Are poly people annoying? Oakland's new relationship non-discrimination law. A spate of open-marriage discovery books. And more.

First off: The big poly/ ENM/ alt-family news of the month (see last week's Another city! Oakland passes nondiscrimination law) finally got some mainstream media coverage. From KQED in San Francisco: Bay Area Cities Push to Legally Validate Polyamorous Families (April 25). Note the "cities" plural.

And yes, life- and career-disrupting discrimination against us in housing and employment is a real and common problem. 

"John Owens poses for a photo with his partners Emily Savage (left)
and Alejandra Bravo Ducey at a celebration party at the East Bay
Community Space in Oakland on April 16, after a bill prohibiting
discrimination of nonmonogamous families passed in the
Oakland City Council." (BethLaBerge/KQED)

 

By Lesley McClurg

John Owens pulled his brown shoulder-length hair back into a bun and tossed brightly colored T-shirts and books into crates and boxes. The 37-year-old artist and writer is moving for the fifth time in less than a decade. ...

Six months after moving into the duplex tucked off the 580 freeway in Oakland, the dishwasher, garbage disposal and driveway gate all needed repairs. Owens told his landlords that one of his romantic partners would be visiting the house and could meet the repair person. This was the first time he’d shared details about his love life. After that, Owens said, the interactions between the landlords “felt much stranger,” and it grew more awkward as time passed.

“The landlords are pretty judgy about polyamory,” Owens said. “At one point, they tried to ask us to leave, threatening an owner-occupied eviction thing. Then, they backtracked and said we could stay, but with a 10% rent increase.”

He said his polyamorous lifestyle alarmed the landlord or master tenant in his last four living situations. 

...“That type of discrimination is pretty common,” Owens said. “It’s hard to even think about all the different times, different people that I’ve encountered in professional, medical, housing or institutional settings that have made it pretty clear that they’re not OK with the way I live my life.”

Research shows that two-thirds of people engaged in consensual nonmonogamy report feeling stigmatized, which inspires many people to hide that they are polyamorous because they fear negative perceptions.

“Stigma and discrimination can show up in a range of domains: housing, employment, health care and immigration,” said Brett Chamberlin, founder and executive director of the Organization for Polyamory and Ethical Non-monogamy [link], a nonprofit advocacy group. “Courts have revoked custody from parents who have multiple partners.”

This month, the Oakland City Council passed new legislation formally recognizing polyamorous families, the first of its kind on the West Coast. It protects “diverse family structures” from discrimination in housing and at businesses and introduces a civil financial penalty for any rights violations by city services or facilities.

...“There’s not a lot of really wonderful good news in the world,” Owens said. “And this is a really wonderful and unambiguously good thing that Oakland is doing.”

Berkeley lawmakers plan to vote on the same legislation on May 7.

A growing movement

Somerville and Cambridge in Massachusetts passed the first laws granting rights to nontraditional families.

“This is a really exciting moment for the nonmonogamy movement because it helps validate and protect families and relationships that for a long time have existed in the shadows or at the margins of societies,” Chamberlin said.

“The nonmonogamous community has something really important to offer this world,” he said. “The way that we pursue relationships is an expression of our values. We put connection above consumption, and we put community and cooperation above competition.”

...Owens said the traditional model didn’t work for him. He had a daughter in his early 20s when he was living in Durham, North Carolina.

“It was hard,” he said. “I can’t imagine trying to parent in a one or two-parent household ever again. There’s no way. For the long arc of human history, children have been raised by the village in large groups of people. My dream scenario is some big polyamorous collective.”

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●  Some people support polyamory in principle but find themselves annoyed by us in practice. Here's one of them. She's witty.  

The Yale Review (it originated in 1819) says it "aims to discover a new generation of writers and thinkers." It says "Brandy Jenson lives in New Orleans with her two dogs" and does an occasional advice column called "Ask a Fuck Up." The magazine published her meditation The Polycrisis: Why can’t we stop talking about nonmonogamy? (April 24).

Excerpts below. How many of her impressions sound plausible to you? Why?

"Polyamory sometimes seems like a practice made to generate
conversations, writes Brandy Jensen." (Getty Images)

TOO OFTEN THESE DAYS I find myself in the position of defending someone I think is annoying from someone I know is dangerous. Most recently this happened with polyamorous people, the existence and behaviors of whom many readers claim to be tired of talking about, only to gleefully comb through every new book or magazine profile. ... I’m guilty of participating in the endless chatter: these too-deep dives are very easy to make fun of. Plus I’m not straight and live in New Orleans, and you can only go on so many dates with people who say things like, “I separated from my nesting partner to go solo poly, although lately I’ve been thinking I’m actually more of a relationship anarchist,” before you build up sufficient resentment to want to get a few jokes in.

This isn’t the fault of the polyamory community as a whole. It’s easy to have your scene ruined by annoying rich people (for example, San Francisco) or to make something cool sound uncool by talking about it too much (for example, weed) or to be right and yet still be embarrassing about it (for example, atheism). The lighthearted mockery of terms like “compersion” is mostly a harmless good time, until it inevitably provides cover for reactionary sexual politics. Suddenly someone is writing an essay in The Atlantic about how polyamory is bourgeois, and before I can even think “That doesn’t seem right,” a bunch of revanchist weirdos eager to roll back the Sexual Revolution are chiming in on X to call polyamory both bourgeois and morally degenerate, and all the fun has been sucked out of my eye-rolling. And so I end up back in bed with the polyamorists, wishing they could figure out how to make having sex sound sexier.

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THE FIRST TIME I slept with a couple it felt like it happened by accident. I don’t mean that it was farcical, but simply that there wasn’t any planning beforehand. Had they told me in advance that they were interested in sleeping together, I probably would have laughed. As I remember it, we were in a big room full of people at a party, and then somehow we were in a bathroom doing drugs, and then somehow we were in a bed doing things I’d never done before. ... 

A classic critique of polyamorists: these people appear to like talking about sex more than they like having it. Perhaps that’s unfair, but polyamory sometimes seems to me like a practice made to generate conversations. Conversations between partners about the possibility of new lovers and between new lovers about prior partners, meta-conversations about how well or poorly all these conversations are going—and, of course, conversations between people who aren’t in any way involved.

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There’s no getting around how important communication is to the polyamorous lifestyle. They are always communicating. This ardor for talking may be, in part, what inspires so much chatter among outside observers. ... Monogamous marriages are famously inscrutable to outsiders — you never know what really happens behind closed doors. [But when they're poly] how thrilling to feel that one’s nosiness is justified. Don’t you think this is a sign they’re going to break up? Is she really okay with it, or is she just doing it to make him happy? Do they think we’re prudes now? Can you believe they think they’re better than us?

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And then there is the content of the communication between polyamorous people about the practice itself, which can come off as smug. In January’s New York feature, a member of a polycule named Nick described his relationship like this: “Some people like to run marathons. We like to do polyamory, complex relationship stuff. Sarah’s favorite activity for the two of us to do is couples therapy.” A member of the Boston polycule featured in The New York Times had this to say: “We learned a strategy from the Multiamory podcast called ‘agile scrum,’ which was adapted from business-meeting models. We utilized that format. We did that for a year and a half, at least once a month, sometimes six to 10 hours of hard poly-processing. That gave us great communication tactics.” I have no interest in going to grad school for relationships, especially when the other students sound so keen to be best in class. 

