"Building the Poly Movement": My keynote speech at Rocky Mountain Poly Living

Loving More puts on two Poly Living conventions each year, in Philadelphia and Denver. I went to my first Rocky Mountain Poly Living April 15–17 and gave the keynote talk starting things off Friday evening. People asked me to put it online. Here it is.

You may recognize some of my central themes.

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Building the Poly Future

When Robyn [Trask] asked me to do this talk I knew what I wanted to say. Three things to say, actually — to lay out a larger perspective on what we’re doing here this weekend.

First: It’s a great time to be a relationship revolutionary.

We’re incredibly lucky to live in a time when ideas like ours can be noticed, take root, and thrive. Think what we’re doing. We are confronting the world with deep new relationship values, new modes of formerly forbidden loving intimacy, new family structures, and new demands for self-determination — all with high ideals of ethics, honesty, and communication. The world is noticing, and the world is fascinated. The wind is with us.

Now a whole lot of things in the world today look like they’re getting worse. But it warms me no end to see that public understanding of the possibility of multiple love and group relationships, and acceptance of relationship choice, is one thing that looks like it’s just going to get better and better in the coming years. And we right here have been a big part of making that happen. Loving More was there when this movement was barely a movement. . . . (Do fundraising plug for Loving More.)

One thing I’ve been doing is running a website called Polyamory in the News. In the last 11 years it’s reported on over 2,000 newspaper and magazine articles, radio and TV broadcasts, and new-media stories of all kinds, during the decade when the poly movement really came onto the world’s radar. And most of the trends I’ve seen happening are really good. I’m doing a workshop on that tomorrow.

And by the way, if you might like to go on TV or radio representing for polyamory, you probably can. The demand for articulate, out polys willing to do media exceeds the supply. Talk to Robyn about that. She can help train you up with some basic tips, and send you good media inquiries that Loving More gets. She’s particularly looking to get a wider diversity of people than you usually see representing us on TV.

This wider exposure of our ideas is beginning to change the wider culture. The media exposure we’ve been getting is pretty darn good, by and large – partly because this movement is blessed with so many fine people who set good examples, and partly because we’ve been emphasizing things like how much polyfolks care for each other, and work to try to make their relationships good for everyone involved, and how this requires efforts to develop communication and relationship skills that monogamous people can learn from too. But most of all, healthy polyamorous relationships are just gradually becoming more familiar. Normalized.

The world is learning the word. The idea that happy multi-love relationships really exist, are actually happening, that they can be a rich, successful way of life for certain people – is much more out there than it used to be. There’s been an especially big rush of this in just the last 8 or 9 months. It’s growing and it will keep growing. The world is increasingly ready to hear us, and see us, and consider our examples. To realize the existence of what Elisabeth Sheff-Stefanik calls the polyamorous possibility.

There will continue to be a lot of pain and discrimination. There will continue to be trouble from your birth families, and from hostile judges in child-custody cases, and from bosses who may fire you and landlords who may evict you. But gradually less with time.

In the last 5 or 10 years we’ve successfully defined ourselves to the public as what we know ourselves to be: ethical people who care deeply about good relationships — smart, interesting, friendly people — nonthreatening and respectful of all well-considered relationship choices, monogamy included — and by and large just kind of adorable. The longer we keep doing this, the firmer a defense we’re building against any future backlashes or moral panics.

It is going to get easier. It's going to get easier to be out. And when that happens, the dam will really burst.

Remember, the dam broke on gay issues when a flood of gay people finally got sick of the closet and came out all over the place in just a few years in the mid-1980s. We’re not quite there yet. But it’s going to happen.

(Pause.)

Now the second message. And maybe you’ve heard this from me before.

You see in social movements throughout history, that the people who push for years to get a bandwagon rolling are often unprepared for what to do when the bandwagon finally starts to move.

No longer is it all about a few devoted people grunting and straining from behind to make the bandwagon’s wheels move half an inch. When the effort begins to succeed, the bandwagon starts rolling on its own, faster and faster.

And unless the people with the original vision stop just shoving the rear bumper and run up and grab the steering wheel, pretty soon the bandwagon outruns them and leaves them behind. And their elation turns to horror as they watch it careen downhill out of control, in disastrous unintended directions. And then it wrecks itself spectacularly in a ditch. Survivors loot the wreckage and disappear, and onlookers nod their heads knowingly and say they saw it coming all along.

I say this as a veteran of the 1960s. Think what happened to the psychedelic drug movement back then, for instance. Think what happened when psychedelic experimentation grew from a thing a few philosophers and intellectuals were doing, picked up speed, and rolled downmarket.

Could something like that happen to our movement?

I keep hearing disturbing ways that the word “polyamory,” as it spreads, is becoming used out there as just a hip-sounding new term for old-style screwing around without regard for other people. Without our defining values of communication, honesty, respect. And love, the great clarifier of values.

This is from Louisa Leontiades, a poly-community activist in Europe and author of The Husband Swap, in an article she titled “The Mass Exodus of Polyamorous People Towards Relationship Anarchy”:

Despite the fact that the polyamorous community says it over and over again — polyamory is ‘not just about sex’ — the perception and focus on sex as the principal driver of polyamorous relationships is not only incorrect, but it has damaged the real meaning of polyamory to such an extent that I don’t know whether we can recover the word.

And, this was posted by someone on the reddit/r/polyamory group (with 34,000 members) a couple weeks ago, in a discussion called “Is poly losing the amory?”

I've stopped using the label for myself, after attending events, and meeting hundreds of people who call themselves polyamorous [this sounds like the Poly Cocktails events that have been set up in various cities] but seem to have very little concept of love, or concept of relationships being things that are worth working at, but somehow expect them to appear by magic because you meet someone who embraces the same label.

I urge you to speak up and jump on that kind of misuse of the word polyamory whenever you see or hear it. It’s actually amazing how far the social influence of one forthright person speaking up can spread.

