After outcry, Florida university restores banned poly and kink talks

You sent letters. You phoned. You helped persuade administrators at the University of North Florida to meet with students and members of the school's LGBT Resource Center about reinstating talks on polyamory, kink, and sex toys. which the administration had banned from upcoming Sex Week presentations. After the meeting, and coverage on Jacksonville TV news — and before students could organize a protest rally — the administrators caved. They restored the talks to the schedule, with "Polyamory in Practice" and "Coming Out Kinky" now listing the student-run Pride Club as their sponsors.

This is from Billy Holder, poly activist and vice-president of the Relationship Equality Foundation, which is providing the speakers for those two talks:

University of North Florida Students and Administration Reach Sex Week Compromise

The students and administration at The University of North Florida have reached a compromise to allow all three previously canceled classes to be held on campus during Sex Week. Two of these classes were being offered by Relationship Equality Foundation and one by the UNF Pride Club. Students have been told that Pride Club can host the classes and that the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) Resource Center can continue to assist Pride Club in the promotion of these events. Relationship Equality Foundation is currently working with Pride Club to bring these classes to students during Sex Week. [The LGBT Resource Center is run by the university; the Pride Club is by and for students.]

For more information, please see the LGBT Center's official statement.

The Relationship Equality Foundation thanks the University for its change of heart and applauds its effort to continue to provide equal sexual education to the students of University of North Florida. The Relationship Equality Foundation also applauds the students and their efforts to ensure that their educational needs are met.

Billy adds, "We were able to educate the administration as well. Several top administrators had never heard of kink or polyamory before and now they know what they are. Thank you; we are a great community."

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Update: The local LGBT Human Rights Ordinance, which some feared might be endangered by anything controversial appearing on campus, easily passed the City Council on February 14th by a vote of 12 to 6 (though with a religious exemption).

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Pushback grows after Florida university cancels poly, kink talks

Sex Week, featuring sex-ed lectures about things college students want to know, has become a thing on many campuses around Valentine's Day. Often included in these programs are Polyamory 101 talks.

But at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, the administration has canceled two poly and kink talks, and one on sex toys, after an outfit called the Leadership Institute in Arlington, Virginia, ("training conservative activists, students, and leaders since 1979") published an article, UNF Sex Week promotes polyamory as 'alternative to cheating', on its site Campus Reform. The story was picked up by other right-wing media, including the Washington Times.

Pressure on the university administration, however, appears to have come from another direction: jittery business and community leaders in Jacksonville who don't want anything controversial to affect passage of a local Human Rights Ordinance (HRO) for LGBT protection. The Jacksonville City Council will vote on the ordinance on February 14th. [Update: It easily easily passed, by a vote of 12 to 6, though with a religious exemption added.]

Administration spokespeople are saying the cancellations were merely to keep Sex Week focused on its goal of "health and wellness, relationships and intimacy, identity and orientation, safety and risk awareness, and consent." As if poly and kink education weren't about exactly those things?

"Cheating vs. Polyamory" and "Coming out Kinky" were to be offered March 8th and 9th by Kitty Chambliss and Airel Zeig, respectively, of the Relationship Equality Foundation. The REF's vice president Billy Holder, of Atlanta Poly Weekend fame, is also scheduled to present a class: "Feeling the Rush: Navigating New Relationship Energy."

This morning, Billy sent out a press release: University of North Florida Denies Students Access to Equal Sexual Education.

CONTACT:

Billy Holder

Relationship Equality Foundation

404-910-7033

relationshipequalityfoundation@gmail.com

www.relationshipequalityfoundation.org 

University of North Florida Denies Students Access to Equal Sexual Education

Jacksonville, Florida, 2/8/2017  –  UNF Vice President Thomas Serwatka has decided to [cancel] two out of three of the classes offered by Relationship Equality Foundation for Sex Week UNF March 6 - 10, 2017, on the basis of unfounded fear and bias against our community and students who identify within this community. This decision came after a short series of conservative articles had been published by Campus Reform.

A piece of programming that the University of North Florida holds is its annual Sex Week, presented by the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) Resource Center. The Relationship Equality Foundation (REF) is a non-profit organization that deals with the continued advocacy and education of ethical non-monogamous relationships for consenting adults. The Foundation was asked if it would provide a couple of classes to complement the overall mission of Sex Week: to provide safe, consensual, and educational information in regard to sexual activities. REF gave UNF three classes, “Coming out Kinky,” “Cheating vs. Polyamory,” and “Navigating New Relationship Energy (NRE).” Two of these classes, “Coming out Kinky” and “Cheating vs. Polyamory,” were cancelled after an article by Campus Reform was published. This article was then picked up by several other conservative, right leaning, publications.