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THIS KEENNESS TO STUDY, and schedule, and have discussion groups, goes some way to explaining the moniker sex nerds, which my friends and I began using a few years ago to express our benign derision, and a long way to explaining the temptation to bully them. Nerds have spent the past few decades triumphing in almost every aspect of American popular culture, and it’s impossible to make them feel bad about it. ... But the classic tactic of saying they are doing sex in a weird way remains available—especially when they’re so eager to tell you about how they play Catan with their polycule every Wednesday.

Polyamory, in this country at least, has pretty much always been the domain of nerds, as... Christopher Gleason’s [recent book] American Poly: A History, makes clear. ... All of these earnest weirdos thought they could remake the world, and insofar as they succeeded, the results have been unevenly distributed.

 ... Liberationists and free lovers had hoped that remaking sex might remake the world, but the relationship between sex and other terrains of political struggle has turned out to be far more complicated. ... Nonmonogamy does not automatically bring about the structural changes which might materially improve intimate life for everyone, As it becomes increasingly popular, [historian Florence] Sutcliffe-Braithwaite cautions, it may also become more easily “sublimated into simple lifestyle politics.” It can therefore be maddening when some polyamorists insist that a day job making surveillance technology does not preclude them from considering themselves politically radical, as long as they spend their weekends having orgies.

...Some threshold number of polycules will never bring down a government.... If what one wants is revolution, of course it isn’t enough to be a revolutionary of sex—but neither does that mean that we shouldn’t be. The answer to any critique which distinguishes between sexual and material freedom must be to claim both. In a system that seeks to atomize and isolate, there is still some emancipatory potential in exploring different styles of living. ...

●  On the subject of self-focused, unrevolutionary revolution — Molly Roden Winter found herself the poster gal for this when her open-marriage memoir More, set in Brooklyn's tony Park Slope, came out with a publicity bonanza starting in January. She adjusts with an interview in the Guardian/Observer. It's titled ‘I wanted sexual adventures, I didn’t want to fall in love’: Molly Roden Winter on her astonishing memoir of an open marriage (April 21).

Vincent Tullo/The Observer

By Michael Segalov

More documents Roden Winter’s life from 2008 to 2018. “I’ve done a lot of living since then,” she says, “a lot of thinking and experiencing. How we do polyamory today is hugely different to what’s at the heart of the book.” Her marriage has evolved, as has the wider conversation about ethical non-monogamy. At present, the couple are properly poly. “My husband and I both love multiple people,” she says, “and it makes us love each other more, not less.” She has two additional partners: one relationship has been ongoing for three years, the other for two. ...

“One response” from critics, she says, “has been to tell me how my husband manipulated me into having an open marriage. That I’m a victim of the patriarchy with no agency.” Certainly, he encouraged the idea – Roden Winter being with other men was a turn on for him. “At first, the only way I could give myself permission was by telling myself that Stew wanted me to have sex with someone else. I was still trying to please him.” But therapy reshaped her rationalisation. “Women of my generation were taught to be pleasers. That being a good mother is to take burnt toast and scraps. In time, I realised I was craving something of my own, that didn’t belong to the marriage.”

Needless to say, there have been snipes and revulsion aplenty from conservatives. “Their view is that I’m a pervert and, with kids involved, what we’re doing is immoral. Meanwhile, they’re 19 and 22 and completely flourishing. It’s why I felt in a good position to write the book.”

...Roden Winter feels the book has proved both popular and divisive not because of its content, but who its author is, and what she represents. For generations, queer people – and gay men in particular – have operated outside the marriage, children, monogamy trifecta. ... “The idea it’s an American heterosexual woman, with children, talking so openly? A heteronormative couple breaking the rules and being honest about it?” This, Roden Winter believes, is what’s causing a stir.

“It shows that people like me could be anywhere. I have a husband, house and kids. I dress, act and live like a Park Slope mom. It throws people off kilter to imagine they, too, could live like me. That I have children, who aren’t fucked up and I’m not being manipulated or miserable.”

...And there have been plenty of positive responses to the book: young parents, mothers in particular, in newly opened marriages grateful for seeing their experiences and emotions acknowledged. ...“Where I live, people consider themselves super liberal. You’ll see in shop windows matching mother and daughter sized shirts emblazoned with ‘The future is female’. But the rules for how you’re supposed to behave as a mother are suffocating, I feel. We put mothers into these straitjacketed roles and shame them for not fitting. ... That’s why this book resonates.”

...Frankly, it all just sounds… exhausting? Not the sex, specifically. But managing multiple long-term romantic relationships. “Most worthwhile things are,” she replies. “We don’t say: medical school sounds so hard, just quit.”...

...Only one rule remains in place today. “If one of us has feelings about something the other is doing,” she says, “we have to work through it together. You can’t say ‘Don’t be jealous’ or ‘It’s ridiculous that you feel insecure’. You have to help the other person feel better.”...

Roden Winter does an interview on polycoach Kitty Chambliss' Loving Without Boundaries podcast just up (April 24; 49 minutes).

●  A 2024 flood. Following Roden Winter's More, Rachel Krantz's memoir Open being reissued, and Holly William's novel The Start of Something soon to appear, another woman's open-marriage-inspired book just came out: Open Season by Cassie Werber in the UK.

It's a novel. Werber writes about her own life in the Guardian: My husband is my co-parent, friend and lover – but he isn’t the only person I have sex with: the inside story of an open marriage (April 20)

By Cassie Werber

I settled back into the train seat and pulled a notebook out of my bag: something extraordinary had happened... the night I’d [just] spent near Brighton with a man I’d known for years, but seen again in a whole new context. About how delighted I felt, how hot, how incredibly free.

My body, which had been pregnant in the Covid pandemic, given birth and then dragged itself through several house moves with a baby and a three-year-old, seemed to be renewed, on fire. My mind was blown, and my lips were bruised. ... I texted friends, caught eyes with strangers: I wanted to talk to everyone about how I was feeling. Most of all, I wanted to tell my husband.

For plenty of people, the idea that I could be so excited about a new sexual encounter, and at the same time in a truly committed marriage, doesn’t compute. But that’s the experience I’ve had for the last eight years, during which I’ve been married to my life partner, had two children, pursued career goals – and also seen other people. It hasn’t all been easy but, honestly, it hasn’t been fraught. ... 

...So how did it happen? ...In the first year of our marriage, we started talking about going together [to a sex club]. We’d both assumed that that world, which we’d only brushed up against before, was probably closed to us now; we were excited to discover it wasn’t. This discussion was organic, gradual and mutual, segueing from the language of fantasy into one of more concrete, real-world plans. It wasn’t driven by one person, and no one had to do any convincing. We didn’t know what it would feel like to experiment with other people, whether it would be the right step for us. We didn’t know whether we’d feel jealous.

