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Some of you may remember me from last year—when I stood up here with my Magic Wand Vibrator, dressed as "Wonder Woman With A Hard-On," and tried to conduct you into neat little Kinsey scale packages, by sexual orientation, around the room. Stand over there if you're a 0—totally heterosexual, no attractions for own sex. There if you're a 1—primarily attracted to the other sex. There if you're a 2—more attracted to the other sex but some attracted to your own. There if you're a 3—equally attracted to both sexes…a lot of you wanted to be 3s, or 3.7s. There if you're a 4—somewhat attracted to the other sex but more attracted to your own. And there if you're a 5—primarily attracted to your own sex but somewhat attracted to the opposite one and there if you're a 6—exclusively attracted to your own sex. Remember there weren't very many 6s.
Some of you may also remember I tried to convince you (I was having a Jocelyn Elder moment) that if you'd ever made yourself come, ever touched your own body with desire, that you could consider yourself part of the vast constellation of we who love our own kind. Get a grip—if you can imagine being attracted to yourself, you might, be gay!!!
How dare I upset all these little boxes we've assigned for ourselves? Gay or straight, male or female, white or black—never the twain shall meet. How dare I blur the boundaries, say that the lines aren't clear, that the fences we erect are arbitrary, or optional? That all of us human beings have a lot more in common than we think?
What I argue tonight is that it's not only white or heterosexual or middle-class people who need support for being polyamorous or deserve our support. We need coalitions across identity groups and interest groups to be able to win legal and social support for poly relationships. That means making our movement more accessible and multicultural—linking with progressive groups in the Latino community, Asian community, African-American community and Native American community who are already working on family issues, welfare issues, health & education issues, regardless if they use or identify with the word "poly," or not.
Compulsory monogamy is rooted in sexism. Homo-hatred is too. So if someone is working on feminism or gay issues or racial equality they are serving the poly cause. We need to speak out against forms of so-called "polyamory" which privilege one sex or orientation over another, and name them for the backward step they are. We must be involved with struggles against domination and oppression, both because we need a broad-based, diverse movement and because it is only all of us together who will demonstrate that the richness of our diverse ways of loving makes our communities strong, and our world wealthy and wise.
When we go along with the divisiveness of difference and allow any dominant group to label a minority group as "other:" heterosexuals labeling queers "other," men labeling women "other," whites labeling people of color "other," we forget that almost all of us end up in the "out" group some of the time. No one really gains from a society polarized into "in" groups and "out" groups. But if we don't work to change these divisions, we perpetuate them with our quiet consent.
I want to talk about the concept of IN-clusion. We're all afraid of being left out. Probably tonight a lot of us are feeling shy— will I really connect with people here? Will I find new partners? Will I be seen for who I really am? Will I feel loved and part of a community?
And as polyamorous people we all want to be included in the larger society too. Yet, if we put ourselves in the position of other, and beg (hands folded, bow…) monogamous people to include us in their mainstream, in their description of family, it often just gets their hackles up. They feel criticized, even if we don't mean to judge them. They get "all-het-up." (Ever wonder where that expression came from—using het as a verb? I do.)
Hets, oops, I mean monogs aren't sure they want to include us. They can't see how it will help them and their relationships at all. We haven't established enough common ground if we're still operating from an us versus them, or an in (them) crowd versus an (us) out crowd. And reversing it so that we're the in crowd, and they're the out, is not the point either. What would that gain? People should be free to be monogamous too. We have to talk in language people identify with, about what they face in relationships every day.
Another problem with focusing on getting included in their reality is that we're still operating too much from the negative, from what separates us, and not enough on what we offer, how we are needed, what we give to the world.
And, when we are the dominant group, the in crowd, like I am as a white person, like every white person is in this room, we need to take more guidance from people of color and get away from only seeing it as progress when we invite people of color into our group. Why don't we join forces with them instead?
Think about that much-used term Outreach. OUT-reach. Now, there's nothing wrong with outreach, per se, but if we stay stuck at this stage of inviting them into our group (if we're the dominants) or, if we're out, asking for inclusion into theirs, (the little poly folk petitioning the big monogs), then we're still giving power to a line of thinking that tends to reify or institutionalize the line, the wall, the fence between the In Group and the Out Group, rather than addressing what causes the line and erasing the line altogether.
