by Неизвестный
John would venture even farther, arguing that open relationships are actually a more natural state than marriage and the nuclear family. “Okay, like ten percent of people in this society say they’re gay, right? I think about the same amount of people are naturally born monogamous.” He continued: “But from day one, as a society, we’re immediately routed toward monogamy. This shit starts right when you get out of the womb, man. Wrap that colored blanket around them, put the mother and father on the birth certificate. Boom.”
He’s rankled about that. “The whole ‘It takes a village’ thing? It shouldn’t be a foreign concept.” John added that Ryan’s book merely validated feelings he’s had for years. “It helped me find words to express how I function.” John will readily admit that his parents were monogamous, and that he grew up without any kind of progressive, open relationship model to use as a reference point. Nonetheless, he says he’s been poly his whole life.
One of the people who attended Ryan’s lecture was Polly Whittaker, a slender, freckled blond who is a veritable Johnny Appleseed of the local polyamory community. Whittaker is one of those rare people who can flaunt her sexual preferences without compunction, since she works in the alt-sex world full time. Born in the United Kingdom and raised in a fairly permissive family—her parents were both sex therapists, and her mother “turned a blind eye” to her father’s multiple affairs—she started going to fetish clubs as a teenager, immersed herself in the “sex underground,” and entered her first open relationship after immigrating to the United States in 1999. “The first weekend I came was the Folsom Street Fair,” she said. “It was amazing. I was like, ‘Yay, this is my town, I’ve arrived.’”
Some people only recognize Whittaker by the costumes she wears at sex parties, which involve a lot of pink wigs and corsets. In person, though, she’s polite and down-to-business, and exudes a surprisingly small amount of sexual energy. In fact, she looks like a grown-up version of the Swiss Miss hot chocolate logo: cute, fair-skinned, and much younger in appearance than her thirty-six years. She says that by day she’s focused on writing; her partner, Scott Levkoff, is a puppeteer.
The couple launched their organization, Mission Control, in January 2001, after leasing a second-floor walk-up in the Mission. Whittaker already had her own fetish party, but she wanted to increase the clientele. “I was inviting some raver-Burner types, as well,” she said, indicating that the idea of mixing those subcultures was still a little outré at that time. “Those communities really hadn’t crossed yet. It was like the goths were the fetish people and the ravers were the ecstasy people. There was no crossover.”
Whittaker took it upon herself to bring the disparate tribes together, if only for the sake of throwing better parties. The result, she said, was fantastic: “colorful, costumed, sex-positive, Burning Man-oriented (but not Burning Man). We just created this space where people felt like they could explore.”
The club now hosts seven different play parties, in addition to a monthly art salon. John said it runs the gamut: fairy nights, ladies’ nights, heavier play nights, lighter play nights, trans nights, fetish nights, sex club–oriented nights. Most events cost thirty to thirty-five dollars and entail a mandatory dress code. Some require all participants to bring a buddy. “You know,” he said, “they want to keep the riffraff out.”
John explained that when sex parties aren’t properly policed, they can attract a bad element—i.e., “dudes in sweatpants who like to jerk off while watching trannies fuck. I mean, not that it’s bad to watch trannies fuck—that’s hot,” he said. “Sweatpants? Not so hot.”
Mission Control’s flagship party is called Kinky Salon, which is kind of an omnisexual catchall. It’s not polyamorous per se, but you have to be poly-friendly to go, given all the exchanging of partners that happens there. According to people who go, it looks nondescript from the outside—just a grate and a door-tender. But the inside is all razzle-dazzle: wood paneling, a smokers’ porch, tapestries, a dance floor with a stripper pole and mirrored disco ball, bartenders who hold your drinks (Kinky Salon has a BYOB policy and no liquor license), baskets full of condoms and lube, a back room full of beds and box springs and futons, people walking around in various stages of undress. Every iteration of the party has a theme (e.g., “woodland creatures,” “superheroes,” or “San Fransexual”).