There are an infinite number of ways to be in an open relationship. ... David and I haven’t felt the need to lay down hard rules for our relationship. So far, at least, we seem to understand each other and communicate quite well. We set aside times for the discussion of worries and annoyances, and usually do so out of the house, while walking. We also talk to each other about the more intense feelings that do, sometimes, come up: rejection or hurt, longing or confusion. Our relationship isn’t some kind of ideal template. We argue as much as many couples. We just don’t often argue about this.

That doesn’t mean it’s always easy. When I stepped off the train after that incredible night away, I walked into several hard days. I found myself feeling really strong, but also spiky. The house was still a mess. Our son still didn’t like preschool. David wanted me to slot back into the exact groove I’d left. But I felt wild, in a good way, and didn’t want to fit back in. ...

●  People posts What Is a Throuple — and How to Know When the Relationship Type Is Right for You, According to an Expert (April 21). "Dr. Lori Beth Bisbey speaks with PEOPLE about [this] 'type of polyamory' and when it may be something to consider." She gives some good warnings for new folks. 

By Nicholas Rice

...Highlighting whether a throuple is right for certain individuals, Bisbey first warns, "Getting three people who align enough to live together with deep intimacy is not simple."

However, "If you are willing to live with two people and have the skills to work through the complexity, it might be a good choice," she adds. "One reason is that two incomes aren’t enough in a lot of places, so three people sharing works better."

(Getty stock photo)

...Bisbey tells PEOPLE signs that it might be the "right choice" include: "You didn’t mind sharing your toys (even your favorite ones) as a child, you desire high levels of communication and interaction with people, and you have found it difficult to be monogamous."

Other reasons that she considers non-monogamy may be of interest to people is if they "have lots of complicated desires and needs, really enjoy complexity in your life (but not drama) and have a high level of honesty with yourself and others and are willing to be authentic."

..."People often romanticize being part of a throuple, but it is actually quite complicated. It is easier to have multiple separate relationships where you are not all sharing space, finances, decisions about everything," she explains. "Throuples work together like couples, dividing labor between three instead of two. Consensus is harder because of more people. Higher levels of communication are needed and all relationships within the group need attention."

Speaking about the stigma surrounding throuples, and the reaction they may receive for their relationship type, Bisbey offers a few words of advice.

"Be prepared to educate people when needed, but remember not everyone is entitled to know your business.... Make sure you have thick skin. If you offend easily, do some personal work to increase your resistance to other people’s views of you. Keep your life private and only share what you are comfortable with anyone knowing."

"Finally, make friends with other non-monogamous people."

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● The New York Times Magazine story on the "20-person polycule" a couple weeks ago (parts of the polycule are actually rather loosely bonded) made waves closer to where the 20 live. The Boston Globe's site Boston.com followed up with What’s a polycule? What we learned from the NYT story on an unusual arrangement happening near Boston. (April 17)

By Abby Patkin

...According to The New York Times Magazine, the term “polycule” suggests “an intricate structure formed of people with overlapping deep attachments: romantic, sexual, sensual, platonic.” In other words, a sort of web of various relationships and personal connections.

One polycule member interviewed for the article said the Boston-area group includes about 20 people in their mid-20s to mid-40s, with gender identities and sexual orientation running the gamut. ... 

“It’s an evolving organism that looks entirely different from everyone’s perspective,” Ashley said. 

...“It’s loving people in a very unapologetic way, not conforming to norms,” polycule member Bine said, later adding, “As a woman, and as a queer woman, being able to live my life as authentically as possible without needing my husband’s permission, that’s empowering.” ...

...The bottom line: If you’re polyamorous and/or looking to join or form a polycule, the Greater Boston area isn’t a bad place to be. ...

Actually, many people around here find poly community hard to locate. But we're definitely not Topeka.

●  From Business Insider: Members of a 20-person polycule used a business strategy called 'agile scrum' to resolve their relationship issues. Here's how it works. (April 18, paywalled) 

By Julia Pugachevsky

...Agile scrum is a combination of business principles and strategy. The idea is for teams to break down their deliverables into smaller tasks and shorter timeframes, reviewing their progress as they go. That way they can swiftly adapt to changes to produce more effective results in the long run.

In The New York Times, Ann said the couple practiced agile scrum "for a year and a half, at least once a month, sometimes six to 10 hours of hard poly-processing."

...[She and her husband] said agile scrum — which they learned from the podcast, Multiamory — helped them to find themselves and each other within the polycule dynamic.

...In 2001, 17 software developers in Utah got together and wrote a manifesto on ways to improve their work. Agile is a set of principles that promotes collaboration and flexibility among teams to produce faster and more effective results. The values include "individuals and interactions over processes and tools," and "responding to change over following a plan."

Scrum is a concrete framework based on agile philosophy that involves smaller, cross-functional teams delivering products in short cycles, or "sprints." It's essentially a more structured approach to agile principles, allowing teams to frequently complete projects together and give each other feedback.

At some point, agile scrum crossed over into the realm of love. ...

●  PS: Poly and neurodiversity research. Comments I made about poly and neurodiversity caught the eye of Janet Walsh-Adams at Australia's Deakin University. She's a PhD candidate doing research at the university's Healthy Autistic Life Lab. She writes, 

Click image to enlarge,
click here for the survey.

I've been following your page for several years, and found it personally helpful as a polyamorous person in getting a nice overview of what was happening in the worldwide community.

You might be aware of some discourse in the online forums about how neurodivergent people (especially autistic and ADHD) seem to be more likely to be attracted to non-monogamy, but nobody has studied this empirically yet. I feel pretty fortunate to be the person who is undertaking the topic for my PhD, and hope to do the community justice in exploring whether there are specific motivations, experiences or supports relevant to different types of practitioners.

Whilst my lab focuses on autism, we're accounting for all neurotypes, and welcome self-identified participants, those with formal diagnoses, those who are non-autistic and those who are unsure. Participants just need to be 18+ and be proficient in English. They can come from any location, have any relationship preferences or experience, and identify with any gender or sexuality. 

Also, here's a story I published with some early speculation on the relationship between autism and non-monogamy.  

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Meanwhile,

    

Aid for Ukraine finally made it through Congress — hopefully not too late to save a free and promising society, but already too late for many thousands of the pro-democracy resistance — after months of blockage by the pro-Putin half of the U.S. Republican Party. The List of Shame.

Here is why I've been ending posts to this polyamory news site with the Ukraine situation: I've seen many progressive movements die out over the years because they failed to scan the wider world accurately and understand their position in it strategically.

We polyamorous people are a small, weird minority of social-rule breakers. Increasingly powerful people call us a threat to society — because by living successfully outside of their worldview, we expose its incompleteness.

Our freedom to choose our relationship structures, and to speak up for ourselves about the truth of ourselves, is just one way we depend on a free and pluralistic society that respects people's dignity to create their own lives, to access facts, and to speak of what they know.

Such a society is possible only where people have reasonably good power to govern themselves, combined with legal structures that are at least supposed to guarantee the rights of all.

Innovative people, communities, and societies who create their own lives, and who insist on the democratic structures and legal rights that enable them to do so safely, infuriate and terrify the authoritarians who are growing in power around the world and in our own United States. Now with direct mutual support, which is increasingly unhidden.

