Group Sex
Communal Ethics of Eroticism, Free Love and the Extended Family

Fifth Estate Note: Since his 1991 review/essay “Operation Gender Blur” [FE #336, Spring, 1991] Sunfrog has written about radical sexuality for the Fifth Estate. Both 1992’s “Pornography and Pleasure: Beyond Capital, Beyond Patriarchy” [FE #340, Autumn 1992] and 1993’s “Queer Anarchy: Anarcha-Faggots Demand to be De-Manned, a (de)Manifesto” [FE #342, Summer 1993] garnered extensive reactions from our readers, from thankful praise to condemnatory criticism. With “Group Sex,” we welcome the return of Sunfrog’s thoughtful, passionate, and uncompromising erotic politics to our pages.

An edited excerpt of a chapter from a much larger work, Utopian Prospects, Communal Projects: Visionary Experiments in Literature and Everyday Life, this essay reflects Sunfrog’s intellectual and collective pursuits since he left Detroit to establish a rural commune in Tennessee. While the other chapters in Sunfrog’s study (addressing ecology and work respectively) cover terrain familiar to many FE readers, this treatise on free love focuses on aspects of the personal as political often ignored in activist periodicals.

In his self-published book, Sunfrog mingles radical social theory, history, literary criticism, and personal narrative to create a festive utopian vision. This abridged version excludes his extensive analysis of the novels The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk and Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach, that figure prominently in the larger work. To see more of Sunfrog’s literary analysis, libertarian vision, and communal life, we encourage readers to read Ron Sakolsky’s review in this section [FE #355, Fall-Winter, 2000] and order the complete text available from the author. See review for ordering information.

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“Free love? As if love is anything but free!”

—Emma Goldman, “Marriage and Love,” in The Traffic in Women

“Most plans for creating a more just society focus on ameliorating human misery. They address unemployment, hunger, illiteracy, class-based inequity, unequal access to medical care, pollution, overpopulation, and discrimination based on sex, race, age, or membership in other devalued groups. While I care about all of those problems, I also wonder why so many of the proposed solutions make me shudder with dread. Perhaps it is because people who take on such enormous political chores are usually suffering from burnout. There is no room in their brave new worlds for fun, creativity, ornamentation, play, and desire. I am skeptical of utopian schemes that don’t take into account the human need for adventure.”

—Pat Califia, “Sluts in Utopia: The Future of Radical Sex,” in Public Sex

Is free love a relic of the past? Does principled promiscuity still persist at the dawn of the twenty-first century? Where do anti-authoritarian radicals stand in the cultural combat that would like to see erotic experiments relegated to a debased subculture, viewed on a talk show, banned from the Internet, or devoured by a religious holy war?

Despite the demonization of deviance and AIDS-era erotophobia, free love experiments continued to flourish throughout the 1990s and show no signs of demise as we begin a new century. The latest wave in the free love movement is often organized around the concept of “Poly,” for polyamory and polysexual.

Polyamory refers to the philosophy and practice of loving more than one person simultaneously. Etymologically, the word polyamory suggests “many loves” and has recently become an umbrella term for a variety of alternative relationship models that share an ethic of compassion, integrity, and complete honesty to combat the negative social stigma associated with words like cheating, swinging, and promiscuity. Polysexual, almost a synonym for utopian bisexual, the term describes a person with an inclusive sexual orientation that embraces not only loving people of both genders but having an erotic relationship with the entire universe and life itself.

Today, polyamory and polysexuality attract many younger iconoclasts informed by several diverse cultural influences—including anarchism, punk rock, bisexuality, neotribal dance music, modern primitivism, safer-sex, paganism, Radical Faeries, Queer Nation, and sex-positive feminist writers, such as Annie Sprinkle, Susie Bright, Pat Califia, and Carol Queen. Alternatives to monogamy have a vast history in the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and queer communities where, until only recently, exclusive monogamous relationships were an aberration rather than the norm.

Contemporary polyamory emerges in a variety of arrangements—including committed groups, orgies or safer sex play parties, one-night stands, flings, affairs, and festive flirtations. However, the most common form of polyamory is the nonexclusive primary relationship that honors the need for healthy and honest sexual liaisons with other people without threatening or undermining the relationship with the primary partner. When parameters of safety and consent are clearly negotiated, casual sex can be genuinely liberating.