If we are to save our defining word from a loss of meaning – the term by which we can find each other and identify ourselves – and guide this bandwagon in good directions as it gains momentum – we should, in my opinion, be taking every opportunity to do several things:

1. Keep stressing that successful polyamory requires high standards of communication, ethics, integrity, generosity, and concern for every person affected;

2. Emphasize that poly is not for everyone, and that monogamy is right and best for many. Relationship choice is the mantra we want to repeat.

3. Insist on the part of the definition that stresses respect for everyone, and the "full knowledge and consent of all involved";

4. Expand that to not just "knowledge and consent," but well-wishing and good intention for all involved. The defining aspect of polyamory, I'm convinced — the thing that sets it apart and makes it powerful and radical and transformative — is in seeing one's metamours not as rivals to be resented, or even as neutral figures to be tolerated, but as, at minimum, reasonable friends or extended family even — for whom you genuinely wish good things. (And beyond that, of course, there's no limit to how close you can become.) This is what differentiates poly from merely having affairs: a sense that at least to some degree, “We’re all in this together.” When this happens poly becomes a generalization of the particular magic of romantic love — into something wider, more widely applicable, than the dominant paradigm of a couple carefully walling away their particular love from anything to do with the rest of humanity.

5. Warn people that, while poly can open extraordinary new worlds of joy and wonder and may help to humanize the world, its benefits must be earned: through courage, hard relationship-honesty work, self-examination, tough personal growth, and a quick readiness to (as they say in the Marines) "choose the difficult right over the easy wrong."

And I also think we have an opportunity here, with this new identity we’ve been creating, to cut across some of the divides between cultures and races and classes and other identifications that are all around us. These societal things are huge and daunting and a lot bigger than us. But by gathering diverse people who share an interesting new way of thought, a new type of identity, we have a chance to intersect through a lot of those other identities, to the strengthening of everyone. We’ll be weaker if we fail to do this.

So please — with the bandwagon now starting to roll fast on its own momentum, let's not let it run away from us in the coming years to the point that "polyamory" goes mass-market as something careless or trivial, or in any way less than what we know it to be.

(Pause)

Okay, third and last message. And this is going to be a little far out.

I want to look ahead farther into the future, where a lot of things in the world may get grim.

Barry Smiler, who runs the BMore Poly network out of Baltimore, has said,

I'm more than half convinced that in the future when historians look back on the poly movement, we'll be remembered not so much for multiple partners, but rather as the cauldron in which was developed some powerful tools and frameworks for discussing and negotiating win-win in relationship situations.

In other words, we’re among the people developing powerful tools and frameworks for getting along intimately in close, complex social structures. Maybe you see where this is going.

150 or 200 years from now, as I sometimes guess, I see surviving cultures spreading out and recolonizing over the climate-changed, resource-overshot wreckage of the 21st and 22nd centuries.

Getting to a sustainable world on the other side of whatever’s coming — “sustainable” meaning a world that is both good and able to last — will not happen without the emergence of genuinely attractive life alternatives to high material consumption.

A sustainable world will surely require more people sharing homes, kitchens, child-rearing, goods and resources of all kinds. Life in more crowded quarters, in a low-consumption economy of resource-sharing, is generally a worse way to live in the present culture. People strive hard all their lives to move in the opposite direction: to get bigger, emptier homes farther apart. Closer living, using less material goods, will truly attract people only in a new culture of unusually high interpersonal and group-living skills by today’s standards.

Forget sex and romance for a moment. I see today’s polyamory community gardening up sprouts of these next-level interpersonal and group-interaction skills – the practices, and ideology, and value system of a new culture. I really want these ideas and practices to take root well enough to survive through ugly times, if that’s what’s coming, and be there to seed the ground on the other side.

Back to sex and romance. A sustainable world is going to require attractive ways to pursue and acquire richness and purpose and meaning in life that do not involve Getting More Stuff. The ways that people find richness and value and meaning will need to have low resource costs. Which means, finding these things in each other. As the bumpersticker says: “The best things in life aren’t things.”

A culture offering wide possibilities for romance and sexual intimacy, or even just deeply intimate socialization throughout life, can offer abundant richness and purpose. A materially simple life need not be simple in any other way.

I think that the polyamory paradigm will help to humanize societies. Thus helping to provide ways to lead rich, rewarding, meaning-filled lives without the Earth-killing pursuit of Ever More Stuff.

Also: Sexual repression in a culture is an accurate predictor (as the CIA is said to be quite aware) of a culture’s tendency toward war hysterias, religious fanaticism, submission to authoritarian rule, and pathologies of denialism toward reality-based ways of thought. So, a safer world will have to be freer of it. And we’re on the intellectual cutting edge against sexual repression.

So then: Is this really the great future that the poly movement has ahead for us?

Well, as the computer pioneer Alan Kay said long ago:

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

Thank you.

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Update: Anton of polyamory.progressor.ru has translated this into Russian. He comments, "The first part of the speech is quite tied to American conditions, though public interest in non-monogamous relationships is present in the Russian-speaking world. The third part is a little too alarmist for my taste. The second part, in my opinion, is universal and important for the Russian-speaking community."

Update: Now it's in German too: Die Zukunft der Polyamorie Bewegung.

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Our Happy Destiny: my keynote talk at Atlanta Poly Weekend

Continuing on the topic of Atlanta Poly Weekend, some of you asked me to post the talk I gave at the closing on Sunday afternoon. Here it is. No apologies if you've seen some of it before.

Our Happy Destiny: Polyamory in the Coming Years

(Modified from a speech I gave at Loving More’s Poly Living Conference in February 2012)

Hi! I'm Alan. Thanks so much for coming. It says here that this is the weekend’s closing keynote, so I am going to take that literally. I've done this before at the start of a conference, but now…

This is a pitch pipe. (Holds it up.)

