The best history yet of the polyamory movement's origins. Choosing if poly is right for you. And more.

Maybe Time magazine caught your attention last week with its web article The Surprising Political Evolution of American Polyamory by Christopher M. Gleason (online Nov. 13).

The occasion for the piece was Gleason's new book American Poly: A History, published November 1st by Oxford University Press. Following last year's Fifty Years of Polyamory in America by Glen W. Olson and Terry Lee Brussel-Rogers, this is the most extensive history yet of our movement's wildly colorful origins and growth, at least in the American context from the 1960s through the early 2000s.  

In the book and the Time article, Gleason emphasizes a provocative theme: the surprising variety of political and social viewpoints among the people who developed modern polyamory's ideas, ideals, and best practices and evangelized them into American awareness. Today most people associate poly with left-ish people and its enemies with the right. But the sorting used to be less predictable.

Here are chunks of Gleason's Time article:

Polyamory seems to have burst upon the American mainstream over the past two decades. The deluge of podcasts, TV shows, books, and magazine articles detailing polycules, metamores, throuples, threesomes, and moresomes testifies to the growing number of Americans willing to jettison monogamy.

...Though studies have shown that Americans from across the political spectrum have embraced forms of consensual non-monogamy, it tends to be liberal progressives who publicly laud polyamory as the next stage of the sexual revolution, while religious conservatives bemoan it as the next step in more than half a century of moral decline. Yet, setting polyamory within the longer history of American sexual dissent uncovers a complicated relationship between politics and sexual freedom that defies simplistic categorization.

Christopher M. Gleason

...Polyamory’s roots [in America] reach back at least a century to the Progressive Era, if not further, when Bohemian notions of free love breached major U.S. metropolises. The “Roaring Twenties” that ensued prefigured the sexual revolution of a half century later, as wars over birth control and the Equal Rights Amendment divided Americans....

The post-Depression era stifled sexual freedom. By the 1940s, the twin threats of nuclear annihilation and the spread of godless Communism exacerbated the return to sexual traditionalism, producing a cultural consensus on marriage and family that tolerated little dissent.

...[From the late 1940s through the 50s] the Beats were not the only Americans to chide mainstream mores, nor to use literature to do so. There was also Ayn Rand, the anti-statist Russian-born novelist bent on destroying all impediments to personal autonomy. Rand dabbled with ethical non-monogamy, believing that her and her protege's shared commitment to her philosophy of Objectivism provided sanction for their intimacy. Though they were honest about the relationship, it brought great emotional distress to both their spouses, and her disregard for the feelings of all others involved made it unlikely for polyamorists to claim her as an intellectual forebear.

The clearest link between polyamory and the first decades of the 20th century is traceable through the influence of acclaimed science fiction writer Robert Heinlein. Referring to himself as a “child of the Torrid Twenties,” Heinlein was a sexual iconoclast. His first two marriages in 1929 and 1932 were both open, and he spent the 1930s and 1940s frequenting nudist clubs, and running in countercultural circles that included the occultic sex magician and Cal Tech rocket scientist Jack Parsons....

...Heinlein’s rightward turn [post-war] did little to temper his promotion of sexually transgressive ideas. If anything, it reinforced the notion that sexual freedom should be protected as a private right. He lamented monogamy and monotheism as the two sacred cows of western civilization and continued to take aim at both in his novels. The [first] of such efforts was his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land. The novel, which follows a human raised on Mars who returns to Earth and starts a church that rejects jealousy in lieu of ritualistic free love, took little time to become canonical within 1960s counterculture.

...The decisively conservative shift of the 1980s did much to halt the sexual revolution. Yet, it was within this conservative climate that disparate poly factions united. This [new,] predominately female-led coalition began publicly organizing, printing newsletters, planning conferences, and making media appearances.

In doing so, they rejected outdated versions of 1960s free love as wanton hedonism. In its place, they learned to speak the language of Reagan, arguing that when rooted in commitment, ethical non-monogamy was not antithetical to family values. In fact, it centered the family, providing greater emotional and financial stability in an age increasingly marred by political and economic uncertainty. Or as Ryam Nearing, the co-founder of the influential polyamory non-profit Loving More argued in 1984, committed multi-partner relationships were identical to monogamous relationships in that they were characterized by the joys and trials of navigating careers, childrearing, spirituality, and asset sharing. What they offered that monogamy could not was “far greater economic security, and an increase in loving parents and role models.” For Nearing, ethical non-monogamy meant “intimacy without nuclear couple isolation, multiplicity without shallowness.” Furthermore, those truly committed to the freedom afforded by limited government had no basis to deny such unions.

Many polyamorists no longer focus narrowly on commitment. Though their relationships may be lifelong, they tend to rest their sexual ethics on ideals of honesty, open communication, and mutual respect. For many of these Americans, polyamory remains a private matter. Others believe polyamory is a civil rights issue. Echoing their forebears, they claim that polyamory is not an assault on the American family, but rather a timely defense of it.  

Christopher M. Gleason is the Academic Director for the Georgia Coalition for Higher Education in Prison, part-time Assistant Professor at Kennesaw State University, and author of American Poly: A History.

Okay, I think he's stretching to make a point of those varied ideological backgrounds. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, published in 1961, was indeed an important inspiration for many in the 1960s and early 70s, including me, as word of it spread through the burgeoning youth movement (see my Polyamory, Robert Heinlein, and his definitive new biography). Heinlein was a committed New Dealer in the 1930s but had become a Goldwaterite right-winger with no intention to start a radical lefty movement. The poly model he set forth in Stranger was a dream impossible to live, since it depended entirely on magic psychic superpowers learned from Martians. More influential in practical terms were works like Robert Rimmer's The Harrad Experiment and Rimmer's other CNM-exploring novels set in contemporary reality. Rimmer also published books of letters sent to him by readers living in actual group relationships in the real world.

And the fact is, most of the people who created the 1960s counterculture, not just the proto-poly parts of it, came from a wide variety of political backgrounds or none at all — from classic Reds to New Deal progressives to Ayn Randers and former Goldwater supporters, but also millions of kids like me who just made it up as we went. People with different political philosophies in those days intermixed and swapped ideas more easily than now. Trust me, I was there for many of those 2 a.m. dorm-room and housing-coop bull sessions.

