“When I was little, my mother had a talk with me about having a ‘public face,’ because not everyone would understand our family,” says Koe Sozuteki, a 20-year-old woman who grew up in a large poly household in Seattle. “That was a hard conversation to have in elementary school.”
Sozuteki has a bio mom, a bio dad, a stepmom, three other poly moms, “several other matriarchal women in the community who I think of as moms,” and an uncle. She also has a brother and half a dozen poly siblings—children she grew up with but is not related to by blood.
Sozuteki was teased in school about her family, she says, and she didn’t get much support from teachers.
“Back in the mid-’90s,” she says, “people just didn’t know how to approach it.”
One experience in particular sticks out in her memory. “In grade school, I had a friend over for a sleepover, and my father and mother were living together at the time, and my father had a partner downstairs—a date night, with his fiancée, now his wife,” recalls Sozuteki. “This friend had never been over before, and I was explaining how things worked in our household—mom might come out topless, dad had a date downstairs.”
When her friend’s parents asked their daughter how the sleepover went, she told them it was fine—and she also told them that Sozuteki’s household was “nudity-positive” and that her father had a date in the house who was not Sozuteki’s mother.
“She wasn’t allowed to come over to my house anymore,” says Sozuteki.
“People in poly relationships—particularly if they have kids—fear judgment and rejection,” says Quintus, an electrician who lives in Kitsap County with his wife and two daughters. “They fear being rejected by their friends, by their families. It’s why so many poly families are still closeted.”
Quintus and his wife Francisca, who have been poly for a dozen years, are the new heads of Polycamp, an annual summer retreat for local poly families. Polycamp began as a one-day picnic in Redmond and now takes place over four days at Millersylvania State Park outside Olympia.
Sozuteki attended her first Polycamp when she was 13. “We got to run around,” she says, “a passel of kids and teenagers, with a sense of freedom because we could be open as poly kids. It was great.”
While families with children were Polycamp’s original focus, Quintus and Francisca explain that Polycamp now strives to appeal to all poly people—”poly people with kids, poly people who can’t stand kids, and people who are single but identify as poly.”
So in addition to more traditional activities for families with young children—
canoeing, puppet-making classes, drum circles, and Frisbee golf—Polycamp now offers workshops for grown-ups. “We added some adults-only stuff,” explains Quintus, “things like life-drawing classes, a snuggle party, an adults-only variety show, a bondage workshop.”
Speaking as a parent myself—a sex-
positive, kink-positive parent—um… a bondage workshop? At a family camp? With kids running around?
“The adults-only workshops are held indoors, in specific cabins and shelters,” Quintus explains to me. “Kid-friendly activities are scheduled at the same time, so the kids are occupied whenever there’s an adults-only workshop or activity going on. We have chaperones; we have rules.”
What Polycamp may not have now, however, is a clear-eyed mission. “We try to appeal to all the different niches in the community,” Quintus tells me. “There’s a lot of overlap: There’s the kink community, the sci-fi community, the nature/granola/hippie community, the pagan community. We want to be a resource for everyone.” While Polycamp once was about meeting the needs of children whose parents were poly, Polycamp now wants to be all poly things to all poly people.
Quintus and Francisca’s daughters are about the same age that Koe Sozuteki was when she first started to attend Polycamp—and they face some of the same pressures that Sozuteki did.
“At school, they keep it private,” says Quintus. “We’ve told them it’s their choice whether they talk to their friends about it. They may receive some judgment or be teased, so it’s their choice. We’re involved in the poly community, so they have peers that they can talk to. They know there are other families like theirs.”
Quintus and Francisca were monogamous when they married and when they had their first child.
“I made a joke about
a threesome—half joking, half testing the waters—and Francisca said, ‘I’ve thought about it, maybe with a friend of mine,'” he says. “That was how we first started talking about it.”
Quintus says the couple didn’t jump right in, but gave it serious thought.
“It wasn’t just, ‘Hey, sweet, more vagina, let’s party!’ We talked about how we were going to handle jealousy, other partners, and being parents. Because we had kids—two by the time we did anything—we needed stability, so we decided we wanted a real girlfriend, someone who could be included in the family, someone who enjoyed children.”
