Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Lesbians and gays in cohousing -- Pattee

[Howard Landman (howard]

christine pattee wrote;
> My sense is that gay people fit in fine (and that a non-monogamous couple
> of any gender would be a problem in most social circles).

Carol and I were fairly out about being poly before we moved into
River Rock.  I think people took it more in stride than we expected.
There was definite language in the vision statements supportive of GLBT
but nothing about poly.  Anyway it hasn't really been an issue, partly
because we've been more poly-in-theory than poly-in-practice since we
moved in (the third member of our triad split with us just before that),
and partly because a lot of other things are more important on a
day-to-day basis.

You might want to look through the archives, there was a brief but
heated discussion of poly and coho some months back.  There was
a bit of anti-poly sentiment and one woman went so far as to imply
that if polys were in coho then it wasn't for her.  But, if memory
serves me, she was an upper-middle-class black to whom "respectability"
was an extremely important value.  My sense of respectability has a
lot more to do with personal integrity, honesty, and accomplishment
than with whether Jerry Falwell would approve, but a lot of people
don't see it that way.

Many polys feel somewhat betrayed by the movement for "gay marriage".
It abandons the larger goal of allowing people to love whom they
choose; it embraces "respectability" in order to win clear but
limited financial and legal gains.  The recent legal changes in Hawaii
which allowed both gay and poly marriages are much more what we
hope to see.

        Howard A. Landman
        River Rock Commons, Fort Collins Co
        (and founder, in the late 1980's, of the "poly" email list)
        (and owner of http://www.polyamory.org/~howard/Poly/)
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