Polyamory: The Next Frontier?
This article is only a portion of the full article. If you are already a premium subscriber please login. If you are not a premium subscriber, please subscribe for access to all of our content.

            The intersection between polyamory and LGBT issues may not be clear-cut, but it seems to me there are a number of ways in which the two intersect (beyond the obvious fact that the participants may be gay or bisexual). Following are a few of them.

1. Polyamory and Same-Sex Marriage

The fact that the polyamory community isn’t clamoring for a letter in the LGBT+ lineup is probably because the LGBT+ movement itself has always kept its distance from this community. Marriage equality was secured in the U.S. in 2015, but while the battle raged during the previous two decades, one of the major arguments against same-sex marriage was a version of the slippery slope that usually began with the question “If gays can get married, what next?” and ended with answers like “group marriage” or “marrying one’s pets.”

            The latter objection was easy enough to dispatch, since the essence of marriage qua legal contract is mutual consent, which is the exclusive province of adult humans. But there’s no obvious reason why three or more consenting adults should not be allowed to enter into this contract as married partners, as Freedom to Marry maven Evan Wolfson has always maintained.

            On the other hand, mainstream organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign and Lambda Legal, when confronted with the slippery slope, always renounced any interest in extending marriage rights to groups, insisting that marriage was understood as a bond between two individuals. In a recent position paper (9/18/18), the HRC lays out the case for “Honoring Bi Visibility All Year Long” that includes the reassuring caveat: “Don’t assume bisexual people are promiscuous or polyamorous.” Always aiming for the heart of mainstream America, the HRC understands that the general public is far more forgiving of homosexuality than it is of promiscuity. 

2. Polyamory and Gay Male Culture

The tendency to equate polyamory with promiscuity is what used to be called a bum rap, since the whole aim of polyamory is to provide a framework for stable bonding among individuals who remain faithful to their agreements—recognizing, of course, that the terms of these arrangements can vary greatly when it comes to issues of sexual exclusivity, living arrangements, and so on—with full disclosure the only requirement.

            The ethical underpinnings of polyamory are emphasized by its proponents, who know they have a PR problem and would like to distance themselves from the “anything goes” stereotype of the past. Psychologist Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico has written what seems to me the best recent exegesis on the subject (“Polyamory Is Growing—And We Need To Get Serious About It,” in Quillette.com, Oct. 29, 2019). Miller’s notion of consensual non-monogamy stresses the elements of informed consent and adherence to agreed-upon rules, as well as the compatibility of polyamory with monogamy:

Monogamy and polyamory also have a common enemy: the impulsive, short-term, alcohol-fueled casual sex culture of bars, clubs, frat parties, and Tinder. It’s possible to make a compelling ethical case for monogamy. It’s also possible to make a compelling ethical case for polyamory. I don’t think it’s possible to make a compelling ethical case for a sexual culture centered around drunken hook-ups.

Fair enough, though Miller’s tone becomes a bit puritanical as he seeks to normalize what he admits is a misunderstood minority—much as the LGBT movement eventually distanced itself from the rhetoric of “sexual revolution” in favor of slogans about love and marriage. Indeed Miller’s statement could almost be read as a rebuke to everything that gay male culture was once famous for—and still is to some considerable extent, if the truth be told. This is not the culture that the mainstream LGBT organizations have wanted to present to the world while pursuing marriage equality and other rights, and it’s one that polyamory has also tried to get past. It is interesting to note, fifty years after Stonewall and the Sexual Revolution, that the ultimate bête noir of puritanical sex codes would turn out to be, not premarital sex, not hard-core porn, not even homosexuality, but sexual promiscuity in all its forms. This, it seems, is the final bugbear from which a sexual minority must distance itself if it wants to get ahead.

