have now been experienced by over 75,000 people in five different countries. Stan’s trainees have carried on his work since his death in 2007.

Because Stan was so open about his own triadic marriage and because of our mentors’ influence, HAI has always been a space where monogamy and heterosexuality are accepted and respected but not imposed on those who have other preferences.

Shortly after meeting Stan and Helen for the first time, I got a phone call from the producer of the
Phil Donahue Show
who was looking for a guest expert, preferably one with a PhD after her name, to appear on the show with Stan, Helen, and Janet Dale. I said “yes,” and it was the outpouring of heartfelt letters I received from those who viewed the show on television that led me to form IntiNet in 1984. At the time, it was the only national organization for responsibly nonmonogamous people—or so I thought. I had no idea when I chose the name IntiNet that
Internet
was soon to become one of the most used words in any language. Nor did I have any idea that about 1,000 miles north of my home in the San Francisco Bay Area, in Eugene, Oregon, Ryam Nearing was starting Polyfidelitous Educational Productions (PEP).

RYAM NEARING AND LOVING MORE MAGAZINE

Ryam Nearing, who founded
Loving More
magazine with me in 1995, was a close friend of the Kerista Villagers, as they sometimes called themselves.

Together with her two husbands, Barry and Alan, they formed a polyfidelitous triad who played a key role in the emergence of modern polyfidelity.

Ryam and Barry were all-American high school sweethearts who decided to add Alan to their marriage instead of subtracting Barry. In the 1980s, prior to the explosion of the World Wide Web and before most people had home computers, networking was much slower than it is now.

I didn’t know that Ryam Nearing and PEP existed until Ryam and I met on the set of the Playboy Channel’s
Women on Sex
television program in Hollywood, where we were both being interviewed.

Ryam was recovering from a brush with cancer and had not yet written her book
The Polyfidelity Primer
(1992) and was producing a newsletter
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and a small conference called PEPCON in the Pacific Northwest. When she decided to move the conference to the University of California at Berkeley, the growth curve accelerated. By the following year, I was organizing the program with her and convinced her to switch to a residential conference at Harbin Hot Springs that quickly doubled the attendance.

During this period, there was a brief flirtation between Ryam and her husbands at the time and me and my husband at the time. We were geographically challenged—they were living in Hawaii by this time—and, perhaps more important, the chemistry wasn’t there.

Ryam and I worked hard and long for a couple of years to create
Loving
More
magazine and expand the Loving More Conferences. She is a woman of great clarity, tolerance, and integrity and was delightful to collaborate with. These were exciting times, filled with television appearances with both our families and radio interviews. Ryam helped provide a sensible, down-to-earth, and reasonable voice for the polyamory movement, which was crucial in those formative days. She was well aware of the importance of creating stable and functional polyamorous relationships if polyamory was to fulfill its promise. In her words, “In entering a love relationship, there’s really no free lunch; no way to open your heart and not be vulnerable; no way to take on the karmic bonding of your soul with another’s and not accept large responsibilities as part of the deal. Yet this is exactly what I see people expressly looking for—love at no cost, no effort and with no strings. Instead, ecstatic connection and soul union for no money down, no interest charges, and no payments ever. Everybody has been trained to look at financial propositions that promise the impossible with the attitude that ‘If it sounds too good to be true, then it is.’ Unfortunately in the relationship arena people lose their common sense. . . . Our hearts don’t need endless brief encounters or to always move on from one person to another to another looking for some perfect match that won’t be so much trouble. Relationships are more than recreation for tonight, and deserve more respect and intention from day one onward. The whole point of loving more for me has always been the increased connection, the amped up intimacy, and the building of a bigger and stronger relationship web. To learn healthy ways to move together through the dances of life amidst a cast of characters growing ever richer in shared experiences.”13

Despite the tantalizing possibility of taking the magazine mainstream, I eventually began to see that the dream of increasing circulation to a sustainable level that would allow us to hire assistants and maybe take a
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vacation once in a blue moon was not likely to be realized anytime soon.

We both had husbands who were supporting us financially and could afford to work full-time for next to nothing, but I also had a small child and was getting burned out.

In 1993, I introduced Ryam to Brett, who soon became her third and eventually only husband at the Kirkridge Conference. Slowly, our business partnership was replaced by their full-on partnership, and when she became pregnant with his child, I knew this was going to have a major impact on all our lives. I decided it was time for me to move on and leave
Loving
More
to them.

GAY, LESBIAN, BISEXUAL, TRANSGENDERED,

While the “mainstream” polyamory community has a decidedly heterosexual focus, it’s important to recognize that all sexual minorities have played an important role in the spread of polyamorous concepts. Bisexual women in particular have been among the earliest polyamory activists14

and continue to maintain a high profile in the poly community. The “hot bi babe” continues to be much sought after by polyamorous heterosexual men hoping for a female–female–male triad, and more than half of women in committed polyamorous triads are bisexual. Bisexual men are more cautious about coming out in the polyamorous community (whether as a result of AIDS phobia or homophobia I can’t say), and while lesbians and gay men are welcomed in theory, few seem to participate. Celeste West, author of
Lesbian Polyfidelity
, was among the first lesbians to take a stand for polyamory within the lesbian community in the early 1990s, and while many lesbians still prefer monogamy, awareness of polyamory as a legitimate option seems well established.

According to Robin Bauer, a gay female-to-male transsexual who co-produced the first international academic conference on polyamory in Germany in 2005, gay men have been practicing nonmonogamy from the get-go and consider heterosexuals to be Johnny-come-latelies. Nevertheless, when gay men attempt more structured multipartner relationships, such as a live-in triad, they seem to have just as much difficulty as hetero-or bisexuals. Polyamory does seem to attract a disproportionate number of transsexuals considering that their numbers are small in the general
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population. More recently, those who prefer the queer identity as a way of making a statement that they don’t fit neatly into any established sexual or gender category have also gravitated toward polyamory.

My impression is that people who have already abandoned heterosexual norms are more likely to question the monogamous norm as well, and surveys have shown that nonmonogamy is common among gay men and, while less common among lesbians, still more frequent than in the heterosexual population. In the early 1990s, when I heard gay theologian and founder of the School of Erotic Massage Joseph Kramer discussing sexual friendship as a survival strategy for gay men in the age of AIDS, a lightbulb lit up in my brain. Kramer was encouraging gay men without primary partners to consider playing erotically with men they already knew and trusted instead of taking risks with strangers or shutting down their sexuality altogether.