402 - Looking Back on the Polyamorous Commune (with authors Glen Olson and Terry Lee Brussels)
Polyamory through the ages
Glen Olson and Terry Lee Brussels are the co-authors of 50 Years of Polyamory in America, A Guided Tour of a Growing Movement. They graciously have joined us to continue the conversation we began with Kathy Labriola last episode: the history of polyamory and aging in polyamory.
Glen, an author and historian of the polyamory movement, gives presentations on the history of polyamory to interested groups. He is a retired fire captain, paramedic, and technical writer. He is a contributing author to the Los Angeles Fire Department’s original CERT Disaster Preparedness Student Manual, distributed nationwide by FEMA. He has written several student manuals for internal fire department use and is a published science fiction and fantasy fiction writer.
His introduction to organized polyamory began in the 1970s when he was invited to attend a workshop on open relationships at Elysium Fields in Topanga Canyon, California. The workshop was hosted by the organization Family Synergy. He subsequently joined Family Synergy, attending many workshops and conventions. Over the next several decades he attended events put on by almost every organization on the West Coast and several in the Midwest and eastern United States. Over the years he has made presentations to colleges and interested groups, like science fiction conventions, on the subject of open relationships and polyamory.
Terry Lee Brussel-Rogers is an author and hypnotherapist, helping clients with everything from intimacy without jealousy to spiritual growth and poly relationship coaching. Terry co-founded Live the Dream, an education and support group for people interested in alternative lifestyles, cooperative living, open relationships, and group marriage.
Some of the topics and questions Terry and Glen tackle during this episode are:
How their book project began, if any of the organizations they speak about in the book are still around today, and what they found most surprising about the project as a whole.
Why they focused on formal organizations in their book and what first drew them to that structure, as well as what we know about polyamory practices outside of organizations.
Do you think as a culture we’ve moved past the idea of a polyamorous, utopian society, or is that still vision present today but just in a different form?
Having surveyed over half a century of polyamorous organizational history, how do you think the nature of polyamorous organizing and community building is similar and/or different now than in the past?
What do you think the future of polyamorous organization and community building will look like? What's your impression or take on how polyamorous practice and education has shifted and changed? How are the next generations picking up the mantle?
Hierarchy and initial uses of the terms primary, secondary, and tertiary.
What’s your take with the whole drama around who “coined” the term polyamory in the first place?
There is a lot of primary focus on predominantly white and often assumed heterosexual communities and organizations in this book. There is also a rich history of Black communities/organizations as well as queer communities/organizations influencing the shape of American polyamory. How do they fit into this history?
How have the swinging and polyamory communities interacted and defined themselves in relation to each other?
Why is it important to look back on polyamorous history? Why is this book important?
Be sure to listen to the full interview to get all of Glen and Terry’s insight, knowledge, and perspective on polyamorous history! 50 Years of Polyamory in America can be purchased at every bookseller’s website, as well as directly from the publisher. Contact Glen at glenolson.org to get a limited time discount code for those who purchase from the publisher’s website!
Find more about Terry and her coaching and hypnotherapy at livethedream.org, acesuccess.com, reachforthestars.today, or reach her directly at 1-800 462-5669 or 1-800-543-3628.
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we are continuing on a theme from last week of focusing on elders in the polyamory community. Specifically, this week, we are talking with Glen Olson and Terry Lee Brussels Rogers, who are authors of the new book 50 Years of Polyamory in America.
The book focuses on their experiences as well as experiences of some of their colleagues in the early polyamorous collective communities in the United States. Very interesting getting that perspective from them. Also, there are some times on this episode where they say things that we just flat-out disagree with, like stances on solo polyamory or hierarchy or things like that.
Honestly, that's something that has really helped us to grow over the years, remembering that we can all be allies and we don't all have to think exactly the same thing or hold exactly the same beliefs about everything. It's okay for us to have some differences of opinion.
Glen Olson is an author and a historian of polyamory communities in America. Over the years, he has made presentations to colleges and science fiction conventions on the subject of open relationships and polyamory. Terry Lee Brussel Rogers is an author and hypnotherapist helping clients with everything from intimacy without jealousy to spiritual growth and poly relationship coaching.
Terry co-founded Live The Dream, which is an education and support group for people interested in alternative lifestyles, cooperative living, open relationships, and group marriage. Glen and Terry, thank you so much for joining us today.
Glen: Thank you. Happy to be here.
Emily: First off, congratulations on the book. That's so amazing that you were able to compile all of this information and history into one book. Just to start off with how did this project begin? What was your research process like? I'm also curious how many of the organizations that you speak about are actually still around.
Terry: Well, it started because I asked Glen to join me in writing a book about polyamory, and he said he'd think about it, and it was wonderful when he decided "yes". He had started being an author and writing science fiction books. By this time, he was retired from the fire department, and I was so glad he chose to join me.
Glen: I did a little bit of research about what was out in the field. We'd already been plugged into the polyamory communities for many years, and noted as authors came out and brought out information. I determined that, at the time that we started thinking about our project, there were about 40 books on the market on the subject of polyamory already. Those books while they were very, very good, each one of them, they all had a very small slice of what was going on.