However, free love did not begin with the counterculture of the 1960s or 1990s. Historians and anthropologists have shown that archaic models for what we call “alternative lifestyles” today exist cross-culturally and throughout history. In On the Prehistory of Marriage, Josef Kohler constructs an anthropological argument for the prevalence of “community in marriage” or “totemistic group marriage” in a variety of primitive cultures.

In Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, Arthur Evans expands Kohler’s ideas about sexual variety among primitive peoples as he describes orgies and sex worship in Africa, America, and other parts of the pre-modern world. About these ecstatic rituals, Evans writes, “Their orgies were acts of sexual worship to the power of sex [primitive peoples] felt in themselves and in nature around them. Nature people did, indeed, believe that through such acts their bodies would become stronger, the crops would grow taller, the sun would shine brighter, and the rains would come in profusion when needed. But they believed these things because they had a collective tribal feeling of the power of sex throbbing through the whole of nature; their experience of sex was so open, public, communal and intense that they felt it reverberate through the whole cosmos.”

Additionally, Evans traces the historical roots of sexual liberation to early European paganism and nature worship, contrasting uninhibited, orgiastic rites with our modern condition of “alienation from nature, sexual repression, self-denial, and obedience.” Throughout his book, Evans convincingly suggests that economic injustice and exploitation of nature cannot be divorced from the wholesale denial of the body that is the cornerstone of normative Christian and capitalist values.

“Hippie”-era Orgies

In America, the roots of contemporary erotic experiments can also be traced to nineteenth-century utopian communities. Free love also continued to exist in bohemian enclaves throughout the twentieth century. Many factors contributed to the well-known reputations of “hippie”-era orgies and open relationships in the late 1960s and early 1970s, distinguishing this period of erotic experimentation from previous examples. “Second wave” feminism, Stonewall-era gay liberation, the widespread availability of birth control, media attention focused on the counterculture, and the rise of sympathetic scholarly investigation into radical movements all contributed to widening celebrations and condemnations of free love. For participants, free love was an emblem for the convergence of the public and private, political and personal, social and spiritual.

Collective gestures towards erotic freedom and experimental relationships offer a profound counter-tradition to the prevalent puritan and ascetic ethic in American history. By studying the history and philosophy of free love and exploring both the limits and possibilities it offers for contemporary radicals seeking free relationships beyond the constricts of romantic capitalism, we can hopefully renew our confidence in the power of love to challenge social conventions and help create more pleasurable lives.

The Nuclear Family, Authoritarian Ideology, and Expansive Alternatives

To understand the modern critique of marriage and the nuclear family, many radical thinkers point to the insights pioneered in the 1930s by renegade psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich. In The Sexual Revolution, Reich charges that “the patriarchal family is the structural and ideological place of reproduction of every social order based on authoritarian principles.”

Rather than celebrate marriage as a natural outgrowth of love between two people, Reich asserts that any marginally redemptive features of modern marriage are consumed by the need to perpetuate the existing economic, political, and social order; thus, marriage and the family become mere “ideological training ground[s] for every member of authoritarian society.” For Reich, a social revolution must be a sexual revolution, and the affirmation of life must begin with an affirmation of erotic pleasure.

From this critical rejection of conventional monogamous marriage and the patriarchal nuclear family, radical activists in the late 1960s and the early 1970s attempted to incorporate a Reichian ethic of sexual affirmation into social and sexual alternatives that included committed communes and group marriages along with ecstatic orgies and casual swinging.

The manner in which we define family as a culture continues to be a loaded and controversial topic. Living with other people and raising healthy children are stressful and energy-consuming endeavors in both traditional and nontraditional families, in suburban apartments or at rural communes. In the Ecotopian Encyclopedia, Ernest Callenbach contends, “In the long sweep of human history, the nuclear family will probably be seen as a very brief aberration, brought about by the special needs of industrial capitalism and the isolated suburban living made possible by cars, but insufficient for nurturing and supporting human beings. In [communes and extended families] we will approximate the ancient groupings our species has relied on for survival: small bands whose variety of strengths and talents give great resilience against outside threats, and whose interior psychological life is rich and complicated enough to challenge its members’ developmental potentials.”

