Polyamory? Poly-Intimacy?

(From the October South Bay Poly newsletter)

Continuing from last month’s thought.  Looking back on my life, I see that I’m a lot more comfortable with physical affection—and sex—now, compared with how I used to be.  When I was young I felt threatened and intimidated, being rather shy and not terribly confident about myself, my body, and my personality.  I hope everyone eventually grows into feeling as comfortable as I do now—though I think some people don’t, for whatever reason. 

Maybe I just have a better idea now of what I like and what I don’t.  It isn’t so much that I disapprove of casual sex, or sex with strangers; it just isn’t something I enjoy very much.  It probably goes back to my original discomfort when I was younger—feeling uncomfortable with people I didn’t know very well, that I couldn’t relax with yet or trust.  I know there are people who don’t have this issue.

Also, I suspect that it isn’t so much the sex that I’m after, as it is the trust, safety, and intimacy.  I love to cuddle and become sexual with someone; I just need to feel safe with them first.  The question of multiple lovers is a separate issue.

And I think I need some expectation of a long-term interaction, not something that will be over immediately.  That may be a trust issue too.  Still thinking.

Polys: What We Are and Aren’t (or at least how I am)

I wrote the following for this month's South Bay Poly newsletter.

The draft was longer, but I trimmed it down—probably too much.

I feel I keep talking around something as I try to put my finger on exactly what I mean.

I think what I'm trying to say is that, for me, sexuality is about connecting to someone as a person.  For me, being sexual with someone is about wanting to know them better.  Generally that involves wanting to see them again and probably becoming friends with them long-term.  It's not just about having sex—even if the sex is "open and honest."

Here's what I actually wrote.

# # #

What do we mean when we say we’re different from cheaters?  Is that even the right question?

We polys say we’re different from cheaters because we’re open and honest about what we’re doing.  We place great value on this “open and honest” business.  We don’t believe in sneaking around behind people’s backs.  We don’t think it’s “fair.”  This shows we value relationships, value other people.

But for me “open and honest” isn’t enough.  I value sexuality that isn’t “cheap.”  I need to respect myself and my own relationship to sexuality.  I think of sex as something positive, not negative.  But even though sex can be enjoyable in itself, I prefer something more. I prefer something more than just a distraction or fling.  I prefer sex to have some larger value.

If I woke up with a total stranger in my bed, I think I’d feel disappointed that our intimate encounter had turned out to be so meaningless.  For me, polyamory is about more than being open and honest.  It’s about nurturing meaning and value.

Polyamory: The Beauty, The Pain, The Commitment, The Challenge

I was still rather depressed when I woke up Saturday morning.  How, I wondered, will I ever market my poly-pagan novel when my friend who wrote the gay novel says there’s no market for that?

But I get up and head for the local park for another friend’s Ceremony of Commitment.  She and her lover are committing to a life together.  Not a simple wedding, since they are each married to someone else.  But the spouses are there and fully participating in the ceremony, conducted by a man who looks the part of a Rabbi (I don’t know whether he actually is or not).  Family members are also present.  I hear friends speaking of their own poly experiences, or of their newness to the poly concept.  It is moving to hear people speak of opening their lives to include their spouses’ lovers.

Then I’m off to a Pagan Beltane ritual, which begins with a May Pole dance.  Then comes the actual ritual, with much talk of flirtation and merriment and rutting, the season of the Lady and the Goat.  And in fact the weather has turned warm and inviting.

Nevertheless, I’m still absorbing the news of the Cleveland women imprisoned for ten years, and other people’s stories of rape and abuse.  I’m still thinking about the Pantheacon workshop on Sex Positivity.  How do we promote sexual health and sanity in a world where sexuality is so often and easily turned to abuse?

And that evening I watch the film Pariah with my girlfriend.  It’s the story of an African-American woman coming to terms with her attraction to other women, and society’s reaction to it.

Well—we must find our way forward, together.

"On The Road" – Film – Questions Before

So tonight, hopefully, is the night.  I finally see the film version of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road.  Afterwards, I suspect, I’ll feel extremely silly about all the postings I’ve done in anticipation of seeing it.  For, after all, how many people care the slightest bit about it?  Though some folks have been waiting fifty-plus years for this.

For the record, here are some of the things I’ll be watching for in the film.  If you’re a Kerouac fan, you might care too.

Watching for:

How much of the film is based on the scroll version rather than the finished book?

An overall theme.  In the book, Sal and friends sense someone walking towards them.  At the end of the book, an old man with long white hair walks past Kerouac in a parking lot and says, “Go moan for man.”  Is anything like this included in the movie?

Is Dean Moriarty presented as a new American saint, an irresponsible sociopath, or…?

The relationship between Mary Lou and Camille.  Kristen Stewart has suggested that her character (Mary Lou) is the pivot of the film.  But the novel exists in a tension between the two.

What is the role of Carlo Marx?   One film reviewer has said:  “Lose Carlo!”  Is Carlo a true prophet?  A true poet?  A bore?  Pretentious?

How do they handle that brothel scene in Mexico…?