And this is a key note. (Blows pitch pipe.)

A key note, remember, is sounded for a chorus, so that the people can start singing together on the same key. But now, the show is mostly over and winding up!

Well, every ending is a beginning. We’re going to say our goodbyes and walk away from this magic, special space that everyone has created, out into the old ordinary world.

You know about “con drop?” The disorientation, the emotional crash that can happen after a gathering of really special people in a special place, when you go back out into the… ordinary? Well… may I sound for you a key note to set the tone, for what I hope we can carry away back with us out into the wilderness.

You know, so much of the world looks like it’s turning for the worse. Climate change is going to grow more severe with no turning back yet in sight. International crises and wars are going to increase as a result, the Defense Department says, because of food, water, and resource disruption. Our own once proudly functional political system is broken, the rich and powerful are becoming more rich and powerful and further abandoning their connection to the rest of us; their pet crazies have seized the works and deny everything – you know the drill – I won’t make this a political rant.

But of all the things I’ve ever been active in, poly was the very first and closest to my heart. And it warms me no end now to see that public understanding of what's now called polyamory, and acceptance of relationship choice, is one thing that looks like in coming years is just going to get better. As we go out of here this afternoon, we can look forward to things for us and our communities getting better, and take comfort in that, and be a part of making that happen.

I called this talk “Our Happy Destiny: Polyamory in the Coming Years.” A few of you will recognize, with a little bit of sentiment, where that came from: the final section of the science fiction story Stranger in a Strange Land is titled His Happy Destiny. And I know we are going to have an easier time of it than the title character in that novel did.

I’ve been in and out of the poly world ever since I was invited into a group of young Stranger in a Strange Land waterbrothers – bonded lovers – when I was 17. I’ve been really back into it for the last eight years. That’s because after a long time out of it, living a pretty conventional life, I discovered in 2005 that what was now being called the polyamory movement had grown and matured enormously while I wasn’t looking. It seemed loaded with fine people who had great ideas and values, and was really getting its act together. So I dove back in.

One thing I’ve been doing is running the Polyamory in the News website. I’ve reported on more than 1,400 news articles, magazine articles, radio and TV broadcasts, all sorts of things, as poly and the poly movement have been coming into the eyes of the wider public. And the trends I’ve seen across these last eight years are really good.

What I’d like to do here is say my piece – and pardon me if you’ve heard some of it before – and then throw it open for discussion.

A few things right away. We’re getting on TV a lot more, and it’s only beginning. This matters to the culture. And by and large, it’s been pretty damn good TV – that emphasizes how much polys care for each other, and how they work at making their relationships good for everyone involved. There were a lot of human-interest news reports like this in the last year, some of them really breaking ground for positivity. There was the Polyamory: Married and Dating series last summer on the Showtime network – which was successful enough that it’s been renewed for a second season. And the best-ever portrayal of us on mainstream TV in my opinion happened just a couple weeks ago on the Oprah Winfrey network, with the hour-long Lisa Ling "Our America" documentary including Gina, Shaun, Jessie, Wes, and Ginny here. We really owe you guys immensely.

This is worlds away from how the media used to be toward the poly vision, on TV especially. They really didn’t used to have a clue what it was, or how to treat it other than as a joke or something to pretend to be shocked by. They still don’t always think it’s a good idea, but at least they usually get it now. And, so do more and more watchers and readers and listeners. People are learning the word. The idea that happy multi-love relationships exist, and are happening, and can be a successful way of life for some people – it's much more out there in the culture than it used to be. And that’s going to grow, and grow.

It’s slow. Even a thing like the Lisa Ling show on cable has less than a million viewers, out of 300 million Americans. But it’s happening. A decade ago almost no one you talked to imagined that loving truly, and happily, and openly beyond a couple was even possible. Most people assumed the idea was just completely outside of human nature.

There’s more coming down the road. Reid Mihalko has worked in and around the TV industry and has said for several years now that Hollywood is quite aware of modern polyamory and its potential to seize viewers' interest. He says TV people have been nosing around the edges of it for at least five years now, since he pitched his own half-hour sitcom Polly and Marie to HBO. He says they came within an inch of buying it. But they were nervous about how advertisers would react. In TV, advertisers rule everything. Now in the last year it looks like maybe this dam is starting to break.

Demand for publicly out polys who want to appear in the media exceeds the supply. People like Robyn Trask in Loving More, and Anita Wagner active in the Poly Leadership Network, keep getting calls for people to interview. Truly – if you want to try your hand at representing open relationships and poly life to the public, the way is open for you. Joreth here has been training out-and-proud polyfolks to become skilled, effective public spokespeople for themselves. There are necessary tricks to this, especially for TV, and they’re easy to learn. She’ll coach you in this for free. Joreth, what's your email where people should write? (Answer: joreth (at) techie.com.) Thanks. And also, call Robyn Trask at Loving More, who has a lot of experience with this too and who gets a lot of calls from media looking for people.

The things we are saying and doing truly grab attention. We turn heads. With relationship roles and rules and ideals in flux throughout society, society is increasingly ready to hear us, and see us, and consider our examples.

Here is something I saw change in just 2½ years. You remember the flap a year ago over Newt Gingrich demanding from his wife that they have an open marriage. Unlike previous cheating-politician scandals, that event became a vehicle for lots of major media attention to good open and poly relationships, contrasting with how Gingrich did it. There were profiles of people doing multiple relationships well, and articles on how to make them work with honesty and close communication and compassion and respect, in the New York Times (twice), the BBC, USA Today, many others.

Now: Contrast that experience with the Governor Mark Sanford cheating-politician scandal 2½ years earlier, which also captivated the nation. Sanford was the governor of South Carolina. Mr. Hiking the Appalachian Trail, with the secret mistress in Argentina. During that, Loving More sent out a press release to media high and low trying to drum up attention for people doing multiple relationships with kindness and consent and good ethics all around – and they couldn’t get a peep of interest. Something really changed in just the couple years between those things.