In the 12 years they’ve been poly, Quintus and Francisca have had two long-term relationships with live-in girlfriends, women who became parental figures in the lives of the children but then moved on.
How do their children understand their parents’ relationship and their relationships?
“Children want to love and be loved,” says Quintus. “Children grasp the concept easily. As they’ve gotten older, we’ve explained that ours is not the traditional form that most relationships take. We’re not ashamed of our lifestyle. We’re open with family and friends. But they had a right to know that their family is unique.”
Sozuteki says she’s happy and that she’s grateful to have been “born into a tribe of intimate friends.”
After a long period of celibacy, Sozuteki’s bio mom is now involved in a quad.
“When I turned 7, my mother became celibate because she wanted to focus on me,” Sozuteki explains. “I was having a hard time when people my bio parents were dating came into my life and then left my life when things didn’t work out.”
Sozuteki identifies as poly—her first relationship, she notes, was a quad—but her closest sibling, her brother, is in a monogamous
relationship. She currently works at the Center for Sex Positive Culture, is studying to become a sex educator, and coined a widely embraced term in the poly community: “polycule.”
“I was in high school at the time,” she says, “and one day I started making a chart of what my family situation looked like. I wrote down names, drew lines between the names, how some bonds were strong, how some shifted, showing all the connections.”
Sozuteki was studying organic chemistry at the time.
“I finished the chart and thought, ‘Oh, my God—this looks like a molecule, like the diagrams in my biology textbook!’ It really helped me to understand my family.” 
Polycamp 2010 takes place Aug 26–29 at Millersylvania State Park. For more information, go to www.polycamp.org.
jamesx @49: “It seems to me that if one is truly bi, poly relationships are the only rational option.”
A heterosexual person has a pool of around three billion other people to potentially be attracted to. A bisexual person has a pool of around six billion. What’s a few billion people, give or take?
@47 Actually, focus really isn’t a problem, IMHO…if an event isn’t of interest to you, don’t go to it, and if there’s something you would like to see that’s not going on, reach out to Quintus and see about setting it up. The only focus for Polycamp is that it’s a gathering for poly people. The camp is what the community makes it.
I’d agree on the nudity part…thankfully, that’s not what is being said about what was happening at Koe’s house; I know the people there, and they are very conscious and caring about others.
As an avid PolyCamp Attendee, who has born witness to the full history of PolyCamp, I find that this article only tells half of the story. It does, however capture the present-tense conversation that PolyCamp is having. While is was once a childrens-space-over-here, adult-space-over-there kind of event, it has lately trended very strongly towards families. Even so, there has been adult-only space and as the director was quoted in the article as saying: we have rules.
While some polys are nudists and some are not, nothing is more highly regarded by polyamory than boundaries. We set them with great care and keep them. With boundaries such as, children do not go in this space, adults refrain from flogging each other in that space, and so on, we can enjoy greater freedom to explore any discussion we care to, however we care to explore it.
This is equivalent to a family friendly restaurant serving alcahol or having a bar. Children do not drink from mommy or daddy’s cup, and do not cross the flimsy gate that demarks bar from restaurant. No one raises alarm when Red Robin has a child-friendly mascot handing out balloons and a bar in the same room because all adults, not just staff and not just parents, participate in keeping children out of the bar area. Our boundaries give us freedom, and make all kinds of combinations possible.
Savage may have hit the mark by describing our current scope as outside our reach, but for the moment we enjoy the connections we make with other poly families struggling to deal with the same issues. Neighbors, co-workers, and relatives prove to be significant challenges to most poly families, and gathering to share our hardships and triumphs helps us learn about survival in a world that misunderstands us. It is building a community.
Jen Boi
Poly-Queer Workshop Leader
The issue I would cite as particularly challenging for kids raised in poly communities is when they turn eighteen. Naming no names, there’s nothing quite like watching a bunch of ponytailed poly men in their forties pursuing the newly legal fresh meat.
@56, You hit the nail on the head. If I had a nickel for every time I have seen that happen…
“”This friend had never been over before, and I was explaining how things worked in our household—mom might come out topless, dad had a date downstairs. When her friend’s parents asked their daughter how the sleepover went, she told them it was fine—and she also told them that Sozuteki’s household was “nudity-positive” and that her father had a date in the house who was not Sozuteki’s mother.