Such rulers and would-be rulers seek to stamp out other people's freedom to choose their lives — by intimidation, repressive laws, inflammatory disinformation and public incitement, weaponizing police abuse, or eventually, artillery.

For what it's worth, Polyamory in the News received more pagereads from pre-invasion Ukraine over the years (56,400) than from any other country in eastern Europe.

You can donate to Ukraine relief through this list of vetted organizations (last updated Oct. 2023). We're giving to a big one, Razom, and to a little informal one, Pizza for Ukraine in Kharkiv, the project of an old friend of my wife.

But that is only the start. For those of us born since World War II, this is the most consequential war of our lifetime. Because we have entered another time when calculating fascism, at home and abroad, is rising and sees freedom and liberalism and social tolerance as weak, degenerate, delusional — inviting easy pushovers. As Russia thought it saw in Ukraine. The whole world is watching what we will do about it.

Background: "The United States has a much higher stake in Russia's war on Ukraine than most people think."  More: "If we stop supporting Ukraine, then everything gets worse, all of a sudden, and no one will be talking about “fatigue” because we will all be talking about disaster."

The coming times may require hard things of us. We don't get to choose the time and place in history we find ourselves born into. We do get to choose how we respond to it. 

Need a little help bucking up? Play this. Another version. More? Some people on the eastern fro nt trying to hold onto an open society. (TW: war is awful.) Maybe your granddad did this from a trench against Hitler's tanks— for you, and us, because a world fascist movement was successfully defeated that time, opening the way for the rest of the 20th century.

But the outcome didn't look good for a couple of years then, either. Popular history remembers the 1945 victory over the Nazis and the joyous homecoming. Less remembered are the defeats and grim prospects from 1941 through early 1943.

Remember, these people say they are doing it for us too. They are correct. The global struggle between a free, open future and a fearful revival of the dark past that's shaping up, including in our own country, is still in its early stages. It's likely to get worse before it gets better. The outcome is again uncertain, and it will determine the 21st century and the handling of all its other problems.

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PS: Ukraine should not be idealized as the paragon of an open democratic society. For instance, see If Ukraine Wants To Stand for Liberty and Democracy, It Should Rethink Some of Its Wartime Policies. And it has quite the history of being run by corrupt oligarchs — leading to the Maidan Uprising of 2013, the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, and Zelensky's overwhelming election in 2019 as the anti-corruption candidate. So they're working on that. And they're also stamping hard on the old culture of everyday, petty corruption.  More on that.  More; "Ukraine shows that real development happens when people believe they have an ownership stake in their own societies."

Now, writes US war correspondent George Packer in The Atlantic, 

Here was a country with a tragic history that had at last begun to build, with great effort, a better society. What made Ukraine different from any other country I had ever seen—certainly from my own—was its spirit of constant self-improvement, which included frank self-criticism. For example, there’s no cult of Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine—a number of Ukrainians told me that he had made mistakes, that they’d vote against him after the war was won. Maxim Prykupenko, a hospital director in Lviv, called Ukraine “a free country aspiring to be better all the time.” The Russians, he added, “are destroying a beautiful country for no logical reason to do it. Maybe they are destroying us just because we have a better life.”

They have a word there, with a deep history, for the horizontal, self-organized, mutual get-it-done that grows from community social trust: hromada. Learn that word. It's been keeping them going  to the extent they've been able. We polyfolks often dream of creating something like that community spirit in miniature, in our polycules and networks. Occasionally we succeed.

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Social attitudes in Ukraine are mostly traditional, rooted in a thousand years of the Orthodox Church. But not bitterly so like often in the US; in the last generation the ideal of modern European civil society has become widely treasured, and social progressivism has room to thrive. The status of women has fast advanced, especially post-invasion. More than 43,000 women volunteer in the armed forces, flooding traditionally male bastions — including as combat officers, artillery gunners, tankers, battlefield medics, snipers, and infantry. (Intimidating video: "Thus the Witch has Said".) Ukraine has more women volunteering in combat positions than any other armed force in the world.

  
Some LGBT folx in the armed forces display symbols of LGBT pride on their uniforms, with official approval, whereas in Russia it's a prison-worthy crime for even a civilian to show a rainbow pin or "say gay." A report on Ukraine's LGBT+ and feminist acceptance revolutions. Another. Another. Another. War changes things.

And in December 2022, Russia made it a crime not just to speak for LGBT recognition in Russia or occupied Ukraine, but to speak for "non-traditional sexual relations." Belarus, a Russia subject state, has followed suit. Pre-invasion, Russia had a visible polyamory education and awareness movement.

Polyfolks are like one ten-thousandth of what's at stake globally. Ukraine must have our full material backing for as long as it takes them to win their security, freedom, and future. Continue to speak up for it.

                                     

A Russian writer grieves: "My country has fallen out of time."

Women defenders near the eastern front

PPS:  U.S. authori-tarians, such as Sen. Ted Cruz, are saying that allowing women in front-line roles is a woke plot to weaken America's armed forces. Ukraine puts that shit to bed. Do you have a relative who talks like that? Send them this video link to Vidma, who commands a mortar platoon, recounting the story of one of their battles near Bakhmut.

Update April 22, 2024: A year and a half later Vidma is still alive, still with her mortar unit in the Bakhmut region, and posting TikToks. They are now at the front in, it looks like, the battle shaping up for Chasiv Yar, a strategic hilltop town west of Bakhmut that will soon, unfortunately, be in world news. A young girl who looks high-school age has showed up to join them. Another. Their lives, and their promising society, depend on us. 

And maybe our own? Says Maine's independent Senator Angus King (Jan. 31, 2024),

Whenever people write to my office [asking why we are supporting Ukraine,] I answer, 'Google Sudetenland, 1938.' We could have stopped a murderous dictator who was bent on geographic expansion…at a relatively low cost. The result of not doing so was 55 million deaths.

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Another city! Oakland CA passes nondiscrimination law for poly/ ENM/ family & relationship structure

Oakland City Hall

From Brett Chamberlin, director of OPEN, the Organization for Polyamory and Ethical Non-monogamy:

Oakland, California just became the third US city to pass nondiscrimination protections for non-monogamy and diverse family structures! It's the first city on the US West Coast and the largest city yet to do so. This is yet another exciting milestone for the accelerating movement to normalize non-monogamy!

Help spread the good news by sharing this story on Instagram, Threads, Facebook, and Twitter.

Our gratitude to Oakland Councilmember Janani Ramachandran, who sponsored the bill, and to our friends at the Polyamory Legal Advocacy Coalition, which drafted the ordinance. Coalition partners also included The Modern Family Institute, Chosen Family Law Center, Harvard Law School LGBTQ+ Legal Advocacy Clinic, PolyActive, and Asexuality Visibility and Education Network. Visit their sites to learn more and support their work!

Our thanks also to the many community members who made this victory possible! Whether you went door-to-door to canvas for Janani last fall or spoke at Oakland City Council to share your story, this win shows what we can accomplish when we build people power and organize together.

