Read Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships Online

Authors: Tristan Taormino

Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Self Help, #Sociology

Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships (4 page)

BOOK: Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships
10.53Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
Open Marriage

In 1972, when most discussions about nonmonogamy concerned
swinging, Nena and George O'Neill proposed a new relationship model
that could include nonmonogamy. Their book Open Marriage: A New
Life Style for Couples, based on interviews they conducted as well as
their own personal philosophies, sold over 1.5 million copies. The
O'Neills summarized their vision for an open marriage:

Open marriage thus can be defined as a relationship in which
the partners are committed to their own and to each other's
growth. It is an honest and open relationship of intimacy and
self-disclosure based on the equal freedom and identity of
both partners. Supportive caring and increasing security in
individual identities make possible the sharing of self-growth
with a meaningful other who encourages and anticipates his
own and his mate's growth. It is a relationship that is flexible enough to allow for change and that is constantly being
renegotiated in the light of changing needs, consensus in
decision-making, acceptance and encouragement of individual growth, and openness to new possibilities for growth.6

Employing some of the trends of the self-help movement of the
time, the O'Neills put forth a new concept of marriage where spouses
rejected rigid roles, emphasized open and honest communication, and
pursued freedom. They envisioned open marriage as a tool for personal growth (as evidenced by their use of the word growth five times
in the brief description above). After the book was published, the
O'Neills attempted to deemphasize the issue of sexual nonmonogamy,
yet the term open marriage became synonymous with a sexually open
marriage.

Multilateral Marriage

In 1973, husband and wife Larry and Joan Constantine coined the term
multilateral marriage in their groundbreaking book Group Marriage:
A Study of Contemporary Multilateral Marriage. Spurred by their own
experience and interest in group marriage, the Constantines decided to
begin a study of people in group marriages. Without conventional
credentials-they were not sociologists or therapists, though Larry
Constantine was studying for a Certificate in Family Therapy at the
Boston Family Institute-they set out to locate people living in group
marriages and conduct detailed interviews with them by mail and in
person. They found subjects through underground networks, hard-tofind support groups, and word of mouth, and as their study got under
way, subjects began contacting them. For three years, they mailed
interviews to people and traveled around the country to interview
them in person, driving 32,000 miles in their Volkswagen Squareback
with a trailer in tow. In total, there were 104 participants in the study

The Constantines defined multilateral marriage as a relationship that
"consists of three or more partners, each of whom considers himself/
herself to be married," intending to distinguish it from the term group
marriage, which referred to a four-person marriage between two men
and two women.' They were among the first (if not the first) to use the
terms cowife and cohusband to describe the relationships between partners within a multilateral marriage. They studied a fairly diverse group
of people (though gays and lesbians are absent from their research-it
was the 70s, and finding straight groups proved difficult enough) and
made astute observations about them. Multilateral marriage was the
prototype of modern polyfidelity, a style of polyamory.

Gay Bathhouses and Sex Clubs

Swinging, open marriage, and multilateral marriage were the first forms
of organized, documented nonmonogamy for heterosexuals. Public,
recreational, and multipartner sex among gay men has been traced
back to before swinging. Gay historian Allan Berube writes, "Before
there were any openly gay or lesbian leaders, political clubs, books,
films, newspapers, businesses, neighborhoods, churches, or legally
recognized gay rights, several generations of pioneers spontaneously
created gay bathhouses. In the late 19th and early 20th century, in
addition to places like parks, YMCAs, and public restrooms, Turkish
baths and other public baths in major cities became sites where men
had sex with other men. From the 1920s to the 1950s, certain bathhouses developed a strong gay following and became relatively safe
spaces where men could meet, socialize, and have anonymous, casual,
or no-strings-attached sex with other men, often in private cubbies or
rooms. During the 1950s, the first bathhouses openly marketed to a
gay clientele opened in San Francisco and New York, marking the first
time public gay male sex was organized and community-based. In the
1960s, in response to the "free love" movement of the era, bathhouses
began installing orgy rooms for group sex.9 By the seventies, gay male
sex, fisting, and S/M clubs were being founded in San Francisco, New
York, and other cities.

