My Kinky Polyamorous Life

My bare ass is pressed against the cold
blue tile of a bathroom wall, jeans around my ankles. A girl on her
knees works magic with her tongue and hands. A New Year’s party is
raging on the other side of the thin door. I met Jordan—husky
Southern drawl, subtle smirk—just hours ago. The night blurs on
with cheap champagne and copious kind bud, and sometime later I awaken
on a kitchen floor, entwined in Jordan’s warm body. Then she drives me
home to my boyfriend of five years and our cat.

Jordan was my first venture into nonmonogamy. She wasn’t out to her
family and lived with her mom in a small town outside of Nashville. The
boyfriend and I had just broached the subject of opening up our
flailing relationship days earlier. I left the conversation thinking we
were going to try this thing; he left it thinking we were just talking
about it. Eventually we came around to the same page and drew up some
agreements, one of which was no dates in our apartment. Jordan and I
were broke, so the majority of our relationship was spent in her
uncle’s beat-up white GMC pickup. We’d fuck frantically during my lunch
break from the bookstore, with Amy Ray crooning over the fuzzing
speakers. Months of great sex and drunken fights later, we parted ways,
and as I boarded a plane to move to Seattle, she handed me a CD-R with
the words “Stay in the Car” scrawled in Sharpie. She had written me a
heartbreaking love song in that killer voice: Meet out back at 2:00
a.m./You’re just what I need for the shape I’m in/Got some money to
burn and nothing to lose/We could stay in the car if you wanted to…
If you wanted to/We could leave tonight/Shave our heads and start a new
life/But you won’t go, so I wont ask/I’ll meet ya next week parked out
back.

I used to be a good Christian. Focus on the Family’s Adventures
in Odyssey audio stories lulled me to sleep as a kid with
character-building lessons on the dangers of the occult and the
importance of purity. I was baptized by evangelicals on the Oregon
Coast, helped build a house for heathens on a mission trip in Mexico,
and strongly believed in “love the sinner, hate the sin.” Somewhere
along the line, something went drastically, wonderfully wrong.

For me, being queer and being poly go hand in hand. When the
illusion of monogamous heterosexuality as natural—the only way to
be—dissolved, I began to see choice in many parts of my life.
During my freshman year of college, I came out as queer. At a
university where Old South values predominated, where saddlebacking
with a side of coke and bulimia was the height of femininity, I found
haven in the relatively radical left of various humanities departments.
And Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt’s The Ethical Slut and
Wendy-O Matik’s Redefining Our Relationships provided a decent
introduction to open relationships, covering the theory (e.g., the
model most of us have for relationships is really codependence
masquerading as romantic love) and the practice (developing agreements,
negotiating conflict). Years later in Seattle, I attended the
Relationship Skills Class by local nonprofit Northwest Network. The
class covered “identifying cultural norms and personal values,
accountability, naming and setting boundaries, and strengthening
support networks.” But no book or class is going to prepare you or your
partners for the mindfuck that is poly. You just have to fuck up and
learn from your mistakes.

Flash-forward a couple Seattle summers: Fresh off the plane from
visiting a lover in the Bay, with a burst of confidence that only an
out-of-town fuck buddy can provide, I buy a six-pack and stroll over to
a potluck at a house down the street. After making the
rounds—greeting people I know, eyeing cute ones I don’t—I
join a crew on the back porch sipping Rainier. I notice a familiar face
to my left. He’s a sexy redhead who identifies as a fag but not as a
man, and the contents of his pants are none of your fucking business.
“Hey, weren’t you in my Relationship Skills Class?” I ask, knowing full
well that he was. Sparks fly, and it’s only a matter of time before
we’re in bed. We commandeer the futon in this house where neither of us
live. Again I rise at dawn, but at least I’m not on a kitchen floor
this time.

Now I have to figure out how to tell the girl I’m dating about the
redhead. She and I have been poly since the beginning (me gung ho, her
warily so) but had hesitated about drawing up agreements. See, it isn’t
until you’re in a specific situation—making eyes at someone
across a dance floor, making out with an old friend—that you
realize how you’re going to feel. I tell her, she is hurt, I’m
defensive, we talk and talk and talk, I date both of them for a month
or so, the girlfriend decides it’s too much and too fast, I’m not
willing to slow down, and we break up. One thing I’ve learned the hard
way: Don’t date people who aren’t sure whether they want to be poly.
Another thing: You can either be an irresponsible fuck and just keep
dating and fucking and kissing whomever you please, leaving a trail of
broken hearts behind, or you can figure out what you want and need in
each relationship and communicate it up front (squelching your own
feelings to save someone else’s is not only paternalistic, it’s
dumb).

I have been at this long enough that the history of my love life has
gotten super complicated—my friends’ love lives, too. For a
couple years, I lived in a house full of queers. Some of us were poly,
and if we hadn’t already kissed or fucked, it only took one other
person to connect us. One night, sitting at a cluttered kitchen table
in that moldy house with a carbon-monoxide leak and buzzing fluorescent
lights, we decided to create a visual representation of the horrible
mess of love and hate and broken hearts and lust that we had gotten
ourselves into. There was a whole system of names and lines and dots:
attraction, straight line; repulsion, ellipses; exes, Xs… then
we replaced this system with descriptors on the strands connecting
names: close, enemies, kinda friends, used to be close, exes, grrr
(don’t get along but not quite enemies), used to live together, live
together, dating, dating-ish, kissed, fucked, spooned. You should have
seen this thing. It looked like a web spun by a demented spider.

Add to the mix that I date people of all genders. Past and present
attractions include big hairy guys and small beautiful femmes, people
who fuck with gender and people who bravely find their place in a mess
of possibilities, butch dykes, high femmes, hard femmes, tranny fags,
genderqueers, femme fags, bois, gay boys… in a word, queers. I’m
queer because I don’t know whom I’m going to like next. The only
category on my blacklist is straight people—people who need me to
fit within a neat package, people whose identity depends upon mine.

Even as queers become more socially accepted, creating our own homes
and families and maybe even babies, don’t be deceived—we’re still
fucking freaks.