Neither the students nor REF were contacted by Campus Reform or the University to explain these classes further. [Both classes are] evidence-based education and would fulfill the overall goal of Sex Week. Currently the students are angry and feel unheard, and are exercising every resource available to them to bring these classes back. It is the belief of both REF and the students that there should be non-discriminatory sexual education for students to be a part of. Since this has occurred, several letters have been written by both students and outside organizations, including the National Coalition of Sexual Freedom, addressed to the University asking for these classes to be put back on the schedule during sex week.

According to [university] VP and Chief of Staff Tom Serwatka, the decision to cancel these classes stems from pressures from the supporters and lobbyist in favor of the HRO passage next week. We at REF believe the HRO is a great thing and hope that its passage will give our community members in intersecting communities that it covers protections they do not currently have.

Relationship Equality Foundation

The Relationship Equality Foundation, Inc.’s (REF) purpose is to provide outreach, education and support for those involved in or seeking relationships with non-traditional structures, and education and outreach to the general public about these relationships.

Billy says the student LGBT Resource Center, which runs Sex Week, is asking for letters of support for reinstating the talks, including from outside the university to show that the wider world is watching.

"A few letters of support have started coming in but more are needed!" Billy writes. "Thank you to those who have written. But many more are needed. The Administration is currently meeting to decide the fate of the entire Sex Week program, I was told. The letters are helping."

The address to write to is slgbt@unf.edu. Update: To write to the administration directly, contact Vice President Tom Serwatka, tom.serwatka@unf.edu. Be polite and respectful; represent us well.

A meeting between students and administrators is scheduled for tomorrow (Thursday Feb. 9).

Update Feb. 9: The daily student newspaper, the UNF Spinnaker, now has an article: UNF Sex Week events cancelled by officials.

Update Feb. 12: After outcry, Florida university restores banned poly and kink talks.


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One day before primary, big poly article appears in Florida Republican country

Tampa Bay Times

The Tampa-Orlando axis is not a stronghold of alternative culture. This morning it's in the national news as being the home to nearly half of Florida's Republicans. But it has had an active poly social scene for many years, thanks in part to Shara Smith, Franklin Veaux, and others in and around their network.

Today, the day before the crucial Florida Republican primary, Smith forms the lead to a 1,300-word feature article in the Tampa Bay Times about polyamory and why it is not like Newt Gingrich.

The Tampa Bay Times is the region's largest newspaper and has influence beyond its size. It was named the St. Petersburg Times until one month ago, and under that name it long earned a reputation as one of the country's best newspapers.

Coming on the eve of the primary, with Gingrich plummeting in the Florida polls (especially among women), the article's timing is surely no coincidence. The paper is rubbing his nose in his mess, using the local poly movement with its emphasis on high ethics as a foil to make him look bad by comparison.

I think this is the first time we've ever been used as a political football in a good way for us. (Usually we're used as a warning of the chaos supposedly looming beyond gay marriage.)

Still, I was rooting for anybody to take down the insufferable Mitt Romney. I'm from Massachusetts where Romney used to be governor; 'nuff said.

Polyamorists Say They're Not Like Newt

By Leonora LaPeter Anton

Shara Smith has three boyfriends, two in Tampa, one in Portland. Her Portland boyfriend has half a dozen "partners," including Shara. Her Tampa boyfriends are dating not only her but each others' wives.

It's complicated, to be sure. But Smith, 35, believes that some people, like herself, are not meant to be monogamous. They are polyamorous, meaning they have more than one long-term relationship going on at once.

Recently, Newt Gingrich found himself in national headlines that suggested the GOP presidential hopeful was an unlikely member of this group after his ex-wife, Marianne, alleged he had once asked her for an open marriage.

Marianne told ABC's Nightline that Newt informed her of his six-year affair with congressional aide, Callista Bisek, now his third wife, and wanted permission to continue seeing her.

"And I just stared at him, and he said, 'Callista doesn't care what I do.' He wanted an open marriage, and I refused."

Far from embracing Gingrich as a celebrity adherent, some in the polyamory community were quick to distance themselves, saying his alleged actions gave their lifestyle a bad name.