Oftentimes, it would be a memoir, someone talking about their life path and the things they've learned. Sometimes it would be two or three people but it had a very small scope, and I said-- Terry, who I have known since high school, we've been friends for that long. I said--
Terry: If you want to go back to when the project started, we could go back to when we were 15, 16 years old when we started our first nest together based on-
Emily: Oh, wow.
Terry: -Stranger in a Strange Land.
Jase: Wow.
Glen: That's right. The project had its start in portions, but this particular kickoff was because I'd been doing seminars and making appearances at colleges and science fiction conventions and things like that, and so had Terry. Someone said to me, "Glen, what do you know about the term primary and secondary? Glen, what do you know about the term compersion?"
I would tell them, "Well, I know who started the process. I know where the term came from." At the end of the day, someone said to me, "Gee, you've been everywhere, and you've met everyone in the polyamory communities." I said, "Well, that can't be true."
When I went back to talk with Terry, I read between the two of us we have possibly met, over the last Humpty years, the majority of the people that have worked on the needs of being in an open committed relationship and being in open loving relationships and how they found out what they were doing and the organizations they started and said, "That's our book. Let's tell the history of polyamory."
Jase: Something that I think really interested us about this book and in talking to you, too, is that the polyamory experience and this history that you talk about in the book is one that's very different from our own experience of polyamory and the communities that we've been in.
There's obviously a lot of overlap, a lot of similar influencers, so that's something that we're very curious about because these kinds of more intentional communities and things like that, real-life communities, not online ones, is something that you have a lot of history with. That's exciting for us to get more of that firsthand history as well as the history that you've researched for this.
Terry: When we first started this, there was no online.
Emily: Sure.
Terry: I didn't start having my Live the Dream meetings online until the pandemic hit.
Jase: Wow.
Emily: Oh, wow. My goodness. In terms of all of the different organizations that you talk about in the book, how many of those are still around today? Because I know many of them are from the past, and you speak about the 50 years of polyamory. Are there many that are still around today that are in the book?
Terry: Well, we had several of them actually represented at our 35th anniversary of Live the Dream this last Saturday, week ago from Saturday, when we had Oberon Zell who was the founder of Church of All Worlds, we had Pat Lafarlette who was a co-founder of Family Synergy. We had, well, myself, who co-founded Live the Dream. Then we had somebody with us who was actually part of the More University back in the day was, actually, online with us on Zoom.
Though that's still going on, every one of those is-- Well, no, Family Synergy is going on, but through Live the Dream. Live the Dream was inspired by Family Synergy, and I have carried on its functions.
Dedeker: Of the organizations that you cover in the book-- I guess I'm also curious about how many of these groups are actually participating in some of that more like, I guess, what we would call today commune style living, group living, versus just being educational organizations. What is the makeup there?
Terry: Well, Morehouse is still doing group living, isn't it, Glen?
Glen: Yes. Morehouse or More university, which started all the way in 1969, at one time grew to 27 group houses scattered around the United States, and they have taught many, many courses in communication and human sexuality. They've inspired a bunch of authors. The people that wrote the 60-Minute Orgas, I am blanking on their names, I apologize, lived at a Morehouse for several months and did their research there with those people.
The group living situation that was very powerful and very cutting-edge in the 1960s and '70s, while there are still people who are doing that, they are very little of the landscape these days.
Terry: Something interesting, a lot of the older people who are looking at their retirement options are starting intentional communities, and those seem to be working out. Some of those are either secretly or openly poly.
Emily: Right. Yes.
Jase: That makes sense. Yes.
Terry: The Zag Movement actually was part of that, and then they have the poly day caps here in a lot of different things. They have people that have involved themselves in intentional communities.
Emily: Yes. Actually, I want to dive into the group living communes intentional communities. Through the book, there's definitely, as you track, the history of all these different communities and these different organizations. There's this throughline of a lot of influence by the writings of people like Heinlein and other authors who were also responsible for inspiring a lot of the general utopian movements of the '60s and inspiration to go back to the land and go back to co-living and things like that.
I find that really interesting, especially with an author like Heinlein. I read Stranger in a Strange Land for the first time maybe five years ago or so. Jase, I think you said you read it in high school also, and it was pretty influential on you. Very influential writing, and then also at the same time reading Heinlein now so many decades later, there's definitely parts of it that feels a little outdated or a little bit well-worn.
I guess I'm interested in your impressions. Do you think that as a culture, people are moving past the idea of, "Oh, we can create this like utopic polyamorous community," or is that vision still present today, but it's just in a different form with younger generations?
Terry: I think the vision is still present today and the Pagan community, or the Neo-Pagan community, which its first legally recognized church was Church of all Worlds. Oberon Zell has written the foreword to our book, and he is so busy going to different Pagan conventions that he practically doesn't have time to breathe and has now needed to move to where they are because a lot of them are back east.