Gleason also explores other divergences among the seminal polyfolks of those early days. Today's poly movement, as a movement, stems most distinctly from two tireless founding mothers in the early-mid 1980s through the 1990s: Ryam Nearing and Deborah Anapol. In the movement's complex family tree, the two of them formed a trunk that carried sap from the tangled 1960s-70s roots to the later, ever-widening branches. Among many other things, they wrote the two books that marked the beginning of the modern polyamory movement and set forth many of the ideas it has kept today, as the count of nonfiction print books about polyamory passes 80. But Nearing and Anapol did not exactly get along.

Nearing was firmly set on closed, homey, polyfidelitous polyfamily, especially with kids, and advocated for primary-secondary hierarchy when a previous couple was involved. Anapol was a sexual and romantic free-wheeler who went through three husbands and graphically shared her adventures in her newsletters and later, Loving More magazine. Although she and Nearing were always friends, their different approaches kept them working separately for a decade — until the crucial 1993 Kirkridge "Sex and Spirit" conference in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains. The conference was organized by Father Robert T. Francoeur, a married, sex-positive Catholic priest. (The office of Pope Paul VI granted special recognition of his marriage, Francoeur later surmised, by accidentally rubber-stamping the wrong letter "Approved.") At the Kirkridge conference Francoeur, Rimmer, and others in the coalescing movement urged,  begged, implored Nearing and Anapol to combine forces. They did. The result was the full-fledged Loving More magazine and its conferences, which the two initially ran jointly.

Because of their continuing differences Anapol quit Loving More's management after one year, but she kept contributing frequently for many years more. Loving More was the poly movement's central nexus and growth driver through the 1990s. Its membership list grew to 10,000 under Nearing by 1999, before the internet enabled exponential spread.

A different type of early tension in the movement was what Gleason calls spiritualist: between sacred-sexuality people, including neo-Tantrics, Pagans, tarot readers, crystal believers, and New Agers generally, and less esoteric polys who often felt embarrassed by the former and dissed them as woo-woo. One example was the dispute about whether so many text-dense pages of Loving More magazine should be devoted to astrology. Members of a prominent quad who organized gatherings in Vermont set up a Yahoo discussion group called PolyWON, for Poly WithOut Newage, pronounced sewage.

Today those old conflicts are largely forgotten. But any of them could have derailed the movement when it was small and fragile. In facing the larger world, the movement indeed had a very tough sell. Its central revelation was that multi-intimate relationships can actually work among all parties — can blossom and thrive splendiferously — at least for some people, at least if they embrace hard-learned lessons about communication skills, caring, and honesty. Mainstream America mostly ridiculed the idea as impossible when it noticed us at all. But then the internet enabled the movement to find enough of its audience to take off.

And then so did serious media attention, after the dismissiveness and hostility that Nearing and Anapol often endured. This attitude shift in the media, happening in the mid and late 2000s, had much to do with the goal that Nearing's successor at Loving More, Robyn Trask, set for herself: to "make polyamory a household word." She was passionate about reaching people like her own former self: lost and ashamed in a monocentric wilderness, with no idea that another way is possible. She realized that this was something only the mass media could do, despite the movement's distrust of media exposure. Trask's indefatigable folksy friendliness made her a good interview catch, and she also made Loving More a trusted clearinghouse matching talkative, out polys to interested journalists. It worked. By 2012 the media's fascination with us had become unstoppable.   

The butterfly effect is real. Any "chaotic system," such as the weather or human affairs, is marked by huge effects emerging from fluky little causes — whether a paperwork-stamping error in the Vatican, or a college freshman in Missouri noticing an ad for the Science Fiction Book Club. The freshman, Lance Christie, turned his friend Oberon Zell on to Stranger.  Zell became Stranger's most colorful 1960s evangelist, and Zell's partner Morning Glory invented our defining word. 

One criticism of American Poly: It needed more readers pre-publication to catch careless mistakes. For instance, Morning Glory Zell's famous 1990 essay that birthed the word polyamory was "A Bouquet of Lovers," but Gleason calls it "A Banquet of Lovers" throughout the book. (Cannibalism?)  He misstates the name of this website. He repeatedly misspells the names of Robyn Trask and the early poly New Age skeptic Ken Olum. I have to wonder how many other details are off?

Still, this is a very impressive work. American Poly is the most comprehensive history yet of the inspirers, passionate early builders, and fluky bloodlines of modern polyamory's growth as a movement. It spans the era of Harrad, the Church of All Worlds, Haight-Ashbury, the Kerista commune (with its formative influence on the San Francisco counterculture and on Nearing and her husbands, though she was put off by Kerista's cultishness), Family Synergy, the Human Awareness Institute, the early PEPCONs, and the rest. These shaped the ideas and the fundamental good character of the movement we have today — which has at last propelled "the polyamorous possibility" (Elisabeth Sheff's term) into widespread American knowledge and understanding.

●  Rounding out the picture is the other poly-movement history book, the one that came out last year: Fifty Years of Polyamory in America by Glen W. Olson and Terry Lee Brussel-Rogers.

 

Glen Olson and Terry Brussel-Rogers

Whereas Gleason is an academic historian, Glen and Terry were right there in the thick of it for many years, at least the California parts of it, as I previously wrote. Their narrative includes detail-rich chapters on life in Family Synergy, the neo-pagan influence, Live the Dream, Morehouse, HAI, and the origins of Loving More. It mostly spans 1971 to the early 2000s and has retrospectives from key players still living.

The authors' own roots are in 1960s California. The summer of 1967, they write,  

was the culmination of three dominant trends happening in America at the time. The civil rights movement had been changing people's hearts throughout the 1960s, making activism respectable. The Human Potential Movement [had been] quietly gaining momentum all decade with the message that you can change who you are for the better. ... And the literary Beat culture of the 1950s, whose basic tenets included challenging your preconceptions, making a spiritual quest, and rejecting economic materialism, had turned into the popular and energetic hippie movement of the 1960s. ... The fervor of these secular movements infused the following decade with excitement about human potential and the ability to love.

These two books capture how the foundations of today's polyamory movement were built. The books round each other out. If you are moved to get one of them, do get the other one too.

