The Lifestyle (35 page)

“Okay, it’s early, so to change the energy and increase the spirit of fun before we get started,” Audrey said, “I’d like everybody to stand up. We would like our friend Marguerite, who I’ve discovered loves to sing, to help us do a fun little song that kind of embodies some of the philosophy that’s helped us. We’re going to start doing it, and you just kind of ‘monkey-see-monkey-do.’”

A dark-haired woman in a flowing muslin dress and plastic
sandals walked to the front of the room. “I sing this song with children, so I’d like to invite all of your inner children here to participate fully, including the hand motions,” said Marguerite. “It’s fun. Actually, it can be as deep as you want. Some of you know this song. It’s called ‘The Magic Penny.’ It’s really about this: The more love you give away, the more you get! We’re going to do the little children’s hand motions so that you can practice giving more love away and getting more love back. You can really get into it by actually giving away love to the individuals around you in the room. Ready?”

“Ready!” everyone shouted, eager as six-year-olds.

“Okay, here we go.”

At the end of this song everyone hugged the polys in full circumference around them. I offered hugs to the non-poly Texans Dr. Jean Henry and Clark Ross, then found myself in the arms of a ruggedly handsome old man named Lloyd, whom I held onto because I really liked him. Back in 1971, when most swing clubs were still living-room affairs, Lloyd had been on the executive committee of Sandstone Ranch, the encounter-group oriented “love community” in Topanga Canyon, whose members included individuals of such stature as Max Lerner, the syndicated left-wing columnist; Betty Dodson and Sally Binford, the pioneering pro-sex feminists; Daniel Ellesberg, who’d leaked the Pentagon Papers to the
New York Times;
Alex Comfort, author of
The Joy of Sex;
and Edward Brecher. Lloyd had kept the sexually politicized spirit
of those swinging days alive in his heart, as I’d found out the very first hour of this conference when he stood up before the two hundred assembled polyfidelitists and said: “At the end of World War II, America invented the nuclear bomb and the nuclear family. The nuclear family is more dangerous!”

Now, after several encounter sessions in which we’d sat beside each other relating our “personal myths,” Lloyd said to me, “Brother, I know you’ll be gentle and loving to this lifestyle. You don’t have to see us as we see ourselves, but you have to
hear
us. We are only trying to expand the narrow passage through which the race can’t fit anymore.”

Poly people really talk like that.

To get a handle on how the day-to-day lifestyle of spouse-sharing polyfidelitists differs from that other “lifestyle” led by playcouples, you have to understand the bottom-line distinction between “utopian swingers” and “recreational swingers.” As defined by sociologists like Edgar Butler, poly people are to recreational swingers as, say, Trotskyites are to liberal democrats. They are radical theoreticians who believe the lifestyle is much more about changing the world than it is modifying a single marriage. “Recreational swingers have no great overt revolutionary feeling that the establishment needs to be overthrown,” Butler wrote. “They violate norms but nevertheless accept them as being legitimate. However, Utopian swingers are nonconformists who publicize opposition to societal norms and [make] attempts to change them.” They “advocate some form of group marriage or communal life, an idea rejected by almost all swingers.”

Frank Lomas pointed out for us the conservative desire of swingers for their own bathrooms, and in this they are historically congruent with mainstream swingers since World War II.

Most of them have grown from the rows first sown by that suburban Johnny Appleseed, the traveling salesman Leidy, who promoted recreational sex within a primary pair-bond. Although many Utopian swingers like Lloyd started out as recreational swingers—and still cross the line on occasion—we can trace their more serious approach to multipartner sex to a different source, the free-love communes of the nineteenth century, in particular the Oneida commune in New York.