Today, a Reichian analysis of the coercion inherent in the patriarchal, heterosexual, nuclear family has lost some ground: leading gay rights activists have ceased calling for a Whitmanesque “army of lovers” and are begging politicians for the right to imitate heterosexual marriage; a few feminists have joined the religious right in a legislative war against sexual freedom and the First Amendment; self-righteous pronouncements about the sanctity of the traditional family flood the culture as our religious and political leaders cling to rigid notions of kinship. Nonetheless, common alternatives to life-long heterosexual marriages continue to abound, ranging from serial monogamy to single-parent households to unmarried cohabitation. Furthermore, a variety of libertarian models for extended families and erotic affinity groups that involve networks of lovers and their children, although a minority, refuse to go away.

Feminism and free love

American sex-radicals from the nineteenth century to the present frequently include feminist ideals in their advocacy of erotic liberation. For many nineteenth-century activists, free love was synonymous with a feminist critique of marriage as a legal manifestation of gender oppression and male supremacy. In Free Love in America, Taylor Stoehr observes that “[w]omen in particular stood to gain” from the abolition of marriage and the flowering of alternatives; according to Stoehr, “every militant free lover” of the nineteenth century “was also a feminist.”

Emma Goldman’s vigorous exhortations in “Marriage and Love” typify the radical dismissal of marriage desired by many late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century feminists: She wrote:

“The institution of marriage makes a parasite of woman, an absolute dependent. It incapacitates her for life’s struggle, annihilates her social consciousness, paralyzes her imagination, and then imposes its gracious protection, which is in reality a snare.”

Anarchist, free love advocates at the nineteenth-century utopian colony Modern Times, like Goldman, focused their rhetoric on a critique of marriage. Modern Times’ most adamant admonishment of marriage came from a married couple, Mary and Thomas Nichols. In their eloquent attack on erotic restraint, the Nicholses charge: “A true marriage may be what the laws call adultery while the real adultery is an unloving marriage. [Nature gave men and women] the power, and consequently the right, to love more than one person at the same time to have and enjoy a succession and a variety of passions. Of that system of superstition, bigotry, oppression, and plunder, which we call civilization, the monogamic, indissoluble marriage is the center and the soul. If marriage is false it must be destroyed; and the social system that rests upon falsehood, must be false, as every one sees and feels society to be—false and rotten to its heart’s core. Let it be destroyed; the sooner, the better. The society we want is men and women living in freedom and governed by their attractions.”

A century later, however, when free love was born again in the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, the desire for sexual freedom did not always acknowledge the need for sexual equality. During this period, free love no longer signified an explicit feminist critique of marriage as much as it heralded an invocation of and invitation to indulgence in primordial impulses and intense pleasures with a variety of partners. If the practice of erotic openness does not include clear negotiation, consent, and an explicit critique of male-female power relationships in a sexist society, free love can further victimize rather than liberate women.

However, this is not a failure of the philosophy of free love as much as it is a testimonial to the fact that widespread socialization into traditional gender roles and puritanical sexual repression cannot be entirely overcome without radically restructuring society. An overt refusal or unintentional inability by both men and women to maintain the historical connection between free love and feminism during the sexual revolution may be responsible, in part, for the feminist backlash against sexual freedom that took hold in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Addressing this backlash in “Among Us, Against Us: Right Wing Feminism” in her book Public Sex, Pat Califia chronicles the propaganda and political goals of the feminist anti-pornography movement spearheaded by Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon. While Dworkin and MacKinnon focus their crusades on a particular issue, their rhetoric typifies all-encompassing erotophobic values that gained popularity among feminists during the Reagan years.

Califia’s vigorous criticism attacks this new feminist morality on many fronts, but most importantly, she insists that anti-sex feminism is reactionary and counterrevolutionary because it reinscribes a Victorian ideal that “women need to be protected from sex” to avoid “being degraded and victimized by out-of-control men” and it lends itself to co-optation by “powerful segments of our society to create a sex-negative climate that will facilitate the suppression of all forms of sexual dissent.”

Far from a problem with the philosophy of feminism and gender equality, the new prudery is merely an odd manifestation of patriarchal repression clothed in feminist rhetoric. And, far from condemning the free consensual choices of any woman, sex-radical feminists merely seek to honor free erotic desire as part of their social liberation without the threat of legal and moral persecution from politicians, preachers, and, unfortunately, some feminists.

As contemporary sex-positive feminists reclaim feminism and desire from the dire Puritanism of the new Victorians and erotophobic sex police, the utopian voices of a small yet eclectic, eccentric, and egalitarian free love movement remain vibrant, promising a panoply of possible alternatives for people of all genders and sexual orientations.