And while we're on this topic, last year we crossed a certain milestone in poly history – we became a political football in a way that was good for us. For years, we’ve been the Something Awful that’s waiting at the bottom of the slippery slope of gay marriage. But the day before the Florida Republican primary last spring, the largest newspaper in Florida’s largest Republican belt, the Tampa Bay Times, published a long feature article on the people in their local poly community and their high ethical standards – explicitly drawing a contrast between them and Newt Gingrich right in the lead paragraphs. The newspaper was profiling us very positively to drive home Gingrich's scuzziness by comparison, the day before Florida’s vote.

If we’re going to be used as a political football, that’s a pretty good football to be.

It’s now at the point where, just for an example, a couple weeks ago a commentator at the University of Maryland had this to say:

“...I’m the wrong person to explain exactly what polyamory is, as I fall under the umbrella of monogamy. However... the polyamorous people I have encountered in my life are some of the most stable and rational people I know. They develop strong emotional connections with their partners. They have real, loving relationships and can even be happily married with children. Though their relationships are often hidden to avoid social stigma, when you get to know them as people, they are just as open and happy about their relationships as anyone else.”

Some polyfolks clearly impressed that guy pretty favorably. Thank you, whoever you were. This stuff is happening a lot. One thing I hope I can leave you with as we go out of here, is that we can help a poly-friendly world to develop by being our best in how we run our lives and in how we impress the people around us.

Now, as we become more widely seen and talked about and thought about, is there going to be a backlash in the next few years? A big moral-panic persecution, as the things we’re saying become less avoidable, less dismissable – and therefore maybe more threatening?

My prediction is no. I used to think there would be a great backlash at some point, but now I don’t.

There will continue to be a lot of pain and discrimination. There will continue to be trouble from your birth families, and in court from hostile judges in child-custody divorce cases, and from bosses who may fire you. But gradually less with time.

One reason why I think this, is that an organized backlash has already been tried. From about 2003 to 2006, some top-level conservative think tanks and journals tried to whip up a campaign against us as the next great threat to civilization that they could defend everyone from. Not just as a side exhibit in the gay-marriage debate, but as a threat in our own right. It was all over the serious conservative journals like the National Review and the Weekly Standard.

This campaign gained very little traction beyond the conservative movement’s immediate followers. It didn't take. So, they pretty much just dropped it, and went on to try other things that would do better in the panic market.

Meanwhile, therefore, we have had year after year now in which we’ve been defining ourselves to the public on our own terms. This is crucial. Politicians spend millions of dollars trying to define themselves to the public before their opponents can do it. We've done it on a shoestring.

We've done it thanks to a whole lot of brave volunteers – including in Loving More, the Polyamory Leadership Network, a whole lot of local groups all over, and the folks right here who created this conference from scratch starting three years ago. Thanks to all these people, we’ve successfully represented the modern polyamory movement to the public as what we know ourselves to be: ethical people who care deeply about good relationships — smart, verbal, interesting, friendly people — nonthreatening and respectful of all well-considered relationship choices, monogamy included — and by and large just kind of adorable. Every year we are better entrenching this public image, firming up our defense against future moral panics.

It is going to get easier. It's gradually going to get easier to be out. And when that happens, the dam will really burst.

Remember, the dam broke on gay issues when a flood of gay people finally got sick of the closet and came out all over the place in just a few years in the mid-1980s. We’re not quite there yet. But it’s going to happen.

(Pause.)

And now I want to look ahead much farther into the future, where a lot of things in the world may get grim.

Barry Smiler, who was here last year, has said, quote:

      I'm more than half convinced that in the future when
      historians look back on the poly movement, we'll be
      remembered not so much for multiple partners, but
      rather as the cauldron in which was developed some
      powerful tools and frameworks for discussing and
      negotiating win-win in relationship situations.

In other words, we’re among the people developing powerful tools and frameworks for getting along intimately in close, complex social structures. Maybe you see where this is going.

As someone who was influenced early by science fiction, I try to take long views.

150 or 200 years from now, I sometimes think, I see surviving cultures spreading out and recolonizing over the climate-changed, resource-overshot wreckage of the 21st and 22nd centuries.

Getting to a sustainable world on the other side, or maybe with any luck before things get that bad — “sustainable” meaning a world that is both good and able to last — will not happen, without the emergence of genuinely attractive life alternatives to high material consumption.

A sustainable world will surely require more people sharing homes, kitchens, child-rearing, goods and resources of all kinds. Life in more crowded quarters, in a low-consumption economy of resource-sharing, is generally a worse way to live in the present culture. People strive hard all their lives to move in the opposite direction: to get bigger, emptier homes farther apart. Closer living, using less material goods, will truly attract people only in a new culture of unusually high interpersonal and group-living skills by today’s standards.

Never mind about sex and romance for a moment. I see today’s polyamory community gardening up sprouts of these next-level interpersonal and group-interaction skills – the practices, and ideology, and the interpersonal value system of a new culture. I really want these ideas and practices to take root well enough to survive through ugly times, if that’s what’s coming, and be there to seed the ground on the other side.

Second point: Back to sex and romance. A sustainable world is going to require attractive ways to pursue and acquire richness and purpose and meaning in life that do not involve Getting More Stuff. The ways that people find richness and value and meaning will need to have low resource costs. Which means, finding these things in each other. As the bumpersticker says: “The best things in life aren’t things.”

A culture offering wide possibilities for romance and sexual intimacy, or just deeply intimate socialization throughout life, can offer abundant richness and purpose. A materially simple life need not be simple in any other way.