Founded in 1848 and lasting for thirty years, the Oneida commune’s Utopian premise was stated by its leader, the radical Christian preacher John Humphrey Noyes: “In the Kingdom of Heaven the institution of marriage which assigns the exclusive possession of one woman to one man does not exist, for in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are as the Angels of God in Heaven.” Noyes specifically applied that premise to the sexual relations of the three hundred men and women at Oneida, who all accepted his idiosyncratic religion, called “Bible Communism,” which held that since divine love was non-possessive, possessive love was the original sin. At Oneida, therefore, romantic love was viewed as a sinful emotion—entailing as it did a feeling of we-two-and-not-you—and monogamous marriage was an evil institution based on economic selfishness—we-four-and-no-more. In order to live in “universal love,” the communards practiced “complex marriage” in a huge brick mansion, where everyone had sex (though not group sex) with everyone else. In an odd reversal of sinful behavior, however, the proscription against feeling exclusive love for one’s sexual partner was constantly violated by the communards.

For all its frailties and faults, Oneida was a financial success, and it lasted until the law took a dim view of what was going on in the mansion. In 1879 Noyes was declared a public enemy by the locals and fled to Canada under threats of prosecution. After this the complex marriage of the religious commune,
already teetering, collapsed completely. But the secular dream of universal love and sexual sharing lived on among nonreligious anarchists, sex radicals, and communists, who carried it through the Depression and the war in their bohemian lairs. From this emerged a subculture in the late forties and early fifties whose cool adherants believed in beatitude, partner swapping, and social revolution: the beatniks.

These were the modern archetypes of the poly people—the first of the New Agers who would discard Christianity almost entirely in favor of wistful interpretations of Buddhism, Taoism, and native traditions. Made famous by Jack Kerouac in novels like
The Dharma Bums
, the beats were hairy intellectual types, and they all viewed the North American supermarket world as needing a radical shake-up. Sex was satori, and the capitalist monolith that promoted monogamy was, to the beats, hard, aggressive, militaristic, and, in an odd way, atheistic. To make love in groups was to help bring down the system by undermining the conventions that controlled and regulated human sexuality.

Being pleasure oriented, the swinging rebels occasionally visited the parties thrown by the
MR
. -inspired swinger magazines, but by the early sixties you could tell by the dress and talk of the couples in attendance that some just wanted to sexually share within their traditional marriage, and some wanted to show that sexual sharing was an act of revolutionary love. Heinlein had recently published
Stranger in a Strange Land
, and its proposition “Martians don’t own
anything”
struck a tremendous chord among the beats. No one knows for certain who formalized the Utopian faction of swinging by inventing the term “polyamorism,” but it seems to have entered the vernacular of some whole-earth hippies during the “love-in” era of the late sixties, and, by virtue of the “ism” suffix, it declared that multipartner sex was a distinctive doctrine, an ideal with a goal, as opposed to just a swinging sex practice. The goal of
threesomes and foursomes became Peace on Earth. Make Love not War.

Technically, “recreational swingers” practiced a bona fide form of polyamorism, but because playcouples were strictly bourgeois in their value structure, most polyamorists did not consider themselves swingers. Today polyamorists would group-gestalt you into a corner if you labeled them swingers without qualification. They are “in the lifestyle,” and use those words all the time, but polyamory is an ideology—“loving more than one”—with the emphasis on the word “loving.” They have departed from Noyes in their belief that you can sexually, spiritually,
and
romantically love more than one.

Polyfidelity takes the polyamorist lifestyle one ideological step further, actually, back in the direction of Oneida but without the Christian predicate. The term polyfidelity was invented by the secular Kerista commune in the eighties to describe the most politically mature form of polyamorism, which Mitch described in
Loving More
magazine as including “group marriage, shared parenting, total economic sharing, a group growth process, and a Utopian plan for improving life around the world [by] community living.” In the case of Kerista, polyfidelity also involved a lot of group sex among the generally bohemian-looking communards, who formed group marriages, dissolved them, formed new ones with different partners, and then merged to “encompass all but two people in the community.” Yet because Mitch “genuinely loved” his lovers, “all [his] familial relationships were indeed primary and equal,” and, therefore, the “experience was in keeping with [the commune’s] strict polyfidelitous ideology.”

