I visited the Siena College LGB Literature class again a couple weeks ago. Much like last time, we talked a lot more about my family structure, and queer politics in general, than we did about the poetry itself. And like last time, they were much quicker on the uptake than most folks. It was fun, even if I feel like I should have pushed the discussion more literary-ward sometimes. I was also intrigued to have one student pop up and talk about the paper she'd done on polyamory. The times they are a changing.

Note to self, however: Your standard line about how your parents thought you and Becca were too young to get married (21) and "Looking back, I can see their point, even though it worked out well" is not going to make sense to college students. Smart as they are, they don't yet know what they don't know.

Since I posted his first letter and my response, I thought it only fair to post John's surprisingly friendly and accommodating, if somewhat missing the point on how term redefining tends to work, response to me.
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Thanks Miriam,

I tend to be a bit conservative in my views. However the Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance goes way, way too far, in my view. 

I mean no disrespect to loving couples, triples, etc. Words are redefined every day. So are laws. What used to mean happy (i.e. "gay"), now means homosexual. What used to be bigamy is now called "three way marriage." This is our life. 

Despite the fact that I've never been published, I'd like to redefine the term "Nobel-prize winning author" so that it applies to me. In this sense, I look forward to this sort of language engineering. Come to think of it, I could also be a "top-grossing CEO", a "billionaire philanthropist", etc. 

You are certainly a talented writer. Your forthright and open style is very refreshing. 

Best wishes on your personal and professional endeavors.

Regards,

John

regarding this. sort of disappointingly predictable, but there you go.

John Francis wrote:

Dear Ms. Axel-Lute:

I read with interest your recent article entitled The Power of “Wife” In the article you say that:

[The words] “married,” “wife,” and “husband” have still got some power. (paraphrase)

I would contend that the ‘free marriage movement’ is destined to strip these words of their power. The very power that the non-conventional groupings like yours are trying to sieze, is the very power that this movement is undermining. That’s exactly why regular, non freaky-deaky, married couples are so intent on crushing the movement.

As a single person, I sometimes also resent the power and prestige that ordinary married couples are afforded in our society. But I feel that because these unions can produce children, they deserve some special treatment and respect from society. I also think that unions that cannot produce children should not be treated with the same deference.

What if I were to say that my ‘husband’ is a canary, and that we should be treated with equal rights, the same as any other married couple? I think this is a slippery slope that will lead to the disempowerment of the words with which everyone is clamoring to describe themselves. It seems like it’s all driven by insecurity and low self-esteem.

"To force a word into currency can be a revolutionary act" ~ Richard Rodriguez (complete article attached)

John

John,

I think my previous article on the subject may address some of your concerns and the reasons I think expanding recognition of family relationships is about the best interests of society, not just those of people in unconventional ones.

But here are a couple specific responses:

It's silly to say that people can't tell the difference between people and animals. "Consenting adults" is a perfectly firm boundary, easy to draw clearly.

As for unions that can produce children--if you are willing to deny marriage to sterile couples, old couples, and couples that don't want to have any kids, then you can have that argument. Otherwise, it's a red herring. I should also point out that my particular marriage could, if we chose, churn out children faster than any heterosexual couple, so you're on thin ice there too. Not to mention that plenty of same-sex couples not only have kids but are raising adopted children--a quite legit social value, as important for the health of society as just creating more children.

I'd be quite happy if the government abandoned the words all together and left it to the religions and individuals to define. Just as "wife" has survived transitioning beyond a meaning that involved possession as chattel, I think it would survive this transition as well. But as long as gov't is overseeing this institution and the words associated with it, they need to think about reasonable ways to allocate it and its benefits, not ones based on knee-jerk bias, which you have not yet proven to me that yours are not.

Best,
Miriam

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( And now, for a positive letter from a Republican voter... )

 
Thanks to Vicky Cristina Barcelona, at least some segment of the country has three-way relationships on the brain. And thanks to the essay I wrote for Babble on poly parenting last fall, I got called in to provide my perspective a couple times last week.

First was the New York Daily News, who did a pretty decent job at a "How does this really work?" kind of article. I have  small quibbles (like the wrong definition of a "V" and the assessment that my parents' concern about my first wedding was the queerness not the youngness, when I know I said only something in passing about our age), but overall it's not particularly misleading or sensational.

Then, also not distressing, but very odd, was my appearance on Boston AM talk radio with Curtis Sliwa. (I can't find an archived version of the show.) I had no idea what to expect. My column in Metroland this week talks about the amusing experience and draws some probably far over-reaching conclusions from it. I kind of regret having begged off doing it a second time the next morning with an hour's notice, due to work commitments, if only to see what Sliwa was like after a night to think over what I'd said the first time. Oh well.
Back to my "lifestyle," I mean life.