I have no use for fairyland woo-woo about these things. But I do think that the polyamory paradigm might help to humanize the world. I think that it might even someday generalize the magic of romantic love into something larger and more powerful in the world than the isolated couple-love where society has safely walled it away. Thus helping to provide ways to lead rich, rewarding, meaning-filled lives without the Earth-killing pursuit of Ever More Stuff.

And thirdly: Sexual repression in a culture is an accurate predictor (as the CIA is said to be quite aware) of a culture’s tendency toward war hysterias, religious fanaticism, submission to authoritarian rule, and pathologies of denialism toward reality-based ways of thought. So, a safer world will have to be freer of it. And we’re on the intellectual cutting edge against sexual repression.

So: Is this really going to be the great future that this movement has ahead for us?

Well, as the computer pioneer Alan Kay said: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

(Pause)

So. (Blows pitch pipe.) As we go out into the world again when we close down here, just go for it. Follow your dream, follow your bliss. Help make it happen. “Life rewards people who move in the direction of greatest courage.” It’s going to get better for us. The wind is with us.

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My keynote speech at Poly Living 2012

I'm still winding down from the exciting, almost overwhelming whirl of people (130 of them) and workshops and ideas and conversations and affection at last weekend's Poly Living Conference in Philadelphia, run by the Loving More nonprofit. I gave the keynote speech.

People asked me to put the text of it online. So here it is. Regular readers will recognize chunks of it and some of my hobbyhorses. No apologies for self-plagiarism.

For much of the time I was talking I had a slide show running on the wall behind me, presenting screen shots of the last 90 or so posts on this site. Some people said this was an effective enhancement; others said it was a distraction. If you were there, what did you think?

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Busting Loose: Polyamory in the Next Five Years

(Keynote speech, Poly Living Conference; Feb. 10, 2012)

Hi! I'm Alan. And now, if this is supposed to be the keynote talk for the weekend, I am going to take the assignment seriously:

(Blows pitch pipe.)

A key note is sounded for a chorus, so that they can start together on the same key. I hope that what I say here will set the tone, for everybody to have an exciting and productive weekend.

(Holds up pitch pipe.) I will be back to this.

Okay, here is what I am going to do:

-- I'm going to talk first about how and why polyamory right now is busting out all over, and what I think we can expect to see in the next five years or so.

-- And then, looking much farther out, I'll be a bit daring and describe how I think the things we are doing, and the culture we are haltingly building, just might shape the direction and survival of Western civilization in ages to come.

-- And then, we can get up out of our seats and do a couple of fun little exercises to maybe start getting to know each other better and kick off the social part of the evening.

So:

What kind of "busting loose" is polyamory going to have in the next five years?

Just a couple months ago when I wrote the description of this talk in the program, I worded it kind of tentatively. "We may be in for quite a ride." "The pace of public awareness may be accelerating." Well since then, things have been going nuts. We're having a sudden breakout of greater public recognition, which clearly must have been just waiting to happen.

For instance: Unlike in previous cheating-politician scandals... (audience laughter) ...the Newt Gingrich open-marriage episode two weeks ago became a vehicle for major media attention to good open and poly relationships, contrasting with how Gingrich did it. There have been big profiles of people doing multiple relationships, and articles on how to make them work with honesty and close communication and compassion and respect, in the New York Times (twice), the BBC, USA Today, many others. Representatives for poly done well are suddenly in demand to I think an unprecedented degree.

And here I have to show some slides from less than 24 hours ago. (Click other powerpoint.) Our own presenters Anita and Tim Illig and Michael Rios and Sarah Taub here this weekend were riding this wave last night on the Channel Seven news in DC, representing us and our values just beautifully.... And a bit farther south in Virginia, members of that area’s poly community are about to be on TV too. It’s happening all over.

Now: Contrast this experience with the Governor Mark Sanford cheating-politician scandal 2½ years ago, which also captivated the nation for a few days. Sanford was Mr. Hiking the Appalachian Trial. During that one, Loving More sent out a press release to media high and low trying to drum up attention for multiple relationships that are done with kindness and consent and good ethics all around — and couldn't get a peep of interest. Something really changed in those intervening 2½ years.

Moreover: On January 30th I think we crossed a certain milestone in poly history. For the first time that I know of, we became a political football in a national political arena in a way that was good for us. For years, we’ve been railed against as an example of the Something Awful waiting at the bottom of the slippery slope of gay marriage. But the day before the Florida Republican primary, the largest newspaper in Florida's largest Republican belt published a long feature article on the people in the local poly community and their high ethical standards, explicitly drawing a pointed contrast between us and Newt Gingrich right in the lead paragraphs. The newspaper was profiling us very positively to drive home Gingrich's scuzziness by comparison — the day before Florida's crucial vote (which Gingrich lost, though I'm sure this was only a tiny part of it).

If we're going to be used as a political football, that was a pretty good football to be! I didn't expect to see this happening this soon.

Other milestones in the last month or so: In the space of one week, we saw poly triad families, each with a kid, profiled positively on ABC's Morning Edition, Nightline, and the National Geographic Channel. More and more of the public is getting acquainted with what multi-partner families actually look like. We are becoming more familiar; on the way to being normalized.

That same week, we also saw a broadcast-TV drama, ABC's "Private Practice," present a fictional polyamorous triad family — explicitly called that by name, so viewers would be sure to get it — treated so well, and at such length, that it reminded me of the first breakthrough shows treating gay characters with understanding and respect.

Reid Mihalko, who works in and around the TV industry, has said for a few years that Hollywood is quite aware of modern polyamory and its potential to seize viewers' interest. He says TV people have been nosing around the edges of it. But they've been nervous about letting it get any closer to home than the polygamists in "Big Love" and "Sister Wives," who are pretty removed from American mainstream life. Because, Reid says, the networks still aren't sure how advertisers will react, and in TV, advertisers rule everything. Now it looks like maybe the networks have decided it's time to test the waters a little more boldly.