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Other Polyamory in the News:

●  Maybe you've spotted one difference between those poly-historic times and now. We're more down to earth. We've outgrown the heady early utopianism — which sometimes created unrealistic ideals and party lines, bred room elephants that no one dared talk about, and hence led to especially poignant failures.

Realism is good. Maturity is good. Maturity is a sign of success. If we hoped to normalize the poly relationship option, we have been succeeding, and guess what: Normal means... ordinary.

And that allows for more clear-headed assessments of whether or not this thing is right for you.

For instance, on Medium a lady in a triad that recently broke up assesses, Does the Polyamorous Model Work Better Than Monogamy? (reprinted on The Good Men Project Nov. 19).

Her answer is mixed. Here's the meat of it.

Choosing a path. The author's
caption: "Thank you, Dall-E"

By Marianna Zelichenko

In my last post, I shared how our polycule has fallen apart after James and Annie broke up. Thomas left a comment saying:

“The only thing that surprises me about the polyamorous community is how surprised they continue to be that their relationship model doesn’t work any better than the monogamy model.”

...So let’s discuss: Does the polyamorous model work better?...

When the polyamorous model works better:

•  ...You have needs that are important to you and can’t be met in just one romantic relationship (for instance because you have conflicting needs)

•  AND/OR you have a strong craving for freedom when it comes to relationships

•  OR you don’t feel the need to date multiple people, but you don’t mind it when your partner does.

•  AND you’re willing and capable to put in the work that is required to manage multiple relationships simultaneously, including dealing with jealousy and alone time, managing time, resources, and expectations, and communicating clearly and constructively.

If this is true for you, the polyamorous model likely works better, because it’s a better fit for your needs.

(Disclaimer: I’m not taking into account practical matters, such as the access to other polyam folks in your community, etc. — this is a separate matter entirely.)

When the monogamous model works better:

•  ...You can have your important romantic needs met with just one partner.

•  AND You don’t mind or are even happy being with one romantic partner.

•  AND/OR The benefits of being exclusive with one partner matter to you (such benefits may include relative predictability/stability in your schedule, or acceptance from the outside world).

    

•  AND you are willing and capable to put in the work that is required to find your way back to each other as both of you grow as human beings, so that you keep meeting each other’s romantic needs and don’t grow apart.

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

What if it’s neither?

You may have noticed that with both models, I’m focusing on the pull — the things that are appealing about each of them. But both models also come with their own challenges. 

...If you’re not willing to communicate with your partner about your needs, you might choose monogamy, but I question whether your relationship will still be happy and fulfilling down the line.

If you don’t want to take into account your partner’s needs, dating multiple people might bring you a short reprieve first, but is likely to bring you a whole lot of headache after.

In the end, relationships are human, and humans are messy. Polyamory doesn’t cure us from that (and neither does monogamy). But for a lot of us, I do believe polyamory is a ‘better’ model, leading to a life of more freedom and fun.

Last summer, we launched a deck of Polyamory Conversation Cards that help tackle the many different aspects of polyamorous relationships. In 49 prompts, you’ll explore topics such as emotional security, sexuality, and practical matters. Grab your deck in the webshop.

●  GQ (formerly Gentleman's Quarterly) published a snarky but not altogether inaccurate guide to various types of today's ENM. 11 Fundamental Forms of Ethical Non-Monogamy, Explained. "There's a big difference between Polyfidelity and Don't Ask, Don't Tell, after all." 

By Sophie Saint Thomas

Polyamory

...In this often-attempted relationship format, which genuinely does feel like coming home and works wonders for many proud poly people, you form romantic and sexual relationships with more than one partner. Many are called. Few can serve.

Hierarchical Poly

Hierarchical polyamory usually involves a couple. They're each other's number one, emergency contact, and "primary partner," but they can see other people (secondary partners). And those second partners better know their place. Kidding! But really....

...Relationship Anarchy

Screw your rules and reliance on romance. Relationship anarchists consider all their partnerships equally valid whether they bone or not. ... They're all equal, and they're so much more punk than the pumpkin spice latte sipping poly crowd. ...

●  How bad can an anti-poly therapist be? Here's one who got caught. From New Zealand, Counsellor named after failing woman in polyamorous relationship (1News, Nov. 15). "An Auckland counsellor who was found to have mishandled the case of a woman who was in a polyamorous relationship has been publicly named by the Health and Disability Commission. ..."

●  The NPR radio station KCRW in Los Angeles produces a podcast called How's Your Sex Life? This just ran a segment called Polyamory for Beginners, in which host Myisha Battle interviews comedian Ashley Ray. They rave about Tristan Taormino's guidebook Opening Up and cover other good territory, including your need to find poly community. Transcript.

●  You knew it would happen: OUTtv sets polyamorous dating series (Realscreen.com, Nov. 21). "OUTtv has commissioned a new original dating competition series, Looking for a Third, which is set for release on the network in late 2024."...

 
●  From CNN Portugal: The Teatro Villare in Lisbon premieres “Baby, I want to kiss more people” (Nov. 4) "Diogo Varo and Joana Brito Silva made a show to talk about their non-monogamous relationship." Says Varo, 

People quickly assume that non-monogamy is about how many people you live with, but it’s actually a political way of living life. ... Non-monogamy is about being honest – first with ourselves. ... But it’s also about being honest with others, whether they’re like you’re the main partner or not. You need to respect others and know how to communicate with partners.

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And still...

    

“History is coming at us fast right now.

 The geopolitical snow globe has been well and truly shaken.”

– Dominic Nichols, UK

Why, despite all, do I still end most posts to this polyamory news site with Ukraine?

Because I've seen many progressive movements die out because they failed to scan the wider world accurately and understand their position in it strategically.

We polyamorous people are a small, weird minority of social-rule breakers. Increasingly powerful people call us a threat to society — because by living successfully outside their worldview, we expose its incompleteness.

One couple, many hands. "A new mural painting in Kyiv dedicated
to Ukrainian volunteers. If you have helped Ukrainians during this
year and a half, you may consider yourself to be one of them."

Our freedom to choose our relationship structures, and to speak up for ourselves about the truth of ourselves, is just one way we depend on a free and pluralistic society that respects people's dignity to create their own lives, to access facts, and to speak of what they know.

Such a society is possible only where people have power to govern themselves, combined with legal structures that are at least supposed to guarantee the rights of all.