   
So in a haze of other things, I missed mentioning last week when my article on poly parenting went live on Babble. It was was brief, and really fairly surface, but I thought it was pretty cool to be able to give a non-sensationalized, first-person perspective on this in a mainstream publication with a broad audience. (I should have guessed what headline they would come up with. Too bad it's the same as one of my favorite erotica stories, by Mary Anne Mohanraj.)

The editor also blogged it on the AOL news blogs, which someone sent me the link to, and I made the mistake of following it. Oy. None of the comments are any different than I would have expected, really. I just had made an unofficial plan not to read them, and should have stuck to it.

Anyhow, since I did, here are a few probably unnecessary responses:

• This was a narrow essay focused on my family and how we parent. I never claimed poly (or marriage of any sort) was easy, and you will never hear me say that.  We have our deep disagreements and ongoing angst, some of it on poly topics. I don't actually believe we're immune to the pressures of the world and human frailties. However, when I say that our challenges do not include simmering jealousy within the triad or problems with parenting, I actually mean it. And when I say that poly also comes with some benefits that help to counterbalance the challenges, I mean it. It's sad to me, though not surprising, that those fairly mild claims are so hard for people to believe.

• To those folks who insist on saying that "eventually one of you will get jealous of the others and leave": Eventually, your wife will cheat on you.

• To the folks who insist we're damaging our children like their free-love parents damaged them: I'm sorry to hear about your irresponsible parents. Get a therapist.

• To the folks who were offended by my making fun of people asking first thing about our sleeping arrangements: Yes, I understand your curiosity. I have spent rather a lot of time patiently indulging people's curiosity. I don't mind it. It's just funny to me that that one comes up first so often, when there are so many more interesting questions to ask. But so you can breathe easy, at the moment we have one bedroom with a king bed and one with a full.

OK. I am not going to spend any more brain space on this right now, cause, you know, why waste more nap time?

I visited a senior seminar on gay & lesbian literature at Siena College today to read some poetry and talk about being a queer poet/journalist. Remembering some of the questions that I had felt unprepared to answer last time I did this, several years ago, I actually prepared some thoughts about different types of poems that may be influenced by the sexuality of the writer such as: response/political poems, outing/explaining poems, and poems where you want to write about something else and the gender of the person you were marrying/dating/fucking is incidental but likely to come up and you have to think about whether it's going to distract your reader from your other point and whether you care.

After some conversation, prompted by the professor, about that latter point, the class proceeded to illustrate it amusingly by asking me only questions about my family and related issues, and practically nothing about writing. What did I expect? It was a group of students at a Catholic college, whose professor partially teaches this class so there is a space to talk about queer issues at all, and they'd just heard about their first poly family.

Luckily, I'm just as happy to talk about that as I am to talk about poetry. Their questions were intelligent, and interestingly quite different from the ones that my peers inevitably ask. Not a single question about either jealousy or who sleeps where. Lots of questions about parenting, legal custody, marriage, and biphobia. (And the exclusivity as a triad question, which is rarer than you might think.) Good on them.

Of course I was also probably inadvertently mean. In the context of talking (very briefly) about our restricted level of openness, I wrapped up by noting that a party like the one referenced in the poem that had raised the question would probably be fine, but that we didn't have so much access to that anymore, not being on a college campus any longer.  It was clear from the looks, and the not-long-later question about where I went to college, that if Siena is having those parties, which seems doubtful, no one told these folks about them. See above. Catholic college, even if a fairly tolerant one. Not Oberlin. Duh, Miriam.

But that was a side note. Overall, I got to read some stuff that I hadn't dusted off in a long time (including one that I had revised largely based on the class of hers I visited last time being confused by an earlier draft), have a good conversation, and get out of the house into the beautiful weather. Good times.

This week's Looking Up: The great(er) marriage debate, and how my family fits in.

Slightly nerve-wracking to come out that explicitly in the paper, but it seemed relevant, and I was getting tired of avoiding it.

Having taken an interest in the unexpected discovery of the poly family of a stuffy Victorian war poet, I went to see if I could find more information than was in the stilted little Wikipedia paragraph that I copyedited.

Sadly, the biography referenced is quite expensive, even used, so I probably won't be picking that up in the very near future, but the different attitudes of the three reviews I found were quite amusing. One almost wonders if they were reading the same book.

I am figuring that this Globe and Mail column is probably the most accurate summary of the book, because it gives the most concrete detail with the least judgment. An excerpt: "As a 25-year-old lawyer, Henry fell in love with Margaret Duckworth, a woman of great charm who had many qualities associated with young men . . . but when he started to court her an impediment emerged. Margaret was already in love with someone else, her cousin, a beautiful young woman named Ella Coltman. They were both members of the Grecians, a club of women who studied Greek poetry, disdained the company of men, and privately gave each other male names drawn from the classics. Margaret announced she would marry Henry only if Ella became part of their intimate life together, and Henry agreed." They each had some other relationships along the way, but the triad lasted until their deaths.