“She wasn’t allowed to come over to my house anymore….”
Proper outcome. If the parents are so clueless to walk around naked in front of kids–particularly other people’s kids–and have “dates” over for the night when other people are trusting their kids to them, those parents are not demonstrating the sort of care and respect necessary for other people to trust them with their kids.
Being “poly” is not a license to do stupid shit with other people’s kids in the house, and then decry how no one understands your family. It seems they understand it just fine: you folks walk around naked in front of people not into that, and have people over for sexual relations while the kids are nearby. That is just not how you behave when your daughter has a sleepover.
Being poly doesn’t change that, folks.
This whole “ply” movement kind of reminds me of previous utopian movements that tried to change American sexual mores. Feminist separatism, for instance.
Like other utopian movements, such as feminism, it addresses real problems with mainstream sexual politics. In the case of monogamy, the primary one being the biological difficulty of maintaining sexual exclusiveity with one partner. Also, of course the hypocrisy of proclaiming monogamy while tolerating a certain amount of “secret” cheating.
And like other movements, such as anarchism, the “poly” scene seems to have attracted a fair number of weirdos and predators looking for an excuse to act like assholes.
Hopefully the poly movement will make more peopel aware of the limitations, or at least the underlying assumptions, or monogamous practice, and hopefully it will succeed in creating a more free and tolerant society.
However, I personally would avoid this kind of scene. It seems a little cult-like, or at least a little quasi-religiously flakey.
@59. . “I personally would avoid this kind of scene. It seems a little cult-like, or at least a little quasi-religiously flakey.”
You’ve put your finger on the dilemma facing anyone who comes to realize that they are poly and/or bi by nature. I sometimes wonder what it was like for an older gay man in San Francisco in the 70’s. He might look askance at the circus on Castro Street and yet somehow in the back of his mind is the knowledge that he’s not such an outcast anymore. He might also find that now there are people with whom he can talk with openly, which he couldn’t do before. He might even discover that now it’s easier to find a potential partner. But how to avoid the circus? Not so easy.
and @51. . “but many bis are monogamous by choice.”
You may be right, but if so I’d like to meet them. They must be candidates for sainthood. Or are they maybe just enduring a low-level torment every day and using all their self-discipline to keep the “LID on the ID”? I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the poor souls who have been ‘cured’ of homosexuality by their church are of this type. They get confirmation of their cure if they like sex with an opposite-sex partner, but maybe they were just bi all along.
“But when a mono relationship fails, no one says- that’s your problem, monogamy doesn’t work”.
Yes, yes they do. In fact as much as I love Reading Dan, he does it quite frequently.
@56 As if that doesn’t happen to women everywhere anyway? Nothing quite like turning 18 and having Dad’s friends (single, divorced, or whatever) start turning into leering creeps.
@7: How did you go from “have a date” to “fucking”, and presumably somewhere in open view or with an unlocked door, if a girl can just stumble upon them because of a wrong turn?
You know, if I sent my (hypothetical) kid to another family’s house, I’m going to assume that the regular ol’ hetero two-party-maximum parents have sex too. That’s how kids come into being, apparently.
I just assume that while my kid is over there, they’re smart enough to keep it down and lock their bedroom door, or if they can’t, just spend a quiet evening watching a movie, having a glass of wine, or talking to each other — you know, stuff that can be defined as a “date.”
@64 ‘How did you go from “have a date” to “fucking”. . . ?’
Oddly enough, among the poly crowd that I’ve gotten to know over the past almost-two-decades, if you have a partner that you don’t live with, the term ‘date night’ almost always means ‘have sex’. It would be interesting to know if this is also true of the current generation of straight serial monogamists.
Quintus – as a non poly person, someone who knows very little about it, I’d say “calm down”.
I assume the article was aimed at people like me – people who are mostly ignorant about your community, but generally more or less sex positive, open, and tolerant (or we wouldn’t be reading this blog). The liberal mainstream, call it.
And it was a positive article. It presented a community that is mostly happy and well adjusted, doing well, and caring for their children. The fact that it did not present the poly lifestyle as totally trouble free is a good thing – no lifestyle is totally trouble free. We’re intelligent adults reading this, and we want to read what Dan saw and thought. If you had been 100% pleased with the article, that would be a sign that Dan had not done his job of looking at as much of a whole picture as he could see – he would have just been portraying your spin.