John has a fairly sunny view of Kinky Salon, at least in terms of its ability to attract a wide and representative swath of the polyamory subculture. Yes, more than half of the folks who attend are white, college-educated people in their thirties, he said. But they constitute the scene’s demographic majority. “It’s definitely a have-your-life-together-but-are-still-having-tons-of-fun kind of crowd,” he said, adding that in general, the racial makeup pretty much mirrors that of San Francisco.
Jessica’s read is a little more cynical. She’s been to two Mission Control parties and says they definitely stand out in a scene that’s become larger and more diffuse—in the last decade, so-called “pansexual” and “alternative adult” clubs have cropped up all over San Francisco, and many of them are a little less discriminating, in terms of the crowds they draw. All the same, she finds the crowd to be pretty specific, not so much in an elitist way as in an isolationist way. And generally, it’s dominated by nerds. “You know, Burning Man people, Renn Faire people, people who are really costumed,” she said. “They’re older. They’re not really people I’m interested in fucking.”
She continued: “There’s this back room where you go to have sex, and there’s always this weird pile of people going at it in the middle of the room. But it’s way less creepy than it could be.”
Ned Mayhem, a PhD student in the sciences and second-generation polyamorist (his father also has an open marriage), would agree with that assessment. He and his partner, Maggie Mayhem, have a porn website based around their “sex geek” personae. They even invented something called a PSIgasm, which uses sensory devices to measure the strength of orgasms. (They’re trying to get money to develop it, but haven’t been able to work within normal fund-raising apparatuses—Kickstarter snubbed them.) Mayhem said that a lot of the people he meets in the so-called “sexual underground” are nerds in other parts of their lives—grad students, engineers, costume-party types, bookworms, live-action role players. They tend to be open-minded and well educated, but always a little to the left of what mainstream society would consider “sexy.”
Perhaps that explains why polyamory has formed such a flourishing, albeit circumscribed subculture. It’s a scene where square pegs and misfits can reinvent themselves as Lotharios, where a self-described “socially well-adjusted” person like Jessica feels like an outlier.
Certainly, not all polyamorists attend sex parties or engage in kink—many who subscribe to the “open relationship” philosophy still consider themselves fairly vanilla. But the fact that San Francisco has such a vast and well-networked sexual underground benefits them, too, since it makes for a more tolerant environment. It also shows that the alt-sex scene, and by extension, the polyamory scene, isn’t just a countercultural fluke.
At the end of the day, though, it remains marginal. And if you buy into Ryan’s argument that an ownership-based society organizes itself around monogamous relationships, then polyamory may never really become mainstream. It’s a fringe movement by its very definition, and some adherents would prefer that it stay that way.
In fact, there are two main obstacles facing the polyamory movement. One is that, like it or not, we’re a morality-obsessed culture, and in many ways we’re still a doctrinal culture. A 2009 Gallup poll showed that 92 percent of Americans think that having an extramarital affair is morally wrong. That’s about twice as many as those who condemn gay and lesbian relationships, and three times as many as those who oppose the death penalty. Which is to say that as a culture, we’re intractably wedded to the idea of a solid matrimonial bond. We’re more amenable to the idea of legally killing someone than the idea of wrecking a marriage.
Thus, open relationships have a long way to go before becoming socially acceptable, let alone part of the status quo. Bigots who still find the idea of gay marriage unsavory probably won’t cotton to nonmonogamy anytime soon.
Most of the people interviewed for this article wanted to conceal their identities, either because they feared repercussions at work—Kate, for instance, is an elementary schoolteacher; Ned asked that the name of his university be redacted, to avoid raising the attention of administrators—or because they hadn’t “come out” to their families. Jessica said her mom mildly disapproves of open relationships and tends to dodge the subject when Jessica brings it up. A woman named Jess Young, who grew up in Texas and moved to the Bay Area after college, said her parents threw her out of the house when she was in high school for being a lesbian. “I think that polyamory would be beyond the scope of their understanding,” she said.
