Essay | Autobiography | Polyamory
In Defense of Polyamory
Polyamory is a vital constituent of human sexuality. It should neither be denigrated nor denied, but celebrated
I am a gay, polyamorous man. I have been polyamorous all my active gay life. I was polyamorous 22 years before the term was coined in May, 1992. For the first 22 years of my love life, there wasn’t an adjective for what I was or how I lived and loved.
Those of you out there who are about to turn off and walk away because you’re not interested in another gay sex romp through a vast wasteland of loose morals and aberrant sexual behavior, don’t do it. It’s not necessary. If you stick around, you might learn something applicable to emotive, romantic, sexual beings of any gender, any sexual orientation.
This is not a story about a gay man having orgies with multiple other gay men. It is not a story about gays being sexual omnivores nor about how gay men whore it up, sleep around, and constantly engage in immoral, anomalous sexual conduct.
This is an essay about polyamory. It involves a gay man, gay love, and gay sex because I use me and my experiences to punctuate it. But the lessons and observations have universal application.
A hard-coded, genetic predisposition
People of all genders and all sexual orientations have emotional involvements with, romantic feelings for, deep spiritual love for, and sexual attraction to others. Often, it’s just one other at a time. I suspect that that’s not because of 10,000 years of societal convention enforced by religious proscription but rather because of a genetic predisposition.
Either way and nonetheless, there are millions of people in societies and cutures worldwide, of all genders and all sexual orientations who find themselves romantically involved, in deep spiritual love, or sexually intimate with more than one other person simultaneously.
That is neither novel nor unusual. Since the start of recorded history six millennia ago, literature documents that all societies have had so many such people and so many such instances as to make them commonplace even where prohibited by the most stringent religious interdicts.
That should tell one something — that it is human nature to so behave. Any rational person should conclude that the drive to polyamory is in the genes. It is so prevalent even in the face of millennia of teaching and preaching against it and of the threat of the direst consequences that it can spring from no other source.
It’s a pre-coded, hard-wired, genetic predisposition in humans. Though not in all humans because many do maintain one committed relationship at a time with ease and satisfaction.
But millions do not. Millions find themselves not just capable but needful of romantic, deeply spiritual, or meaningful sexual relations with more than one person simultaneously. Such people are incomplete without that additional input. A commanding compulsion to find that completion must be behind their driving need. Otherwise, people would not risk the likely consequences. We may safely say that a substantial plurality of humankind find themselves not only capable or desirous of but also impelled by an irresistible impulse to polyamorous love.
I am one such person. I have known that from my coming out. I have the capacity and the need for a deeply spiritual love of more than one man at a time. I recognize my abiding requisite of sexual and emotional fulfillment from more than one man simultaneously. On only one occasion in my now long life, have I found myself so completely satisfied and fulfilled by one person that I neither needed nor sought emotional, romantic, or sexual involvement with another.
John and Joe
I came out in October 1970, after graduating from Johns Hopkins University. I took a job in Washington D.C. as a computer systems programmer for a mainframe manufacturer. I got an apartment in Alexandria high up in a multi-high-rise complex. I was and had been since 11, securely closeted.
One night, in a painfully unsatisfying state of longing, I stood looking out my window at the building across the pool compound. I saw two lovers romping naked in their living room. They wrestled for a while, then adjourned to the bedroom. They hadn’t drawn the window shades. Backlit by the low light from a lamp on a nightstand behind them, they alternately wrestled and writhed in apparent ecstasy. I watched them for more than an hour until they finished. They slept, holding each other closely. They never did turn out the light.
I counted the floors up from the ground and the windows in from the left until I identified the floor and number of their apartment. I went over the following evening, a Friday, and knocked. One of them opened the door. I made some excuse about why I was there. I finagled a bit. He invited me in.
As we stood talking in the living room, the other of them came whistling down the hall with his head down and rubbing his sopping hair with a bath towel. He strode naked into the room. As he pulled the towel down from around his head, he looked up only to spot four eyes gazing at him, two with some degree of consternation, two with evident longing.
He stopped in mid-stride; the whistling dropped away.
“Oh,” he said.
“I didn’t know we were expecting company,” he continued as he casually wrapped the towel around his waist with not a hint of embarrassment.
They were John and Joe. It was John with the wet hair and towel in hand. They had been together five years. John was a D.C. cop. Joe was the assistant head of the committee charged with the development and building of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. When it was finished, he would become its assistant director.
Not surprisingly, given the setup, it was they who brought me out. I had my first gay sex with them, indeed, my first sex ever. I was 22.