However, as the summaries of the relationship in the other two reviews of the biography I found show, this is just too much for most people to accept.

Either it has to be the man's doing, with the women's relationship ignored:

"Unknown to the world, he also entered into a triangular lifelong relationship with his wife and her best friend, Ella, carefully dividing his favours between the pair of them. The scandal never broke and the gentlemanly and chivalrous Newbolt soon became a sleek establishment figure, fussing over the de luxe binding of his latest book and insisting on wearing velvet knee-breeches and ruffles of the Nelson era when he received his knighthood."
from The Spectator,  Aug 23, 1997  by Andrew Barrow

Or the man has to be the victim of callous and unhousewifely lesbians:

"But not one in a hundred readers would guess the author of that explicitly erotic Viking Love Song, was also the upholder of Victorian values who maintained a bizarre menage a trois with two forcible blue stockings who lived well into their eighties. They shared his London and country life, but not chores. Henry meekly mended his own socks and had little of Bloomsbury comforts."
from Contemporary Review, Jan 1998, Molly Mortimer

Chuckle. Who knew that the distribution of sock-darning was a major complication of multiple-adult households?

From the Wikipedia entry on Sir Henry Newbolt (a poem of whose I have memorized for tonight's Pickin' and Singin' Gatherin' recitation night, which is why I was looking him up):

"A biography of Newbolt published in the 1990s revealed that his wife had a lesbian relationship with Ella Coltman, and even accompanied her on her honeymoon with Newbolt. A further extraordinary aspect was that Newbolt himself enjoyed a sexual relationship with Coltman, in whose Kensington house he was to die. Apparently he had a town wife and an ( official ) country wife."

My edit:

"A biography of Newbolt published in the 1990s revealed that he and his wife also each had a sexual relationship with Ella Coltman, who even accompanied them on their honeymoon. Newbolt died in Coltman's house in Kensington."


I can't really make too much of a habit of copy editing Wikipedia. I'd never have time to do anything else. But every once in a while it's just necessary.

The registrar of the office of vital statistics for the city of Albany is my new hero. She called me back today after yesterday's frustrations, and reported that she'd fought her way up to the director, who finally said OK to domestic partner "as long as they bring you their certificate of domestic partnership" to which she reports that she said "No. I don't make married couples bring me their marriage certificates, I'm not making them do it. Enough is enough." And he backed down.

Principles and spine carry the day!

So after some mess with a late bus and an emergency ride from yip95, Rebecca got there in the nick of time (with a police escort to the office from the front door of City Hall because technically things were closed and they weren't answering their phones to tell security it was OK for her to come up), and we have official pieces of paper on which she has signed as "attendant" and is listed as "domestic partner." Hoorah!!!

So I was so excited by our idea to have Rebecca certify Nadia's birth on the birth certificate, and list her title as co-parent. This perhaps made me less than my usual super-skeptical of bureaucracy. But I've rarely met a "title" field that you couldn't just make up the contents of. Robin listed us both as fiancées on his car loan back in NYC. At Shelterforce I had a dozen titles, and we made up a new appropriate one to fit each circumstance.

And since "title" in this case doesn't confer any official status, and the instructions had an open-ended list of examples ("such as EMT, midwife, father. . ."), I didn't actually worry about it. We were more worried about all the middle names.

Alas, the very nice city registrar says the state health department told her no on "co-parent." They'd take aunt, uncle, friend, father. . . in other words, anything they've heard of. But they don't know what "co-parent" means, so it's not on their list. She didn't know if there was an official written list to choose from somewhere ("This is the state," she says, rolling her eyes when we asked if she could a copy of said list. "I can't get them to give me a copy of the law."), or, as is more likely, there's an unofficial list/set of standards in someone's head.

It's idiotic. We could have said "aunt" and they wouldn't have questioned it and it would be a lie. We could have brought a stranger in to certify who wasn't there and have them say "friend." This is true. And it doesn't matter to anyone but us! It gives no one any power or any rights.

"Mother" also a no-go, on account of there already being one.

She's going to call tomorrow and see about "domestic partner" (which might require Rebecca and I to register as domestic partners with the city, and we had avoided originally because we wanted to list her relationship to Nadia, not to us) or what else might accurately explain the situation and be acceptable to them.

The goofy thing is, we hadn't intended this process to be about proving anything about our family. In fact we hadn't really wanted to raise a fuss or drawn attention to ourselves. We'd long assumed it would be me and Robin on the birth certificate. We have our parenting agreement and our wills to show our intentions in terms of our relationships to Nadia. This is was icing on the cake--something that looked more official, even as it carried less official weight.

But having come so close--she can still sign it, we just need to figure out what to put under title--it's more than any of us can swallow to settle for some absurd understatement of a title like "friend"  unless it's a last recourse. So we don't have a birth certificate yet, as we were there at 5 PM and the state offices were closed. We await word from the registrar after she gets through to a supervisor at the state tomorrow.
Oh dear.