The Erotic Universe: Sacred Sea & Polysexuality

In the era of identity politics, labeling oneself can be an art form. In this age of diversity, it can be a way of honoring differences or dividing people into antagonistic cliques and special interest groups. When I choose to call myself a polysexual—or a pagan or an anarchist—I am participating in the labeling game of identity politics at the same time I am trying to move beyond it. To employ the term polysexual—which may appear exotic or vague—is to insist that my sexuality cannot be encompassed by the existing terms in our limited lexicon of libidinal labels. More than another sexual orientation, polysexuality advocated a philosophy of free love and even attempted to institutionalize its practice. By looking briefly at some of these examples, we can see how the idea of free love was tested in large, idealistic, communal utopias. These historical examples demonstrate the need for freedom, flexibility, and forgiveness in the practice of free love more than the desirability of one model over another.

This segment of my research revolves around the historical literature about four distinct communal experiments: Oneida, founded by John Humphery Noyes in New York state in 1848; Kerista, founded in 1971 in San Francisco; Modern Times, founded by Stephen Pearl Andrews and Josiah Warren in 1851 in what is now Brentwood, New Jersey; and, Home, founded by three families on Puget Sound in Washington state in 1896. These four groups can be separated into two distinct models for free love in community.

Oneida and Kerista attempted to implement clearly organized, complex systems for love in utopia while Modern Times and Home promoted free love as an ideal without institutionalizing it as a practice. Although each of these groups deserves much further attention, this cursory survey should illustrate some important points about the practice of free love in a communal setting.

Both the Oneidans and Keristans attempted to implement a structured context for multi-partner relationships, practiced group therapy techniques of mutual criticism for maintaining a common identity and social control, followed an outspoken leader, and pooled labor and resources communally. At Modern Times as well as at Home, members tempered the communal urge with a strong libertarian spirit, worked independently in a variety of fields, vigorously published radical theories, and lived, as much as possible, according to their individual desires. While both Modern Times and Home clearly had founders and outspoken members, both groups espoused anarchist ideals and neither community expected its members to conform to the wishes of a leader or the ideology of the entire group.

Because unconventional, erotic arrangements were part of the official program, we can learn more about the actual sexual practices at Oneida and Kerista. For the anarchists, free love constituted a theory intended to emancipate women from the patriarchy and liberate lovers from the dictates of the state. While I imagine that some of these anarchist colonists led animated and lighthearted love lives that would startle even contemporary sensibilities, the literature on Home and Modern Times down plays the actual love part of free love. Just as the available sources avoid any prurient details about Modern Times and Home, many contemporary anarchist collectives practice polyamory without betraying their own privacy by publicly proselytizing for it.

John Humphrey Noyes’s nineteenth-century communal outpost at Oneida, New York prospered for thirty years and is probably the most widely researched and discussed attempt at practicing free love in a utopian context. Inspired by the biblical notion that in heaven disciples “neither marry nor are given in marriage,” Oneidans advocated and attempted a form of Christian free love they labeled complex marriage, pioneered birth control with the practice of male continence (sexual intercourse without ejaculation, also known as coitus reservatus).

Innovative Sexual Practices

While the Oneidans firmly rejected claims they were irresponsible, hedonistic, or perverse, they clearly and radically experimented with sexuality as men accepted responsibility for birth control and women acknowledged orgasms a hundred years before the so-called sexual revolution. With successful business endeavors, a sophisticated communal culture, innovative sexual practices, and an extended family identity, the community collectively articulated what Lawrence Foster calls Noyes’s “millenarian expectation that the ideal patterns of the kingdom of heaven could literally be realized on earth.”

Despite Oneida’s utopian achievements, complex marriage and communal solidarity could not extend beyond the enchanted vision of the founder. In 1879, two years after Noyes gave up his leadership role, the Oneidans abandoned complex marriage. In 1881, the community dissolved and reformed as a joint-stock company.

Discontent with the strict structure of sexual relations in the community took many forms. Because participation in complex marriage was required of all adult members, because young adults could not choose their first sexual partners but were initiated by older members of the community, because the community leadership decided who could and could not have children, free love at Oneida was not particularly free. Beyond their obvious faults, Noyes and the Oneidans impressed American reformers with the importance of a communal economy and the practice of erotic camaraderie.