I came away from this article with a generally positive picture of the poly community in Seattle. I suspect that anyone openminded enough to be reading the article in the first place would feel the same. The fact that it’s not all hearts and flowers just means that it’s real, not Disney.
It seems incredibly disrespectful that the parents in this story didn’t give their child’s friend’s parents SOME kind of heads up. Just a “Hey we’d love to have your daughter over by the way we have a nudity positive poly household. If you don’t want your daughter around that maybe you could have our daughter over instead?”
I hope that other poly people demonstrate a little better taste and manners when dealing with more traditional families.
Keep the fucking hairy hippie poly hags off my lawn.
And tell you kid to stop fingerbanging my daughter or I’m voting for Dino Rossi.
What man in his right mind would go for Polyamory. Are these people crypto-Mormons or something.
The whole thing needs some banjo music in the background.
You better stop our daughters from making out with each other at your hippie sleepovers or I’m voting for Dino Rossi and running over fixies with my Landrover.
I can’t wait to have to pay taxes for the therapy all these kids will need. Methinks the actual ‘parents’ might be hard to find in giant cloud of pot smoke and flapping scrotes and tits.
I was intrigued to learn that a thing like polycamp even exists, though I confess I’m a little depressed to learn that being poly has been more-or-less mainstream for so long now that the community now has kids old enough to go canoeing and roast marshmellows.
Why depressed? Because I’ve always sort-of identified as poly, and in my thirty years have never met another individual (much less a woman – I’m a straight male) who has even considered the idea. The closest I’ve got is a couple of troubled open relationships in which previous partners have taken the liberties we’ve agreed to, and then got jealous if I dared to do the same.
I’ve pretty much given up on the idea and settled for traditional monogamous relationships with traditional girls because I’ve learnt that it’s that or going single. I’m an open-minded fun loving happy go lucky kind of guy too, and I think I’d make a great poly. I’ve just never had a chance to find out.
Is it just because I’m living in a stunted backwater of the world (Australia), or am I just blind? Put simply, is polyamoury as mainstream as polyamourists seem to think, and if it is where are they all hiding?
@61: Hi! Happily monogamous bisexual over here. You want to know what I do when I see a hot chick or dude and want to sleep with them? I don’t. It’s about respect for my partner, and the terms and boundaries that we have agreed upon in our relationship, and I like it that way. It’s not a feat of superhuman strength not to sleep with someone. Well, maybe it is for you, I don’t know your life. And, hey- aren’t “respect” and “boundaries” what all the poly people have been saying are important in relationships?
As for those church-brainwashed “ex-gays”, I can’t decide if I feel extremely sorry for them or really pissed off at what they’re saying about the rest of us. Both, I suppose. Anyway, they may well be monogamous, they may or may not be bi, but I doubt they’re happy about it.
Oh, finally- the bondage workshop at the family camp hit my creepy button. Not for being poly, or for being kinky; I’m pretty kinky myself. But there’s a reason that the Sandals chain runs completely separate resorts for couples and families, and it’s about maintaining mental boundaries as much as physical ones.
OK, it may be too late to weigh in here, but I wanted to respond to a couple of the comments here.
I am a bi-girl in a poly relationship that is quite successful so far. No kids yet, but we are all still relatively young, there is time.
Per @71, I would also keep the bondage workshop in an adults-only gathering. Not just because of the psychic space thing, but as a kid who always found out about stuff like this and found a way to sneak in/spy, I have a hard time believing there isn’t some bleed-over that just wouldn’t be appropriate. Keep in mind, reading this, that I am into that myself, so it is not a moralistic veiwpoint.
Regarding the bi comments, I agree with all of them, kinda. Poly does allow for more expression of my full complement of sexual desires and emotional needs, and that’s what I like about it – I am not someone who could just be with one person and not feel somewhat stifled. However, I still keep them within the contracts agreed upon in my relationships, as would any truly monogamous person, as I have when I was in monogamous relationships.
I think poly is a wonderful thing, and I wish it could be more socially known and accepted. So far in my experience, poly people tend to be more self-aware and considerate of others, more conscious of the actual agreements being made, less into game-playing, than most other people I have known.