Demand for publicly out polys who want to appear in the media exceeds the supply. People like Robyn Trask in Loving More, and Anita Wagner active in the Poly Leadership Network, keep getting calls. Truly — if you want to try your hand at representing open relationships and poly life to the public, the way is open. Robyn would love to have more good people to send media inquiries to. She is experienced in dealing with the media herself, and she's an invaluable resource for newbies about how to negotiate with them on a more even basis so you get treated right. And how to know when to walk away, and how to present your message effectively like a pro.

Also: We now have a Polyamory Media Association, which is run by Joreth. It's set up to train out-and-proud polyfolks to become skilled, effective public spokespeople for themselves. There are necessary tricks to this, especially for TV, and they’re easy to learn. The Poly Media Association is also a resource for reporters and program directors seeking poly people. Its services are free and depend on volunteers.

As for the next five years? We're going to be busting loose more all over, though of course there will be plateau periods too. The things we are saying and doing truly grab attention. We turn heads. With relationship roles and rules and ideals in flux throughout society, society is increasingly ready to hear us, and see us, and consider our examples.

And, as we become more widely seen and talked about and thought about, is there going to be a backlash in the next few years? A big moral-panic persecution, as the things we’re saying become less avoidable, less dismissable, and therefore maybe more threatening?

No. That is my prediction. I used to think there would be a great backlash at some point, but now I don't.

There will continue to be a lot of pain and discrimination. There will continue to be trouble from your birth families, and in court from hostile judges in child-custody divorce cases, and from bosses who may fire you. But gradually less with time.

One reason I say this, is that an organized backlash has already been tried. From about 2003 to 2006, some top-level conservative think tanks and journals tried to whip up a campaign against us as the next great threat to civilization that they could defend everyone from. It was all over the serious conservative journals like the National Review and the Weekly Standard.

This campaign gained very little traction beyond the conservative movement's immediate followers. It didn't take. So, they pretty much just abandoned it and went on to try other things that might do better in the panic market.

Meanwhile, therefore, we have had years now in which we've been defining ourselves to the public on our own terms. This is crucial. Politicians spend millions of dollars trying to define themselves to the public before their opponents can do it. We've done it on a shoestring.

Thanks in part to Loving More and a whole lot of brave individual volunteers, we've by and large successfully represented the modern polyamory movement to the public as what we know ourselves to be: ethical people who care deeply about good relationships — smart, verbal, interesting, friendly people — nonthreatening and respectful of all well-considered relationship choices, monogamy included — and by and large just kind of adorable. Every year we are better entrenching this public image, firming up our defense against future moral panics.

It is going to get easier. It's gradually going to get easier to be out. And when that happens, the dam will really burst.

Remember, the dam broke on gay issues when a flood of gay people finally got sick of the closet and came out all over the place in just a few years. We're not quite there yet. But it's going to happen.


(Pause.)

And now, before closing, I want to look ahead much farther.

Barry Smiler has said, quote:

> I'm more than half convinced that in the future when
> historians look back on the poly movement, we'll be
> remembered not so much for multiple partners, but
> rather as the cauldron in which was developed some
> powerful tools and frameworks for discussing and
> negotiating win-win in relationship situations.

In other words, we're among the people developing powerful tools and frameworks for getting along intimately in close, complex social structures.

You see where this is going.

I have a rather bleak view of what may happen to the world in the coming century or two. Some of you have heard this from me, but I'm going to lay it out again.

Maybe 150 or 200 years from now, following climate-change and resource-overshoot catastrophes, I see surviving cultures spreading out and recolonizing the wreckage of the 21st and 22nd centuries.

Getting to a sustainable world on the other side of this, or maybe with any luck before it gets that bad — "sustainable" meaning a world that is both good and able to last — will not happen, without the emergence of genuinely attractive life alternatives to high material consumption.

A sustainable world will surely require more people sharing homes, kitchens, child-rearing, goods and resources of all kinds. Life in more crowded quarters, in a low-consumption economy of resource-sharing, is generally a worse way to live in the present culture. People strive hard all their lives to move in the opposite direction: to buy bigger, emptier homes farther apart. Closer living, using less material goods, will truly attract people only in a new culture of unusually high interpersonal and group-living skills by today's standards.

Never mind about sex and romance for a moment. I see today's polyamory community gardening up sprouts of these next-level interpersonal and group-interaction skills — the practices and ideology and interpersonal value system of a new culture. I really want these ideas and practices to take root well enough to survive through ugly times, if that's what's coming, and be there to seed the ground on the other side.

Second point: Back to sex and romance. A sustainable world is going to require attractive ways to pursue and acquire richness and purpose and meaning in life that do not depend on Getting More Stuff. The ways that people find richness and value and meaning will need to have low resource costs. Which means, finding these things in each other. As the bumpersticker says: "The best things in life aren't things."

A culture offering wide possibilities for romance and sexual intimacy, or just deeply intimate socialization throughout life, can offer abundant richness and purpose. A materially simple life need not be simple in any other way.

Don't get me wrong; I have no use for fairyland woo-woo about these things. But I do think that the polyamory paradigm might help to humanize the world. I think that it might even someday generalize the magic of romantic love into something larger and more powerful in the world than the isolated couple-love where society has safely walled it away. Thus helping to provide ways to lead rich, rewarding, meaning-filled lives without the Earth-killing pursuit of Ever More Stuff.

And thirdly: Sexual repression in a culture is an accurate predictor (as the CIA is said to be quite aware) of that culture's tendency toward war hysterias, religious fanaticism, violence, submission to authoritarian rule, and pathologies of denialism toward reality-based ways of thought. So, a safer world will have to be freer of it. And we're on the intellectual cutting edge against sexual repression.

So: Is this really going to be the great future that this movement has ahead for us?

Well as computer pioneer Alan Kay said: "The best way to predict the future, is to invent it."

Thank you.


(Break.)

Okay! Now, here is the Key Note!