He's moving there as we speak. They would fly him out there and so forth because they really want to hear from him. The whole thing with Church of All Worlds is based on Stranger in a Strange Land. It's expanded to include various ideas like the Greek goddess and goddesses and the Gaia concept, and so forth. It's based on, as far as polyamory is concerned, it comes right out of Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and his other books.
These are people who are doing it today and he runs into people that are in group living situations and such sort of thing all the time. Now, I don't know what age these people are. It's possible that the younger community is doing things differently. I've heard of a lot of different ways that the younger people are living, but certainly, if you're looking at people that are over 40, yep, it's still there. We're still doing it. It's still happening. There are younger people who come to Live the Dream meetings to ask how we're doing it.
Emily: Well, that's actually a good follow-up question. Yes, I think my own observations have been, especially from working with clients is I don't run into as many younger people who say I want to live in a house with all of my partners at once, so I want this big group marriage situation.
I feel like I tend to hear this slightly shifted version of it, which is more based on, "Well, I don't want to live in a commune, I just want to have my own parcel of land with a bunch of tiny houses, where maybe all my partners and friends and stuff can be." It's almost-- I do feel like it's almost the same vision, but just slightly updated or slightly more millennialized.
Terry: Well, we used to talk about in Live The Dream and in the Loving More conferences and the World Poly conferences and all of those since the '90s. We were frequently talking about having a courtyard situation where there was a place for everybody to meet and have dinner or have celebrations and so forth but everybody had their own little apartment. That's very similar to what you're talking about. I heard that talked about right from the beginning.
Jase: It's funny actually because we had this interview set up and we've been looking at your book in preparation and just this last weekend, I was visiting a friend of mine in Los Angeles, and apparently he and his partner and some of her friends had been talking about this like, "What if we got some land out somewhere?" It's very much up there because, again, it comes up every now and then.
Dedeker: I think it's just now you have to call it an intentional community instead of like co-living or you know, anything like that.
Terry: Well, the person who is really the lady in charge of intentional community, Lois Arkin, who's still giving workshops on a regular basis on the subject, is much older than we are. She's still going strong, and she's got a whole apartment building going, and I remember when that was just a light in her eye, and she conducted us around the neighborhood of her dreams for the future of this. It materialized. It's there now.
Emily: Yes, I've made a couple of visits. When I was living in Los Angeles, I made a couple of visits to the Los Angeles Eco-Village because it was actually--
Terry: That's it. Yes, that's Lois Arkin.
Emily: Oh, really?
Terry: I was there when it was a light in her eye.
Dedeker: Yes, I've definitely met her a couple of times. She's fantastic. I've done a couple of tours there, and it seems really interesting. It's very compelling, but then I think about adding polyamory on top of it because I feel like, as you have alluded to in the book, there's been a lot of intentional communities over the years that have not worked out, that have imploded in some way or another.
That's just an intentional community that's not necessarily based on polyamory and those values. I'm curious of, from your years of watching, I'm sure a lot of groups do well, and also a lot of groups not do well. What are the things that the two of you have noticed as through lines in the groups that do well with creating intentional community within a polyamorous framework?
Terry: Well, there's the farm which happens to be something that isn't in the book, and maybe we should have talked about it, but my husband--
Dedeker: Oh so this is like the secret bonus content for the book.
Terry: Yes. My husband has a cousin who was actually major person involved in this thing, and there was polyamory throughout, and they lasted a pretty long time. In fact, kids grew up in that. We were visiting with his daughter, who's now an adult with children of her own.
Glen: It might be in thinking about the resurging interest in communes and trying to put polyamory in it, we might be in the middle of our next social cycle. Apparently, sociologists have noticed that about every 60 years, the United States goes through set of either a spiritual enlightenment, emotional enlightenment, expanded options, and then they calm down and go back mostly to the way they did things before. Then the next new phase starts and that's been tracked since colonial times.
In 1967, when the Supreme Court, under pressure from a lot of wonderful civil rights movements, allowed marriage, any man and any woman of any race could get married, that may have started that 60-year cycle, along with the Human Potential Movement going on at the same time, and the Beat Generation Movement that had turned into the energetic hippie movement, they all infused a whole generation, two generations of people with the ideas that I can choose to do something with my life that's important.
I can choose to make anything possible and bring it into my life. Some of the things they looked at were multiple relationships, multiply committed relationships, communal living, and some of them stayed with political ambitions and trying to make society better. Some of them went for improve the ecology, find the right type of herbal tea to sell to the world. We've been in maybe kind of a quiet phase since the year 2000 in terms of intentional communities and stuff.
That was okay because so many gains had taken place with our personal freedoms. A person from 1970 had many fewer options that society would allow them to do in their personal lives. If you wanted to have four lovers and hang out with them all the time, you had a lot more shielding if you built an intentional community and nobody knew what went on inside the walls, and therefore you were never harassed, but society is a lot more forgiving of difference these days. That's no longer as much of a push. Maybe there is something new that's looking interesting to the new generation of polyamorous.
