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.