Speaking of Mexico—How does the film portray minorities in general?  More specifically, Mexicans and Blacks?

What about sexism?  Do men utterly run the show?

How are the 1940s presented?  How well does the film represent the 1940s, and does it matter?  Though the book is set in 1947-51, most people associate it with the mid-to-late 1950s, when the book first appeared. 

How homo- or bi-sexual is the book?  How sexual is the relationship between Sal and Dean?

How does Old Bull Lee and family come across?  Funny??  Disturbing?  Simply weird?

Does the film include Sal’s vision, in San Francisco, of reincarnation and nonlinear time?

How does the film deal with Sal’s relationship to his mother?

How is America presented?

Does Dean care about anything besides sex and kicks?

How many people and events are cut out of the movie??

That’s it for now—we’ll see how I feel afterwards.

Review: "The Jane Street Girls" (2 of 2)

But—I lose my way in this section.  In the first part of the book, I could barely keep straight the film director, his household, and the expatriate Americans Phil hung around with in Italy.  In the last part, I’m completely lost.  Boyfriends, potential boyfriends, work associates—all these people weaving in and out of focus during parties and other social engagements…I can’t track them all.  Maybe I could, with another reading.  I’ve read this book twice now, and I’ve enjoyed it twice; but something bothers me about it; I can’t quite put my finger on it.

It seems I lose the forest for the trees.  I remember individual trees from the first reading.  I remember, for example, some of the more spectacular events from Phil’s magazine job.  I remember some of Phil’s more spectacular romantic episodes.  Last night, soaking in a hot tub and expecting to read five or ten pages before going to bed, I sailed right on through to the ending, though it was after midnight.  I remembered reading the book the first time—and being confused then; not at the actual ending, but at the events leading up to it, a series of romantic disappointments and blunders.

The book itself ends on a memorable note.  First, like Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room Is Empty, this story ends with a more or less first-hand account of the Stonewall Riots (“Insurrection?”)  in 1969—the birth of the modern American Gay Rights Movement.  Phil is there, walking through Greenwich Village with a friend—but high on LSD and both of them feeling that they must be hallucinating the police and the riot vans.  The next morning, they realize it was no hallucination.  And out they go, to participate in history.

But in a coda to the main narrative, the book jumps forward over a decade to the disappearance of a man once interested in Phil, the death of another friend due to AIDS—and the general bitter melancholy of those times.  What else has happened to Phil over this decade?  We don’t know.

I understand that Men Who Loved Me is actually the middle book of a trilogy.  By chance it is the book available at my local library.  It would be interesting to read the entire set and see how it compares to Edmund White’s autobiographical novels.  Both Picano and White were members of the Violet Quill gay writing group of the early 1980s.  They’re both well-educated and cultured; they’re about the same age and both grew up in the conservative times when it wasn’t safe to be open about being gay; when you could be imprisoned or committed for it, in fact.

Whatever we think of their writing style or the characters they describe, we still owe them.  They had the courage and persistence to figure out how to write positively about being gay when there were precious few models for that sort of thing.  They forged the path out of necessity.

Review: "The Jane Street Girls" (1 of 2)

This is the large concluding section of Felice Picano’s “Memoir in the Form of a Novel,” Men Who Loved Me.  It describes the life of the narrator “Phil” in the New York of the 1960s, when gays were building their own community in Greenwich Village but weren’t necessarily aware of what they were doing.  In the first large section of the book (“The Most Golden Bulgari”), the narrator described his decision to go to Italy and “become homosexual,” his affair with a Yugoslavian film director in Rome, and his abrupt return to the United States.  A brief interlude links these two main sections of the book.

Returning now to New York, Phil manages to find, within just a few days, both a new job and a new boyfriend, both quite substantial.  The boyfriend lasts for something beyond eight months; the job makes Phil into a highly paid and respected magazine editor.

I continually wonder, reading this section, to what extent Picano is slumming, to what extent he has been pampered.  He’s gotten a good college education, he somehow (though he’s been working as a social worker) got himself off to Italy, he immediately lands a good job almost immediately upon returning to the States.  From whence comes this stunning luck?

At the same time, like the Beat writers, he seems to spend a surprising amount of time socializing and partying.  He takes a fair quantity of drugs (to be fair, I wouldn’t call it “excessive;” if he does it often, and gets considerably “buzzed,” he almost never suffers physically from it; and it those days hallucinogens like LSD were still legal).  And—is he gay?  As before, he begs the question with remarks like “since I seemed destined to become gay”…

In addition to his playwright boyfriend, he assembles a large number of gay Greenwich Village friends.  It’s difficult to tell exactly how “swishy” these acquaintances were; they were not, it appears, queens in anything but behavior.  They don’t seem to have gone in for cross-dressing; they simply went in, some of them, for rather hefty camp.  In these days “before Stonewall,” one definitely watched one’s step amongst the public at large; but these folks were definitely at ease with one another.  The Bohemian atmosphere of Greenwich Village is well-described; we’re treated to not one but two “lease-break parties” (parties featuring behavior guaranteed to get you thrown out of the apartment you desperately wanted to leave but couldn’t because of the lease provisions).