Four gay and bi polycules in San Francisco profiled

The Bold Italic

Continuing the theme of gay writers addressing polyamory without fear, this profile of four groups appeared a few days ago in The Bold Italic, "an online magazine, shop, and events hub in San Francisco. We celebrate the free-wheeling spirit of the city."

Polyamory is Alive and Well in SF

By Peter Lawrence Kane

After the Supreme Court’s Prop. 8 ruling came down in June... amid the celebration, there were some wistful sentiments that maybe queerness was waning and all the gays were — as my uber-queer thesis adviser once put it — “ready to go home and cook dinner, forever.”

...But there are multiple other ways of fashioning a life with one’s chosen partner, or partners. I sat down with four families or member of polyamorous groups, two all-male and two male-and-female, to gain some better insight into just how happy (and gleefully sex-positive) these enduring arrangements can be.

Richard, Steven, Rob, Eric, and Paul [above] are all between 47 and 62 years old and live in San Francisco. Richard and Steven (the daddies) have been together for 23 years and legally married in 2008, while the three boys joined in the last five or six years. Rob and Paul are collared, wearing padlocked chains that indicate they’re boys in a daddy-boy dynamic. Additionally, Paul and his separate partner of 16 years wed in October.

Getting together:

Rob: If somebody has a thing going on, we all make a point to show up. We have scheduled dates because if we don’t, they won’t happen.

Eric: And we’re not [gestures to include the entire family] monogamous as well. We all have fuck buddies.

Paul: There’s a lot of focused one-on-one. Not necessarily having sex, but focusing on the relationship. Which usually involves sex.

Richard: We’re not “poly-monogamous.” We interbreed with regularity, though that certainly has diminished as the intensity of the relationship among the five of us has increased....

Do you envision legalized polyamory?

Richard: Three years into our relationship, Steven and I had our own Jewish-pagan ceremony. Then we got domestic-partnered. Right now we’re trying to get the boys to find boys. They need support staff, so to speak. When I’m 90, Eric will be 77, and he’s going to need someone to push my wheelchair around....

Together for three years, Liesl and Steve are a couple dating another couple, Megan and Nathan, along with several other lovers whom they see less often. All are in their late twenties and live in the East Bay.

Getting together:

Steve: If I’m dating a girl, usually Liesl ends up dating that girl, but most of the time, if she’s dating a guy, he and I don’t play too much. Except at either end of Liesl.

Liesl: Although I’ve had lots of guys say that if they were to experiment on a guy, it’d be Steve. I was the first woman Megan had ever been with. But that’s not surprising. All the straight girls, they’re like, “Well, I’ll try this.”

Challenges:

Steve: The reason we’re polyamorous isn’t philosophical, it’s that we’re terrible about monogamy. But in the Bay, people have a whole idea of what that means about our relationship....

Read the whole long article (late November 2013).

-------------------------

Of course some gays really are monogamous, like some straights, and they can get in one's face about it, like some straights — as told by Tom Gualtieri at The Weeklings and reprinted at Salon:

Hey, moralists, spare us the monogamy speech

Your view of your own moral superiority is not going to make someone else’s relationship better or worse.

Back in 2004, just after San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s controversial move issuing same-sex marriage licenses, I went on a date with a good-looking fella I’d met through friends. The topic of monogamy came up – not in the context of some imagined, romantic future for the two of us but in the ado (and much of it) caused as much by Newsom’s boldness as by the legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts the previous autumn.

My date offered, unsolicited, his opinion about gay men who indulge their sexual needs openly and, let us say, frequently. I worked my way through the bread basket as he bloviated....

Eventually, I parried with my philosophy that promiscuity does not equal sluttery and conservatism in the bedroom (or in politics) doesn’t make anyone automatically superior. There are gay men, I said, who neither need nor desire “free love” and are perfectly happy that way. There are other men who don’t engage because, while they would like to, they fear the judges at their own court of inner demons. And finally there are men who profess their superiority at not needing “free love” but do it in secret anyway; we call those men “hypocrites.”

It was at this point that I become sorry we had already placed our order....

Read on (Nov. 30, 2013).

-------------------------

Also of note: at counselor Gina Senarighi's site, Myths of Non-Monogamy: Polyamory is So Gay

One of the myths of non-monogamy I face regularly is that open relationships and polyamory is a gay thing. That straight people are basically monogamous naturally, and gay people for whatever reason aren’t.

“There is no societal or religious pressure, no relationship archetype or historical expectation for a gay man to be monogamously coupled. Unlike heterosexual relationships, gay relationships form simply because two people want to be together.”
          –Tyler Curry

One of the best parts about being a part of the LGBTQ community is that because we don’t have set models for relationships, we get to be creative when we decide to build them....

[Permalink]