Polyamory in the 21st Century: Love and Intimacy With Multiple Partners (27 page)

1 4 7

appearance on the
Tyra Banks Show
, a woman wrote that “with all these sex addicts coming in and out of your house, how long do you think it will be before someone molests your child?” Kamala was genuinely shocked by this comment, telling me, “I’d be much more concerned in a community where people are not bringing so much light and healing to their sexuality as we do here.”

Although it’s quite rare, there have been some well-publicized cases in the United States in which poly families or communities have had their children taken away either temporarily or permanently, but even a temporary issue can have long-term repercussions. When I asked Roland and Juliette, the expatriates living in Spain, whether they had any concerns about losing custody of their child after being so public about their triadic parenting, they were shocked. Roland explained, “Because of the recency of the Franco regime, there’s still a sense of quiet rebellion about the government interfering in people’s private lives, and the government knows this too. It’s inconceivable that the government would come in and take a child just because the parents were polyamorous.”

But in 1998 in Memphis, Tennessee, that’s exactly what happened.

April, Shane, and Chris were a happy triad, all in their twenties, who were raising April’s preschooler from a previous relationship. April and Shane were legally married and living with April’s additional male partner Chris when the threesome agreed to appear on MTV’s
Sex in the ’90s
series.

The child’s Christian grandmother was outraged by their polyamorous (and pagan) lifestyle, and a judge ordered that the child be removed from her stay-at-home mother’s home and put in custody of the grandmother.

The legal battle went on for two years, with Chris moving out in an effort to convince authorities to allow the child to return to her mother. Despite the testimony of four different court-appointed experts who concluded that the girl belonged with her mother and an appeal by April’s attorney on constitutional grounds, the Tennesse judge refused to rule in her favor.

April eventually declared herself “unfit” due to poverty and let the grandmother keep the child.

In a more recent custody case, another Tennessee mother was at risk of losing custody of her ten-year-old child, but with the help of the Sexual
1 4 8

C H A P T E R 7

Freedom League Defense Fund, she got her daughter back without having to leave her triad. The Defense Fund’s website9 has some useful advice for people contemplating polyamorous parenthood, which includes such considerations as deciding who will be listed as parents on the birth certificate, voluntary guardianship (which adds legal guardians without displacing biological parents), estate planning, medical insurance, and custody, property, and visitation agreements in the event of “divorce.”

The Washington, D.C.–based polyamorous community known as the Finders lost custody of their children in 1987 but only temporarily in this extraordinarily bizarre case. However, the sensational newspaper coverage, filled with lurid but contrived accusations that they were a satanic cult, along with rumors of involvement by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), soon led to the demise of the entire community, which had been active for several decades. My friend Michael, who is now in his forties, joined the community right out of high school in the late 1970s and was at the center of the controversy.

As a young man, Michael was attracted to the group by its charismatic leader who became a father figure for him and also by the group’s philosophy, which he perceived as doing everything the reverse of the way it was done in the mainstream because clearly the “normal” way of doing things didn’t work very well. Michael’s parents had tried having an open marriage as part of their human potential explorations in the 1970s but, like many couples in that era, ended up getting divorced. Both parents were too absorbed by their own dilemmas to pay much attention to their children. Michael describes his father as a pot-smoking womanizer and his mother as withdrawn and less available than Michael would have liked. As a self-described nerdy teenager, handsome but too shy and intellectual to be popular with girls, Michael had a difficult adolescence. He was disillusioned both with the mainstream society and by what he’d seen of the

“ESThole’s” way of managing relationships.

As Michael describes it, “The idea behind the Finders was to share everything—money, clothes, food, and also sex partners. It wasn’t polyamory as I think of it now because we were not necessarily drawn to each other; we were drawn to the leader who would orchestrate different games.”

The number of adults in the group ranged from about ten to twenty during Michael’s years there. All were white and mostly well-educated professionals between twenty and forty-something years old. There were a total of seven children, all except one of whom were born in the community.

P O L Y A M O R Y A N D C H I L D R E N

1 4 9

Michael recalls that “one day the leader would tell all the women to pick a man, get married, and have children. Another day he might tell everyone to get divorced.” Sometimes he would wake them up in the middle of the night and send them on a “mission,” so they learned to always keep a suitcase packed with essentials. Michael remembers that “everything was always changing, and it was fun for the adults, but in retrospect I think it was confusing for the children. It was one of these spontaneous, midnight directives which instructed all the women to fly to California and the men to drive there in two vans with the six children. We were all to rendezvous in California, but along the way we stopped in Florida.”

One day, Michael and another man were in a public playground with six scruffy-looking children, only one of whom was his biological child, when they attracted the attention of the police, who suspected a kidnapping or worse. Six children with two women probably would not have been a remarkable sight, but the police took the two men into custody and placed the children in foster care. After forty days in the county jail, all charges were dropped and the men released, but meanwhile the case had made national headlines, and the children were fairly traumatized.

In a rare 1998 interview,10 founder Marion Petty, who died not long after giving the interview, said that he began to keep “open house” in the 1930s and over the years hosted many well-known counterculture figures as well as a handful of followers who were with him for over twenty-five years. He acknowledged that he did have CIA contacts during World War II and that his wife later worked as an administrator for the CIA but denied that his CIA connections explain why the case against Michael was dropped and the children returned to their parents.