I was sexually and emotionally attracted to each of them. I also enjoyed them together as a pair. I spent time with each singly and with them together. I took away something distinct from each of those three dynamics. I wouldn’t say I was in love. Things didn’t click in that sense. But I was surely in lust and fast establishing a sound basis for each of two great and lasting friendships.
They were fantastic guys, kind, gentle, considerate, and sexy. They took me under their collective wings. We spent much time together both in bed and out. I was equally interested in and attracted to each for his particular characteristics and interests. Neither was jealous of the time I spent with the other. I was not a threat to their partnership but an enhancement in a way.
As for myself, I realized that I could have a natural, healthy, substantial, and intense emotional connection to two men engaged in ménage à trois.
Neither fell in love with me. I fell in love with neither. But we developed a fondness that funded a lasting, emotional bond between us that endured for so long as we knew each other. It included an intense sexual component until I met Tommy and Michael some few weeks later.
Tommy and Michael
I first met Tommy and Michael at a dinner I accidentally crashed. My boyfriend Michael Z. lived on the top floor of a low-rise, nine-story apartment building on 6th Street SW, D.C., a block from Potomac Park on the Potomac River. He missed a date one Sunday night that we had set for dinner.
The week before, he had introduced me to Raj and Ulf, who lived below on the eighth floor. They had been gracious and had invited me back anytime.
I wasn’t in a mood to go to the bar or to go home alone, so, when he didn’t answer my knock at his door, I went down and knocked on theirs.
Ulf answered the door. He was welcoming, but explained that they were hosting a late dinner for Tommy and Michael, the two fellows from across the hall, on the occasion of their seventh anniversary. I apologized for interrupting and was about to turn away when he said to come in just the same.
“There is more than enough food and Michael and Tommy can do with meeting some new blood,” he said with a smile and wink.
Before we left the dinner table, I was hopelessly and undeniably in love with them. I loved each of them for the particular person and personality he was. I loved the independent entity that was the two of them operating in tandom.
After dinner, we adjourned to the living room for cognac and conversation. Michael and Tommy sat on the sofa against one wall. Raj and Ulf sat in their recliners against the opposite wall. I sat on the floor with my back to the entertainment unit on Raj’s and Ulf’s side. Facing the sofa with Ulf’s German Shepard Anja’s head in my lap, I gazed both with disbelief and thankfulness to Gaia at the sources of my serendipitous providence.
We five sat talking for hours and hours about anything and everything. When Ulf finally pled impending work, we arose and began to leave.
Michael looked at Tommy, who nodded his head almost imperceptibly. Michael asked whether I would like to go to their apartment for a final nightcap and some more conversation.
Their apartment occupied the eighth-floor’s northwest corner. It was dark. The whole of the living room’s north- and west-facing walls was ceiling-to-floor glass. Thrust fully into the corners, the curtains stood aside and left the broad glass expanse open to the night. Starlight, dimmed by the city’s night lights streamed in throught the windows.
They left the lights off. Michael poured us each a brandy in the kitchen. He heated the bottom of each glass with a lit match until the aroma rose to fill the confined space.
We walked into the living room. They sat in the middle of the massive U-shaped sofa that faced the west window. It was the only seating in room. There was more than enough space for me on the sofa. Instead, I chose to sit cross-legged on the floor facing them with my back against the window ledge. It was me back-lit by the light this time. I gazed at their eyes and their crotches as the night-glow cast shadows and illuminated spaces on their faces and chests.
We sat there talking for another couple of hours when Tommy disappeared down the hall. Moments later, Michael excused himself and followed. I swiveled around on the floor and faced the window. I snifted and sipped the last of my brandy while looking out at the city’s night lights twinkling on the dark Potomac waters.
Michael returned. He moved to a point directly in front of me.
“Both of us want to sleep with you,” he said.
“You choose which. The other will have no hard feelings,” he continued.
“I so want the both of you as friends,” I began.
“I will do nothing to jeopardize that possibility. I will not risk losing that friendship by chosing one of you over the other,” I continued without hesitation.
“I will sleep with both of you or neither. But if neither, then I hope you will let me sleep on the couch. I’ve had too much to drink to drive home,” I finished.
Michael stood over me, gazing silently into my eyes for a moment, then nodded and went back down the hall. Presently, he walked naked and aroused into the living room. He stood over me again. As I ogled what was inches from my face, he extended his hand. I reached up and grasped it. He led me to the big bedroom with the big king-size bed where Tommy laid in an equal state of undress and arousal.
