by Terry Gould
A brief retelling of Stranger in a Strange Land helps clarify this poly-mix of metaphors so crucial to Utopian lifestylers. Valentine Michael Smith (whose first name should not be lost on you) was an orphaned Earthling born on Mars and raised by Martians. Some decades after World War III, a pod of the four smartest and most worthily monogamous couples on Earth were sent on the spaceship Envoy to colonize the red planet, and were not heard from again. The Earthlings met a fate very similar to that which befell the mutinous crew of the Bounty in 1789: fifteen men left Tahiti with twelve women and landed on the isolated Pitcairn Island. When the group were discovered years later, only one male was left alive: within a short time they had murdered each other over the women. In the case of the Earthlings on the Envoy, after Valentine’s birth his mother and her lover were murdered by her husband, who then killed himself. We are led to believe the others were murdered as well.
Interestingly, Heinlein’s native Martians were immune to fighting over sex because they were all born female and then matured into males. They were also advanced enough to be in almost continuous touch with God through a super-mundane, LSD-like experience of total understanding they called “grokking.” The Martians raised Valentine with the knowledge of grokking but with no knowledge of sexual jealousy. That was the way he was delivered into the hands of a rescue party from Earth when he was in his twenties. Christlike, sexually innocent, he winds up on the estate of a famous writer named Jubal, who is surrounded by female secretaries. Valentine begins to teach them all the ritual of sharing water, which immediately becomes synonymous with sharing sex, the hoarded commodity that had led to war on the Envoy. After grokking every bit of intellectual book knowledge on earth, Valentine, like a latter-day Siddhartha with the last name of an Everyman (Smith), decides to learn what the real world is about. He and his lover Jill eventually wind up in Las Vegas, where Jill gets a job as a stripper. Though ridiculous, this is a crucial juncture in the story, at least as far as understanding both wings of the lifestyle in North America. Remember the excitement of husbands at watching their wives with other men in the Annex? Remember the joy women took in being the glamorous objects of men’s attention and their thrilling “urge to help” when their husbands engaged other women? It’s all here in Heinlein’s book—exquisitely heightened because Valentine, whom everyone now calls Mike, is telepathic, and he can at one and the same time read the thoughts of the men in the audience, project them to Jill, and invite her into his mind so she can perceive his arousal at the other women stripping on stage with her.
The poly people eventually gave a name to that sensation: erotic compersion.
“She posed, and talked with Mike in her mind….‘Look where I am looking, my brother. The small one. He quivers. He thirsts for me.’
“I grok his thirst…. We grok him together] Mike agreed.
‘Great thirst for Little Brother.
“Suddenly she was seeing herself through strange eyes and feeling all the primitive need with which that stranger saw Her…. But she was amazed to find that her excitement increased as she looked through Mike’s eyes at other girls.”
After this encounter, Mike begins to broadcast his philosophy among humans, founding the Church of all Worlds, based on the philosophy of loving more in groups amid ritually shared water in warm tubs—the first mention of hot-tub sex in America. Nests of Mike’s church begin sprouting up all around the world, but when the media does their job on the swinging man from Mars, the righteous world reacts. Cheered on by reporters, they mob the gates of his commune screaming “Blasphemer!” Stoned, beaten, and impaled, Mike tells humanity with his dying breath, “The Truth is simple but the Way of
Man is hard…. Thou art God. Know that and the Way is open.”
Contemporary context is everything here. The year 1961 was the height of the Cold War: the nuclear doomsday clock was set at a couple of seconds before midnight and the equivalent of a million Hiroshima bombs were locked and loaded and on hair-trigger firing orders. How did we get ourselves into that fix?