"Gingrich: Don't Destroy Non-monogamous Family Values." That was the headline on a podcast called Polyamory Weekly this past week.

"Non-monogamy in its many forms takes a tremendous amount of communication and work to ensure the happiness of all parties involved," wrote someone using the pseudonym "Cunning Minx" on Polyamory Weekly, "and it is most decidedly not an escape hatch for a guy caught with his trousers down."

"The thing about polyamory is that everyone has to agree to it and so as long as you have any partners who didn't agree to it, it's not polyamory — it's cheating," Shara Smith said.

Smith, a camera operator and video lighting technician from Orlando, said she decided monogamy was not for her after she kept falling in love with two men at the same time.

"I decided that the only way was to have an open arrangement in which everybody was honest," she said.

Polyamory is not part of the cultural mainstream. In fact, most people who practice it guard their identities. It has come up in divorce cases and the workplace, threatening child custody and jobs.

For one man or woman to take on multiple significant others is still a big taboo here in America, says Joseph Vandello, an associate professor of psychology at the University of South Florida.

"I think people have more of a problem with open marriage where neither partner is lying to each other than to an adulterous marriage where they are cheating behind each other's back," Vandello said....

Read on (Jan. 30, 2011), and leave a comment.

The article includes a sidebar with some poly terminology, such as

Bright-eyed Novice: a person who has just discovered polyamory. Handle at your own risk as they tend to date as if eating at a buffet, they are still unaware of the amount of energy and work they will need to make their relationships work and have not yet refined their communication skills.

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"Gay after marriage: A bisexual woman figures out how to make it work"

The Daily Loaf

The website of Creative Loafing for Tampa Bay (one of a chain of alternative newspapers in the South) offers a first-person story tracing a path by which many people explore their way into polyamory.

Gay after marriage: A bisexual woman figures out how to make it work

What do you do when you discover you’re gay after you’re already married?

By Alexandra and her husband, Nick

I suppose a lot of spouses trip over themselves as they run to find a lawyer. I suppose others cry or yell or throw things. I suppose still more sprout feathers and thrust their heads into the sand. But not my husband. Actually, he was the one who told me that I’m bi.

No, it was I who sobbed into our bedspread until my eyes could hardly open. It was I who said “No, no, no” as my husband rubbed my back and told me everything was okay and that he still loves me. It was I who woke up the next morning and denied that night had any real meaning. And it was I for whom it took eight more months until I could finally learn to realize, then accept, then love the fact that I also love women.

But what then? I am married. I am loyal. I am … so gay.

Once again, Nick surprised me. First in the utter joy and relief he emanated when I finally realized that I like women, and then when he said, “This is an important part of who you are. You need to explore this and date women.” When I replied, “But I’m married,” he said, so what? He didn’t want me to deny a fundamental part of who I am or hold me back. And that’s when I learned the word, polyamory....

...Nick paved the way eight months prior, and then Kim helped get me to the tipping point of acceptance in October 2009. Out of the blue, she casually mentioned that she had once dated a couple. My head snapped to attention at that moment. Wait, you can DO that?...

...For days I couldn’t stop thinking about that. I began to unlock dusty doors hiding in the shadows of my mind, allowing myself to sneak inside and, for the first time, explore the mental images and concepts that hid behind them. I remembered a dream that I’d had more than a year before that left a smile on my lips for days without knowing why....

...My two champions and best friends threw me a coming out party. Nick even baked me a pussy cake. Yes. That’s right. A French vanilla cake with vanilla fudge frosting, pink sugar sprinkles and topped with fruit in the unmistakable arrangement of a vagina. A half a mango, raspberries, grape jelly and cocoa powder came together to create a beautiful, delicious … um, yeah. I don’t even need the photos Nick snapped to remember the look of delighted disbelief on Kim’s face when she realized what the cake depicted.

Then came the more challenging part. How in the world does one dive into the poly world? Nick and I found an amazing support network on FetLife.com, both for my bisexuality and for polyamory.... The biggest gift it gave me was realizing that Nick and I aren’t alone....

Read the whole article (June 26, 2010).

Update July 6: The author posts another article on The Daily Loaf telling more about her evolving story: My poly adventure: Polyamory, bisexuality and me.

Update July 29: She's doing more in this continuing series. Here's the list.

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"Rules of Engagement for Polyamory Relationships"

Creative Loafing

On Florida's west coast, a very sex-positive college student devotes her latest online column for an alternative weekly newspaper to poly rules that she and her boyfriend live by.