When gay male culture was underground and criminalized, bathhouses and bars were among the few places for men to meet each other.
Yet after being gay became more accepted and a visible gay community
emerged, bathhouses remained-and to this day still remain-an
important, thriving part of gay male culture. Bathhouses exist all over the
country and are frequented by single men, partnered men, and couples
who go together. The presence of bathhouses and their longevity in gay
culture represents how casual sex and nonmonogamy (both consensual
and not) have been part of gay communities.

In her essay about the infamous San Francisco fisting and S/M
club the Catacombs, Gayle Rubin refers to the underlying relationships
formed through public sex spaces: "Places devoted to sex are usually
depicted as harsh, alienated, scary environments, where people have
only the most utilitarian and exploitative relationships. The Catacombs
could not have been more different... It was a sexually organized environment where people treated each other with mutual respect, and
where they were lovingly sexual without being in holy wedlock."" Jack
Fritscher echoes Rubin's sentiments in his recollection of some of the
nontraditional relationships that came out of the Catacombs:

I think particularly of Cynthia Slater, the founder of the
Janus Society, with whom I played Top many times at the
Catacombs-which was interesting because outside the
Catacombs, Cynthia was herself conducting a sexual affair
with my brother (yes, my real actual straight brother), just
as she was being photographed by my bicoastal lover,
Robert Mapplethorpe, to whom I introduced her. Cynthia
liked my brother, because he was straight and he could fuck
her while I could Top her in S/M, so she got two very similar
guys in, like, one huge experience. Oh, fuck it: she, he, and
I-it was soooo 70s! So "Twosies beats onesies, but nothing
beats threes" from Cabaret."

In addition to public and multipartner sex, other kinds of nonmonogamy among gay men are quite common. As the community and
culture evolved, gay men, especially those interested in S/M and public
sex, were already renegades of mainstream society, and it seems only
logical that they would forge new relationship styles rather than
sticking to straight, monogamous ones.

Lesbian Collectives and Sex Wars

During the women's movement of the 1970s, all-women (and specifically all-lesbian) cooperative living situations were born. Women sought
to create lives free of sexism and other forms of oppression in alternative utopias where they shared childrearing duties, living space, and
resources. Part of the communal philosophy was to envision and bring
to life nonpatriarchal models, including those for sex and relationships.
In her account of living in one such collective in Oregon, Thyme S.
Siegel writes about these emerging villages: "Emerald City's Matriarchal
Village was one place among many, on country land and in college
towns of the 1970s, where lesbian villages emerged. Most of these villages were characterized by various sorts of `nonmonogamy,' harmonious
and not.""

In the late seventies and eighties, as gay male sex and S/M clubs
emerged in urban areas, women were allowed into these clubs in rare
cases (as at the Catacombs in San Francisco). Lesbian and bisexual
women began to "borrow" these spaces for their own parties, and eventually lesbian sex and S/M events happened on a regular basis both at
clubs and private parties; this created a physical space for communities to begin to coalesce-communities of women interested in power
play, public and multipartner sex, and alternative relationship structures. The lesbian sex magazine On Our Backs debuted in 1984; in
addition to explicit photography, one issue contained an essay on
group sex by then editor Susie Bright. During the sex wars of the
1980s, while anti-S/M lesbian feminists and lesbian feminist sex radicals found themselves on opposites sides of arguments about sex,
porn, and sadomasochism, some of them did agree on one thing:
monogamy should not be assumed or necessarily embraced.

The 1990s and early 2000s brought a surge of writing by queer
women about nontraditional sexuality and relationships, including
Lesbian Polyfidelity, by Celeste West; The Lesbian Polyamory Reader, edited by Marcia Munson and Judith P Stelboum; writing by Pat Califia,
Susie Bright, Shar Rednour, and Carol Queen; essays in Bi Any Other
Name and Coming to Power: A Leatherdyhe Reader; as well as dozens of
erotica anthologies. In her 1996 book Lesbian Polyfidelity, Celeste West
reported that 20 percent of her lesbian respondents were polyamorous.