For Heinlein the core problem was not the biological truth of our sexually competitive nature but our inability to transcend that nature through sharing. “All human behavior, all human motivations, all man’s hopes and fears, were colored and controlled by mankind’s tragic and oddly beautiful pattern of reproduction.” The tragic part of the story for Heinlein was that whenever humans made beautiful love, they immediately wanted to possess the body they loved—even if it meant killing the body and all the competitors who wanted it also. Everything men did—from earning wages to becoming rulers and setting out to conquer the world—seemed to be done with an eye to getting and possessing sex partners. Everything women did, from dressing provocatively to damaging a rival’s reputation through a clever slur, seemed to be motivated by their desire to attract a man to “quicken eggs” and make sure the family’s wealth stayed at home—even if that wealth was excessive and people went hungry elsewhere. Stranger in a Strange Land argues, as do poly people, that if nuclear bombs are ever used in an all-out war it will be because of the dog-eat-dog dynamic of sexual competition. In this Heinlein and the poly people have considerable backing from evolutionary theorists.
Trace the history of war through the centuries from the Trojan War onward and you will find that “as for motives, sex is dominant,” as Matt Ridley wrote in The Red Queen. The first war recorded, in Homer’s Iliad, began with the abduction of a beauteous woman, Helen. If territory, resources, and power were gained by men in war, it made the victors more attractive to mates and eliminated rivals in the process. In both preliterate societies and our own, men compete to accrue and display resources to attract partners and, once mated, husbands and wives join hands to gather and profligately use even more resources to promote the welfare of children born within their dyadic relationship. To scientists, there seems to be no way out of this Darwinian dilemma: productive and destructive, it is the causa movcns of all action. “There is now overwhelming evidence that there is no other way for evolution to work except by competitive reproduction,” according to Ridley. The free will of which we humans are so proud is just another mechanism “to satisfy ambition, to compete with fellow human beings… and so eventually to be in a better position to reproduce and rear children than human beings who do not reproduce.”
Polyfidelitists, on the other hand, really believe that there is a way to rewrite this unforgiving script. Why not, like Valentine Smith, teach men and women ways to share sexual and emotional love within an “expanded” family that does not cramp the ability of people to love each other “more.” Wouldn’t that take the edge off at least one cause of our woes?
In this the poly people are not as far as they believe from the thinking of playcouples—who merely don’t make a big deal about proselytizing the truths they personally perceive. When asked, however, they tend to offer the Loving More philosophy in earthy terms. As the Lifestyles Organization’s director of publicity, Steve Mason, told the Los Angeles Times in 1998: “We’ve often thought that the best way to solve all the world’s problems is to turn the United Nations into a swingers’ organization. How do you drop a bomb onto people that you’ve just had an orgasm with?”
Yet polyfidelitists are more impatient than the merry Mason, who feels sexual sharing at clubs, parties, and conventions is progressive enough for most people. Like other millennial thinkers, however, polys believe we are at a crucial juncture in evolution and that something more must be done now, before desperate conditions born of sexual competition destroy us. Ryam Nearing concluded her book with a ringing one-page testament called “Polyfidelity and Saving Humans,” in which she challenged people to break out of the “divide and conquer nightmare” of isolated family living. “We can cocoon into our homes and approach the next millennium as insulated as possible from the dark ages mentality that we’d hoped was dead and buried but now appears to be resurrecting…. Or we can stand as expressions of choice, of creativity, of psycho-spiritual explorati
on…. Polyfidelity is one part of the answer. It is one part of the potentially positive future we can envision. It is one part of the dream that we can live now, continuing to develop it as we go along, and always sharing it with others who may be looking for love, belonging and a mission. In the interest of human potential and on-going evolution, let the strength of social diversity of which we are a part, prevail.”
Phrased that way, it sounds like a millennial dream—and only a dream. But polys actually train people in fulfilling that dream. They teach people techniques for overcoming instincts and living in a house with those they might rather put a kitchen knife into, never mind feel compersion for. “Before people can successfully live in a group marriage,” Butler wrote, “they must learn the things that one learns in an encounter group; they must value intimacy and know how to encounter people in an intense situation, with person-to-person interaction that is disarmed and open.”