Some people think it’s impossible to cheat in a polyamory relationship, but it doesn’t work that way. The following are four rules that my boyfriend, The Puppy, and I have:

1) No starting a new relationship without telling your partner.

...You may be thinking that you’re fine with a V (Sally and Susan are dating Timmy, but not each other) or a triad (Susan, Sally, and Timmy date each other) relationship. Your partner may want a closed triad... or maybe you were expecting to have a hierarchical relationship where your starting partner would be your primary.... Things like this should be talked over before either party brings home someone new.

2) No dating someone your partner doesn’t approve of.

...There was once this guy that I was interested in for curiosity’s sake. Mr. Chaotic (my former long-distance boyfriend) didn’t care if I went for it because he had been dealing with the fact that other men were tapping what he couldn’t for a while. But, the Puppy had a problem with it. At first he would only say that he found the idea of me sleeping with the new guy stomach turning.... On top of that, he didn’t think that the other guy could handle being third fiddle....

On the reverse end of that, one of my conditions with The Puppy is that anyone he dates has to understand that I’m part of the deal. They don’t have to date me. Hell, they don’t even have to like me, but they do have to be civil....

3) No bare backing or fluid bonding with someone without talking it over with your partner(s).

STI/STDs are a major concern for any relationship that involves sex. A cold sore, a yeasty, sex that involves going from one orifice to another without cleaning in between — all could lead to horrible results.... Then there’s pregnancy....

4) None of the usual stuff that would count as cheating in a monogamous relationship.

...Non-monogamy rises and falls on the back of communication, honesty, and trust. Without those, the network crumbles. For the Puppy and I, this can be tricky because our boundaries go a bit further than others....

For example: Last summer, I attended a friend’s party without The Puppy. At one point during the night, an acquaintance that has seen me topless before asked if another friend (also female) and I would take off our tops and let him take a picture of us hugging. There were about five other people in the room. One of them was the host (who has also seen me topless). I text messaged the Puppy.

Puppy to Camile: If you know them and are comfortable with it, then go ahead. Did you really have to ask?

Read the whole article (April 30, 2009). Here are all her columns for Creative Loafing.

Here's more about Camile. She has written to us:

I first began to think that it was okay to be more open about being poly both because of sites like this [Polyamory in the News] and the LiveJournal Polyamory group. I became even more comfortable when I saw authors like Laurell K. Hamilton and Emma Holly present (mostly positive) examples of non-monogamous relationships in their work. Most of the open relationships I had seen before then were always either two siblings deciding to share a third person, or a couple having a brief fling before deciding that monogamy was the way to be.

I'm hoping that with my own contributions to Creative Loafing's Sex&Love site and my fiction writing (I will get over this writer's block), I can do my little part as well.

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Poly Realism on Florida's Sun Coast

Creative Loafing (Sarasota)

For its cover story this week, an alternative newsweekly on Florida's west coast presents a long, realistic article about polyamory, with three sidebars profiling local characters who are doing it.

A missus, a mister and their mistress

Polyamorous lovers keep their options — and their relationships — open.

By Justin Richards

When Vance's girlfriend meets someone she likes, there are things she has to explain before it goes any further.

The new guy has to appreciate her relationship with Vance. If he's a dominant, sexually, he needs to know that Vance's orders come first during a submission-domination sex scene. Oh, and they can only spend the night together as often as Vance can tolerate.

...It's an especially structured sort, but what this Sarasota couple is explicitly and consensually engaged in is a polyamorous relationship. In order to challenge one of society's most rooted institutions — the one-at-a-time rule for relationships — people like Vance and his partner have created an institution of their own.

In the mainstream, monogamy has been a cultural assumption on par with monotheism, air conditioning and covered sex parts. There have been strains of resistance throughout the 20th century — swingers, lesbian collectives, polyfidelitous communes — but the term "polyamory" didn't appear until the 1990s....

For many open-minded people, our sources stipulated, monogamy remains the most satisfying option. But they did argue for certain advantages afforded by polyamory. Of course, certain difficulties arise as well. We'll start with the most obvious of those.

Enough to go around?

Time, care and libido become a lot scarcer when several partners are clamoring for them. And how these resources are parceled out can cause jealousy, which polyamorous people are not immune to....

Vance has put his girlfriend and her secondary boyfriend on hiatus for the time being, he says, because she had kinky sex with the guy without telling Vance beforehand.

