Polyamory in the 21st Century: Love and Intimacy With Multiple Partners (11 page)

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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 worldwide new culture permeated beneath the surface by a vast network of lovers. When it’s necessary to pull together a team project 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

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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 polyamorous 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 Anni-versary Edition of
Harrad
, Bob Rimmer also discusses his military service in India in World War II, where he was first exposed to Tantric teachings
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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.

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
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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 impera-tive. 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 Eros
10 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,
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he was subsequently defrocked after confiding to members of his “open and affirming congregation” (meaning that 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 collabora-tion 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.

The Williamsons were profoundly influenced by the work of Dr. Abraham Maslow. Maslow, one of the giants of the humanistic psychology movement, is well known for his theories of human need hierarchies, eupsychian management, and group synergy. Maslow was a fan of Bob Rimmer, and the two enjoyed a long-standing friendship. Maslow, along with Dr. Rollo May, Dr. Carl Rogers, Drs. Nina and George O’Neil, and many other figures in the human potential movement of the 1970s, was an advocate of loosening the rigidity of monogamous marriage in the interests of supporting greater growth and fulfillment for individuals as well enhancing the depth and quality of marital relationships.

In retrospect, it’s difficult to evaluate the success of experiments such as Sandstone and the role of humanistic psychology in changing family
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forms and sexual mores in America. Tom Hatfield was an enthusiastic participant in the Sandstone experiment until its demise and author of a book documenting the whole project. In a recent personal communication, he confessed that he now questions whether the ideals of synergy and equality were ever achieved. Nevertheless, Sandstone showed many people the power of peak sexual experiences to facilitate personal transformation. The work of best-selling authors such as Alex Comfort (
The Joy of Sex
), Gay Talese (
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
), and many other prominent and influential Sandstone guests has deeply penetrated Western culture.

At the same time, the sexual revolution of the 1970s left in its wake the widespread belief that open marriage doesn’t work. Open marriage has been lampooned by journalists such as Cyra McFadden, whose satirical writings on Marin County–style human potential marriages in the 1970s11

are both humorous and on the mark. More recently, the CBS series
Swingtown
has highlighted the escapades of several couples in open marriages in the 1970s and humorously portrays the often messy and dramatic lifestyle of these forerunners of modern polyamory. While the necessary research to conclusively answer the question of whether monogamous marriage