Innovative people, communities, and societies who create their own lives, and who insist on the democratic structures and legal rights that enable them to do so safely, infuriate and terrify the authoritarians who are growing in power around the world and in our own United States. Now with direct mutual support.

Such rulers and would-be rulers seek to stamp out other people's freedom to choose their lives — by intimidation, repressive laws, inflammatory disinformation and public incitement, abusive police power, or eventually, artillery.

For what it's worth, Polyamory in the News received more pagereads from pre-invasion Ukraine over the years (56,400) than from any other country in eastern Europe.

You can donate to Ukraine relief through this updated list of vetted organizations (Nov. 2023) or elsewhere. We're giving to a big one, Razom, and to a little informal one, Pizza for Ukraine in Kharkiv, the project of an old friend of my wife (story).

But that is only the start. For those of us born since World War II, this is the most consequential war of our lifetime. Because we have entered another time when calculating fascism, at home and abroad, is rising and sees freedom and liberalism and social tolerance as weak, degenerate, delusional — inviting easy pushovers. As Russia thought it saw in Ukraine. The whole world is watching what we will do about it.

The coming times may require hard things of us. We don't get to choose the time and place in history we are born into. We do get to choose how we respond to it. 

Need a little help bucking up? Take perspective. Play this. Another version. More? Some people on the eastern front helping to hold onto an open society, a shrinking thing in the world. Maybe your granddad did this across a trench from Hitler's troops — for you, and us, because a world fascist movement was successfully defeated that time, opening the way for the rest of the 20th century.

Although the outcome didn't look good for a couple of years there, either. Popular history remembers the victory over the Nazis and the joyous homecoming in 1945. Much less remembered are the defeats and overall grim prospects from 1941 through early 1943.

Remember, these people say they are doing it for us too. They are correct. The global struggle between a free, open future and a fearful revival of the dark past that's shaping up, including in our own country, is still in its early stages. It's likely to get worse before it gets better. The outcome is again uncertain, and it will determine the 21st century and the handling of all its other problems.

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PS: Ukraine should not be idealized as the paragon of an open democratic society. For instance, see If Ukraine Wants To Stand for Liberty and Democracy, It Should Rethink Some of Its Wartime Policies. And it has quite the history of being run by corrupt oligarchs — leading to the Maidan Uprising of 2013, the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, and Zelensky's overwhelming election in 2019 as the anti-corruption candidate. So they're working on that. And they're stamping hard on the old culture of petty, everyday corruption too.  More. More; "Ukraine shows that real development happens when people believe they have an ownership stake in their own societies."

Now, writes US war correspondent George Packer in The Atlantic, 

Here was a country with a tragic history that had at last begun to build, with great effort, a better society. What made Ukraine different from any other country I had ever seen—certainly from my own—was its spirit of constant self-improvement, which included frank self-criticism. For example, there’s no cult of Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine—a number of Ukrainians told me that he had made mistakes, that they’d vote against him after the war was won. Maxim Prykupenko, a hospital director in Lviv, called Ukraine “a free country aspiring to be better all the time.” The Russians, he added, “are destroying a beautiful country for no logical reason to do it. Maybe they are destroying us just because we have a better life.”

They have a word there, with a deep history, for the horizontal, self-organized, mutual get-it-done that grows from community social trust: hromada. Learn that word. It's been getting them through  to the extent they've been able. We polyfolks often dream of creating something like that community spirit in miniature, in our polycules and networks. Occasionally we succeed.

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Social attitudes in Ukraine tend traditional, rooted in a thousand years of the Orthodox Church. But not bitterly so like often in the US; the ideal of modern European civil society is widely treasured, and social progressivism has room to thrive. The status of women is fast advancing, especially post-invasion (pre-invasion article). A reported 43,000 women volunteer in the armed forces, flooding traditionally male bastions — not just as staff but as combat officers, artillery gunners, tankers, battlefield medics, and snipers. (Intimidating video: "Thus the Witch has Spoken".)

  

Ukraine's LGBT military unicorn.
The thorns and barbed wire
represent old restrictions
now being cut away. 
 

Some LGBT folx in the armed forces display symbols of LGBT pride on their uniforms, with official approval, whereas in Russia it's a prison-worthy crime for even a civilian to show a rainbow pin or "say gay." A report on Ukraine's LGBT+ and feminist acceptance revolutions. Another. Another. Another. War changes things.

And in December 2022, Russia made it a crime not just to speak for LGBT recognition, but to speak for "non-traditional sexual relations." Until last year Russia had a visible polyamory education and awareness movement.

Polyfolks are like one ten-thousandth of what's at stake globally. Ukraine must have our full material backing for however long as it takes to succeed. Speak out for it.

A Russian writer grieves: "My country has fallen out of time."

Women fighters in a trench in the Donetsk region

PPS:  US authoritarians (such as Sen. Ted Cruz) are saying that allowing women in front-line roles is a woke plot to weaken America's armed forces. Ukraine puts that shit to bed. Do you have a relative who talks like that? Send them this video link to Vidma, who commands a mortar platoon, recounting the tale of one of their battles near Bakhmut – the Verdun of this war.

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The polyamory flag is a grim, confusing failure. Let's do better.

So here's a years-long peeve, and boy howdy, am I not the only one. The polyamory flag stinks. It confuses, it fails to communicate a message other than Huh?, and its colors loom angry and foreboding. "Some math or engineering society" is what usually comes to people's minds. It fails to declare for us, fails to inspire, fails to do a flag's job.

But we keep using it decade after decade, ever since Jim Evans proposed it in 1995 against no competition. It seemed like a good idea at the time.¹ Maybe it was, when the self-identifying polyamory community was small, insular, and (as Evans later explained) mostly trying to keep hidden.^{1, 2}

From a typical recent discussion on reddit/r/polyamory (161,000 subscribers):

"The flag everyone is happy to see burn."

"New rule for this sub. Who ever posts this flag shall be banned. It is fugly."

"Every time it's posted, everyone hates it, so everybody just stop using it. It's no longer our flag."

"Can we please throw that flag out now?"

"Slowly takes walltacks out of the poly flag hanging on my wall I just learned everyone hates."

Another discussion on reddit/r/polyamory.

Fortunately, many people have created new polyamory flag candidates. At least two of them IMO would be excellent if enough folks decide to adopt them as the new standard.