Terry: Well, I know economics is tending to drive some of it. It costs so much more to live these days. If you have to pay for four or five kitchens instead of one, it's going to cost more. You can really cut down your expenses and you'd be amazed of the-- We do an exercise over the years we've done it where everybody will write down how much they could afford to put down in a house and how much they could afford per month and so forth. We come up with these amazing things like being able to get a wonderful 3,200 square foot house which we are now living in and resulted from one of those exercises and we actually had people do it, move in with us and make the group house work.
Glen: When writing the Live the Dream chapter of our book, we talk about that particular exercise and how people responded to it. Some people went on and actually made it happen.
Emily: I think given the fact that so many people in just genderqueer in my generation are choosing not to really get married or have children and therefore the more traditional nuclear family is going away, I think, in a lot of people that we know in terms of our generation. This idea of creating more intentional communities around chosen family or around polyamorous partners makes a lot of sense to me because you're around people that can continue to help and care for each other as they age.
I think that's something that perhaps we'll continue to see more and more of. That's fascinating that you say every 60 years it comes around because here we are kind of moving into that next phase, for sure.
Dedeker: Yes, I feel like I see a lot of millennials. I do think that as our generation ages and does get closer to having to think about retirement age because, statistically, millennials are not saving enough for retirement. I think there's this assumption that social security is probably going to dry up by the time we're there, combined with the stuff that Emily was saying about fewer people getting married and fewer people having kids, and so it's like as those more traditional safety nets around care as you get older, I think, have disappeared more for our generation.
I do think, again, regardless of polyamory or not, I think a lot of our peers are going to be in a position of having to think about that of like even if it's something as informal as, or maybe this isn't a full-on Eco-Village or intentional community, but I am going to get a house with a couple of roommates as we age together. I think that we're going to see a lot more of, I think, even that informal intentional community building happening. I think also polyamorous folk are going to get wrapped up in that as well.
Jase: In the second half of this episode, we're going to continue on asking a few more questions, as well as some questions that are our Patreon supporters submitted online ahead of time for us to ask. We're excited to get to that, but we're going to take a quick break first to talk about some ways that you can support this show if this is content that you value and you appreciate, helping us put this information out there for everyone for free, taking a moment to listen to our advertisers, and if any of them are interesting to you, go check them out. That does directly help our show, and we really appreciate it.
Emily: We're back. We are going to get to some of our listener questions but first, so Glen, as we were in the lead-up to recording this episode, you just teased something in one of our conversations about the initial historical usage of the terms primary, secondary, and tertiary. I'm really fascinated in this because, again, these are terms that have become very controversial in the last decade or so, so what can you tell us about where this came from?
Glen: Absolutely. I've been interested in watching as society changes and as people's attitudes change and, in some ways, become more inclusive also, hot buttons start appearing in places that we've never seen them before. Yes, so to take you in the way back machine to the late 1960s, there were several books that came out that talked about the kind of group relationships that were built upon two people in a marriage marrying two other people in a marriage, making a four-person marriage.
A lot of people wondered if those fantasy relationships could happen. That was one of the premises on which Family Synergy was born.
Terry: Robert Rimer, primarily.
Glen: Thank you. Robert Rimer, my other brain, and so Family Synergy was started by a whole bunch of couples who wondered if they could find another couple to marry and form marriages basically full-on everything like have children with them, grow old together, buy houses, be a real marriage.
The stresses of that are perhaps another podcast but what they started grappling with was, "We have no terminology for any of this. Who is my husband, who is my boyfriend? Is that really my boyfriend, or is it my lover, or is he actually--" and I'm talking quickly, I apologize. "Is this person actually my polyamor? Is this-- all terms that we were working on. "Is this person actually my other husband? Yes, but I haven't married him yet."
People bumped into the idea that how do you describe the person that's closest in your life and should that have a name? How do you describe the person that's a little further from the center of your life and that should have a name? They actually went to psychology and used what were very neutral terms at the time and didn't have anything to do with the idea of hierarchy.
The term primary, in psychology, your primary relationship is that person that's closest to you in all the phases of your life, whoever that person is and however they're closest to you. In psychology, the idea was that there's only one primary relationship and everything else is a secondary relationship.
They adopted those terms and what they really were trying to say is, "I am in a primary relationship with this person, and primary means I spend a lot of my time with them. I love them. I may have commingled my income with them, buy a house with them, raise children with them, they are so central to my life in so many ways they get the name primary."
Someone else I might love a lot but I'm less likely to buy a car with them or commingle our resources or have children with them, and while I may love them just as much as my primary on an emotional level, they're not as close to the center of my life, they're actually a secondary relationship. It was important to have those terms for people to figure out what they were doing while they were inventing all this stuff. That's just basically stayed in the lexicon because they're so useful.
Terry: Some people speak of non-hierarchical structure, and I believe that's actually unrealistic. How can a new person who you are dating or even one who just moved in with you be as important to you as the person who you have lived with for many years, perhaps, have vowed for the rest of your life with, have children with. I found that couples who use the word non-hierarchical sound like they're being very inclusive, and people are very positive about that, but when somebody who is single uses this word, and this came up for me just very recently because as a fourth generation matchmaker who's frequently asked to comment on people's okay cupid profiles and so forth, I noticed that somebody I cared about she had put in, "I want a non-hierarchical couple to date," and I said you should get that off your profile.