Although this seems like an issue of sexual jealousy, Vance says it's not that way. "If somebody starts developing a whole separate set of personality cues and a whole different lifestyle," he says, "you guys are going to drift apart.... There's a lot of that in monogamous relationships, too. It just gets more complicated when you're polyamorous."

...[Tristan] Taormino sees polyamory as a new frontier in equality. A polyamorist is unprotected against discrimination, and Taormino writes in Opening Up that coming out as polyamorous can be risky. She spoke with two people, in researching her book, who lost custody of their children due to polyamory.

...Lilian's parents know about her boyfriends, but they never allow her to bring both to the same gathering. So she brings one of them to Thanksgiving, for example, and the other to Christmas. That way, she says, "They can pretend really hard."...

Read the whole article (July 23, 2008). And leave a comment there.

Here are the three sidebars:

Michael: the Pioneer

Michael Rosen-Pyros is one of the early ones, a sort of a prototype. When he and a group of leftist post-beatnik intellectuals started exploring nonmonogamy in the 1960s, they didn't have much to go on.

The friends he was living with, in a commune on Long Island, studied thinkers like Karl Marx, Wilhelm Reich and Emma Goldman. As the youngest, 19-year-old Rosen-Pyros was something of an outsider.... "They were interesting people, they were my heroes, they were wonderful, and they were dealing with the most dangerous of all things, which was possession of each other's loved ones."

..."They talked about it, like good old lefties, for about a year before they ever did anything. 'Cause everybody wants to make sure that whatever they do is in the line of the central committee."...

Vance: the Alpha

Vance went on his first date when he was 20 years old, and he's been loving in multitude ever since.... One day, Vance and his girlfriend were at a party, where they met a third girl. Vance hit it off, so all three of them went back to the new girl's place. And so it went. It was the start of a dating collective that, kind of like The Cure, has been gaining and losing members ever since, with Vance as its perpetual Robert Smith.

...Now, Fay is Vance's only primary, and vice versa. Fay has a secondary boyfriend, though, whom she normally visits for one day every month. That day is really hard on Vance. When Fay comes home, the first thing they do is cuddle, as he needs to be comforted. Then he asks her to tell him everything — their activities during the day and all the way through the night.

The situation may be hard on Vance, but what about the other guy?

"We both really want him to get another girlfriend," Vance says.

Lilian: the Analytic

"Your identity gets collapsed into this other person," Lilian says of typical monogamous life, "and there are cultural myths that you're supposed to exist for this other person, that blinding obsessive jealousy is somehow normal....

Lilian kind of stumbled through her first few attempts at polyamory, like most do. She and her lovers hadn't studied any precedents like those outlined in The Ethical Slut (the polyamory bible, to some). They didn't lay out ground rules in advance (Some polyamorists even draw up contracts.). Pain and confusion ensued.

Much forethought and structuring often go into a polyamorous relationship, and Lilian says that monogamous couples would do well to learn from that.... Today, Lilian and her two boyfriends have things laid out pretty clearly.

...Her dream, Lilian says, is to live in a big house full of her partners. Some of them will have families and children. She will remain the "crazy aunt."

It seems an odd model for romantic fulfillment. But to ask why it seems odd is to examine the traditional model and to wonder why one should expect it to satisfy everybody.

"They've got 'big love,' and they love to talk about it"

Palm Beach Post

In South Florida, Beki Rosenthal and Peter Strowbridge decided not only to be out, but to offer short Poly 101 workshops free to the public. They sought publicity from a local newspaper, which obliged with this nice article (Nov. 17, 2007):

They like to hold hands and look into each other's eyes as they tell you of their deep love. They also practice polyamory. If you are heading for the Merriam Webster, make sure it's not old.... Polyamory is the practice of having more than one intimate relationship at a time, with full knowledge and consent by all partners involved. In other words, it's consensual non-monogamy.

...Rosenthal, a self-employed graphic designer from Boca Raton, and Strowbridge, a licensed massage therapist from Fort Lauderdale, have decided to hold open workshops for people who are considering this love style....

The reaction [Strowbridge] gets most often, when talking of his lifestyle: "You can do that?"

As with a monogamous couple, every polyamorous couple makes their own rules. Rosenthal and Strowbridge's requires constant communication. "In the past relationships, there were always things being hidden, things not stated," says Strowbridge. "Suddenly, I was in a position where I could say exactly how I felt about things."