Polyamory

Some sources state that the word polyamory may have roots as far back
as the 1960s. The concept and basic principles of consensual, responsible nonmonogamy emerged before the term polyamory was actually
coined. As swinger and gay and lesbian communities thrived in
California in the seventies, a different form of nonmonogamy emerged
in San Francisco: utopian communes. One of the best known is the
Kerista Commune (also known as Kerista Village), which began to take
shape amid the free love and hippie movements of the era. The Kerista
Commune was a community founded in the early to mid-seventies by
Jud Presmont. Keristans coined the term polyfidelity (faithful to many
partners) to describe this new relationship form in which each woman
in the group had a sexual and love relationship with each man, complete with a "balanced rotational sleeping schedule" that determined
who slept with whom; no one had sex or relationships outside the
group. The number of Kerista members varied from about eight to as
many as 30, and each member agreed to a social contract that included
hundreds of points. They eventually formed a profitable computer business together. At its height, Kerista was a model of a new consensual,
conscious, multipartner relationship style. Kerista officially disbanded
in 199113

In 1984, Ryam Nearing published the first issue of Loving More, a
newsletter dedicated to the exploration of consensual multiple loving
relationships; in the eighties, Nearing also began organizing conferences for people who wore exploring those relationships. At the time, the
articles that appeared in Loving More used terms like polyfidelity, open
relationships, and intimate networks, but many of the ideas discussed
were precursors to polyamory. In 1991, Loving More became a magazine cofounded by Nearing and Deborah Taj Anapol."

People began identifying themselves as polyamorous, and the
concept of polyamorous relationships and communities first emerged,
in the 1990s. The term polyamory has been attributed to two sources.
In a 1990 article titled "A Bouquet of Lovers: Strategies for Responsible
Open Relationships," Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart used the term
poly-amorous to describe a lifestyle of multiple partners, though she
uses polygamy (not polyamory) as the noun. In 1992, Jennifer Wesp
created the Usenet newsgroup alt.polyamory.'5

The nineties produced several important contributions to defining and understanding polyamory. Five books on the subject were
published, including Ryam Nearing's Loving More: The Polyfidelity
Primer and Deborah Taj Anapol's Love Without Limits. The Ethical Slut:
A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities, by Dossie Easton and Catherine
A. Liszt (a pseudonym for Janet Hardy), is arguably the most influential
one, considered by many to be the bible of polyamory It was published
in 1997, has been cited in hundreds of other works on polyamory,
and, incidentally, was mentioned by at least 80 percent of my interviewees in the course of discussing how they first came to learn about
polyamory In the next decade, as the Internet grew in popularity, poly
people found many ways to connect with one another online.

Today, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of local and national
organizations, support groups, Listservs, and online communities, plus
conferences, events, and websites dedicated to polyamory (See the
Resource Guide.) There has not been enough research on polyamorous
people to produce many meaningful statistics about the number of
people currently or formerly in some kind of consensual nonmonogamous relationship. In their 1983 study, Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz reported that of 3,574 couples in their sample, 15 percent
of married couples had "an understanding that allows nonmonogamy
under some circumstances." Those percentages were higher among
cohabiting couples (28 percent), lesbian couples (29 percent), and gay
male couples (65 percent)." The Janus Report sampled 1,800 people
(1993), 21 percent of whom said they participated in open marriage.'
In a much smaller 2004 study of 217 bisexual people, E. H. Page found
that 33 percent were involved in a polyamorous relationship and
54 percent considered polyamory ideal.18 In 2007, when Oprah.com
conducted a survey of over 14,000 people, 21 percent said they were
in an open marriage.19

 
Chapter 2
Myths about Nonmonogamy

FROM RELIGION AND RHETORIC to pundits and punch lines, misconceptions about nonmonogamy are everywhere in our society,
making them hard to escape and easy to internalize. It is important to
expose and correct misinformed, negative mythology to gain a better
understanding of what nonmonogamy really is and what it's not before
you can fairly consider all your relationship options. Exposing the bias
behind the myths and revealing the facts can also help you respond to
criticism from others.

BOOK: Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships
10.53Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Shattered by Natalie Baird
Death by Cliché by Defendi, Bob
Let's Play in the Garden by Grover, John
I'm With Cupid by Anna Staniszewski
The Birthday Lunch by Joan Clark
Chronicles of Eden - Act IV by Alexander Gordon
Domination in Pink by Holly Roberts