Cohousing-L Mailing List: poly vs gay, poly & coho

[Howard Landman (howard]

Deb Smyre wrote:
> I view polyamory as simply a lifestyle choice, not a congenital trait
> or an ethnicity, and I don't believe disapproval of a lifestyle choice
> is in the same social category as hating someone for being brown or
> gay.  That is to say, it's not an individual's choice to be brown or
> gay, but it's a choice to be poly.

Since I'm poly, and am in fairly violent disagreement with Deb's view
expressed above, I thought I should try to express why.

I differentiate feelings from actions.  Most people can't, generally,
controls their feelings.  Especially, most people can't control what they
like or find beautiful or find sexually attractive.  And no amount of
arguing will change those either - "De gustibus non disputandum est".

But a human being should be expected to have some control over their
actions.  This is where real choice comes in.

If we look at feelings (what Deb calls "being"), neither gays nor polys
typically have much choice about *feeling* gay or poly.  I certainly
had some poly feelings before I was 10 years old, my diary shows strong
evidence of my preferences developing in that direction by age 13 or so,
and by age 15 or 16 I was verbally expressing my polyness to potential
girlfriends (and paying the consequences of doing so).  In short,
I've been very clear on this aspect of myself since I was a child.
Every relationship I've had has been open to one degree or another.
My wedding ceremony did not include the words "and forsaking all others".

If we look at actions (what Deb calls "doing"), it is clear that both
people with gay feelings and people with poly feelings can, many times,
suppress those feelings and appear to conform to another lifestyle.
I'm not saying that it's good or healthy or honest or desirable to do
so, but it can be done.  Gays can act straight, polys can act mono.
I've chosen not to do so because (1) it felt dishonest and hypocritical
to me, (2) I didn't think I'd have much chance of finding appropriate
partners if I hid myself under a basket, and (3) many polys today are
afraid - perhaps even more afraid than gays used to be - and by standing
up and "being out", I make things a bit easier for others.  All three
of these reasons appear to apply to gays and polys equally.

So from both viewpoints, there doesn't seem to be much difference between
the state of being/feeling gay and the state of being/feeling poly, in
so far as the being vs doing question goes.   I utterly fail to see
how this makes my being poly a "lifestyle choice" and someone else's
being gay as inherent as the color of their skin - especially since I
know that some gays don't figure out their preference until their 20's,
and that there's a continuum between straight and gay with many, many
shades of bi in between.  It's also clear, at least in rats, that
environmental factors such as overcrowding can cause *substantial*
increases in homosexual behavior.  This argues rather strongly against
complete genetic determinism (though not necessarily against "being"
gay in the above sense, which includes more than just genetics).

..

There was a strong relationship between the 19th century American
communitarian movement and various forms of non-monogamy.  A good survey
of this can be found in John H. Noyes' "A History of American Socialisms".
(Noyes was founder of the Oneida commune, a 200-person group marriage
that lasted over 40 years and founded several businesses including the
current Oneida flatware company.  A "socialism" or "communism" in the
mid-1800's meant what we would call a "commune" today; this was before
Marx and Engels and their followers twisted the terms to mean fascistic
nation-sized dictatorships.)  I could talk about this at great length, but
that really deserves an epistle of its own.  Suffice it to say that many
leaders of that movement believed that one couldn't have true community
as long as the principle of private property dominated the group, and that
monogamous marriage (in which the wife was considered the private property
of the husband) was a key piece of the edifice that needed dismantling.
There's a deep historical bond between attempts to find alternatives to
monogamy and attempts to find alternatives to single-family housing.

So it's not unreasonable to expect that cohousing and poly should go
together like waffles and syrup.  Indeed, the first cohousing discussion
group in which I participated was started by a poly family, one of whose
members had previously been a member of the Kerista commune (which invented
the word "polyfidelity").  And presentations about cohousing have been a
semi-regular feature of the annual Loving More conferences.  My sense is
that poly folks are *much* more likely to be interested in cohousing than
members of the general population.

Is the converse also true?  Maybe there should be a presentation about
polyamory at the annual Cohousing conference?

        Howard A. Landman
        howard [at] polyamory.org or howardl [at] sitera.com
        founder, poly email list
        maintainer, http://www.polyamory.org/~howard/Poly/ website
        resident of River Rock Cohousing for 2 weeks!

        "Socialism will never work; it occupies far too many evenings."
                - Oscar Wilde