About an hour after my talk with Ryam, Chip August, a senior facilitator at Stan Dale’s Human Awareness Institute, pressed a button on a boom box and the kind of music that swells during the cathartic parts of a tearjerker movie filled the main meeting room of Harbin Hot Springs. Eighty naked people sat on the rug with their legs wrapped around the waist of a person they had never touched before today—and didn’t like much either. They had all followed Chip’s instructions to mill about the room and purposely search out a partner they had been “avoiding,” “were angry at,” or “somehow would never choose for a partner.” Amazingly, within a minute they had all zeroed in on a target. Even in a crowd of polys it seemed that people could instantly identify a person who after two days on a life raft they would probably beg God to be delivered from. They had then taken a minute to explain to their partner why they had bestowed this backhanded compliment on them. It was a gestalt exercise known as “truthing.”
“I chose you because you reminded me of my first husband.”
“I chose you because you kind of cut in front of me in line during breakfast.”
“Now,” said Chip, when they were done, “reach your hands out and lovingly begin to stroke your partner’s face. And as you do so I invite you to ponder this: what happens if you open your heart to this person and say ‘I love you’?”
In the musical seconds that followed, hands reached out like branches from a forest of peeled human souls, and the image looked to me to be a potential cover for Loving More magazine. The words “I love you” were whispered throughout the room.
Chip, a mountainously large man, beamed like the Buddha he sort of nakedly resembled. Halfway through this ninety-minute workshop, the personal growth of the attendees seemed to be heading them right down the path to the seminar’s promised goal of having them live perpetually beneath a “shower of love drops.” “I want to suggest to you that you can live in love,” Chip had stated when all had first taken their clothes off. “Whenever I present to people the option of living constantly in love they say, ‘Oh my God, that’s a dream, you can’t feel that way moment to moment, I would have to quit my job.’ I want to suggest to you that it is possible, and that in this next hour and a half of space you can feel it is possible. Everything we’re going to do here is about living at choice. Loving others is not a function of them, it’s a function you.
Before you heap laughter, scorn, and ridicule on what could too easily be dismissed as New Age nonsense, “I invite you to consider the possibilities,” as Stan Dale often said at his HAI gatherings. Seven months before, Dale had taken a toned-down version of his “authentic connecting” workshop to the People’s Republic of China, where he was a national hit from Beijing to Guangzhou. He was interviewed by the head of China TV for an hour and a half, speaking to hundreds of millions on “love and intimacy, sexuality and relationships.” After presenting his HAI workshop at Shandong University, he was awarded an honorary professorship. If we consider the mission statement of HAI, “Creating a World where Everyone Wins,” and the subversive possibilities of millions of people expressing themselves with sexual freedom in a national structure where they don’t even have the right to open their mouths about “alternative lifestyles” for Tibetans, it is a miracle Dale and seventy of his acolytes were invited back the following September to whistle-stop their workshops from Shanghai to Beijing. Chinese elites with some real influence in government have actually sat down on the carpet, stared into each other’s eyes, and touched each other’s faces. “Tell me why I am crying,” the head of China TV had asked Dale, tears pouring down his cheeks. In the past thirty years, forty thousand people have gone though HAI’s weekend retreats, and most of them have emerged swearing it could teach backbiters and butt kissers to “love more” in their workaday lives. According to the HAI brochures, rituals such as the one that was taking place before me promoted “personal growth and social evolution, replacing ignorance and fear with awareness and love.” In the years before the Soviet Union collapsed, Dale was over there on three occasions giving his seminars to glasnost-leaning bureaucrats and academics. “Consider the possibilities.”
“You may notice there are tears in that face before you,” Chip said, and, indeed, some were now crying. “With your partner’s permission, stroke their hair. You are stroking God. Notice what happens when you take a breath. Open your heart. Think the thought: I love you. Touch your partner’s hair lightly. I invite you to realize that ten million years of evolution have brought you both to this point. You don’t have to believe in the concept of evolution to believe that all of our lives have a starting point, and they have led to this moment—now—and I am stroking this being before me. A perfect God-being. Ask: If not now—when? If not here—where?”