Almost a century after the collapse of Oneida’s complex marriage, a handful of hip dreamers attempted to reinvent group marriage without jealousy at Kerista, an urban commune in San Francisco. Despite infectious utopian idealism and a successful community computer business, Kerista’s elaborate social contract and cult of personality (surrounding the group’s unofficial leader) ultimately created an intolerable social climate for the members.

In “A Tale of Two Communes: A Scholar and His Errors,” Michael Cummings offers a critical yet balanced assessment of Kerista’s creative response to the limits of monogamy and final failure to practice polyfidelity in the context of a feminist, egalitarian commune. As in many utopian schemes, the Keristans’ “ambitious visions” proved difficult to sustain in everyday practice.

However, Cummings and former Keristans agree that the commune’s demise did not result from too much freedom in terms of sexual practices, but from a lack of freedom in the communal structure. Cummings believes that polyfidelity provided the Keristans with “a high level of personal gratification and freedom from sexual tension.”

“Delicious Sexual Variety”

In “The Dark Side of Community,” former member Michael Slomiak recalls “the love, delicious sexual variety, intellectual dynamism, humor, and vision.” Similarly, founding Keristan Eve Furchgott remembers “a real sense of belonging to a tribe.” Nevertheless, Slomiak, Furchgott, and other survivors of the Kerista experiment express profound disillusionment with the communal dynamic and the authoritarian power trips of Kerista’s quasi-guru, “Brother Jud.”

In the end, a strong leader and elements of social control severed the tribal bonds and overshadowed the liberating aspects of polyamory. One shortcoming with highly-structured group marriages and erotic communes is the failure to acknowledge more fully the inherently unstructured impulses of human desire. While free love can liberate people from the limits of monogamy, the legacy of Oneida and Kerista shows that authoritarian enforcement of free love in a utopian commune can be as repressive as an unhealthy marriage in the mainstream world.

In contrast, the history of Modern Times and Home gives a dramatically different picture of free love in America. The secular, nineteenth-century anarchist movement for free love crystallized at Modern Times. These American free-lovers drank liberally from the eccentric brew of utopian philosophy proposed by French philosopher Charles Fourier. While the first American Fourierists watered down this extraordinary thinker’s wilder notions of passionate attraction in favor of his attractive socialism, the anarchists significantly modified the socialism while embracing free love as part of their insistence on individualist ideals. Indeed, Fourier’s fantastic speculations sparkle with images of intoxication, festivity, and delight in a passionate new world where, according to twentieth-century Fourierist Peter Lamborn Wilson, “Everything is erotic” and “the only possible society is one composed entirely of lovers.”

In “Modern Times and the Emergence of Free Love,” John Spurlock emphasizes “Modern Time’s tolerance for strange and dangerous ideas” as the factor that made the community a “congenial birth place for free love” as it “attracted radicals who were suspicious of all institutions.” The vibrant collection of nonconformists who converged at Modern Times included several outspoken opponents of conventional marriage such as writer Marx Edgeworth Lazarus and founder Stephen Pearl Andrews. Upon leaving Modern Times, one short-term resident charged that “Wife with them is synonymous with slave, and monogamy is denounced as a vicious monopoly of affection.”

Similar to Modern Times and founded as vibrant response to conventional moralities and strictly organized communities, settlers at the Home colony resisted any formal organization beyond the association that kept the land in common.

In “Anarchist Utopianism in the Progressive Era,” Detroit-based social historian and Fifth Estate contributor Francis Shor describes Home as a “haven for nonconformists” and observes that “colonists advocated free sexual liberation, nudity, communal landholding, and radical politics which, in turn, challenged the dominant norms and values of their neighbors and the wider society.”

Home’s critics in the local media of the time painted a sensational picture of “filthy dreamers” and anarchist “perverts.” However, the colonists frequently earned and celebrated their radical reputation. In “Home: Nest of Anarchy or Haven of Individualism,” Charles LeWarne notes that the community attracted a diverse collection of people including ones who lived in wigwams and tree stumps, lectured on everything from classical history to herbology to astrology, housed fugitives, played music, cross-dressed, discussed philosophy, studied in an extensive library, educated children without rules, ate vegetarian food, and published widely-read journals of anarchist dissent.

