Dear Friend and Reader:
I’m here with one last report from Loving More East Coast. When most of us grew up, there was straight, gay and maybe bisexual. Bisexual has long been controversial, particularly among those who consider themselves firmly on the queer side or the straight side.
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NYC-based sexual civil rights attorney Diana Adams, covered in two entries below. Photo by Eric Francis.
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Today we have this thing called LGBTQ — an acronym you can’t pronounce that stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer. Of course if you’re heterosexual that doesn’t include you, but at least there is some growing recognition that there are a diversity of sexual orientations and that we need to work from common ground. If we did this acronym right, it would be LGBTQ-Y, since You have your own sexual orientation.
LGBTQ does not include numerous points of orientation: whether you go in the direction of having one partner or lover, or more than one; whether you prefer sex with people you know well, or whether you prefer it with those who are unfamiliar; whether you’re more oriented on others or on yourself. It does not include any of what you might call “shadow tendencies,” such as when someone tends toward monogamy but also tends to find partners who do not.
The word “polyamory” in theory means the option to have multiple relationships with the full knowledge of your partners (and vice versa), but in reality it’s an honoring of relational diversity. (The term “polyamory” means no one thing; it’s is an umbrella term that covers at least 10 different established forms of relationship.)