Strict communitarianism is still pretty much what polyfidelity means to its adherents—which explains a lot of the millennial seriousness you encounter at poly conferences: Utopians consider their poly-swinging lifestyle as a beacon on the hill to the rest of humanity. They might be pleased that
millions of bourgeois swingers have derived a system of rules that enable them to transcend societal norms and affectionately make love with others without jealousy—something their hero, Heinlein, would have approved of as a step in the right Utopian direction—but they are highly critical of swingers who feel there is no need to complicate things by falling in love with their lovers and sharing bank accounts. Look at us, they seem to say: we go the whole hog, romantically loving many spouses, pooling our resources, and moving in together on our inner-city communes and truck farms in the country.

Given the sorts of difficulties you’d expect in living a polyfidelitous life, it is not surprising that there are only about one-tenth as many Utopian as recreational swingers. Drawn on a chart with circles and double-headed arrows criss-crossed and connected, group marriage resembles something like a complicated football play that must be executed every day—not just at parties. “A third person triples the number of relationships to be fulfilled and maintained compared with what a couple has,” Butler wrote, “and a fourth partner brings the number up to twelve. Love, trust, and communication are reciprocal behaviors that must thus be expended in a number of different relationships.” In California, the median life span of a traditional dyadic marriage is five years; only 7 percent of group marriages last that long.

Yet the very heroic complexity of poly life makes it an alluring ideal. Today polys have as many centers of family intimacy in North America as swingers have clubs. On Gabriola Island in British Columbia, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in San Francisco, New York, Toronto, Denver, and other centers of New Age awareness, polys gather around real or symbolic campfires, beat drums, meditate, and discuss shamanism, “the new sexuality,” goddesses and gods, matriarchy, ethnobotany, “reclaiming history,” pagan rituals, and white witchcraft. When recreational swingers attend their
gatherings—as they are often invited to do in advertisements placed in swing publications—they find the language of polys to be eerily different from their own. Poly talk is ecstatic in metaphor, often Martian, part of the dialect established by Valentine Smith’s Church of All Worlds, to which a thousand polys belong. When poly people make love they “blend” and “quicken eggs” and “share water.” When they appreciate what you are saying they “resonate” your words and “grok” your soul. They refer to their families as “nests” and their parties as “intimate networking.”

The fact is, polys are making some headway into that supposedly “other” lifestyle of playcouples. Polyfidelity lecturers regularly make the swing-convention circuit, proselytizing their views to couples whom they feel are already partway there, and whom they urge to sit down after a night at the club and discuss ways to extend their erotic play to true love. Stan Dale, head of California’s Human Awareness Institute and a founder of the Loving More conference, was the keynote speaker at the Lifestyles Organization’s 1993 convention. As mentioned, Dr. Deborah Anapol, one of the founders of
Loving More
magazine, often lectures at Lifestyles conventions. As does Dave Hutchison, head of the Liberated Christians, which embraces swinging as the first step straights might consider taking on the road to poly commitment. Bob Miller and Carol Roberts, who attended the convention at New Horizons, are board members of the polyfidelitist organization Family Synergy; they, too, lecture at Lifestyles conventions, trying to pull the two movements together. “Some of our members are ‘evolved swingers,’” states their brochure, “attracted to Family Synergy because of its focus on deeper relationships.” Indeed, on page one of every issue of
Loving More
its editors, Ryam Nearing and Brett Hill, espouse the poly “ecology of love” mission statement that you’ll find stacked in piles at the literature tables of Lifestyles conventions. “We affirm that loving more
than one can be a natural expression of health, exuberance, joy and intimacy,” the poly leaders write. “We view the shift from enforced monogamy and nuclear families to polyamory and intentional families or tribes in the context of a larger shift toward a more balanced, peaceful and sustainable way of life.”