This victory is yet another step forward towards a world where non-monogamous families and relationships are accepted, respected, and protected. But we have more work to do to bring these protections to even more cities and begin taking this fight to the US state and federal levels. Can you chip in to make that work possible? We're grateful for your support!

Wherever you are, I hope you'll take a moment to pause and celebrate yet another victory for this growing movement. Then, let's roll up our sleeves and continue the work!

🥳 Yours in celebration,

Brett Chamberlin, Executive Director

The measure passed the Oakland City Council on April 16. Surprisingly, I find no coverage in news media yet.

From the Chosen Family Law Center in New York:

...The [Oakland] law prohibits discrimination in areas such as housing, business establishments and public services on the basis of family or relationship structure. The protections cover individuals with diverse family and intimate relationship structures, including multi-partner/multi-parent families and relationships, step-families, multi-generational households, non-nuclear family structures, consensually nonmonogamous relationships, and platonic partnerships, including asexual and aromantic relationships.

 

We’re celebrating the way that these ordinances reflect growing understanding and recognition of the diverse forms that families and relationships take, and we are grateful to the coalition movement that did this work.

The previous two cities to enact such laws were Somerville and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Earlier, both of those and neighboring Arlington, MA, passed measures to officially recognize domestic partnerships of three or more adults.

Oakland is a big place, population 430,000. Writes Lily Lamboy of the Modern Family Institute,

[this law] will triple the number of people protected on the basis of family and relationship structure. This event is a testament to the coalition’s care, collective effort, and decades of advocacy leading up to this moment. 

Next up: Berkeley.

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A 20-person polycule have their say, at length, in the NY Times Magazine. For queer peeps "Is Monogamy Cool again?" And more.

Multilove amazement?

●  Coming up in the New York Times Magazine this Sunday, April 21: Lessons From a 20-Person Polycule (online April 15). It's a long, photo-rich series of interviews and personal tales, clearly distilled way down to concentrate the insights, complexities, hopes and dreams. It's part of the magazine's 's "Modern Love" issue.

The extended polycule live in the Boston area. Their stories and perceptions make a powerful and impressive read. Much may resonate with your own life experiences.

How they set boundaries, navigate jealousy, wingman their spouses and foster community.

Interviews by Daniel Bergner

Photographs by Anne Vetter

...It’s not clear when the word [polycule] was coined, but it seems to have started catching on around 15 years ago to suggest an intricate structure formed of people with overlapping deep attachments: romantic, sexual, sensual, platonic. It’s difficult to describe a polycule. Words like “family” and “network” are used, but neither on its own captures it. Perhaps it’s best left to a polycule itself to offer descriptions. ...

These photographs were taken at a gathering of the polycule in Cambridge, Mass., in March. Some people pictured or interviewed asked that they not be identified and are using a middle name or a nickname.

Describing the Polycule

Katie: The polycule is like this weird family.

Ann: It’s chosen family. It works like complex kinship networks work — just a little kinkier. It reflects radical queer values.

Katie: Our polycule is large, 20 or a little more — people in their mid-20s to mid-40s. There are self-identified males who identify as heteroflexible, heterosexual, bisexual. There’s a nonbinary person. Every femme-presenting person or woman identifies as queer. A lot of people are married and have primary partnerships. They’re coming to it from the opening of a monogamous relationship.

Anne Vetter

Ashley: A bunch of couples met in the summer of 2020. Over the next year, we were all dating and developing friendships with several couples and individuals that eventually blossomed into this community. It’s an evolving organism that looks entirely different from everyone’s perspective.

...Nico: Our polycule is female-run. It’s the female-identified people who spearhead. We convene, we plan, we call the shots. It’s a bunch of queer women who say we’re not going to follow the rules.

Katie: It’s freedom. I am so grateful to be a part of it. I have this abundance of love to give. I feel so in my power. We all approach ENM, ethical nonmonogamy, differently. Everyone is so deeply in love with each other, whether or not it’s romantic love.

Relationships With More Than One Person

...M: (Katie’s main partner) I identified as a single guy. I went from that to dating nonmonogamously. And I fell in love with someone who was already in love with more than one other person. The fear of abandonment that I’d been programmed from Day 1 to expect, I had a huge amount of stress about that. And of expressing too much anxiety. I spent a lot of time suffering alone during the first months because I didn’t want to overwhelm my new partner and have them realize, Hey, you know what, this is just too much of a pain in the ass, and I need you to do more work to reach the level where you need to be.

...Ann: I’m 34, and I feel like I’ve been on and off nonmonogamous much of my life, even though I didn’t have the word. When I was 17, 18, I said free love. Around 2018, 2019, I swore off monogamy forevermore. I use the word “polyamorous,” though relationship anarchist is probably a more accurate representation.

Listen up as she goes on: 

My husband and I are very, very different, which is our strength. He’s a frat bro who loves sports, and I’m a radical alien witch academic nerd. In the beginning, we did all the typical stuff. Read the books on nonmonogamy, did the relationship check-ins. We’d sit down, take notes. We did every exercise in the books, listened to every podcast. We learned a strategy from the Multiamory podcast called “agile scrum,” which was adapted from business-meeting models. We utilized that format. We did that for a year and a half, at least once a month, sometimes six to 10 hours of hard poly-processing. That gave us great communication tactics.

Robert: (Ann’s husband) We have this motto: Feelings are not facts. That gets us through the hard times. ... I would ask her questions, and she would be like, No, I don’t feel that way; and I would be like, I know you like being with him more than me; and she would say, I’m not lying to you, it’s different, but it doesn’t make me love you less, you provide so much more to my life than just sex. I totally get it now. That was the first instance of feelings are not facts. They feel like it. But they ain’t facts.

Setting Boundaries

Bine: ...We had discussed opening up our relationship to a potential third, because I identified as bi, and that was important to me. And then five years into our marriage, he was the one to start talking about ethical nonmonogamy. At that point we were saying, 'Let’s just have some fun, but ours is really the primary relationship.'

There were a lot of restrictions. I felt very insecure, like if we’re going to do this there’s going to have to be a laundry list of rules. It can be a one-night stand, but we’re not going to see this person again. It can’t be a friend. But it became clear that these rules didn’t make any sense. We felt deeper connections with people beyond the sexual. We had to shift things, and we kind of drifted into the polyamorous space in 2018.

Resources always help, books like “The Ethical Slut” and “Polysecure.” But undoing the monogamous script, the socialization, is really, really difficult.

Katie (left) is dating Alex (second from left). Alex is legally married to Ashley (third from left). Chris (lower right) is legally married to Bine (not pictured), and Chris and Bine date Alex and Ashley as couples, while Bine has also dated Ashley individually. (Ann Vetter photo)

Katie: There’s a lot of boundary-setting. Broken rules can be really damaging. Adhering to other people’s boundaries is a big part of being in the polycule. That’s paramount. In the polycule it ranges from people who really don’t have rules, to we’re only going to date people together, or we’re going to participate in the group only as friendships, or as sensual friendships, or we’re only going to be sexually intimate at gatherings, and outside of that we’re not going to date anyone individually. We keep track in group chats. We also gather as a group for parties that are sometimes intentionally sexual but sometimes not at all, and that is a time for people to communicate about their interests. But group chats are big.