He told everyone to stare into each other’s eyes without looking away. “Many of us live our lives as if we are traveling in an elevator. When we feel it is our floor, we get off and say good-bye to the other people. But we can stay in the elevator and take that journey upward.”
A gorgeous young woman of perhaps twenty-five with a God’s eye painted on her cheek, who was sitting with a loudmouth in his fifties, one of the few cigarette smokers at the conference, called aloud, “Oh yes!” It wasn’t sexual. She was expressing some emotion she felt at grokking someone she probably perceived as an arrogant, unhealthy, overage womanizer, the one she had chosen for a partner because she disliked everything about him.
“Now, partner number one, cup your partner’s face in your hands,” Chip said. “Can you see the soul in that person’s face? Give your partner little baby kisses all over their face.”
All kissed their partners, smiling blissfully.
“Now, partner number two,” Chip said, “give sweet-daddy-and-mommy-kisses. This isn’t about turning someone on. Tell them, ‘I love you, Little John.’”
The room was filled with softly murmured “I love yous.”
“Feel the love.”
Beat. Music rising.
“Now, both of you kiss at once.”
Sitting on my stool beholding this amazing sight, I tried to picture backstabbing Communists from the faculty of Shandong University and the bureaucracy of China TV following these instructions, choosing their worst enemy and giving them sweet-daddy-and-mommy-kisses. I had to consider the possibilities: maybe one of them would have some restraining influence over starting a nuclear war because of Taiwan. No wonder an organization called the Ethical Humanists had once elected Stan Dale “Humanitarian of the Year;” no wonder he was one of the world’s thirteen recipients of the Mahatma Gandhi Peace Medallion.
I had interviewed Dale just before I’d driven up to Harbin. He lived in the clean, airy California town of Belmont, south of San Francisco. On his wall was a drawing of Gandhi given him by a lifer at San Quentin prison. On another wall was a computer drawing of two nude airborne lovers embracing—with the man’s erect penis coming into view after a few seconds of staring. On the mirrored table was a Japanese sculpture of a No dancer—a male dressed as a female—called “Looking For Her Soul in the Mirror
of Her Face.”
Stan was about seventy, with two spouses—Helen, whom he’d been married to for thirty-nine years, and Janet, who’d been living with the Dales for two decades. He had the vandyke beard and arched brows of the sixties “guru” Allan Watts, whom he distinctly resembled. He received his training in Japan during the Korean War—not from a Zen master, but from the aged female head of a geisha house, at which he lived for seven months. The geisha gave him a stone and told him to discover the beauty of the universe in it. When he found it there three days later in a moment of satori, she offered him an adage to live by for the rest of his life: “If God wanted to hide, He would hide in human beings, because that’s the last place you would think to look.”
“I learned reverence in the geisha house for all people and all things,” Dale told me in his sonorous, almost hypnotic voice. It was the very voice that played the Shadow on radio in the 1940s, and then narrated the Green Hornet and Sgt. Preston of the Yukon. Later, in the sixties, Dale was the host of the first phone-in radio show, in which a burdened public called in to talk about love, relationships, work, and sex. It was just an idea that had occurred to Stan one night in 1968, at WCFL-Radio in Chicago, when he was “Stan, the All-Night Record Man”: Why not open up the phone lines across the nation and let people talk? Within a couple of days he was averaging a hundred thousand calls a night. That prompted him to hold his first “Love, Intimacy, and Sexuality” seminar—for which he coined the term “love-in,” another first—which drew a thousand people just by word of mouth. He formalized his experiential seminar into a workshop, got a doctorate from Ted Mcllvenna’s Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, and he was now the longest-reigning encounter-group facilitator in North America.