Polyamory in the 21st Century: Love and Intimacy With Multiple Partners

by Deborah M. Anapol

  Started in 1841 by Unitarian minister, Harvard graduate, and social reformer George Ripley and his wife Sophia, with author Nathaniel Hawthorne as one of the original trustees, Brook Farm was initially conceived as an agrarian cooperative that would provide its members a more natural and wholesome lifestyle. Ripley, as well as Emerson, is known to have had large libraries that included European writers as well as translations of Indian and Chinese classics. It’s possible that John Noyes may have been exposed to Tantric and Taoist philosophies through this group, although their own departures from traditional marital and gender roles were less regimented and kept in the background and out of the headlines.

  In 1844, Albert Brisbane, who translated the works of French utopian philosopher Charles Fourier into English during his frequent visits to Brook Farm, convinced the directors to become a Fourierist community. Fourier’s ideas are now largely forgotten, although they reached a wide audience in the United States in the 1840s through Brisbane’s columns in the New York Tribune.

  In addition to his very detailed prescriptions for the physical structures and agricultural, business, and social organization of these communes, or phalansteries, as he called them, Fourier held some unusual views on the subject of monogamy. Fourier asserted that a harmonious society required an awareness of the “laws of passionate attraction.” He believed that each person has a set capacity for the number of lovers he or she can engage with at one time, with a range from zero to eight. Both ends of the spectrum were thought to be quite rare, with most people naturally falling somewhere in the middle.3 Fourier also took a strong stance on the importance of pleasure and sexual gratification and was an advocate of women’s rights, gay rights, and sexual freedom long before the sexual revolutions of the twentieth century dawned.

  EMMA GOLDMAN, FREE LOVE, AND THE

  FIRST WAVE OF THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION

  Emma Goldman was one of my earliest heroines. A feminist anarchist who devoted her life to organizing support for the independence of women at a time when women in the United States had not yet won the right to vote and when advocating access to birth control was grounds for imprisonment, she was also a passionate supporter of free love. While the scope of her work was not limited to women’s issues, Goldman is often credited with bringing sexual liberty and reproductive rights into serious political conversation.

  In the early nineteenth century, the term free love, whose creation is attributed to Oneida founder John Noyes, carried a different meaning than it took on in the 1960s. Originally, it implied freedom for women from the ownership of men through the institution of marriage. The Oneidan version of free love could be likened to today’s term polyfidelity (which refers to a type of closed group marriage), but Goldman and her fellow anarchists didn’t believe in imposing any kind of structure or rules on the free flow of love. It is this meaning of freedom from legislation or mental constructs, as well as equality for all genders, that inspired my own vision for polyamory as a more heartfelt way to love. It seems ironic that some polyamorous people, as well as monogamous nonheterosexuals, are now clamoring to have their marriages recognized by church and state.

  A talented orator and writer as well as a nurse midwife, Goldman had an impact on Western culture that wasn’t fully recognized until long after her death in 1940. She was also ruthlessly honest in revealing her struggle with jealousy arising from sharing her beloved. Her gift for formulating and articulating a critique of patriarchal values gave rise to changes that are still unfolding in the twenty-first century. In 1930, Goldman wrote, “I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.”4

  Emma Goldman, like Victoria Woodhull, another early feminist and free love advocate, did more than theorize about free love. Both women boldly exercised their right to love whomever they pleased at a time when even monogamous sexually active unmarried women were considered sluts. Woodhull is even known to have openly engaged in triadic love relationships, including one with a prominent Christian minister that caused a national scandal.5

  Politically and emotionally, Goldman, the quintessential anarchist who thought that voting was a waste of time, and Woodhull, the first woman to run for the presidency of the United States in 1872, were worlds apart, but both created many effective cocreative partnerships with men that merged their intimate and professional needs. This model for harnessing the power of sexual passion in service of social goals is a theme elaborated on a generation later by other key figures in the evolution of polyamory.

  SCIENCE FICTION AND THE CHURCH OF ALL WORLDS

  If there is any one book that can be said to have kicked off the present-day evolution of polyamory, that book would have to be Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. This novel, with a Martian-raised human hero who finds the concept of sexual possessiveness very peculiar and starts a religion based on sharing, struck a deep chord with the millions who’ve read it since its publication in 1961. Heinlein wrote many other science-fiction novels with polyamorous themes that continue to be widely read today, though none has achieved the popularity of Stranger in a Strange Land.

  Polyamory as a model or support system for creating transformation in the larger culture has been a popular topic with many science-fiction and fantasy writers, such as Thea Alexander, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Ernest Callenbach, Spider Robinson, Starhawk, and John Varley. Consensual multipartner relationships have also figured prominently in the books of literary giants such as Anais Nin, Doris Lessing, and Alice Walker.