...Michael Dean Goodman [is] a spiritual teacher and counselor who sees all types of couples and has written articles on nontraditional relationships. Goodman, 60, who divides his time between West Palm Beach and Boca Raton, says that being a polyamorist himself helps him relate to the couples he sees....

...Polyamorists won't tell you this is the only "right" way to be, but simply present it as an alternative.... "I wouldn't try and talk anybody into this," Strowbridge says. "I would just say: This is who I am, and it works wonderfully for me.

"But you have to do it your own way."

Read the whole article.

If you're out, maybe this'll inspire you to do it in your community?

"Love me two (or more) times"

Orlando Weekly

The alternative newspaper of central Florida presents a big, excellent intro to poly in its July 5th issue, starting with a profile of a local woman and her two males. They're part of the network of friends and lovers who have turned Florida's Tampa-Orlando axis, not exactly a hotbed of alternative culture, into one of the most polyactive areas in the U.S.

Monogamy not cutting it? Maybe you're a polyamorist.

By Deanna Sheffield

Shara Smith looks pretty normal. She’s petite with a pale complexion and long dark hair that falls well below the waist of her thin frame. Smith is 30, outgoing, childless and has a career as a lighting and video technician.... The only hint a casual observer might have that she’s not wholly middle-of-the-road is the message on the black camisole she wears during a recent interview: “My boyfriend says I need to be more affectionate,” it reads, “so now I have 2 boyfriends.”

It’s a joke, and it isn’t a joke. Smith has two boyfriends, as well as relationships with two other men that are “not well-defined.” She’s not a cheater; she’s a polyamorist, the difference being that all her boyfriends know about her other boyfriends, and they’re cool with it.

Smith is sipping coffee at an Orlando Starbucks and holding hands with Ki, one of her boyfriends. Unlike Smith, Ki (who asked that his last name be withheld) is shy, though today he’s excited.

Smith fires up her laptop and logs on to a live chat session with Franklin Veaux, another of her beaus. (Veaux has four girlfriends himself, including Smith. Ki, who has two girlfriends and three “undefined relationships,” has never met Veaux.)

Smith turns the video camera resting on top of her computer toward Ki. Smith and Ki are holding hands as the two men wave and smile at each other. At the conclusion of the conversation, Ki asks Smith for Veaux’s number so the men can chat, and says he looks forward to visiting him if he’s ever in Atlanta, where Veaux lives.

“Generally when you’re interested in one person, you tend to like the other people that they like,” says Smith. “You don’t go in thinking they’re a threat or competition; they’re allies.”

Such is life in a polyamorous relationship.

...“Poly is not mainstream because people are not aware of it, but that’s starting to change,” Veaux says. “I think that more people are becoming aware of it and considering methods aside from traditional monogamy.”

...Smith...keeps a computerized spreadsheet of everyone she’s slept with (or even been in close quarters with) since 1989, the results of their health tests, and all of the exams she has received over the years. Her Excel document, appropriately titled “Sexual Health and History Disclosure,” doesn’t just skim the surface. It lists her last checkup... It includes a laundry list of diseases ranging from HIV to syphilis and two types of the human papillomavirus, the dates she was most recently tested for each, the results and the status of any previous diagnosis. She includes her fertility status, the fact that she is not surgically sterile, uses condoms as her preferred method of birth control, doesn’t plan to have kids, and is pro-choice.

“Things don’t usually just happen,” she says. “There’s too many people that would be affected and could get hurt.”

Read the whole article. Be the first to comment at the end, or send a letter to the editor.

This is another one to bookmark for friends and relatives.

"Whole lotta love"

Salon

Salon, a widely read and highly respected general-interest online magazine, is just out with an excellent overview of polyamory and what it's about. It starts with scenes from the recent Florida Poly Retreat. As one reader comments, in the letters that are fast piling in about the article, "Wow! A nonsensationalist article on poly! Thanks Salon and the author for writing an article that pretty much describes a lot of the folks I know in the poly community."

By Liz Langley

June 14, 2007 | You may have seen a bumper sticker around town that says "Marriage =" and then, as if it was an elementary equation, silhouettes of a man and a woman. Traipsing through the wooded parking lot of the Pines Retreat Center in Brooksville, Fla., I notice a car with a different version of this bumper sticker: Instead of one male and one female, this one has three of each.

"As I'm fond of saying, polyamory ain't for sissies," says Anita Wagner, a 54-year-old legal secretary and poly activist in the Washington, D.C., area, whom I spoke to on the phone before the retreat. Anita has a primary partner with whom she's in a long-term committed relationship; she also has another boyfriend and a girlfriend; her partner has two other girlfriends. As far as being able to sort out the details of their relationships without acrimony, Anita tells me, "I'm very proud of us."