Queer, feminist, multicultural family values embrace everyone by naming those excluded and inviting them in. OR inviting us all to come out. I remember the first poly conference I ever went to in 1993. The older, heterosexual, church people at Kirkridge who'd organized the conference talked about the poly movement needing to learn from the queer movement—about how to come out, about how to lobby for our rights, about how to redefine family and relationship and love and sex in ways that include more people and more kinds of loving.
The queer movement has broken a lot of ground polys benefit from, but we need to understand and support queer people's struggles too if we expect them to support ours or anyone to understand that our struggles overlap and include each other. Here's a concrete example: when the same-sex marriage debate exploded on Capitol Hill, conservative Congressmen started attacking bisexuals publicly, saying that if society gave gays the right to marriage, why next, it would be bisexuals wanting to marry more than one sex. That's poly marriage folks. And did we have an organized poly movement able and willing to make supportive statements to the press? Not really, not yet. And you know why? Because a lot of poly-loving folk haven't realized that every poly marriage is a same-sex relationship in some sense. Think about it. Multi-adult families have same-sex relationships and what you do in bed together is the least of it!
I work with the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bi & Transgender) movement. The LGBT movement has not always been called the LGBT movement. In fact, it is still NOT called the LGBT movement in many circles, particularly the circles of white and privileged gay people (we call them the gayristocracy) who just want to be included and accepted into the mainstream—not to transform how our culture makes families and loving relationships. Some gay men and lesbians don't see that they have anything in common with bisexual and transgender people, plus they don't want us included in their movement, even though we've been part of building it from the start. However if people could just see that expanding the L/G movement to the LGBT & Allies movement creates incredible opportunities, they might reconsider the position of single-issue isolation and identity. Here's the opportunity—without bisexuals and transgenders connected to lesbians and gays, mainstream society can stay complacent, reassuring itself that gays are other (nothing like us.)
But once it becomes clear that a large majority of society has had bisexual thoughts and feelings, whether they've ever acted on them or not (yet); once it becomes clear that a large majority of society is even gender variant, gender discordant, or gender nonconforming to some degree, whether they identify as transgender or not (I mean, what woman hasn't changed a tire, worn men's clothes, or learned to use a weapon; what man hasn't put on an earring or raised a child or cried?); and once it becomes clear that even many folk who've loved one person all their life have wanted to love more than one, or tried being poly and been discouraged, or think it's fine we are, even if they aren't; and once it becomes clear that even many folk—our friends, our co-workers, neighbors, families and loved ones—who are monogamous and heterosexual and perhaps perfectly gender- conforming (there must be someone who is), decide to stand up and be our allies, to educate for change with us, then suddenly we are potentially everyone—we are part of each other, we are all in this together. It is no longer us and them, men and women, or gay and straight, or polyamorous and monogamous, or even white and of color. (The color line is often an illusion too. Whiteness is an illusion. Unfortunately racism is not, it's very real.)
If we stay focused on including poly relationships in the mainstream of American culture, we don't question the underlying assumption that the only thing that's needed is for the in-group (in this case the monogamous couples) to expand to let the out- group (us) in. Why not make the in group join the out? ("We're coming out, we want the world to know, we want to let it show...!")
What we need is a whole paradigm shift—from seeing some of the culture as more normal or entitled than others, from privileging only monogamous relationships, or only male/female relationships, or only white people, to honoring all kinds of loving relationships and cultures.
My goal for inclusion is to teach everyone that there's no they, we are all part of us. Not that we LGBT people, or poly people, are a new ethnicity deserving recognition, not that we are born- this-way-and-can't help-it, not that we are so different, or even that we're just like monogs, or heterosexuals except we love our own sex, or more than one, but that we are all beautifully part of each other, all part of humanity's magnificent rainbow, and all equally deserving of a place in the sun, a place in the circle, a place in the family, a place that expresses us to the fullest.
So, as we make community here together this weekend, let us think about the contributions each of us brings and how rich we are. And remember that none of us is free, until all of us are free. So let's have a great time getting free all together!