I never promised to be non-directive. I said, "Get it off your profile, and you will get a lot better response because couples who see something like that find that to be pushy, especially if it's the man who wants to connect with you and then his wife sees that, it's going to be not real good, and that might be a reason why somebody would stop dating you because suddenly they were dating you and then their wife saw the profile."
I knew poly coaching and hypnotherapy, and so forth, so I have stuff like this coming up for me when people are running into these issues. I think that the hierarchical and primary, and secondary are useful terms. If you choose to marry another couple or another person, triads are more common than these quads that they were trying to produce in Family Synergy. In fact, triads became really common, and people even had children in triads.
When our speaker Pat Lafarlette was talking about that a couple of Saturdays ago, the wife had a child by each of the husbands, and you can't get equal than that. That wasn't hierarchical at the point where they were doing that. I think you need to be able, especially when there's new relationship energy going on, say I know who my husband is, I know who my boyfriend is and not risk the primary relationship due to the secondary one.
Emily: Well, I think what's interesting to me tracking the ways that this particular model and this particular usage of terms has shifted. I feel what I'm hearing from you, Glen, coming out of this initial structure of, ooh, let's have couples marry each other. Where it feels like, based on your description, is that these terms came out of how are we describing the circle of legal and financial entanglements with somebody in particular, especially when we're really focused on like creating a marriage unit whether that's a marriage unit between two people, between four people or things like that.
That's interesting. I feel where I've seen it shift and where I think people get scared by the idea of hierarchy is what I see in our generation is seeing the primary and secondary terms, not just being limited to legal financial entanglements, but being people interpret it as corresponding to like behavior as in how I'm going to treat you as a secondary, or how I'm going to--
When you're coming in as a secondary you already have some arbitrary limits and automatically my primary is the person who also decides those limits. It's interesting that I think that I've seen people because of the way the behavior has changed, it's like people push back against that and that's why non-hierarchy becomes so popular.
Then also I think that we're coming around on that cycle as well where I think we've talked about this on the show before where we also see people who are in very hierarchical relationships who also are very kind and very ethical and create really wonderful relationships. Then we've also seen people in profess non-hierarchical relationships who are really shitty to their partners.
I do think we are starting to come to an understanding that just professing non-hierarchy or hierarchy doesn't automatically equate to how ethical or how good of a partner you are within a polyamorous context. That's really fascinating to see that evolution over time.
Dedeker: First the language.
Emily: Always freaking language.
Terry: Sometimes things are not what they appear to be. I know of a group situation that looks like a man with a harem, but the fact is that his wife has the harem and only is interested in having a male partner, him and the others she wants is female. He is actually caring and loving to every one of these people that are involved in his household and takes care of every one of them emotionally and all the rest of it.
Their primary relationship if you're losing primaries with his wife. It's interesting. There are so many ways of looking at things and if one reads Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, a lot of it is covered pretty well as to how a group marriage works and how capital can be passed on and children raised and all of that. I think it still applies today. I don't think it's outdated. I haven't managed to put something like that together. I'd still love to, and I know a lot of people who are looking at that as a future wish.
Emily: Sure. I want to move on to some of our listener questions. We have a big community that is online, that is our Patreon community and we'd ask them if they had any questions for the two of you. This first one I'm not actually familiar with but perhaps you will be. You are, Dedeker? Jase and I were like, I don't know what this is referring to, but we had a listener ask, what's your take with the whole drama around who coined the term polyamory in the first place. Please, Glen.
Glen: I'm happy to take that one because after you sent the question over to me to look at, oh-oh, I said this is another situation where I was there. I was in the room when it happened.
Dedeker: Interesting.
Emily: Oh, wow.
Dedeker: Controversial.
Glen: Sociologist Elisabeth Sheff has pulled together two competing origin stories for the term polyamory and the one in which went to publication. In 1990 Morning Glory Zell, as she tells it with the strong assistance of her two spouses wrote a really lovely article called A Bouquet of Lovers. That actually appears in our book as well. She was trying to come up with a less clunky term than ethical non-monogamy, multiple love relationships.
We had a lot of clunky terms at the time.
They brainstormed, and to make this a much shorter answer, they came up with the term polyamory and polyamorous. That appeared in print in 1990. Later on, Elisabeth Sheff finds that, that there was a story where sometime in a timeframe unknown one of the people that live was living at the Kerista Commune, speaking of communes. Kerista, I'll really quickly mention was a very successful commune for 20 years in San Francisco.
They had a charismatic leader whose nickname was Jud.
He helped fashion a long-standing group. The group had a family business. They were into computers, building them, selling them, referring them. They all lived together in a group household. They considered themselves, here's the term that they are credited with creating, polyfidelitous. They were many people who were committed to each other only. Everyone else was an outsider. If you were an insider they were part of your family and your lovers and everyone else was an outsider.