At right are a few of the alternatives that people have put into the public domain on Wikimedia Commons. Take a look at the hi-res versions there, with the creators' names, dates and descriptions. And maybe add one of your own.

Here are more new candidates, sorted by keyword "polyamory" from the geeky site reddit/r/QueerVexillology. (I know this brings up the old debate "Is poly queer?", but there they are.)

And here's what an internet-wide image search brings up for "polyamory flag."

 

My own favorites are the two below. Both use our universal infinity-heart symbol, which is by far the most widely recognized emblem of polyamory today.³

   

This first one is by Emma @HECKSCAPER, created September 2019. It seems to be catching on, and it's my fav. Here's its Wikimedia Commons page. Emma tweeted that the Evans flag left her "so visually offended that I had to make my own version using the infinity heart instead, while maintaining the general meaning of the chosen colors." She made the colors lighter and less severe, and the central disk is bold, happy and airy. But shouldn't it be just a little larger for better proportioning?

This one is by Monroe of RatLab Art, August 2016. Its Wikimedia Commons page. Wrote Monroe, "I redesigned the polyamory flag bc the old one seems a little jarring to me. I like the original meaning behind the colors, though." Again the colors are more muted than the original's. The infinity heart is proudly center stage and grabs you from a distance. I might prefer a brighter gold rather than tan, keeping Evans' original symbolism that went with the gold color for the pi.¹

So, how can we get a new flag into wide use? By using it! The ultimate decider will be the wisdom of the crowd. If you have a favorite, or design one, promote it (like I just did!) and see if other people pick it up.

I bet in a few years we'll be using a new poly flag that most of us are happy with and that carries our message proudly and well.

Update: Another interesting new proposal, skipping the infinity heart, from reddit/r/polyfamilies user TheGreyBandit. 

Update: A new Facebook thread with more proposed designs.

Update, June 15, 2021:  An organized initiative is starting up for a new and better polyamory flag and other symbology. Sarah at PolyamProud writes,

I recently read your article on your distaste for the polyamory pride flag. I noticed that you have seen the reddit post by TheGreyBandit and his new ideas on the Polyam flag. I am currently working with him and several other Polyam people who all agree with you. We have collectively formed @PolyamProud, a volunteer coalition dedicated to establishing a definitive and representative visual identity for the polyamorous community.

Update, November 23, 2022: The winner of that new-flag competition

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1.  In August 2016 Jim Evans wrote about his thinking behind the flag when he created it 21 years earlier. Among other things, he says that he kept its meaning deliberately obscure because people were more closeted then. And he used the letter pi partly because he could simply copy it from a font into Microsoft Paint, while drawing an infinity heart in Paint would have been challenging "given my limited abilities."

From Evans' post: 

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Polyamory, Pride Flags, and Patterns of Feedback

...I've been polyamorous, or "poly" for short, for nearly all of my adult life. A little over 20 years ago, I lived in the Pacific Northwest, and for the first time in my life, I experienced first-hand the struggles and celebrations of what is now known as the LGBT community. One thing that struck me was the imagery and symbolism those communities used to rally around, identify other members, and publicly announce their membership in the community. The pride flag was one image that made a huge impression on me. At that time, the poly community didn't really have similar symbols to use, so I took it upon myself to create one. Here's what I made up, and released into the public domain in the late summer or early fall of 1995.

Here's the text I wrote up describing it to the first mailing list I shared it with. It's become the canonical description of this particular flag:

The poly pride flag consists of three equal horizontal colored stripes with a symbol in the center of the flag. The colors of the stripes, from top to bottom, are as follows: blue, representing the openness and honesty among all partners with which we conduct our multiple relationships; red, representing love and passion; and black, representing solidarity with those who, though they are open and honest with all participants of their relationships, must hide those relationships from the outside world due to societal pressures. The symbol in the center of the flag is a gold Greek lowercase letter 'pi', as the first letter of 'polyamory'. The letter's gold color represents the value that we place on the emotional attachment to others, be the relationship friendly or romantic in nature, as opposed to merely primarily physical relationships.

Now, here are some things to understand. Clearly, I'm not a visual artist. My tools for creation at the time were literally limited to Microsoft Paint, running on Windows 3.1. Nevertheless, the flag design managed to limp along, with little fanfare. My friends and I used it, and thought of it as quirky and something that could be used in the way other pride flags were used, as a symbol to rally around and for identification.

Fast forward 20 years. Apparently, this thing called the World Wide Web happened, and let all sorts of people communicate and discover things they'd never known about before. New polyamorous people began to discover the flag existed. One would think that people might think it was an interesting idea, given its intent. One would be wrong. The flag has been called vile, no good, hideous, disappointing, ugly, and many other negative things.

One of the issues frequently brought up is that the color scheme is garish or unpleasing. That's subjective, and I can't argue with their perception. I still think there's value in the color symbology, if not the actual RGB values I used when creating it.

Many people seem to take issue with the pi symbol as obscure. There were specific reasons for choosing it at the time. First, I specifically avoided imagery that included a heart. The leather pride flag, which predates the design of mine, includes a heart, and I was trying to avoid confusion, given that community was there first. The "infinity heart" was not yet as widely accepted a symbol for polyamory, and would have been challenging for me to incorporate given my limited abilities in the visual arts. The letter pi was readily available on computer typographic platforms even in those days, so I chose that.

Also, at the time, I was more concerned with "in the closet" polyfolk, and was far more in the closet myself than I am these days. I wanted a symbol that could be used relatively anonymously, that could let people who were in on the symbology connect, without it being too specific.

Additionally, there was already a rich history of existing pride symbols using Greek letters, the use of lambda as an LGBT symbol being a concrete example. I was hoping to evoke similarity and solidarity without being too explicit or derivative. Finally, the fact that the "poly" in polyamory is a Greek root seemed to indicate that would be a natural choice. In retrospect, perhaps a lemniscate ("infinity symbol") would've been a better choice, but nobody spoke up then.

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2.  In the history of the modern polyamory movement, one person stands above everyone else in bringing the small early community out of its shell of secrecy and fear of public notice. That was Robyn Trask, who acquired Loving More magazine and its gatherings in 2004 to rescue it when it was on the brink of extinction.