The other problem is that humans are jealous creatures, whether or not you throw the concept of ownership into the equation. Asked if we can ever overcome jealousy, Dan Savage had a pretty straightforward answer: “No,” he wrote, in an email interview. “And I say that as someone who has been in a monogam ish relationship for a dozen years. Jealousy is a control, I think, a natural human emotion—just like the desire for variety and other partners.”
And the truth is that polyamorous relationships are hard. Those who practice them say there’s no set way of doing it. Levkoff and Whittaker are loose enough and trusting enough to let each other spend entire weekends with their respective lovers. Whittaker said she usually likes to meet the people her partner dates, particularly if it’s more than just a casual romance, but she’s not always interested in hearing all the details.
Jessica and John have a more hands-on approach, meaning they pretty much tell each other everything. Jessica confessed that she finds herself getting jealous in unexpected ways, and not always about sex. “I’ll be like, ‘Hey, you made dinner with her? No fair.’” Ned describes his relationship with Maggie as “poly-fuckerous” rather than polyamorous, and says that largely owes to time constraints; he’s a full-time student, she has a day job, and neither of them has the energy for endless “processing.”
Some polyamorists subscribe to the idea of “compersion,” which is basically a way of being happy that your partner is happy, even if that means allowing your partner to see other people. Oft described as “the inverse of jealousy,” it’s defined both as an enlightened, empathic state, and a tool to surmount the feelings of possessiveness and insecurity that normally crop up in romantic relationships. Some polyamory scholars argue that compersion can be learned. Easton discusses it at length in The Ethical Slut. Jessica says she’s been able to implement it sometimes. “Really,” she said, “nobody’s immune to jealousy.”
And then, well, there’s the problem of some people being liars, no matter what situation you put them in—closed, open, whatever. People in monogamous relationships cheat, but so do people in polyamorous relationships. Some people “open up” relationships in order to sabotage rather than enhance them. Savage put it bluntly: “Some people convince their partners to open their relationships, and promise them that it’s not because they’re not attracted to ’em anymore, but they’re really done and want out of the relationship, and ‘openness’ for them means ‘I’m out there auditioning potential new partners and as soon as I find one I’m going to dump the person I’m with.’”
Kate agreed. “Nonmonogamous people can cheat,” she said. “It’s just about being a dishonest schmuck. If you do it right, it’s supposed to be thoughtful. You’re supposed to do a lot of ‘checking in’ and talking things to death.”
And, granted, people in polyamorous relationships deal with their fair share of dishonest schmucks. “The first guy I dated in New York, I think he wanted to rescue me from John,” Jessica said. “He was super emotionally intimate with me, listened to me talk about my relationships, sort of alluded to the fact that he wasn’t really down with the program. After two months he disappeared.” She sighed. “I feel like dudes think that because you already have a boyfriend, they don’t have to actually break things off.”
John’s been jilted, too. “There was a girl I was dating for a month or two, the sex was really hot, and she was down with the fact that I had another partner,” he said. “Then I went off to New York for a few weeks, and she basically started dating someone who wanted to be monogamous.” So the girl just bounced, leaving John in the lurch. “It really hurts when someone starts dating you, and then they have to stop because they’re not actually poly.” He explained that even though most people are theoretically born nonmonogamous, few people can actually practice nonmonogamy in a healthy, fair, fully communicative way. We’re so habituated to think of romance in terms of competition and scarcity that it becomes nearly impossible to break away from that model. John said one would think that his and Jessica’s pool of potential partners is a lot bigger than that of the average person, but it’s actually more limited.
In the end, it’s hard to say which model is better, given our social circumstances. “I think monogamy has certain pressures and discontents that complicate relationships,” Savage wrote. “And I think polyamory does, too. You get to pick your poison.”