The four-day retreat includes workshops such as "Coming Out as Poly," "Poly and BDSM," "Poly and Christianity," "STD Update and Fun Safer Sex," and a roundtable event that I moderated called "Meet the Press," set up by organizer and poly activist Cherie Ve Ard.

..."There is no poly lifestyle," Franklin [Veaux] says at the roundtable when I use the term. "That's like 'the monogamous lifestyle.'"

...As for who practices poly, Robyn Trask of Loving More, a polyamorist association and magazine, offers me a survey her magazine did in 2002 of 1,000 poly practitioners (who, given their lifestyle, could conceivably be speaking for another 4,000). The survey found the following: 40 percent of the poly population have graduate degrees or higher (as opposed to 8 percent of the general population). Most were raised Christian (87 percent) but [many] identified as pagan (30 percent). One-fifth had never married; one-fifth had been divorced. And only 49 percent were sexually involved with someone they described as a love interest.

That last figure would seem to undercut the easy assumption that polyamory is all about sex.

...A recent St. Petersburg Times story featuring Cherie Ve Ard reported that when she finds a new romantic interest "she sends him a 'sexual history disclosure spreadsheet,' complete with names of partners, the types of sexual contact they had and the results of tests for sexually transmitted diseases. Ve Ard expects the same in return."

This is the part where some people start to think, "This sounds like a lot of work."

..."In the monogamous world," Cherie tells me, "jealousy is usually handled at the trigger point. It's assumed that your partner isn't going to flirt with other people." Poly people don't get the luxury of being on romantic autopilot — if a partner's flirtations upset them, they have to think about why. It means a lot of self-assessment.

Read the whole article. (You may have to click past ads. If you can't get the second page, you can read the full text here).

This is definitely one to bookmark and send to people who need help understanding what we're all about.

Here is Cherie's own backstory about her difficult decision to allow this reporter into the Florida Poly Retreat, and how pleased she is with the outcome.

"A love triangle? Try a hexagon"

St. Petersburg Times

Today's Sunday St. Petersburg Times (Feb. 18, 2007) has, on the front page of its "Floridian" section (photo), a great big story on polyamory featuring Florida polyactivists Cherie L. Ve Ard, Franklin Veaux, Fritz Neumann, and their lovers and friends.

By Leonora LaPeter

Cherie Ve Ard is worried. As she waits for her burrito at an Orlando Tijuana Flats, she wonders if she's giving her three boyfriends enough attention.

There's Franklin Veaux, 40, her long-distance love from Atlanta, who has surprised her with a visit. He's holding her left hand and kissing her neck.

Her longtime live-in boyfriend, Fritz Neumann, 40, cradles her right hand on his knee.

And she gazes googly-eyed across the table at her newest love, Chris Dunphy, 34, of California. They met in a Toyota Prius chat room in June, and their conversation was so intense he drove cross-country to her doorstep one day ago.

Ve Ard, 33, knows people may think she's a swinger. But these aren't casual sexual relationships, she says. They are a natural outcome of her belief that there's more than one true love out there for her at any given time.

...The term is used to define an entire range of relationships. Some polyamorists are married people with multiple love interests, and others practice informal group "marriage." Some have group sex, and others have a series of one-on-one relationships.

Polyamorists around the country gather in support groups formed on the Internet; Meetup.com has about 6,000 polyamorous members nationally. A half-dozen groups meet in Florida, including Gator Poly at the University of Florida and PolyTampa in the Tampa Bay area (178 members).

..."The majority of polyamorists are white middle- and upper-class professionals," says Elisabeth Sheff, an assistant professor of sociology at Georgia State University.... "Many work in the computer industry, so there is a strong online community. They tend to gravitate toward urban areas," she said, "much like gays and lesbians."

...Polyamorists like Ve Ard spend a lot of time trying to convince a monogamous culture that their lifestyle is viable. Outsiders are dubious, to say the least, especially where children are involved.

"We need to have a debate right now about what this means for children... because having multiple unrelated adults passing through will open them up to a much higher risk of physical and sexual abuse," said Elizabeth Marquardt, director of the Center for Marriage and Families in New York City.

No one has actually studied the effect of polyamory on children. Polyamorists say it has benefits because there are multiple adults around to care for them.