The common view in the polyworld up to then had been that all the news media are sensationalist and nasty and incapable of treating this thing we do accurately. There were examples of that. But few in the community seemed able, or willing, to see the difference between a scandal-seeking hack and the serious writers and editors who would soon be producing excellent, seminal feature articles about us for the likes of the Washington Post and New Scientist.

Robyn has always said that her motivation is to help people like her own younger self: lost and ashamed in a monocentric wilderness, with no idea that another way is possible. On taking over Loving More, Robyn realized that only the mass media could reach most such people and let them know that there's a whole community they can join, one that has amassed a great deal of practical polyamory expertise. She says that early on, she set a goal for Loving More "to make polyamory a household word."

She started sending out press releases to news media. Within two months of acquiring Loving More she got her hometown Denver Post to run a 2000-word feature story on the concept and on local polyfolks who volunteered to be interviewed. The 700 Club, the showpiece program of the Christian Broadcasting Network, invited her on and she bravely accepted. They treated her with surprising respect, giving her a chance to explain, in her pleasant and folksy way, that multiple loving relationships with everyone's understanding and consent are actually possible and really happening — to more than a million Christian viewers.

She sent out a press release before the 2005 Loving More conference at Ramblewood in Maryland, the first conference under her leadership, and welcomed onsite a reporter and photographer from the Baltimore Sun, which was then one of America's great newspapers. She introduced them to everybody at the beginning, they agreed in front of the crowd to hard rules she set around everyone's privacy, and they left after one day. The result was a major, excellent feature article in the Sun, later reprinted elsewhere. It was surely a life-changer to some readers who had thought they were the only ones in the world.

Good media like that began to change attitudes in the poly community about what was possible — especially if you chose intelligently who to deal with, researched their employers' biases and motives, and learned basic tricks for dealing with the media successfully. Such as memorizing and rehearsing your key talking points beforehand, presenting yourself well in the eyes of the audience, saying nothing that you don't want used even if it means a long silence while you think (they'll clip that out), and how to walk away from a trap.

The more news stories and TV interviews that poly people did, the better informed the media themselves became going into interviews, and the easier it got. This required many intelligent, good-hearted, quick-witted, very out polyfolks who were ready to go on camera and to talk to writers. But our movement had people like that! By about 2012 "herd journalism" had taken hold: If your competitor runs a story about an interesting new topic that grabs people's attention, you have to do it too. 

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As it happened, that Loving More conference at Ramblewood was my own first. I'll always remember stepping out of my car in the parking field and walking toward the gaily decorated registration table, my heart pounding with an awareness that in a few moments my life would change forever. (I was right.)

Within weeks of the conference and that Baltimore Sun article, I started doing the project that became Polyamory in the News. My original intent was to capture and highlight how the mainstream world was actually treating us, and what we could do about it. That was roughly 4,000 articles and broadcasts ago as individually documented here, plus many more that I've surely missed.

It worked. Fifteen years later just about the entire Western world knows about us — and has learned that for some people, multi-relationships can work joyously all around, when carried out in the right environment of abundant communication with work on serious self-knowledge and relationship skills. "The polyamorous possibility" has become widely known.

It's so much better now — thanks to all you dedicated, great-hearted volunteers who are working in ways large and small, year after year, for a powerful idea.

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3.  The infinity heart as a symbol for polyamory arose in the mid-1990s. The very first was the one at right, created and put into the public domain by Brian Crabtree. New versions quickly appeared (now there are hundreds), and by about 2010 the infinity heart had pushed the once-dominant⁴ poly parrot nearly to extinction. . .

. . .such as Ray Dillinger's parrot from 1997 or before, at left, one of the first. For years it was the familiar logo of the alt.polyamory Usenet group, the first large poly-specific discussion site on the web. The site was created (with no graphics) on May 21, 1992, by Jennifer L. Wesp, who had just invented the word polyamory in a Usenet discussion independently of Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart (who first published a form of it in May 1990). See "Polyamory" enters the Oxford English Dictionary, and tracking the word's origins. (Though it's often called the first internet poly site, the alt.polyamory list was predated by the "Triples List," founded around 1989 and hosted by Sun Microsystems, recalls Howard Landman, August 2020.)

In 2002 Alex West posted a history of polyamory symbols, documenting things back while the movement was still young.

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4.  For instance, alt.polyamory had a very old FAQ page (undated but still in a version of the site "last modified June 1997"), including,  "There are several proposed symbols of polyamory, of which the most common seems to be the parrot.  As parrot pins and other ornaments are relatively easy to find, this symbol seems likely to catch on over the others."

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OLDER ARTICLES, FOR HISTORY’S SAKE

In the fall of 2005 I started keeping the blog that would become Polyamory in the News. Of course, there were many earlier instances of poly in the media. Here are some significant ones. They're in reverse chronological order.

Do you know of more that ought to be here? Write me at alan7388 {at} gmail.com. Send the link, a scan, or text.

Last updated November 18, 2022.

● New York Times, Sept. 4, 2005: Three Men and a Woman, a writerly vignette in the Times's "Modern Love" column.

● The Guardian, progressive British newspaper, April 4, 2005: Free love gets a fit of the wibbles, by Steven Alexander, featuring Meg Barker.

● Denver Post, Denver's big daily paper, Jan. 23, 2005: Polyamorists Don't Just Have Sex... (paywalled). A 2,000-word feature article about Robyn Trask and friends in her hometown paper, two months after she bought Loving More magazine and its gatherings in November 2004. This was probably her first big media placement for the concept of polyamory — the first of very, very many — after setting herself a goal for Loving More "to make 'polyamory' a household word."

● Boston Magazine, July 2003 issue: ‘Multiply your Love: Local Advocates of “Polyamory” Say You Can Love Two People At Once. Or Three. Or Four’, by M. Blanding.

● The Guardian (U.K. newspaper), Nov. 13, 2003: When two just won't do, by Helena Echlin. "Many people find it hard to stick to the confines of a monogamous relationship. Which is why in America more and more are now choosing to live in 'group marriages'."

● Elle magazine on Maureen Marovitch and company, October 2002: What It's Like to Have Two Boyfriends.

● Detroit Metro Times, alternative weekly newspaper, cover story, Feb. 13, 2002: Lovers Leap: Penetrating the Polyamory Subculture.