  I vaguely remember reading Stranger in a Strange Land as a freshman in college in 1969 and finding it delightful but not earthshaking. Perhaps it did seep into my subconscious mind and influence my future career unbeknownst to me. When I reread it about twenty years later, I was shocked by the sexist language and dialogue that had slipped right across my pre-feminist radar. Why, I wondered, was this particular book so influential? We may never be able to fully answer that question, but some portion of its impact may have to do with neopagan leader Oberon Zell. When I first met Oberon, or Otter as he was called at the time, in the 1980s, he had long since founded the Church of All Worlds (CAW) and was publisher of Green Egg Magazine, an early neopagan periodical. He and his wife Morning Glory had been in a triad for some years with the magazine’s editor and were later to form a group marriage with three others that incorporated many of Heinlein’s ideas.

  CAW itself was inspired by and based on Stranger in a Strange Land, and the Zells, who invented the term polyamory in 1990, have done much to spread these beliefs among the pagan community in the United States. Oberon asserts that “polyamory has really caught on as a primary relationship model for the younger generation, especially in the worldwide pagan community which is estimated at ten million adherents and still growing. In the Pagan community, polyamory is so well accepted as an option— even an ideal—that those of us who engage in it don’t even merit a raised eyebrow. Far from being seen as scandalous (as would have been the case prior to the ’60s), flamboyantly polyamorous folk such as ourselves are looked upon as models. . . . At this time, there is scarcely any Pagan group anywhere in the world that doesn’t have some connection with some other group(s) through lover relationships between them.”6

  According to the Zells, the principle here is exactly the same as the medieval custom of “fostering” children out to be raised in other households and of royalty marrying princes or princesses of different nationalities. The idea is to forge bonds and alliances based on personal relationships. Oberon believes that “polyamory will continue to grow and spread throughout the world. It’s a viral meme with an extremely high promulgation factor! The Vision that we have, and which you articulated so well in that article you wrote back in 1990, is of a world-wide new culture permeated beneath the surface by a vast network of lovers. When it’s necessary to pull together a team pr
oject of some sort—whether something so simple as moving to a new home, or something so large as creating a new organization—or even a movement—lovers are the ones you can best count on to show up and get involved. This is how MG and I have managed to accomplish pretty much everything we’ve done in our lives—by having a wide pool of diversely-talented lovers to tap to become involved.”7

  CAW is the pagan group most identified with polyamory, and while I must emphasize that all pagans are not polyamorous, CAW is not alone. For example, Starhawk, who is known in some quarters as the witch whose appointment to the faculty of a Catholic University got Matthew Fox, renegade priest and creator of the Macro Cosmic Mass, excommunicated has written many well respected books on witchcraft and ritual. Rather than modeling her organization on a novel, Starhawk created her own fictional world featuring polyamorous relationships as a basis for social change movements in her first novel, The Fifth Sacred Thing.8

  ROBERT RIMMER

  Robert Rimmer is another author whose novels played a huge role in inspiring modern-day polyamory. His best-selling Harrad Experiment was first published in 1966 and, along with Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, influenced a whole generation of young people to question monogamy as an ideal and to create their own experiments in group marriage. Harrad Experiment described an undergraduate program designed to liberate students from sexual repression and monogamous conditioning and teach them to embrace healthy open relating. It eventually sold nearly 3 million copies and still evokes fond memories among many baby boomers who have long since forgotten exactly what it was all about.

  Harrad was followed by a series of other widely read novels, including Proposition 31, which explored group marriage and its legalization; Thursday My Love, which addressed extramarital sex; and Come Live My Life, which bears an uncanny resemblance to a recent reality TV show about mate swapping (as in living in another household, not a sexual one-night stand). All of Rimmer’s writing emphasizes the importance of integrating sex, love, and spirituality and maintaining high ethical standards even while struggling with typical human fears and difficult emotions.

  One of his later novels, The Immoral Reverend (1985), features a poly-amorous Unitarian minister from the Boston area who starts a sex-positive church, not unlike some of the nineteenth-century efforts discussed earlier in this chapter. And, in fact, the Unitarian Universalist Church was the first mainstream religious institution to officially welcome polyamorists into its ranks.

  Rimmer, who died in 2001 at the age of eighty-four, was a tireless crusader for saner family structures until the end of his days. He was no literary giant, but he was a masterful storyteller and popular speaker on the college and social science lecture circuit. Rimmer refused to disclose anything about his personal life until the deaths of the couple that he and Erma, his wife for almost sixty years, were intimate with allowed him to talk freely.

  I doubt that anyone was shocked to learn that the Rimmers had participated in a long-term relationship with another couple and that this relationship was a model for many of his fictionalized accounts of group marriage. In his miniautobiography, included in the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition of Harrad, Bob Rimmer also discusses his military service in India in World War II, where he was first exposed to Tantric teachings on the sacredness of sexuality. While polyamory and Tantra do not have to go together, Rimmer’s writings have planted many seeds.

  After we’d corresponded for several years, I finally met Bob and Erma Rimmer face-to-face in the early 1990s in Rowe, Massachusetts, where Ryam Nearing and I had convened the first East Coast Loving More Conference. It was Bob who encouraged Ryam and me to join forces and replace our separate newsletters with Loving More magazine. Additionally, Bob generously shipped me copies of all his out-of-print books, which I made available as a lending library before used books could be easily located on the Internet. Bob also supported the revival of the Kirkridge Conferences in the early 1990s, bringing me into contact with an earlier generation of love, sex, and intimacy activists based on the East Coast.