‘‘It’s an evolving organism that looks entirely different from everyone’s perspective,’’ one person who is part of the polycule says.

Making Time for Multiple Partners

M: The capacity to love is not a finite thing. But time is. You can’t do two things at once.

Bine: Scheduling can be very tricky. Making sure there’s still one or two evenings every week when we spend quality time together. Overnights is something we’re discussing now. We don’t sleep over individually with anyone we’re dating; we only do that when we’re dating someone together.

Ann: My husband, my nesting partner, is the person I own a home with. I also have life-partnership friends, I call them my wives, who are core members in the polycule. One of their husbands is one of my best friends and occasional sexual partner, and I do have sex with my wives, but we’re not romantically involved. But I love them.

I don’t ask anyone’s permission on anything. I spend 60 percent of my time in my house with my nesting partner and about 25 percent of my time with another partner, and although I technically have one home right now, I’m in the process of building homes with multiple partners. There are check-ins, but the check-ins aren’t for permission. It’s, "I’m doing these things, I’m going to be gone for these two weeks, what do you need from me?"

Katie: Poly-saturation is different for different people. For me, the maximum seems to be three partners at once, especially because I gravitate toward long-term committed in-depth relationships. I mean romantic partners. We have play parties that are intended to be a sexual space but more of a casual connection, and I’m not only with my partners there.

Benefits of the Polycule

Robert: We have a lot of compersion — being happy seeing your partner happy with one of their other partners — for each other. There are times when my wife will meet someone she knows I’ll be attracted to, and she’ll say, You have to meet my husband. She’ll wingman me. Or I’m talking to this guy, and I think, She would really like this guy. We do that for each other.

Bine: There’s something that feels radical about it, that feels liberating, that really speaks to empowerment, especially for women or queer or nonbinary individuals. It’s loving people in a very unapologetic way, not conforming to norms. We know why monogamy is still the dominant structure. The patriarchy. The lack of rights women had. As a woman, and as a queer woman, being able to live my life as authentically as possible without needing my husband’s permission, that’s empowering.

Nico: I was in a very bad car accident in the fall, and I felt so supported. I had 20 text messages from people in the polycule — this is the doctor I know, this is the lawyer I have, this is the physical therapist, so many resources.

Ann: I have one partner now with three kids. He is transmasc, and he’s radical about the way he raises them. They’re radically home-schooled. They’re 17 and nonbinary, 6 and 5. They know everything in age-appropriate ways. They’ve seen their mommy undergo the transmasc experience, seen their mom become who they really are.

I was up late last night with him in a hotel room, and the 17-year-old was in the room snoozing, so we just sat on the bathroom floor chatting about our relationship all night, and while that was happening my husband was texting to say, Oh, I got a last-minute match, so I’m going to meet this girl for a date. And then I get a text while we were still on the bathroom floor vibing, it was 4 in the morning, and he said, We had a great date, a great connection, she’s looking for friends with benefits, we had sex. And I was smiling. You know you’re really poly when you’re with one of your partners talking about how much you love each other and you’re so happy your husband had this awesome night. ...

Katie: Last night I was at a party that was full of poly people, and at the end of the night we wound up in this big cuddle pile. There were eight of us fit together like puzzle pieces, snuggling. It felt so cozy, so much oxytocin flowing. We were all envisioning living together, not having to worry about individual mortgages, just having some big house. Can’t we just do that? Why can’t we do that? An adult sleepover camp, that’s the vibe. It is my mission to make that happen for me and whoever wants to join me.

And lastly,

Poly as an Identity or a Movement or Both

Ashley: Whenever you veer outside the confines of the status quo, it is political. We’re really intentional about the way we want to connect, really questioning why one type of relationship has to be more significant than others. For the first time in my life, I’ve found community, in a true sense. These are people who really show up for each other in beautiful ways, people who aren’t guarded around each other. It’s just pure love. I can’t imagine my life without it now.

Ann: It is very much about social change. It is about making the world a better place. I want to be in relationships and be with people who make me live in this world better.

Nico: Some of us are survivors of sexual assault and have reclaimed what it means to be a sexual woman, to be radically and unapologetically ourselves. Some don’t really ever have sex — I think there is a power in female sexuality that doesn’t necessarily mean having a lot of sex; I don’t know how to explain that. It’s about making decisions for yourself, how you want your relationships to look.

...What has been valuable is being around men who want to be around empowered women, who aren’t intimidated. It’s not like they’re wimpy guys — to me, they’re strong because they’re not threatened.

...Katie: I hope this is a social movement. I hope people will feel more freedom about how they want to live and about pooling resources and living their best life. The structure of the nuclear family, the nuclear marriage, needs to shift. It’s really hard to afford a house. Some of us are thinking of moving into a place with four or five bedrooms where eight or nine of us could live together. We could share the burden of bills. It’s just more realistic. And it would be a community space. We would hold events and gather and play and have this endless sleepover. If I get to do this, I will have achieved something great — great emotionally and great in terms of social transformation.

The day after the story appeared online, the tabloid New York Post, a Murdoch-owned competitor for the New York market, condensed and reprinted a lot of it while inserting slimy spins: Inside a ‘radical’ 20-person polyamorous relationship where wild sex is always on tap (April 16). I see editorial envy. At least they acknowledge that it was a Times story, not their own.

●  Also in the Boston area, Esther Perel (Mating in Captivity) did an interview with the Boston Globe (April 4) while on the road with a tour she’s calling “The Future of Relationships, Love, and Desire.” Poly was the first topic that came up:

Q. In Greater Boston, there’s a lot of talk about polyamory — mostly because Somerville became the first municipality in the country to pass an ordinance where you can have more than one domestic partner. Now other communities [Cambridge, Arlington] are following suit. Is polyamory something that’s coming up more for you? Are people checking in to see how you feel about it?

A. I wrote about consensual non-monogamy and polyamory in “The State of Affairs” and in “Mating in Captivity”... from the point of view of how it helps us reconcile the improbable duality between independence and belonging. It was one of the ways people were answering the question of “How do I straddle the need for security and the need for freedom?” ... But in addition, I think that polyamory, more and more, has become an answer to questions of community building. ... I’ve said before, the nuclear model is too insulated and isolated. We demand too much from one person to give us what the whole village is to provide. I’ve said before that gay couples have long understood the difference between emotional monogamy and sexual promiscuity — and they understood that monogamy is a primary commitment to a primary relationship that may or may not involve sexual exclusiveness. ... Polyamory is a philosophy. It’s a practice. It’s a relational arrangement. It’s not just a solution to the mishaps of infidelity. It needs to be done in a context that demands enormous equality. It can’t be a power maneuver.

●  For his Cosmopolitan column "Navigating Non-Monogamy," Zachary Zane interviews two people in a brilliant poly partnership of many years: Let This Couple Prove that Polyamory Actually Can Last Long-Term. 

...Just take it from Diana, 45, and Ed, 49, who’ve been polyamorous for 17 years. Like every couple, they experienced their own growing pains, but these two are happy, in love, and raising their eight-year-old daughter together. ...