That's the concept of polyfidelity. Apparently at some point during a house meeting one of the participants, one of the guys that lived there also was unhappy with all the clunky terms that were in use at that time. He apparently threw out a term, don't know how much research he did, but he just dropped this term in a group meeting, we have polyfidelity, why not polyamory?
It is reported that he said that. Now during the mid-80s I was a guest several times at the Kerista compound and had a number of conversations with Jud. He usually does most of the talking at that time. I had what I'll call several conversations with Jud. In my time hanging around there, I never heard them use that term. We do have a documented published time of 1990 for the term and a reported timeframe that we don't quite know for it coming.
Here's what's really important is that it's okay if more people invent the same thing at the same time in some other places as the world, this happens in human society all the time in mathematics, in chemistry, in physics somewhere in the world, somebody comes up with an idea or invents something, and son of a gun, someone else is working on the same thing on another continent, and both ideas hit the world at the same time. Who-- Maybe both of them invented it.
It's quite possible that the term has been invented in multiple places spontaneously. What we know is that--
Terry: I think the finest presentation of it would've been A Bouquet of Lovers by Morning Glory Zell. I think she should have the primary credit for that one.
Glen: That is our--
Terry: She didn't throw it out in a group meeting. She really did something with it.
Glen: That is our first known published use of the term.
Dedeker: Got you. I love the claim from you, Glen, of like, oh, I was in the room where it happened, because now I feel now we got to go out and search for someone who is on the Usenet where it happened because that was the other story. That it was on these also these like Usenet bulletin boards in the '80s as well. I know there's a name attached to the person who allegedly is credited there, but I forget her name.
Glen: Oh, so now we have three--
Dedeker: Now we got to write down.
Glen: Now we have three origin stories.
Emily: We have three.
Glen: I'd forgotten about the Usenet one.
Emily: Goodness.
Dedeker: This next one is actually a little bit of a hybrid of some questions that a number of listeners ask. In this book there's a lot of primary focus on organizations, formal organizations, that are assumed predominantly white, often assumed hetero communities. There's also a rich history of black communities and organizations such as the Black Panthers, queer communities and organizations who also influence the shape of American polyamory.
I'm just interested what do you know about that particular influence on this particular little slice of history in America?
Terry: First of all, what I was talking about earlier with the gentleman who looks like he has a hair and they're Black. Some of their participants are white, but I didn't mention their skin color. We don't mention the skin color of a lot of the people in our book. You may assume that they're Black, white or whatever they are, but that wasn't our primary focus.
My second husband, Paul Gibbons, and I used to have a bi table at the Loving Moore conference over the years so the bi people would've a chance to see each other and talk about their unique issues and so forth. One year, we were told we were not going to get that table. I was upset so I asked the organizer why? She said everybody in our community at this point appears to be either bi or bi-curious or they're embarrassed to admit they're completely straight. I think we solved this problem.
I think she was right.
Glen: Indeed, I want to read that book that somebody is going to write about these communities. Certainly, the alternate sexuality communities of the BDSM communities, the other people that are swingers, and we're going to probably ask a question about those separately, everyone, over this period of time has had an effect on society, and how we adopt our behaviors, and how we interact with people.
It's all been a big mix. When it comes to the organizations that we write about, I have noticed and once again, I have to reference Elisabeth Sheff, sociologists have been tracking by means of questionnaires, who is interested, who's involved in alternative sexualities, polyamory, and things like that.
For a long time, the only people they could find to answer to these questionnaires were tried out predominantly either college educated, or fairly highly educated, middle class or better, and white, people that had a lot of resources and the ability to-- They weren't fighting for the right to have equal housing with some other social groups. They weren't fighting for these things.
It made sense that these people might be overrepresented or easier to find. By the '90s, we started noticing all the ethnic groups and all levels of the socio-economic spectrum, being more and more represented in the polygroups. It's probably pretty close to the normal society mix of groups in polyamory right now.
Dedeker: It does seem that I think as specifically, research recruitment has gotten better and more skillful and more appealing to people who don't fall in that particular demographic that we are seeing a much more representative spread when we do research these populations.
Jase: Yes, absolutely. That's something we talked about a few months ago. We did a two-part episode where we looked at a bunch of different research studies that have been done within the last maybe 5 to 10 years or so
Emily: To 10 years.
Jase: -more recent. As far as the income thing goes, several of them actually showed that the polyamorous people or non-monogamous people in their studies, skewed on the lower end of the income spectrum, rather than that idea we had before, it's only wealthier upper-middle-class people. It's definitely something that-
Terry: That's interesting.
Jase: -it's more of a recruitment issue, I think than actual facts. That is cool that we're starting to see more of that information. I'm going to ask our next question here, which you alluded to a little bit there, Glen, which is through this 50 years of history of polyamory in America, how have the swinging and polyamory communities interacted? I guess, what have you seen as far as that? Is there competition or identifying each other as what they're not or more seeing themselves as allies?
We've even seen this change over the course of doing this podcast. I'm curious for you in a bigger timeframe, what you've seen.