The whole truth may never be known, but Michael, who I’ve known well for over a decade, says that the case was fabricated in typical tabloid fashion even though it was reported by respectable daily papers. For example, pictures of white-clothed “satanic rituals” were from a Halloween party, nudity was just part of their lifestyle and had nothing to do with pedophilia, and sacrificial animals were part of an educational project to teach the children about raising animals for food. The whole case is one of the strangest ever to make the news and has given conspiracy buffs on both sides of the fence plenty of ammunition, but I tend to believe Michael when he says that while the Finders was surely a cult—and a polyamorous one at that—there was no child abuse or buying and selling of children involved. As for the CIA, who knows?

1 5 0

C H A P T E R 7

Most of the members left the community in the aftermath of the scandal. One former member who had no children of his own but became a kind of surrogate father to them all still keeps an “open house” in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the grown children often visit him. Now young adults, they seem to have emerged no more scathed than your average twenty-something-year-old. Michael’s own son, now twenty-four, graduated from college with a major in theater and currently works as a substitute teacher in an inner-city school system. Michael says that one boy who had the most challenging time in a series of foster homes ended up joining the military and is now serving in Iraq. To Michael, this is a failure, but for many Americans, it’s something to be proud of.

While the simple fact of polyamory can be alarming to those raised to believe in monogamy, polyamorous communities with children can easily be seen as an even bigger threat to society. Even though few have been as controversial as the Finders, these communities sometimes have challenges interfacing with the outside world, but still the children seem to do at least as well as those in the average nuclear family.

The ZEGG community relocated from the Black Forest to Belzig, Germany, in 1990 when the Berlin Wall came down and a former Stasi camp in what had been East Germany became available at a very reasonable price.

We’ll discuss this community in more detail in chapter 9, but for now let’s just say that it was founded on the premise that “a free society needs free love,” which is one of their popular slogans. Currently, there are about fifteen children living at ZEGG, while an earlier generation of young people who were raised there are now in their twenties and off on their journeys into adulthood. Ina, who has been part of ZEGG from the beginning, told me that this first group of children lived together in the Children’s House when they were in their teens, much like the children of the Osho ashram.

There were four or five of them, she recalls, and they were very physically affectionate together, snuggling and touching a lot but not having sex with each other. In fact, Ina tells me that they all chose not to become fully sexual at all until their late teens. The group is still quite close, like brothers and sisters, and stay in touch via Facebook and instant messaging.

Some are now at the university or working in Berlin, which is only an hour
P O L Y A M O R Y A N D C H I L D R E N

1 5 1

away, so they often come to visit. Others have gone to live at ZEGG’s sister community of Tamera in Portugal and have children of their own The children now at ZEGG don’t live separately from the adults but meet daily at the children’s house after school and sometimes on Saturdays and usually have lunch there as well. The house and adult staff are provided by the community who feel it’s important that the children be supported to build their own community. The parents at ZEGG also have a close community with each other and support each other in being parents.

Most of the children live with either both parents or their mothers, but it varies according to the needs of each family. One boy decided that he wanted to live in a larger living group where his friends lived instead of in a small house with his mother, and she supported that, though she still visits with him every day. Sometimes a daughter will live with her mother and a son with his father if the parents are no longer together as a couple, which is often the case. Usually, the parents remain good friends even after a separation and may go on holidays together as a family or to visit grandparents, so the children are still held in a secure family after a divorce. Still, Ina feels that it’s challenging to create enough stability in open relationships to make a safe container for kids.

Over the years, she’s observed that if the parents feel good in their open relationship, it’s easy for the children to accept new partners. If one parent feels neglected or unhappy about it, then the children don’t like it. Another difficulty is that some of the parents in the local neighborhood won’t allow their children to play at the homes of the ZEGG children; they think it’s too dangerous because of scandalous reports in the press in earlier years.

But on the whole, ZEGG and its children are accepted. Ina explains that

“we’ve been here eighteen years, so they see that in spite of what they may have read or heard about us, we take care of our gardens and our buildings.

We’re not as strange as they may have thought at first.”

Ina, who has no children of her own, says that before living at ZEGG, she thought it was normal for teens to be in conflict with their parents because that’s how she grew up. Now she realizes that it’s possible for teens to have deep friendship and open communication with their parents.

Often the teens will choose another adult in the community who is not their parent to bring questions about sex and relationships. All the adult women participate in circles to encourage the young women to value their womanhood and answer their questions about love and sex. Part of the gift of living in community is the opportunity to play an important role in
1 5 2

C H A P T E R 7

children’s lives without the demands and responsibility of being a full-time parent. Ina says that this has very much been the case at ZEGG, where there are relatively few children partly because in the early years at ZEGG, there was the idea that you had to be almost perfect, an ideal woman, to be a mother.

ZEGG founder Dieter Duhm may have gotten the idea for the children’s house from the Osho ashram in Pune, India, which he visited in the 1970s.

Jivana Kennedy is an American woman who spent several years at the ashram. Her own children never lived there, as their father took custody of them before she went to the ashram in her late thirties, but she reports that “from everything I’ve heard, those kids grew into the sanest and most creative teenagers anyone would want to be around—sensual and free but not crazed from the distortions that arise from lack of information and repression.”

While Osho often praised conscious monogamy as a very evolved form of relationship, he was a severe critic of the traditional family, saying that it was “no longer relevant for the new humanity that is just being born.”

While acknowledging that families have helped people survive, he said that it was rare for a family to be loving, joyous, and free. Most were a “necessary evil,” which “corrupts the human mind” and breeds neuroses. Instead, he proposed that children belong to the commune as a whole, where they would “have more opportunities to grow with many more kinds of people”