Two days later Forbes published a profile of Diana by Ashoka, a nonprofit that spotlights social entrepreneurs: How Expanding The Legal Definition Of Family Helps Us All (April 2)

Q: Your other legislative push is around family status non-discrimination. Why is this needed?

A: Many neighborhoods are zoned for couples—even though, as we’ve discussed, the majority of Americans are doing something different. Some people are not getting houses rented to them if they want to live with, say, their best friend and kid and mother. A property owner can say, I was looking for a traditional couple. So, every time we pass one of these laws, we're able to raise awareness that 80% of us are doing something different and our laws need to reflect this reality. In fact, I encourage us to get away from saying “traditional” or “non-traditional” family because living in extended and multi-generational families and communities is what is traditional.

Q: What about the argument that children need stability?

A: Children absolutely need stability of parental figures, as numerous psychological studies have shown. But in the past, those researchers made the logical leap that stability needed to be a married mother and father. Now, we’re clearer that stability can also be mom and grandma, a same-sex couple, include a step parent, and beyond. These families can absolutely provide stability and children in them thrive.

● On Slate's "Care & Feeding" podcast of parenting advice: Parenting While Polyamorous (April 15).

On this episode: Elizabeth sits down with Jess Daylover and her metamour, Ash, of the Remodeled Love podcast, to talk all things polyamory and parenting. There are a lot of misconceptions out there about what polyamory is and isn’t — so we think you’ll love hearing about how it works as a parenting co-op.

Jess and Ash are part of a long-term quad household raising two kids. Listen (49 minutes). Transcript. 

●  Elle UK presents Is This the End of Monogamy? by controversial open-marriage memoirist Molly Roden Winter (paywalled; it's in the May 1 print issue). The story is in a section titled Is This How We Date Now? The section starts, "Apps are over. Meet-cutes are back. Polyamory is mainstream. Love has no boundaries."

The cover teases, "Radical love: A new era of relationship rules."

A fashion magazine is gonna see things as fashion.

●  A healthy counter to the "everyone is doing it" wave of stories comes from Gabe Dunn, a well known queer polyamory activist, writer and producer for at least a decade who's now transmasc. Among queerfolk, he writes, Is Monogamy Cool Again? His long report appears in the lesbian/queer online magazine Autostraddle (April 17).

Remember, people — the consensus in the poly-awareness movement is to spread understanding of the polyamorous possibility and its best practices, and to support people in whatever relationship structure they find is right for them. The point is not to imply that poly is right for most people (it's not), or is a trend you gotta join, or that you can't change your mind about it or be ambiamorous. Rigid doctrine creates trainwrecks. That's true in any movement. (Are you listening, cancel-culturists?)

I haven’t been monogamous since high school, and even then, my relationships were never fully closed. So when I learned about polyamory at 22, I was thrilled. There was a word for what I was!

The lifestyle and my relationships helped me to eliminate so much sexual shame and provided my first experiences of gender euphoria. Of course, I’ve also contended with judgment for being multi-amorous in a world built for two. Luckily, I was also queer, and to me, queerness felt intrinsically intertwined with non-monogamy. They were in the same polycule, if you will.

I’m single for the first time in five years, and back on the dating apps (as opposed to the hook up apps). Imagine my surprise to find that in my absence, all these queers have become monogamous!

“If you are partnered and poly, swipe left.”

“I don’t have the mental energy for poly.”

“We’ll get along if: You want monogamy too.”

It’s a non-negotiable! When I was single in 2019, the monogamous cuties I’d run across would sometimes bashfully try to play at maybe being interested in trying poly — just for me. I’d have to cut them off at the pass for their own good. Now? They’re cutting me off first! With pride!

It’s not just on the apps. The person who taught me what polyamory was is now in a monogamous relationship. The last few T4T [trans looking for trans] couples I’ve inquired about joining in on have been closed for funny business. 

...I’m being cheeky. Monogamy isn’t the same as uncontrollable jealousy, nor is it inherently unenlightened. It’s also not a stagnant state. There are times when someone might be one or the other, or some combination of the two.

But my overall working thesis in general? Monogamy is back on trend for queers!

Consider my writing about this on par with the New York Times’ insistence that only cis people report on trans issues. Only I, a famous polyamorist, could possibly investigate a resurgence of monogamy without bias. That’s how journalism works, folks.

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...More people tried it. For some it worked. For some, it didn’t. Polyamory is not inherently easier or harder than monogamy, but in the end, monogamy is what’s familiar. There’s more of a social roadmap to follow. It’s comfortable.

“There are ways through this discomfort,” single non-binary lesbian Anna Hope told me when I put out an Instagram call for monogamists to explain themselves. But that hard work isn’t for everyone. Hope has been polyamorous before, but said in 2024, they’re looking for monogamy.

“[Polyamory] feels liberating for some, but scary and chaotic for others,” Hope said. “It’s only fair to choose the way back instead, if monogamy also works for you.”

It works for monogamous queers like BJ and Harmony Colangelo, wives who co-host the feminist film podcast This Ends At Prom. Until recently, they felt like outliers, because as a cis lesbian and trans woman whose “sexuality is whatever,” respectively, their being monogamous seemed outlandish.

“The response is always some form of shock that we’re not poly,” BJ said, “because it’s become almost assumed that if you’re queer or trans in 2024 – especially in Los Angeles – that you’re also dismantling relationship structures.”

It’s a reasonable enough assumption. When you’re going against society’s defaults in one way, why wouldn’t you adopt some of the other ways?

...“I guess I am monogamous because there is no one else out there that makes me feel the way I do with BJ,” Harmony said.

BJ agreed, “Anyone else just feels redundant.”

Nicole Kristal, a bisexual woman who has been monogamous with another bi woman for the past six years, said being with someone who is also bisexual eliminated the temptation to act on other opportunities. She can be honest about her outside attractions, she said, without her girlfriend feeling insecure, and thus the temptation fizzles.

Kristal, who is also the founder of Still Bisexual, said it took her 20 years of searching to find this kind of healthy monogamous relationship in the queer community. ... “We joke that someday we might get a pool boy,” Kristal said, “but overall we are just enjoying being monogamous.”

He offers some provocative insight:

So what changed?

It once behooved queer couples to present as similar to the average heterosexual pairing. ... When monogamy was the default, polyamorous people were the ones who had to specify [themselves] so that no one was wasting their time pursuing incompatible matches. Now it’s the other way around.

...Recently, on @openrelating, an X account run by relationship coach Roy Graff, he suggested that maybe there aren’t actually less [queer] poly people, so much as ... poly people have stopped talking about being poly. ... We non-monogamous folk have had our moment in the spotlight and have quietly stopped trying to prove anything or call attention to ourselves.

Read on.

BTW, as we straight cis polyfolks age, I've noticed that we also tend to settle in with one long-term anchor partner and have other intimate relationships rather the way an ordinary married couple might have close friends. 

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Meanwhile, as the larger world stage darkens. . .