Terry: Swinger certainly practice non-monogamy and make agreements with their primary relationships so that they can have sex with other people. However, one important difference is that swingers agree not to build lasting emotional relationships with other sex partners. In that way, the two are very different. We have a meeting for Live the Dream, most every year that's called Swinging—Black and White or Shades of Gray.
I always allude to in lifestyles convention, so I wouldn't do it for many, many years. I even won lifestyles award one year in 1988, for contributing to the knowledge of human sexuality because of my poly-oriented recordings, such as Intimacy Without Jealousy, and so forth. Anyway, they've got to thing there called the Hospitality Group. The Hospitality Group are people who take care of all sorts of things for this convention, and many of them have been involved in that group for 10, 20 years at this time.
If they swing together because they happen to go to a swing party together, they might have even been strangers at one time have been swinging together but now they call each other at 3:00 in the morning if they're in trouble or they've gotten to each others children's bat mitzvahs in each other's weddings. They are really close, so they're still having sex at swing parties, maybe. Does that make them swingers? What are they now? I think now they're poly.
Sometimes swingers wake up in the morning and go, oh, I must be poly.
Dedeker: I think the reverse of that happen a lot also sometimes of some people realizing, oh, actually, I think it's more of the swinging side for me.
Terry: That does happen. Even in Family Synergy, many, many years ago, we got a whole lot of people that were swingers who evolved to be polyamorous, and they considered it an evolution because they added the emotional commitment to the sexuality.
Glen: Terry said it all very well. The setup for your question, Jase, which indicated that possibly in the beginning of this process, the two groups thought of themselves as very distinct, and possibly antagonistic toward each other-
Terry: It's true.
Glen: -is quite true. Many of the people that I know and knew, who call themselves lifestylers which is their internal term for swinging, they have very strong, usually, they're noncouples. It is not impossible to be a single person and in the swinging communities, but usually, it's done by couples as a hobby. They have an enormous number of agreements between each other about what's okay, what's not okay.
They're usually pretty darn good about keeping those agreements. Those agreements are very strict. We only got two parties together. You got 15 minutes with the person or whatever, I'm making some of this up. All the agreements, though, if one of them strays outside the limits of those agreements, there's trouble between them and then they have to bring it back to rights.
I think that early swingers thought that people who practice polyamory were too chaotic. We simply, what? Aren't there any rules? Why don't you-- We make a lot of agreements, but they're looser.
Terry: Absolutely.
Glen: They're looser agreements or there are agreements where we want everyone to win. We want everyone to have the best possible outcome in their lives. Compersion is not a term that you'll hear people in the swinging community use. Compersion had to be invented, or the term had to be invented, to describe what poly people were feeling about the fact that their lover spent all night with someone else that they were very emotionally entangled with, and then came back to me.
I'm so happy for them. Welcome back. Either tell me what happened or don't tell me what happened, but let's go to bed and talk about it. You may want to leave that out of the podcast.
Terry: I wouldn't leave it out. I think that's really important.
Glen: I have actually given that advice and that counsel to people who were just opening up their marriages. In one case, they were a lovely pair of people. Both of them were psychologists. Both of them were very intellectual and in their heads, and each of them would go on a date, come back, and then they would dissect the date, and explain in excruciating detail to each other what their feelings were and how events transpired and things like that.
I was blinking my eyes when they were saying that this and says, what if you just tried coming back home and saying nothing to each other, but falling into bed and bringing that lovely energy back with you to share? Oh, do people do that? Yes.
Terry: I like to do both. I think both are fun, though I don't think you did dissect a date.
Dedeker: That's really interesting. I think my impressions and then I don't know Emily and Jase if you share these impressions, I think we have seen the polyamorous communities and the swinging communities maybe become a little less antagonistic toward each other a little bit less like, oh, those weirdos over there approach. I think we're seeing more people also in the middle, overlap in the Venn diagram there.
I think we're seeing more people who want to explore some form of non-monogamy, but they're not quite sure where they land. They're like, oh, I don't know. I'm open to the occasional threesome, but I also have someone that I'm more emotionally entangled with. I don't know. I do think that that's contributing to those communities, maybe being more allies to each other.
I do think we still though, occasionally, sometimes. Sometimes I'll talk to a swinger or someone who heavily identifies as a swinger. I think there is still a little bit of this lingering like, ooh, polyamory is like radioactive waste. Don't get it on you. Keep it over there if you want to keep your relationship intact. I don't know. Emily, Jase, would you share that impression based on the people we've talked to?
Emily: That's an interesting thing that you just said regarding-- People still feeling as though polyamory is a little bit other-- It's something it maybe to look at, but not necessarily to do. I do think that I've found that the lines have become more blurred over the time that we've been doing this podcast over the last eight years.
We just actually had a two-part episode on jealousy, and it made me think of the question that we asked, does one feel more jealousy or more compersion if you are in a sexual situation with someone versus an emotional situation. Perhaps those who want to be swingers do better if they only are jealous in an emotional way or find-- That's the scarier part of coupling with somebody else is only if emotions get entangled there. That's maybe a gateway way to get into non-monogamy. Yes, Glen.