  THE SECOND AMERICAN SEXUAL REVOLUTION

  I came of age in the midst of the sexual revolution heralded by Time magazine in 1964 and pronounced dead by Time in 1984, a casualty of AIDS, an economic downturn, and/or the radical right, depending on whom you ask. The year 1984 happens to be the same year I found myself beginning the work of organizing today’s polyamory movement.

  The increasing acceptance of consensual nonmonogamy, open marriage, and other experiments in loving more than one are only one manifestation of the many shifts in sexual values and cultural norms that occurred during those tumultuous twenty years. The sexual revolution as a whole created a climate in which the behaviors that have come to be known as polyamory were able to be seen and experienced by large numbers of people in the Western world for the first time since the rise of the Catholic Church.

  Although many people today think of polyamory as a hedonistic, self-centered, and godless approach to love, Christian clergy have been instrumental in breaking the cultural monopoly of monogamy during both the first and the second sexual revolution. As we have seen, many of the nineteenth-century nonmonogamous utopian communities were founded by Christian preachers, and in the mid-twentieth century, Christian clergy again provided much of the spiritual and intellectual underpinnings for validating alternatives to monogamous marriage.

  Dr. Robert Francouer is among the most prolific academic authors to advocate a greater range of sexual and marital choices. After rejecting the celibacy required by the Catholic priesthood, Francouer acquired the distinction of becoming a married Catholic priest after the Vatican granted him permission to wed. He and his wife Anna were among the first to write about changing attitudes toward love and sex as an evolutionary imperative. In their 1974 book Hot and Cool Sex,9 they reexamine the concepts of fidelity, jealousy, and postpatriarchal sex and convincingly portray open marriage as a path to growth.

  Bob Francouer was the first of this circle of East Coast Christian clergy to reach out to me in the early 1990s after the publication of my book Love without Limits. He introduced me to a well-established network who had been working together toward greater sexual and emotional freedom for both married and single people since the 1960s. Many of them were, like myself, veterans of the sexual revolution, but while I had been a teenage hippie in those days, they were already married and professionally established adults with successful careers when this wave of sexual freedom hit. In those pre-Internet, pre–cell phone, pre–e-mail days, networking depended more on the written word and face-to-face meetings. Bob Rimmer’s books were one channel of connection, and the Kirkridge Conferences were another.

  I was delighted to connect with an earlier generation of pioneers, such as Dr. Rusty and Della Roy; Dr. Gerald Jud; Reverend Raymond Lawrence, PhD; Sister Annette Covatta, PhD; and Reverend Hal Minor. Gerry Jud in particular, who must have been in his seventies at the time, was very persistent in urging me to come meet with this group of poly clergy, as I dubbed them, at his retreat center in rural Pennsylvania. A Yale graduate and veteran of the civil rights movement, he’d left his position as a church executive many years ago and founded a successful growth center in New York State called Shalom Mountain. By the time we met, he’d moved on to a new venue called Timshel, along with his artist wife and another couple they were courting.

  In 1993, Gerry invited me to speak at a wonderful conference held at St. Peter’s Church in New York City called “The Union of Sex and Spirit.” It seemed like the perfect opportunity to meet a young polyamorous pastor I’d been corresponding with, and it was love at first sight. We ended up sharing the loft in Ray Lawrence’s Times Square apartment, climbing over cases of his newly released Poisoning of Eros10 to get into bed. The young pastor was concerned about what would transpire if our relationship ever became public knowledge, but this never happened. However, he was subsequently defrocked after confiding to members of his “open and affirming congregation” (meaning th
at they accepted nonheterosexual members) that he and his wife were sharing the parish house with their good Christian girlfriend.

  The Union of Sex and Spirit event inspired me to later create the Celebration of Eros Conferences on the West Coast and led to my collaboration with the poly clergy network to organize a new series of Kirkridge Conferences that later evolved into the grassroots East Coast organization called The Body Sacred. Gerry Jud once confided to me that twenty years of experience had convinced these very astute activists that sacred sexuality was a far more viable cause and far more palatable to the mainstream culture than nonmonogamy and would eventually lead to similar changes in marital norms. This was one of many reasons I subsequently changed the focus of my own work to Tantra and sexual healing.

  Over twenty years earlier, a series of conferences produced by Rustum Roy and his wife Della at the same Christian retreat center had bridged the East Coast–West Coast divide by introducing easterners to one of the best-known experiments of the sexual revolution, Sandstone Retreat, located in the hills above Topanga Canyon in Los Angeles County.

  Sandstone was founded by John and Barbara Williamson in 1967, and along with Esalen Institute, Sandstone brought together the concepts of humanistic psychology with sexual freedom. Esalen, which similarly to Brook Farm kept its sex life in the background and later did its best to retreat from the sexual frontier, continues as a successful retreat center. Sandstone, which put much of its focus on open sexuality and extramarital activities, closed its doors in 1972, partly as a result of legal issues.