It’s possible to make a serious mess of a polyamorous relationship, be an unthinking, uncaring jerk, and alienate the people around you. Then again, it’s also possible to create the kind of romance that John and Jessica apparently have, in which everything seems beautiful and clean.
Very Legal: Sex and Love in Retirement
Alex Morris
Sally loves her boyfriend Albert’s hair. She loves his face and his body, too, but she keeps coming back to the hair. It is great hair, thick and luxuriant and combed back from his face in little waves that puff out here and there. Still, when they first met, Sally wasn’t always sure Al was right for her. She thought, Albert is good-looking, but he’s too loud and boisterous for me. His voice would carry across the entire dining room.
For his part, Al noticed Sally right away. He didn’t sit with her at meals, but he got in the habit of stopping by her table, where he would stand and chat with the ladies seated around it. Then he joined the poker game she played every night and saw how other men flirted with her over their cards. Still, he kept his cool and waited patiently. “I used to say, ‘See you at the game,’ and that’s all. I never made a play at her.” Eventually, his slow-burn approach had the desired effect.
“He’s so handsome,” Sally now coos. We’re in the Large Activities Room of Flushing House—an independent-living facility in Queens, with a population just over three hundred—and despite the game of volleyball going on behind them in which fifteen or so seated residents bat a balloon back and forth over a low net, Al and Sally have scooted their chairs close together, and their hands are like moths, constantly flittering over the armrests and toward each other. “He is a handsome man for eighty-nine. Look at that hair.” Sally runs her fingers through it.
“And the moustache? You don’t like the moustache?” asks Al.
“I love the moustache. You know that, Albert.”
“You’re the prettiest girl here, Sally. The prettiest woman here.”
“I’m ninety years old! The prettiest girl here?” Sally laughs at the thought, and yet her hand reaches up to smooth her peach-tinted bob.
By Flushing House standards, Sally and Al took things at a glacial pace. So did Kitty and David, who had been at Flushing House together for around a year before they started dating, though she’d had a tendency to fall asleep sitting next to him in the lobby with her head resting on his shoulder. (“She came after me” is how he explains it. “It may be true,” she responds.) Herb and Henrietta met in the hallway shortly after she moved in four doors down from him, and she says, “He didn’t give me a chance to look for anybody else.” Tony and Alice became “companions” after dancing together at the New Year’s Eve party just a few months after h
e became a resident.
This last coupling was a particular disappointment to a number of the single women. Tony has a twinkly, Frank Sinatra vibe. He walks without a cane. He dances with panache. But while Tony will amiably two-step with anyone, his real attentions are directed at Alice, for reasons even he can’t articulate. (“It just grows, I guess.”) She’s the one he takes on walks, the one whose hand he holds, the one he cares for ever since her memory started to slip—and the one whom he might do a few more intimate things with, though as a rule he stays tight-lipped on that particular subject.
Al decidedly doesn’t. “I’m eighty-nine, but I’ve still got that zing.” Along with chewing gum and sugar pills, he keeps Viagra in a plastic bag in the breast pocket of his shirt. “I get the best from the V.A.,” he tells me, fingering the blue tablet. “They’re better now than ever. They get me crazy… You know, sex isn’t everything, but it has a lot to do with it. An awful lot to do with it. That’s three quarters of your battle won.” And it’s a battle he won with Sally, even though she was the one to initiate the romance, following him home one night from poker. “She made a right turn. I asked, ‘Where are you going?’ She said, ‘To your apartment.’ And that was it.”
Traditionally, nursing homes don’t encourage sex. Not only do many, including Flushing House, have religious affiliations to contend with, but there’s also the fact that the people footing the bill are often children and grandchildren not thrilled to imagine their forebears shacking up with someone new. Then there’s the fear of sexually transmitted diseases, which, owing in part to Viagra, are famously on the rise among the geriatric population. As Al puts it, “Sex takes a little longer now, but it’s wonderful for the woman. I can go on. You know?”