Periscope

Reid knocked it out of the park. I’ve never seen him present before; this is a guy whose friends estimate he’s had more than 150,000 conversations with people about sex and relationships. It started when he was working as a bartender while attending Brown. He was the guy who would always start the conversation; and then people started seeking him out. That’s how be got his initial training as a ‘sex expert’. The perfect way.

Listening to him I was having a difficult time putting my finger through the gold ring of what he was saying in his keynote presentation. His many stories were weaving a theme, but I couldn’t see the pattern. Usually I’m good at summing up the ideas of others in a way they agree is valid.

I’ll try again. I think he was saying that now that polyamory has reached a level of cultural acknowledgment (at least in many places), we need to put the struggle for acceptance down (and it has been significant for many poly people, who have had the shadow material of others blown back in their faces constantly), and ease into being a legitimate part of society: not one of its problems. Not some other form of cheating, but people who are entitled to love the way that we love and organize our households the way that we want.

Point taken about how kids who read Facebook and see many people openly stating that they are polyamorous would have no way of really knowing that three years ago the same people would have been widely considered heretics. (In the late 1990s I tried to place an personal ad in the Village Voice looking for partners and they refused the ad because I admitted to seeking more than one person — in the Village fucking Voice of all places). Now on Craigslists all over the world, you can post listings for M4MM, M4MW, W4WW, W4MW, and so on), among the ‘ordinary’ options like M4W).

Reid suggest that poly folk invest their energy into living well and setting a good example for the world: an example of being real and on the level in our relationships, regardless of whether we are out of the closet in any situation or not. He acknowledged that there were people sitting in the room who, if their polyamorous sexual orientation were known, they would be fired.

He reminded the conference to remember that there are a lot of people in a lot of small towns for whom being polyamorous is not acceptable and for whom there are exceedingly few people they can relate to without causing a controversy by merely existing. I’ve made the decision in my own town to be more vocal (I have a platform, in a large magazine I write for, and starting writing about polyamory for in the mid 1990s) to remind my readers: you read it here first.

Before we had Newsweek speaking with some sensitivity and accuracy to the public on the subject. Before it was trendy. I know there’s a lot of you out there — let’s get together.

Logging off for the night from Poly Living 2010 in Ft. Washington, PA.