Glen: I love the term gateway, the way you used it, but one thing to remember--
Emily: It's a gateway drug.
Glen: One thing to remember is that people are not static creatures, who I am today is a combination of all the things I learned and experienced in the past, and who I am tomorrow is going to be a little bit different based on what I did today. People can indeed have periods in their life when they are only able to bond with one person. They'll have periods in their life when they don't want to make a connection with anybody, but a lot of pre-sex is fine.
Everyone's on a journey and emotional, and intellectual, and life journey. These journeys, if a person checks in with themselves and say, where am I today? It's really helpful to anyone who's associated with them, and so please tell me who you are today, and I will enjoy and honor that. That sounded a little, I know new agey, but it works.
Emily: I love that.
Glen: It works.
Terry: Oh, good. I know we're getting the end of this, and there was a question about why is it important to look back on polyamorous history? Why is this book important? I think I'd like to get to that question so we don't leave it out.
Emily: Sure. Please let us know why you find it important.
Terry: I believe it's important because Glen and I actually knew the people who made a major difference in the poly movement and could interview them for our book, for a firsthand account of what they did. Sometimes we were in the room when they were doing it, and asked them why they were doing it. I knew Deborah Anapol who has passed on now. I knew Hy Levy, the co-founder of Family Synergy, who gave us a very in-depth interview on his part in that organization and how it was founded before his passing and we got it on tape.
Pat Lafollette is still with us and a frequent Live the Dream speaker, the other co-founder, and he gave us plenty of material for our chapter on Family Synergy. A lot of these folks will not be with us forever.
Glen: I will point out that polyamory is a part of many people's lives, and it's only because of what went on before that allows it to be so comfortable for a lot of people. In this world where we sometimes are worried about certain of our rights being taken away, and being lost, and being active to guard our rights is very important. I want to say that I'm very confident and very optimistic that the path our society is on, is a very strong one for people maintaining and keeping our personal rights.
In 2015, the Supreme Court said that two people of the same gender can marry. Now, there may be some arguments about that back and forth in legal evidence, but that happened because a majority of the states had already been letting same-sex couples register themselves as a domestic partnership. The state of Hawaii turned that into, you can be married. That started sweeping the other states, and then the Supreme Court stepped in and said people of the same gender can be married to each other.
Just in the last year or so, there are a couple of towns in Massachusetts that changed their requirements for domestic partnership. To say it doesn't have to just be two people. It can be as many people as declare themselves a domestic partnership. That is the ground swell, the ground root movement in society that makes these major changes and keeps them with us forever. Where I see polyamory possibly going is now will a lot of people more than already are interested in doing it?
Maybe not. It may always be a very small part of society, but if it's a choice for everybody in all its permutations. We don't know how many people are going to actually choose to do this at least during some portion of their lives, but it's there for us to do.
Terry: I would just like to mention that it's always important to keep in mind that these freedoms that we're getting are precious, and if we have to fight for them, and we may because we have the thing with Roe versus Wade reversed and the Clarence Thomas, the Justice who says he's going to go after other rights. I think we need to always be aware that if you need to fight for your rights, and I have done that in court personally then you just have to be willing to do it.
The freedoms and the changes are wonderful and upbeat, and I believe in give me liberty or give me death. You got to be willing to keep fighting for.
Emily: Lovely. Thank you both so much for joining us today. We really appreciate your time and just where can everybody find more about you? When is the book coming out? Where can they find the book?
Glen: Our publisher, Rowman & Littlefield shipped us our first case of books. We have an official launch date of November 11th of this year on November 11th, 2022 which is also Veterans Day and a national holiday. Now it'll also be a polyamory holiday. Fifty Years of Polyamory is available with every book seller that you can think of. If you go online and just type our book in you can find it being offered everywhere.
The publisher themselves, Rowman & Littlefield, if you actually go on their website at this time they are offering a 30% discount if you buy it right through their website. I've got a code, but I don't know how to get it to you. Anybody that contacts us, myself, I'm glenolson.org, that's my author website or Terry will give you hers and we can pass along all that information.
Terry: I'm Terry Lee Brussel Rogers, my website. There's livethedream.org, for people who are want to check out our poly organization. There's acesuccess.com, for people interested in hypnotherapy and whether they are hypnotherapists or want to learn how to help with the poly community, or they just want hypnotherapy for themselves. Then there is reachforthestars.today, for the guided meditations themselves presented in a very unusual way.
You should go check it out. If you want to reach me directly, you can get me at 800-GOAL-NOW (462-5669) for the hypnotherapy or 800-LIFE-MATE (543-3628) for poly coaching and that kind of thing.
Dedeker: Wonderful. Glen and Terry, it was so great to have you on today and to talk about all of these things. For anyone who's listening, we have a question for you. This is the question that we're going to be posting on our Instagram stories this week. We've been spending a lot of time talking about the history. We want to know, what do you predict for the future of polyamory? We'll be really excited to hear your responses to our Instagram stories question.