...Ve Ard says she's not having sex with all of her boyfriends. But whenever she adds another lover to her repertoire, she sends him a "sexual history disclosure" spreadsheet, complete with names of partners, the types of sexual contact they had and the results of tests for sexually transmitted diseases. She expects the same in return.

So when she and Dunphy initiated a sexual relationship, they exchanged spreadsheets and she disclosed to him that she has had human papillomavirus, or HPV, a common sexually transmitted disease. They also got tested for other STDs, including HIV, and shared the results with each other — and with Neumann.

"Because I'm sexually involved with her, any new diseases will affect me," Neumann says.

It is hard to imagine all of this ever being simple. Sheff, the Georgia State University professor, said polyamorous relationships sometimes fail because some partners feel unequal. Typically it is the long-term partner who starts to feel neglected.

Neumann, Ve Ard's longtime beau, realizes her new relationship with Dunphy is something special compared with the other relationships she's had. But he appears unconcerned.

"New relationships take more energy," says Neumann. "But it is something we'll get through. She's going to be spending more time and energy with her new relationships. I accept that as an existing partner."

He admitted one feeling: envy.

"I just wish I had that new relationship fluffiness going on," he says. "It's like the little kid in you seeing a new toy and saying, 'I want, I want, I want.' "

He has limits. If Ve Ard's new relationships start taking up too much of her time, Neumann says he'll let her know it.

"Cherie (Smoocherie) invented the word polysaturation," says Neumann. "If she gets enough partners, all of us are going to go to her and say, 'Cherie, come on, you're spread too thin.' "

..."Seriously enjoying having two guys around the house," Ve Ard wrote in her online journal one day recently. "It's sheer bliss and I feel so absolutely loved and adored."

The three planned a seven-day cruise to Mexico on Disney's Magic. They would share a suite.

Neumann offered to let Ve Ard and Dunphy have the master suite while he took the sleeper sofa. Ve Ard said she would probably spend a few nights with Neumann.

A few days later, they boarded the ship hand in hand. All three of them.

Read the whole article. To send a letter to the editor: http://www.sptimes.com/letters/. And you can also leave a comment at the end of the article.

Update: The article was reprinted in the Chicago Tribune for March 7th, under the title "Polyamory: Moving beyond the love triangle." To send a letter to the editor: ctc-TribLetter@Tribune.com .

CNN Special Report on Polyamory

As part of a pre-Valentine's Day special, CNN aired a short but stunningly on-target report on polyamory (Feb. 11, 2007). In only three minutes, they got it just right.

Actually, as soon as I saw the people being featured — Darrell and Nancy from Tampa — I knew it would be a hit. These wonderful people, married 38 years, ran a presentation at last summer's Loving More East conference, and they just glowed. They totally get it.

The CNN report on them and their loving partners had special power coming just before another, very different Valentine's report about a couple nearly torn apart by a screaming, lying affair.

Twelve years into their marriage they began to explore, as Nancy puts it, "the path less traveled."... Over the next 20 years the two began to meet, fall in love with, and have sex with other people, never letting go of their primary commitment to each other. They developed long-term committed relationships with six other couples. They call them their extended family.

Nancy: "They're people that, if I'm feeling sadness or pain, I can share with them, they'll listen, and if they can help in some way they will. I don't just have one or two. I have maybe a dozen. And that's — pretty remarkable."

Watch the video (may require Internet Explorer). This is one to bookmark to send to friends and relatives who need help in grasping the possibility.

"Husbands And Wife"

CBS4-TV, Miami

A local TV news show in Miami does a dippy and breathless report on the poly trend. Never mind the eye-rollers here; at least it gets the concept out and shows someone reading Google results, which is the sane way to start learning more.

From the station's website (Nov. 15, 2006):

...Varela reports that while the threesome embraces their lifestyle and share the same bed, they know what they're doing is a big taboo.

"You can come out and people freak out," Cat told CBS4.

Amidst all the controversy, polyamory seems to be a growing trend. A Google search produced more than a million references, including a polyamory newsgroup credited with starting the movement in 1992.

...CBS4 did manage to find an active group here in Florida and went undercover to get a feel for how polyamorous individuals live.

Varela reported that the meeting took place in the conference room of a public library, where a dozen Florida polys meet once a month. Men, women, husbands, wives and lovers gathered, all who feel monogamy is monotonous.

The group conversed amicably, talking about their unions and how fulfilling they felt their lifestyle is.

Read the transcript; watch the video.