Call your representative,

because he or she is about to vote on whether to tilt the 21st century toward free societies or toward their fascistic conquerors. It's that stark. Look up your rep's phone / email.

    

UPDATE April 22: "The pro-Russian caucus inside the GOP was defeated on Saturday, and with it Putin's dream of quickly occupying Ukraine.
"Now the US and Europe need to seize the moment to win, and end, the war."

                                                                                     --Anne Applebaum

Here is why I've been ending posts to this polyamory news site with Ukraine: I've seen many progressive movements die out because they failed to scan the wider world accurately and understand their position in it strategically.

We polyamorous people are a small, weird minority of social-rule breakers. Increasingly powerful people call us a threat to society — because by living successfully outside of their worldview, we expose its incompleteness.

Our freedom to choose our relationship structures, and to speak up for ourselves about the truth of ourselves, is just one way we depend on a free and pluralistic society that respects people's dignity to create their own lives, to access facts, and to speak of what they know.

Such a society is possible only where people have reasonably good power to govern themselves, combined with legal structures that are at least supposed to guarantee the rights of all.

Innovative people, communities, and societies who create their own lives, and who insist on the democratic structures and legal rights that enable them to do so safely, infuriate and terrify the authoritarians who are growing in power around the world and in our own United States. Now with direct mutual support, which is increasingly unhidden.

Such rulers and would-be rulers seek to stamp out other people's freedom to choose their lives — by intimidation, repressive laws, inflammatory disinformation and public incitement, weaponizing police abuse, or eventually, artillery.

For what it's worth, Polyamory in the News received more pagereads from pre-invasion Ukraine over the years (56,400) than from any other country in eastern Europe.

You can donate to Ukraine relief through this list of vetted organizations (last updated Oct. 2023). We're giving to a big one, Razom, and to a little informal one, Pizza for Ukraine in Kharkiv, the project of an old friend of my wife.

But that is only the start. For those of us born since World War II, this is the most consequential war of our lifetime. Because we have entered another time when calculating fascism, at home and abroad, is rising and sees freedom and liberalism and social tolerance as weak, degenerate, delusional — inviting easy pushovers. As Russia thought it saw in Ukraine. The whole world is watching what we will do about it.

Background: "The United States has a much higher stake in Russia's war on Ukraine than most people think."  More: "If we stop supporting Ukraine, then everything gets worse, all of a sudden, and no one will be talking about “fatigue” because we will all be talking about disaster."

The coming times may require hard things of us. We don't get to choose the time and place in history we find ourselves born into. We do get to choose how we respond to it. 

Need a little help bucking up? Play this. Another version. More? Some people on the eastern front trying to hold onto an open society. (TW: war is awful.) Maybe your granddad did this from a trench against Hitler's tanks— for you, and us, because a world fascist movement was successfully defeated that time, opening the way for the rest of the 20th century.

But the outcome didn't look good for a couple of years then, either. Popular history remembers the 1945 victory over the Nazis and the joyous homecoming. Less remembered are the defeats and grim prospects from 1941 through early 1943.

Remember, these people say they are doing it for us too. They are correct. The global struggle between a free, open future and a fearful revival of the dark past that's shaping up, including in our own country, is still in its early stages. It's likely to get worse before it gets better. The outcome is again uncertain, and it will determine the 21st century and the handling of all its other problems.

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PS: Ukraine should not be idealized as the paragon of an open democratic society. For instance, see If Ukraine Wants To Stand for Liberty and Democracy, It Should Rethink Some of Its Wartime Policies. And it has quite the history of being run by corrupt oligarchs — leading to the Maidan Uprising of 2013, the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, and Zelensky's overwhelming election in 2019 as the anti-corruption candidate. So they're working on that. And they're also stamping hard on the old culture of everyday, petty corruption.  More on that.  More; "Ukraine shows that real development happens when people believe they have an ownership stake in their own societies."

Now, writes US war correspondent George Packer in The Atlantic, 

Here was a country with a tragic history that had at last begun to build, with great effort, a better society. What made Ukraine different from any other country I had ever seen—certainly from my own—was its spirit of constant self-improvement, which included frank self-criticism. For example, there’s no cult of Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine—a number of Ukrainians told me that he had made mistakes, that they’d vote against him after the war was won. Maxim Prykupenko, a hospital director in Lviv, called Ukraine “a free country aspiring to be better all the time.” The Russians, he added, “are destroying a beautiful country for no logical reason to do it. Maybe they are destroying us just because we have a better life.”

They have a word there, with a deep history, for the horizontal, self-organized, mutual get-it-done that grows from community social trust: hromada. Learn that word. It's been keeping them going  to the extent they've been able. We polyfolks often dream of creating something like that community spirit in miniature, in our polycules and networks. Occasionally we succeed.

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Social attitudes in Ukraine are mostly traditional, rooted in a thousand years of the Orthodox Church. But not bitterly so like often in the US; in the last generation the ideal of modern European civil society has become widely treasured, and social progressivism has room to thrive. The status of women has fast advanced, especially post-invasion. More than 43,000 women volunteer in the armed forces, flooding traditionally male bastions — including as combat officers, artillery gunners, tankers, battlefield medics, snipers, and infantry. (Intimidating video: "Thus the Witch has Said".) Ukraine has more women volunteering in combat positions than any other armed force in the world.

  
Some LGBT folx in the armed forces display symbols of LGBT pride on their uniforms, with official approval, whereas in Russia it's a prison-worthy crime for even a civilian to show a rainbow pin or "say gay." A report on Ukraine's LGBT+ and feminist acceptance revolutions. Another. Another. Another. War changes things.

And in December 2022, Russia made it a crime not just to speak for LGBT recognition in Russia or occupied Ukraine, but to speak for "non-traditional sexual relations." Belarus, a Russia subject state, has followed suit. Pre-invasion, Russia had a visible polyamory education and awareness movement.

Polyfolks are like one ten-thousandth of what's at stake globally. Ukraine must have our full material backing for as long as it takes them to win their security, freedom, and future. Continue to speak up for it.

                                     

A Russian writer grieves: "My country has fallen out of time."

Women defenders near the eastern front

PPS:  U.S. authori-tarians, such as Sen. Ted Cruz, are saying that allowing women in front-line roles is a woke plot to weaken America's armed forces. Ukraine puts that shit to bed. Do you have a relative who talks like that? Send them this video link to Vidma, who commands a mortar platoon, recounting the story of one of their battles near Bakhmut.

Update April 22, 2024: A year and a half later Vidma is still alive, still with her mortar unit in the Bakhmut region, and posting TikToks. They are now at the front in, it looks like, the battle for Chasiv Yar ("Quiet Ravine"), a strategic  town west of Bakhmut that will soon, unfortunately, be in world news. A young girl who looks high-school age has showed up to join them. Another. Their lives, and their promising society, depend on us. 

And maybe our own? Says Maine's independent Senator Angus King (Jan. 31, 2024),

Whenever people write to my office [asking why we are supporting Ukraine,] I answer, 'Google Sudetenland, 1938.' We could have stopped a murderous dictator who was bent on geographic expansion…at a relatively low cost. The result of not doing so was 55 million deaths.

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