It’s pride month and that brings up the topic of whether ENM folks belong at Pride events. That is, at Pride events specifically because of their non-monogamy.
Stating my bias and privilege up-front: I’m white, male, middle-class, cisgender, abled, and more or less straight-passing most of the time. I don’t think I have any standing to make judgments for others on this topic. I just have some historical observations and some ponderings to jot down.
First off, non-monogamy is a big umbrella. If we’re talking about “the lifestyle” aka Swinging, I can see why a lot of people would be sketched out about swingers being represented at Pride. Swinging has long been heavily associated with well-to-do, often culturally conservative white folks who indulge in private promiscuity while publicly propping up institutions of oppression. It also has a long and ugly history of sexist homophobia: i.e. it’s fine for women to hook up, especially as part of a threesome with a man, but men hooking up is taboo.
From what I hear the lifestyle has evolved a lot, but it’s still widely viewed as recreational rather than an orientation. I’m open to arguments otherwise but I don’t see an obvious argument for traditional swinger representation at Pride.
Then there’s Polyamory and Relationship Anarchy. This is where it gets fuzzier, because some people look at those as lifestyle choices, and others see them as orientations.
My introduction to Polyamory was similar I think to how a lot of white folks of my era found it: in the context of mostly middle-class white libertarians. “Economic conservative, socially liberal” folks who more or less made common cause with conservatives, but who were proud of their irreligious “freethinking” status. Having spent a lot of my life embedded in that group, I have a lot to say about everything that’s fucked about it. Today is not the day for that laundry list.
But I will say that my first experience of Poly group meetups was in that context. And it was not what I would call a pride-friendly group of people. I distinctly remember attending a polyamory panel at the Heinlein centennial in 2007. Panelists were happy to rail at the gay community for “failing to support” them.
There was a tiny seed of truth to their complaint: there was and is a contingent of well-to-do white male gay men who are more than happy to practice respectability politics while throwing gay kinksters, transfolk, genderfluid folk, lesbians and bi women, “too flamboyant” gay men, and anyone else who doesn’t practice white-picket-fence monogamy under the bus, for clout.
But panelists at this event weren’t making fine distinctions: it was just “the gays threw us under the bus for marriage equality”. Blech.
And in general polyamory in the world of white technocrat libertarians more often than not skews weird and cultlike and creepy. For all of its high-minded talk of freedom and release from the bonds of taboo and superstition, in practice it often boils down to men seeking to complete their privilege bingo card by building a harem. Often with extremely sketchy interpretations of BDSM thrown in for good measure. Again: blech.
See also: the stereotypical Instagram Poly Influencer account, featuring a white guy and two women in a triad doing Photogenic Aspirational White People Things together. While being pointedly silent during moments of social justice tragedy or remembrance. There’s a reason I’ve largely stopped following white ENM “authority” accounts.
Once again: I can see why people would look askance at giving this community space at Pride.
In the past few years I’ve sought out non-white, non-patriarchal, queer, gender-expansive voices on ENM. This has brought some refreshing new perspectives. Perspectives that have shifted and deepened my understanding of non-monogamy as more than merely an exercise in living out an individual dream of sexual/romantic freedom.
When you look at non-monogamy, not as a rejection of an outmoded religious taboo, but as reframing of human relationship pitched directly against colonialist, patriarchal values of ownership and value-capture… it starts to get more interesting. When it becomes about consciously rejecting the model of “owning” other people; about demolishing barriers to living-in-community; about rejecting the value of structural goal-seeking in relationships and replacing it with an embrace of perpetual growth and change… then it starts to take on a more truly liberatory aspect.
One way I’ve seen it stated: being non-monogamous doesn’t automatically make you queer. But non-monogamy can be practiced as a deliberate queering of relationships. An expansion of possibility that disrupts assumptions about what relationships are “supposed” to look like, creates space, and reinforces other expansions of what love can look like.
It’s also important to acknowledge how inextricably the rejection of compulsory monogamy has been woven into queer liberation movements throughout history. Just as we wouldn’t have Pride without women of color, or without transfolk, we wouldn’t have it without proud sluts.
When it comes to the question of “is it an orientation or a practice”, my understanding is fuzzier than before. Certainly I observe that some people are more naturally comfortable in non-monogamy than others, which does seem to suggest that it’s an inherent orientation, to some extent.
But it’s also very difficult in the current culture to say for sure how much of someone’s difficulty with jealousy etc. is because of their nature. Versus how much is conditioning from birth to view perfect eternal romantic fidelity as their only possible hope of happiness in this life.
One reason I’m still a little uncomfortable calling it an orientation is for a reason that’s maybe a little backwards from what you might expect. If we’re to take seriously the case put forward by books like Sex at Dawn, compulsory monogamy is a recent, miniscule aberration when set against the vast bulk of human history and prehistory. I almost worry that framing non-monogamy as an orientation potentially sets it up to be viewed as a “quirk” a few people have, rather than as the human default state.
But this is not something I have strong opinions on, let alone the desire to assert those opinions on anyone else.
For myself, at this moment: I think I do belong at Pride as a man who is happily effeminate and/or gender-bending in some ways, and who often finds other men sexy as hell.
When it comes to belonging at pride for being non-monogamist: I personally have not experienced notable oppression for being a slut. In fact the vast majority of cis straight-passing white men like me will never experience oppression for being sluts, whether they call it “non-monogamy” or just “boys being boys”. On the other hand, people of color, trans folk, and visibly queer people experience all kinds of extra harassment, discrimination, and violence for being “promiscuous” (or merely being stereotyped as such).
If I can create more space and normalization for these folks by being out and proud as a slut with them, then count me in.
Very well said. Thank you