Making a gig of telling your poly stories

On HuffPost, Jeff Leavell just published another piece about his gay triad family and its ongoing changes. He seems to have cracked the paying market (I hope?) for first-person stories about his life, especially his poly life. He's is a regular, for instance, in Vice and has written for the Washington Post's online section "Solo-ish."

Another guy who has made a go of this, writing from very similar circumstances, is Zachary Zane.

If they've made these gigs work, so can you.

Jeff (center) and family members.

How My Three-Way Polyamorous Relationship Works

“These men that I love, they are my family.”

By Jeff Leavell

We are told our whole lives that we can hate as many people as we want: whole nations, groups of people, ideologies and races, our bosses, our neighbors: we are allowed to hate freely and abundantly, but we only get to truly love one other person.

When my husband, Alex, and I met Jon, a handsome intellectual with blue eyes and the gait of an old man trapped in a young man’s body: sexy and endearingly awkward all at the same time, it was just supposed to be a hook up in a long line of sexual adventures. But then Jon came back again, and again and again. And then we were making plans to watch movies and eat pizza. We invited Jon to spend the night.

I knew the first time Jon came over and the three of us didn’t have sex that something important was happening: Jon was no longer a trick. We were falling in love. All three of us.

I had no idea what to do. I had no idea what was normal or not normal. I was like a crazy person: madly in love and jealous at the same time....

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

...Movie style happy endings don’t exist. People we love get sick. The circumstances of life make what had once seemed so easy, so perfect, suddenly impossible. We grow older. We fail almost as often as we succeed, sometimes more.

And yet, these men that I love, they are my family. Even as some of us drift apart. They are mine. And there is a beauty to that.

...None of this is easy. But as my father likes to remind me, nothing is. It’s just a matter of whether it was worth it or not.

Read the whole article (April 28, 2017).

[Permalink]