After the most intensely rewarding sex I had had to that date, I slept with them in that king-size bed. I was in the middle. They lay on their sides to my left and right. Each cradled his head on one of my shoulders. My arms extended under their necks and wrapped around their backs until my hands rested on their waists. I pulled them close against me.
We loved then slept like that the next night, and the next, and the next for the three years we were together until Tommy left. Michael and I remained together another year until he, too, left.
I have since thought about what caused the three of us to break up like that. It was not a flaw in our polyamorous relationship.
I think Tommy was already looking to leave their partnership when I met them. They had brought each other out in their second year at Harvard Law School in 1963. The night I met them was the seventh anniversary of their first night together. Neither had ever been with another man until that night with me.
I think that by that time, Tommy was feeling the need to do what most gay men do once they’ve come out — play around. He needed to have affairs, to experience sex and intimate relations with others. I think he had been feeling that need before I met them. Whether he had discussed it with Michael, I never knew. For three years, I satisfied that need. Then, it reasserted itself, and he did what he was about to do when we met, leave to play around.
Once he had satisfied that need, he settled with a man with whom he stayed for so long as I knew of him. Whether they were polyamorous, i.e., whether they had an “open relationship,” I never knew.
As for Michael, I think that we would be together today but for my enduring habit of making decisions on singular matters of life-altering proportions on my own. I neither consulted nor discussed my thinking or decision with another, even another of importance to me who would be affected. It’s a failing of long-standing. I made a stupid decision that lost him to me. It was my fault, not any attributable to the polyamorous nature of our relationship.
When I was with the two of them, I never sought an affair or even just raw, physical sex with someone else. Between the two of them, they satisfied all my needs and fulfilled all my expectations. I had no desire to have a meaningful relationship with anyone else. I had no desire to find sexual gratification anywhere else. I had no interest, no expectation, and no need of further growth that they did not satisfy between them.
My encounter with them was the most magnificent, beautiful, and fathomless love I have known. Not even with Loy, whom I profoundly loved from the outset and for the nearly nine years until his death, have I been so fulfilled and contented as I was with the two of them.
That is the stuff of polyamorous legend.
Other incidents
I have since been involved in a love affair with a pair of lovers three times.
In one in San Francisco, I fell in love with them both. I would have moved in, but they weren’t ready to invite another as an equal into their relationship. They related to me as a dear friend with whom they were happy to share their bed from time to time but not to share their union.
The second, also in San Francisco, reversed the dynamics. They fell in love with me and wanted me to join them. I loved them dearly as friends and playmates but not so deeply that I wanted to join them permanently.
In Alaska, I was a law clerk in Fairbanks for the academic year 1978-’79. So far as I ever knew, I was the only gay man in Fairbanks. So, I often spent weekends in Anchorage, which had the one gay bar in the state. Early on, I met a gay couple with whom I developed a strong relationship. I stayed with them every time I went to Anchorage. When my year was up, they asked me to join them. A law firm in Philadelphia offered me a job. I had had enough of Alaska. I went to Philadelphia.
Tandom polyamorous relationships
Commitment in a three-way relationship is not the only manifestation of polyamory. One can love two people simultaneously, in tandem and have a deep, meaningful relationship with each, with them knowing nothing of each other. In each of the two worlds, one finds satisfaction and meaning not available in the other. One has particular needs satisfied in one relationship that the other can not gratify.
That is not to denigrate the committed relationship or the committed partners. It is to recognize that often, no one person can or will satisfy all the emotional, psychological, intellectual, or physical needs of another for all time. Men just aren’t built that way. I suspect that the same is true of women but to a lesser extent.
In my life, I have had four long-lasting, spousal-like relationships. The first with Michael and Tommy. The remaining three with one person. In each of those three, I told the person that I could not promise to be monogamous. I did not promise to be “faithful” in that sense
To me, fidelity is a commitment to grace the other’s life with love, to cherish, nurture, and support him in his needs, and always to be there for him when he is available. Fidelity in love does not equate with monogamy. Fidelity is a state of mind and intent. Monogamy is crap.
Celebrate polyamory
People are complex psychological beings. That complexity can manifest as multiple, emotional, romantic, or sexual needs that any one relationship with any one person can not satisfy. It is not just predictable but also a commonplace expectation.
The six-millennia-long recorded history of humankind documents that in full. One has only to read to find that polyamory is and has always been a regular feature of mankind’s intimate relationships.
Polyamory is a natural and prevalent element in human beings. It serves a critical function. It should be neither denied nor denigrated. Where it exists in viable and productive relationships, one should instead celebrate it.
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