(Blow pitch pipe.)

My challenge to you guys here this weekend, is to imagine what YOU would like to create. What ways of being would you like to develop here at this conference? How do we empower each other to do this? Go for it — go ahead and push your limits. Risk it.

We've kept you in your seats long enough. I'd like to suggest we try a little something to get up and get the juices flowing for the reception and the next part of the evening.

First let's everybody stand up and stretch.

Now — start moving around a bit. Just moving.

Okay, as you are milling, look at someone near you that you may not know. Get their eye.

And the two of you, face off with each other. Now if you're okay with this tell the other person your deepest hopes and dreams about what you hope to get out of this weekend. First one of you, then the other.

What brought you here? What are your dearest hopes in your heart for this event? And then trade, and the other person can say theirs.

And when you're done, go back to join the milling, and do it with someone else, someone you don't know....

(By that point I was completely drowned out by a rising roar of excited chatter, and my job was done. It worked!)

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Poly Pride Day in New York: My Report

I'm back from New York City and Polyamorous NYC's 9th annual Poly Pride Picnic & Rally in Central Park.

I wasn't sure what to expect this time. Last year's Poly Pride Weekend was a record-breaker — in terms of numbers of people, numbers of events, publicity efforts, and outside attention — thanks to an influx of enthusiastic and energetic volunteers in the months beforehand. This year, however, things were a lot quieter and turned out about half the size, for reasons described below.

A big Cuddle Party was again held Friday night at the LGBT Community Center in the West Village. The main (and only other) event, the Saturday Picnic & Rally at Great Hill, peaked at about 100 people mid-afternoon, half of last year's number. Not much as New York rallies go. But as a big picnic of friends and acquaintances, enlivened with live music, performances, and talks, it was a fine success.

I had a grand time. Met old friends, made new ones (Hi Michelle and Polina!), joined snuggle piles on blankets (this is a very affectionate crowd), and listened to some surprisingly good music. A lady having a birthday brought 100 cupcakes to pass around. And again, I got to deliver a speech.

So what happened to last year's momentum? Short version: Right after that weekend's success there was a split in leadership. Polyamorous NYC's founder wanted to keep the group to his vision of being primarily gay- and queer-focused and felt he was losing control to newcomers. The new volunteers, who had accepted leadership positions, wanted to do wider outreach to the mainstream world and have a bigger say in running things. The upshot: many of the new people left and are starting Open Love NY. The two sides of the split are now amicable and cross back and forth, including at Saturday's picnic (these are polys after all). But a failure to handle growing pains well halted the growth.

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Out of consideration for the audience, the speeches onstage Saturday were limited to five minutes each. Here is mine, which I delivered at the top of my voice to echo from the distance:

The Long View

I started the Polyamory in the News site four years ago... it now has 338 articles, TV shows, radio interviews, magazine stories -- and most of them nowadays are surprisingly good. It's unusual now for the media to miss the basic concepts behind what we're doing, and why. That's a wonderful change from how it used to be.

But let's drop back and take a longer view.

I have believed for years that the polyamory-awareness work we are doing in our time is not just for us and now, but for the decades and centuries.

We are seeing that although we're rather small in numbers, the things that we are saying, and the examples that we are showing, grab very wide attention. We really turn heads. That's because we are declaring, and demonstrating, a previously almost unthinkable paradigm to most people for what is possible in our most intimate sphere of existence. And it's an idea that once heard and seen, is not easily forgotten.

Poly relationships have always been around. But until recent years they were little-known — secretive, ashamed, underground — accepted only among small private elites with no interest in gaining attention — and elsewhere, such relationships were dismissed as insignificant or a joke at best, or an awful crime at worst. A lot like how gay and lesbian relationships existed 50, or 100, or 200 years ago. The great emergence of gay relationships and gay culture into wide recognition in the last 40 years — the normalization of the gay alternative — marks a permanent change in the world. And for centuries to come, this change will be recognized as having taken place during our time.

The same is starting to happen with polyamory. There aren't very many of us yet. The largest poly get-togethers in any one place since this movement began have numbered about 200 or 250 people as best as I can determine ¹. Newsweek just reported estimates that there are a half million poly households, in a nation of 300 million people. And yet, we've already had a head-turning impact throughout the Western world. We've introduced a new word into the English language — literally. We've brought a ground-shifting concept — of choice in life relationship style, and of a generalization of romantic love — into wide public awareness. We're busting up the unspoken, unthought-about assumption of mono-normativity as the only possible way that's open to ethical, kind, good people. So that now, people living out in nowhereville who thought they were the only ones on Earth are having shocks of recognition, and realizing there's a world awaiting them. And, we're scaring the pants off bigtime social conservatives.

If we keep it up, future generations will grow up with the basic background knowledge that successful poly love relationships are a real, possible choice for some people — that monogamy isn't necessarily the only good way — and that for some people, life in a wonderful, love-rich poly family or network is possible, workable, and actually happening.

This is how the world changes. As the theologian Paul Tillich noted, "There were only a few thousand people in all Europe who brought about the Renaissance." ²

Lastly: So much of any education-and-awareness work must be done on faith. It is not given to us to know the fruits of our labor. Every generation thinks that their ideas are the culmination of history, that they are the crown of creation... but I'm pretty sure that the polyamory movement as it exists today, and as poly is practiced today, will be seen in the future as just building the foundation for advances that now appear impossible or haven't been imagined — but that will be created by our successors. Surely we are setting the stage for extraordinary and revolutionary developments to come... for things that are now only science fiction, or entirely unthought-of. Yet by shaping the good character of what we do now, we shape the character of the foundation that those advances will be built upon.

So, after much thought, I've concluded that we are doing something remarkably important. Keep it up.

Thank you.