Radical luminaries like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman visited Home along with many lesser known labor organizers and radical writers. While Goldman lectured at Home and visited friends there at least twice, she was rumored to have criticized the community—like so many twentieth-century, political activists have criticized “hippie” communes—because “the people seemed more interested in vegetables and chickens than in propaganda.”

According to LeWarne, Home’s notion of free love “was based on the belief that neither state nor church had a right to control the family or sexual relations.” While LeWarne dismisses the possibility of “licentiousness” at Home, a lively controversy concerning communal sexual ethics emerged around the practice of nude bathing. When some Home residents were arrested for swimming naked, the local community divided its support for and against nudity and the prosecuted communards. Radical editor Jay Fox added fuel to the fire with an outspoken rant entitled, “The Nudes and the Prudes” that appeared in The Agitator, a Home-based radical journal. Fox writes:

“Clothing was made to protect the body, not to hide it. [Home had always been] a community of free spirits, who came out into the woods to escape the polluted atmosphere of priest-ridden conventional society. One of the liberties enjoyed by the Homeites was the privilege to bathe in evening dress, or with merely the clothes nature gave them, just as they chose.”

Fox’s exhortations exhibit the uncompromising ethic of freedom that defines anarchist communes today as well as those more than a hundred years ago. Although we can only speculate about the specific relational styles that people at Home enjoyed because the historical literature does not deal with this, it is doubtful that a colony with such fiercely libertarian ideals would frown upon any manifestation of erotic multiplicity.

As at Modern Times, residents of Home lived in private dwellings and pursued individual livelihoods. They sought to survive without laws and practice voluntary cooperation. In sharp contrast to the communal economies and complex marriages of Oneida and Kerista, members of these anarchist free-love societies practiced cultural radicalism without a messianic leader, a constricting social contract, or any singular ideological doctrine beyond total freedom. Founding Home member Oliver Verity described their philosophy as “the personal liberty to follow their own line of action no matter how much it may differ from the customs of the past or present, without censure or ostracism from their neighbor.”

Free love and the polysexual future

The 1980s and ‘90s saw reactionary political and religious leaders mount a bitter moral backlash against erotic alternatives. Harsh penalties have been levied on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and polyamorous parents who, in some tragic cases, lost custody of their children because the government believes it can decide that being legally separated from one’s mother or father is better for a child than learning that humans can love one another in a variety of ways. While a vocal queer, polysexual, and polyamorous contingent exists within the communal movement, we have had to defend vigorously our choices against moralistic suspicion and condemnation from disapproving families, invasive social workers, and in some cases, self-righteous communitarians.

Today, the commune that exists as an enclave of erotic freedom usually invokes values of diversity and tolerance without official collective pronouncements to promote a doctrine of sex radicalism, even though many believe that complete erotic liberation can be an honest and ethical choice for living a freer and fuller life. We remain hesitant to challenge anyone’s prerogative to choose a monogamous, heterosexual lifestyle after living a life riddled with repression for the choices we make.

Beyond Reichian notions that postulate sexual repression, private property, and the patriarchal nuclear family as fundamental sources of misery and alienation in the modern world, I frequently return to inspired revelations of free love’s liberating potential. Truly, the intangible and ineffable power of love itself is what makes polyamory possible. The words of Emma Goldman remind us that love is “the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy the defier of all laws, of all conventions...”

Inheriting the radical legacy of free love, contemporary polyamorists reject the fairy-tale concept of the “one, true soul-mate” inscribed both by conservative religion and commodity culture’s manufactured images of heterosupremacy and couple-ism so pathetically apparent in such cultural artifacts as the pop song, the date movie, and the romance novel. The notion that all of our intimate needs can be met exclusively by one person is a myth that needs to be questioned by the entire culture, even if some people choose not to act on their desires to love more than one person. Humans possess a variety of physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual needs and desires most adequately satisfied by a variety of people in a variety of ways.

Also, expanding definitions of intimacy should by no means be limited to sexual expression. Like the erotic utopians who precede me, our sexually experimental gestures comprise part of creating a new culture.

Ultimately, love provides its own justification. Just as some communes and group marriages fail, others reappear. Whatever the future holds for free lovers, unconditional love and unwavering optimism shape my vision of an amorous and autonomous society. So, with my merry pranksters of passion, we dance into the polysexual future with enthusiasm, experience, and expanding visions of a voluptuous life, challenging conformity and celebrating diversity.