● AlterNet, Oct. 25, 2001: Polyamory: Ethical Non-Monogamy, by Paul King; reprinted from CU City View.

● Isthmus, alternative (or college) newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin, Feb. 1, 2001: Open Marriage: A glimpse into the world of polyamory. Long article.

● Houston Press, Nov. 30, 2000, alternative weekly newspaper, Meet Mr. & Mrs. & Mrs. Jones. Long feature profiling polyfamilies and the movement.

● Time magazine, Nov. 15, 1999, reporting on the April Divilbiss case: “Henry & Mary & Janet &...”. This article, and the Tennessee child custody case it was about, was an important early event in the polyamory movement becoming visible to the mainstream world. The original article is behind a subscription paywall, but it's important enough for the historical record that I'll reprint the text:

Henry & Mary & Janet &...

By John Cloud

To get to the home that April Divilbiss has shared with the two men she calls her husbands, you drive south on Interstate 55 from Memphis, Tenn., and cross the border into Mississippi. Then you double back along a little road that winds into a forlorn section of Memphis again. It's not just two states but several states of mind you end up traversing. That's because the family album under the TV in April's apartment contains snapshots not of a happy couple but of a devoted threesome. And baby makes four.

April and Shane Divilbiss, who work as a stay-at-home mom and a computer technician, are legally married, but until recently Chris Littrell, a male nurse, lived with them too. No, the two guys don't go for each other; the triad tried a menage a trois once but stopped because Chris thought it was icky. Instead, they lived as man and wife and man, with April taking turns. Together they were raising April's toddler (from a previous relationship), earning a living and wondering how Shane could learn to manage his jealousy when he heard Chris having sex with their wife. Despite the obvious difficulties, until about a year ago, they had formed an odd but functional family.

But now these three Southerners, all in their 20s, find themselves litigants in a legal mess and, consequently, martyrs of sorts for a fledgling movement. A year ago, a judge removed April's daughter Alana from the Divilbiss-Littrell home. The judge was acting on a petition from Alana's paternal grandmother arguing that the threesome's relationship revealed such "depravity" that it could "endanger the morals or health" of the little girl, a sunshiney four-year-old who prizes her Barbies. The grandmother took action after seeing the three discuss their lifestyle on an MTV program, Sex in the '90s: It's a Group Thing.

More Americans than you might think are practicing what is commonly known as polygamy but what adherents prefer to call "polyamory": loving more than one person simultaneously and--this is crucial--openly. No one has taken a survey on polyamory, but as with many fringe movements, it has grown on the Web. "Ten years ago, there were maybe three support groups for polies," says Brett Hill, who helps run a magazine (circ. 10,000), a website (1,000 hits a month) and two annual conferences for an organization called Loving More. Today there are perhaps 250 polyamory support groups, mostly on the Internet but some that meet for potluck suppers. Sure, most of them are in such expected precincts as Boston and Los Angeles, but there are also outposts like KanPoly, where polyamorous residents of Kansas can meet others like themselves and even download a "poly pride flag."

The poly community is rallying around April, Chris and Shane, whose case may provide the tale of injustice every movement needs. The case could well be the first of its kind; it's surely the first to debate explicitly the worthiness of polies as parents. The roots of the movement, however, reach back to the communes of the mid-1800s and their flower-children descendants a century later. The poly family is usually smaller than a commune and more committed than a swingers' group--though polyamorists insist on the prerogative of each family to set its own rules about fidelity, as long as everyone is honest. Polies tend to be an exceedingly earnest bunch, and many describe what they practice as "responsible nonmonogamy." During a recent Loving More conference, an organizer pointedly noted that "Loving More does not mean 'f______ more.'"

So what is it that polyamorists want? Until the Divilbiss case, they had few political goals, and even now their mission is mostly social. Basically, they want to convince us that the politics of the heart doesn't have to be governed by a one-party system. "If you are married, but you meet someone in the office you fall in love with, what do you do?" asks Hill. Most of us have to give up someone. "But that's so painful. People destroy themselves, destroy their families over that. All I'm saying is, we have choices."

April, Chris and Shane found out the hard way. Chris served as Shane's best man at Shane and April's 1996 wedding. But Chris and April quickly bonded, and by January 1997, April knew she was in love--again. It was tough to keep her feelings bottled up, and she didn't want to cheat, so she told Shane that she and Chris were in love. It was Valentine's Day.

Chris thought Shane would shoot him. Instead, they went to a Waffle House for a long talk. Eventually, they returned to April and announced that they wanted to try a live-in threesome. April says philosophically that she and Shane "just knew that if we didn't try this, we would have lost one of our best friends just because of modern stereotypes and jealousy and social conditioning." The arrangement was difficult but manageable. But the judge handling the grandmother's petition said one of the men had to move out before he would consider returning Alana. The case has dragged on for months. Divilbiss's lawyer Asa Hoke (whose fees are being paid with Loving More's help) hopes to persuade the court to change its mind since Chris has now moved. Hoke has also appealed the decision on constitutional grounds, arguing that parents should be able to raise their kids without undue interference.

Polies see such experiences as painful but transcendental, and not surprisingly, there's a fair amount of New Age flimflam associated with the movement. But many adherents like Loving More leader Ryam Nearing prefer to dwell on science. "People are biologically poly," she asserts, noting that polyamory occurs even in societies that punish it by death. Polyamorists love the work of Helen Fisher, a Rutgers University anthropologist and author of Anatomy of Love. Fisher has written that only 16% of cultures on record actually prescribe monogamy; in most, polygamy is sought after by men as a sign of power. Fisher also completed a study of divorce in 62 societies, which revealed that people have a remarkable tendency to split up after just four years. The implication that polyamorists take from Fisher's work is that we aren't built for monogamy.

Fisher has a more complex view. She says we have conflicting evolutionary impulses: lust (to ensure progeny), attraction (to conserve mating energy for good catches) and attachment (to allow us to stay with someone at least long enough to raise a child through infancy--about four years). "So these polyamory people are fascinating," Fisher says. "They are trying to be realistic." Still, if "polyamory is extremely mature," she adds, "it is also extremely naive." Jealousy will never fade permanently, she says. Indeed, just about every polyamory website, meeting and publication is obsessed with curing jealousy. It is the polyamorists' worst enemy.