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

As the afternoon grew late and chilly, we warmed up dancing to the gay rock of Houston Bernard and Bonfire Bandit. (Video). For more than a day later I still had an eerie, disorienting earworm/eyeworm of Larkin Grimm and her group performing a creepy extended version of "Durge"; if Hindu gods were real I'd be damn scared of them now. Kelli Dunham did a great job as MC and stage comedian all afternoon. Thanks to Polina Malamud, the poetry inserter, the crowd was introduced to Marge Piercy's wonderful polyamory poem "A New Constellation"; save this one for if you ever have a group-marriage ceremony. Piercy was unfortunately a little ahead of her time and never connected up with today's poly world.

Justen M. Bennett-Maccubbin , leader of Polyamorous NYC, is already planning the 2010 Poly Pride and has high hopes for a new breakthrough. And yup, I'll be back.

(Three notes for future attendees: It's October so bring a heavy coat and long pants no matter how warm the day starts. Despite PolyNYC's advice I drove my car right into Manhattan and, like last year, parked easily near the location. And yes, there are restrooms onsite.)

See also the blogs about the day by Kelli Dunham and by The Last Unicorn.

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

¹ These are, to the best of my knowledge: the 2008 Poly NYC Picnic & Rally, the 2005 PolyCamp Northwest in Washington State, probably the annual Poly Paradise campsite at Burning Man, and the annual PolyDay get-together in London. One or more Loving More conferences around 2000 came close. Do you know of any others?

² From A History of Christian Thought: From Its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism, Paul Tillich (1967, 1968), page 349. The page is online at tinyurl.com/y9f55nm. A version going around the internet is, "What we call the Renaissance was participated in by about one thousand people," and I've quoted that version before, but I can't trace it to Tillich, and my guess now is that it's someone's misquote. (If you know otherwise please write me at alan7388 AT gmail DOT com.)

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More from Poly Pride Weekend: My Speech

Back when I was 17 and all young and everything, and had been among Heinlein-style waterbrothers for less than a year, I had this idea that someday in the future I would be standing on stage at a microphone in front of an outdoor crowd delivering a blazing manifesto on multi-loving as the next great advance in Western Civilization's possible ways of life.

Well... as Thoreau said,

"If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."

So years later, there I was last Saturday onstage at a microphone at the Poly Pride Rally in New York's Central Park, trying to deliver my words as roundly as Obama does and making sure I could hear them echoing back from the distance. Below is what I said. Regular readers will recognize a lot of this, but if you haven't seen it yet....

For the last three years [I boomed into the mike], I’ve been running a site called Polyamory in the News. I’ve put up posts about more than 240 articles and broadcasts, and more of them keep coming in all the time. It's clear that during just these three years, worldwide interest in ethical polyamory, and the ideas and values behind it, has been growing rapidly.

Also growing are misconceptions about it, and misuses of the term that I think threaten to spiral out of control.

So at this historic moment, I want to deliver a caution, and some advice about our future.

People who push for years to get a bandwagon rolling are usually unprepared for what to do when the bandwagon finally starts to move. No longer is it all about a few devoted people grunting and straining from behind to make the bandwagon’s wheels move half an inch. When the effort begins to succeed, the bandwagon starts rolling on its own, faster and faster.

And unless the people with the original vision stop just shoving the rear bumper and run up and grab the steering wheel, pretty soon the bandwagon outruns them and leaves them behind. And their elation turns to horror as they watch it careen downhill out of control, in disastrous unintended directions. And then it wrecks itself spectacularly in a ditch. Survivors loot the wreckage and disappear, and onlookers nod their heads knowingly and say they saw it coming all along.

Think of what happened to the psychedelic drug movement a generation ago. It started with tremendous promise among a handful of philosophers and intellectuals in the early 1960s, gained popularity and momentum, careened out of control downmarket, and morphed into a cheapened, degraded "drugs are good" cultural meme for the masses. By the early 1970s the drug-culture bandwagon was so ugly and indiscriminate that people like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died from, of all the stupid things, tranquilizers and heroin.

So maybe it’s now time for us to pay less attention to just pushing the polyamory-awareness movement, and more to steering it.

If we are to save our defining word from serious cheapening in the next few years, and guide this thing in good directions as it gains momentum, we should, in my opinion, be taking every opportunity to do several things:

1. Keep stressing that successful polyamory requires high standards of communication, ethics, integrity, generosity, and concern for every person affected;

2. Emphasize that poly is not for everyone, and that monogamy is right and best for many;

3. Insist on the part of the definition that stresses respect for everyone and the "full knowledge and consent of all involved";

4. Expand that to not just "knowledge and consent," but well-wishing and good intention for all involved. The defining aspect of polyamory, I'm convinced — the thing that sets it apart and makes it powerful and radical and transformative — is in seeing one's metamours not as rivals to be resented, or even as neutral figures to be tolerated, but as, at minimum, friends and acquaintances — perhaps family even — for whom you genuinely wish good things. (And beyond that, of course, there's no limit to how close you can become.) This is what differentiates poly from merely having affairs. In this way it becomes a generalization of the magic of romantic love — into something much wider, and more widely applicable, than the dominant paradigm of a couple carefully walling away their particular love from anything to do with the rest of humanity.

And, 5. Warn people that, while poly can open extraordinary new worlds of joy and wonder and may help to humanize the world, its benefits must be earned: through courage, hard relationship-honesty work, ruthless self-examination, tough personal growth, and a quick readiness to (as they say in the Marines) "choose the difficult right over the easy wrong."

Please — with the bandwagon now moving, let's not let it run away from us in the next few years to the point that "polyamory" goes mass-market as something careless or trivial, or in any way less than what we know it to be.

Thank you.

Updates:

Here's another Poly Pride rally speech: Anita Wagner's "The Mainstreaming of Polyamory".

And another: Leanna Wolfe's "On Kittens and the Very Invented Culture of Polyamory".

And Tristan Taormino's ringing Poly Pride Keynote Address.

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