3. “Gay Marriage for Straight People”

If both the polyamory and the gay rights movements have aligned themselves with the institution of marriage to gain public acceptance, this alignment has been challenged by some leftist activists. In a lengthy piece on her blog titled “Polyamory Is Gay Marriage for Straight People” (Feb. 14, 2019), Yasmin Nair argues that polyamory is essentially a faddish movement for a certain class of hip urban dwellers—she dissects an article from Quartz, an e-zine that offered an upbeat account of polyamorists living together in Brooklyn—who delude themselves when they describe their lifestyle as “revolutionary.” Nair is cynical about the vaunted ethic of responsibility: “Polyamory has become popular in recent years because it has been urbanized and dissociated from its origins in less sexy worlds like that of Ren[aissance]Fairs, and been reinvented as something engaged in by people of great intelligence and social cachet, mostly residing in expensive neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Seattle.”

            To the extent that polyamory is essentially a variety of marriage, or at least an endorsement of it, Nair sees it as capitulation to a conservative institution that people buy into mostly for material reasons. In the end, she argues, the push for same-sex marriage came down to health-care benefits and passing on estates, just as those yuppies in Brooklyn are shacking up in groups to save on rent. In Nair’s analysis, gay marriage “is part of a larger system that has systematically justified the cutting of benefits like health care, forcing individuals to rely on marriage to gain such basic rights.” The fact that marriage does yield real benefits means that those who aren’t married are further excluded and relegated to second-class citizenship.

            While Nair does not offer an ethical defense of Miller’s “drunken hook-ups,” she doesn’t find much to admire in the ethical stance of polyamory, which “doesn’t offer much more than a set of mind-numbing directives … disseminated by people for whom it appears to have become yet another fashionable accessory.” At this point Nair’s equivalence of polyamory with gay marriage may give readers of this magazine a bit of pause, though perhaps reducing marriage to a fashion accessory isn’t the worst thing that could happen to it.

4. The Rise and Fall of Monogamy

If today’s polyamory is a descendant of experiments that were being tried in the 1960s and ’70s (“free love,” group marriage, communal living, and so on), its roots are deeper still. Indeed “polyamory” of a kind has been the prevailing marriage pattern for most of human history, namely a form of polygyny under which one man could be married to multiple women. The shift to monogamy as the dominant and eventually the exclusive marital system was a slow process that began with the rise of agriculture and village life some 11,000 years ago. By the time we get to urban civilizations like ancient Greece and Rome, monogamous marriage has firmly established itself as the legal norm (however subject to violation), and this pattern has prevailed, with a few exceptions, down to the present.

            The extent to which monogamy drove off the old system of polygyny in urbanizing civilizations worldwide suggests that this shift served a fundamental requirement of civilization itself. Geoffrey Miller points out that one advantage of monogamy is that it can reduce the spread of sexually transmitted disease, a real problem when people start crowding into cities. A more important reason is that monogamy reduced competition among males, and the violence that can accompany it, while equalizing mating opportunities for all men.

            So what happens when the norm of monogamy is weakened or broken, allowing people to go back to having multiple partners or spouses? Miller detects that “many guys in the Manosphere are terrified that polyamory will expand the sexual underclass.” This, however, assumes that we’re returning to a system of polygyny in which only men have the prerogative of multiple partners—something that would never fly in today’s urban culture. Women may not have full equality at the workplace, but they can hold their own in relationships. Meanwhile, all those non-alpha men should stop worrying that polyamory will make it harder to find a partner. Argues Miller: “Polyamory actually makes it easier, because these guys don’t have to be good enough to be a woman’s primary partner.”

            The implications for gay men aren’t entirely clear, but the implications for men in general are intriguing. Miller’s scenario envisions a world in which competition among men is reduced by the availability of more options for amorous relationships. A possibility that he doesn’t explore is that this expansion of opportunities could allow for greater flexibility and experimentation of a kind that heterosexual monogamy discourages. The persistence of monogamy has forced men to enter the arena with a single-minded goal, one that precludes any thought of swerving from the straight and narrow path, properly so called. A gradual acceptance of polyamory as the norm could free all those Kinsey Two’s and Three’s from the straightjacket that keeps them grimly clinging to the Zero. Lifting the all-consuming fear that one might just be a teeny bit attracted to other males could emancipate a lot of men from an age-old taboo.

* “Open Relationships, Nonconsensual Nonmonogamy, and Monogamy among U.S. Adults: Findings from the 2012 National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior.” Archives of Sexual Behavior, July 2018.