None of which means, necessarily, that practicing polyamory should be reason enough to lose custody of your child. In the Divilbiss case, four sets of independent, court-appointed experts concluded that Alana should be returned to her mother. They have also recommended counseling for everyone involved.

A social worker from New York State probably would be willing to provide it. She and her husband have been in another type of polyamorous relationship--what could also be called an "open marriage"--for 28 years. They have never lived with their other lovers, but they each have long-term relationships outside their marriage, which they say has remained healthy. Many friends still don't understand--"to them it's just adultery with chocolate sprinkles," says the 51-year-old husband. "But it's more." The couple have a son Matthew who's 21 and in college. Matthew thinks that what has happened to April, Chris and Shane is awful. "My experience with having 'extra' parents was quite positive," he wrote in a recent e-mail. As a teenager, he had begun to suspect that his mother was having an affair. "To then find out that she was but that it was an approved activity was entirely a relief... It only seemed natural."

Matthew has had some problems because of his upbringing, however. "Having this kind of heritage makes my life a great deal more confusing" with respect to his own relationships, he wrote. "For most people, the relationship options are fairly constrained. For me, there are all these options that seem perfectly valid. Choosing between them is a task and a half!"

● Salon, July 19, 1999: Stranger in a Super-Friendly Land, by Lady Chimmerly. Another influential story in the late 1990s, revolving around a Loving More conference.

● Esquire magazine, May 1999: Scenes from a (Group) Marriage, by John H. Richardson. (The link is to Esquire's online reprint of the article in September 2022. It's also in Esquire's archive filed with a 2007 date; don't be misled.) This 8,000-word article featured Nan Wise's quad and Loving More conferences, and made poly life seem tumultuous and exhausting.

● HBO, "Real Sex" series, sometime in the 1990s: The HBO cable-TV channel aired a 4-minute segment about a workshop with poly pioneer Deborah Anapol at Harbin Hot Springs. Deborah writes (May 2, 2014): "More archival footage... this is an excerpt from HBO's Real Sex series shot at one of my workshops in the 90's. One of their most popular shows ever – they are still showing re-runs! – with Elizabeth Fuller, Conrad Bishop, Roy Turpin, Arlene Q. Allen, Joseph Tavormina and Victor Gold."

● The Boston Phoenix, Oct. 16, 1998: Free Love Grows Up. "Free Love Might Sound Like a Euphemism for Group Sex, but to Boston’s Polyamory Community, It’s Just Like Marriage – Only Bigger.’ By Alicia Potter.

● New York Times Magazine, Feb. 16, 1997: They Call it Polyluv.

● Newsweek, July 17, 1995, cover story: The Bisexuals: Not gay. Not straight. A new sexual identity emerges. This mentions "polyamory" by name, just a few years after the word was first coined by Morning Glory Zell and shared over Deborah Anapol's kitchen table in Mill Valley, California. Excerpt:

...[Steven and Lori's] marriage now is a home invention that they describe as "body-fluid monogamous." In conversation, they discuss condoms as matter-of-factly as the weather. Lori has an ongoing sexual relationship with another man and is looking for another woman; Steven has a friendship with a man that is sometimes sexual. ...

...In a culture organized, however precariously, around monogamy, bisexuality lurks as a rupture in the social structure, conjuring fears of promiscuity, secret lives and instability. It can make the knotty issues of human relationships -- jealousy, fidelity, finances, parental roles, custody -- even more complex. And with these uncertainties comes an increased threat of AIDS. Failed monogamy is already a principal source of pain in this country; bisexuality suggests that nonmonogamy, or "polyamory," is an accepted part of life.

Bisexuality is the hidden wild card of our erotic culture. ... Bisexual characters have popped up in TV series like "Roseanne" and "Melrose Place" and in films like "Three of Hearts" and "Threesome." ... Many college students, particularly women, talk about a new sexual "fluidity" on campus. ...

...In practice, bisexuality has come to describe an incredibly broad range of erotic patterns: some monogamous, some polyamorous, some fleeting and some wholly fantastic. Indigo Som, 28, a paper artist currently in a monogamous relationship with another woman, considers the word bisexual far too vague to describe her life. "My sexual orientation," she says, "is toward creative people of color who can cook."

● KCAL-9 TV, Los Angeles, Dec. 21, 1993: Shirley -- Open Relationships on the "Shirley" talk show. This is an important one for poly-movement historians.

The show devoted its full 43 minutes to interviewing a long-term open MFM triad about their life together. A fourth partner of theirs, a woman who has a husband and other partners of her own, comes on partway through the show. The whole extended network is on great terms with one another.

The married couple met their other main partner at a "workshop in California," which they've gone to for years to learn about depths of communication, sexuality, and human relationships. The husband mentions Stan Dale, and that confirms it: those were Human Awareness Institute events, probably at Harbin Hot Springs, California. Stan Dale (1929-2007) founded and ran HAI with his wife Helen Dale. It became a crucial early seedbed for the modern polyamory movement, roots often forgotten today (2022).

The people on the show may have 1970s-ish hairstyles, but they are remarkably representative of high-quality, best-practices, successful polyamory as we recognize it nearly 30 years later. That is because they came out of HAI -- as did much of the movement's communicate-communicate-communicate ideology, its viewpoints on jealousy and insecurity and how to understand them, and even some of today's poly jargon, as you will recognize here.

They do not yet, however, use the word "polyamory," nor does the host or anyone else on the show. The word was still too new and unknown; it had originated elsewhere just three years earlier. (Even Loving More magazine didn't settle on "polyamory" as the word for what it was doing until 1995, two years after this show aired.)

Thanks to Randy Ralston for discovering this archival show and alerting us to it.

● In the May 1980 issue of Psychology Today there appeared a lead article on jealousy. Featured in the article was a two-page spread entitled "Polyfidelity: The Keristan Village Ideal."

● If you're reading this page, you'll be interested in the book Fifty Years of Polyamory in America: A Guided Tour of a Growing Movement, by Glen W. Olson and Terry Lee Brussel-Rogers (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022). The bulk of it is about the period from 1968 through 1994. 

MANY ADDITIONAL EARLY ARTICLES and papers are held in the Kenneth R. Haslam Collection on Polyamory in the Kinsey Institute Library at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. The articles are listed in the Finding Aid to the collection; search the pdf document for "Series IV) Media Coverage".

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