people, or “polys,” as they call themselves, love many, many people. And a poly doesn’t just love those people, he or she has sex with them, even when some of those people live in the same house and are married to still other people in that house, many of whom the aforementioned poly is already having sex with anyway.
The most public polyamorous family in the United States is called Ravenheart. They took the name Ravenheart three years ago when they were living on a remote California ranch surrounded by ravens. They also invented the word “polyamory,” combining the Greek and Latin roots for “many loves,” and it has since been entered into the Oxford English Dictionary. None of the Ravenhearts are related by birth. In polyamorous terminology, they are known as “a nest,” a chosen family. Today they occupy a large house and an adjacent smaller house (which has four apartment units and often houses friends and other lovers) in Sonoma County, about forty-five miles north of San Francisco. There are three men, all heterosexual, and three women, all bisexual. They have an age range spanning over thirty years. As members of the Church of All Worlds, a neo-pagan religion based on Robert A. Heinlein’s 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, which the eldest family member, Oberon Zell Ravenheart, founded back in 1962, they are allowed to marry more than one partner via a pagan ritual called a hand fasting. And although their coupling arrangements are best outlined with a map or flowchart, a description of whom sleeps with who goes something like this.
Oberon, fifty-seven, has been legally married to his wife Morning Glory, fifty-three, for twenty-six years. In 1996, they celebrated a hand fasting with a man named Wolf, thirty-six, who just this past August formally married a woman named Wynter, twenty-one. Though Oberon and Wolf refer to themselves as each other’s husbands—“I can’t imagine life without my husband Wolf,” Oberon says—and Morning Glory and Wynter consider themselves each other’s wives, only Morning Glory and Wynter have sex with each other, although Morning Glory also has sex with Oberon and Wolf. When Wynter became an official Ravenheart three years ago, she had a brief sexual relationship with Oberon, which has since moved into what Oberon describes as a “mentor/apprentice” dynamic. Oberon also has sex at least twice a week with Liza, forty-six, who is also the lover of Jon, twenty-one. The Ravenhearts get regular tests for STDs and the most enforced house rule is that any sex occurring outside the family must involve the use of condoms.
Before I met the Ravenhearts, my knowledge of them was limited mostly to the above information. Oberon sent me biographical sketches of each family member, which explained more or less who is partnered with whom. I knew that they belonged to the Church of All Worlds, but, as my assignment involved gaining an understanding of polyamory and exploring the feasibility or non-feasibility of open multiple partnerships for the vast majority of us, I more or less ignored the pagan stuff.
But when I meet Oberon, who opens the gate to the privacy fence and greets me with a hug, I see his black T-shirt reading “Never Thirst” (one of the big tropes from Stranger in a Strange Land ) and realize that I have stepped into that realm that has long elicited my deepest repulsion. I have stepped into an intersection of science fiction geeks and velvet-caped jousters. And there is absolutely no separating the family’s prolific sexual activity with the fact that they attend ritual events with names like Eleusinian Mysteries and have culled the bulk of their personal philosophies from science fiction novels.
“I never had the slightest glimmerings of monogamy as a personal value,” says Oberon, who grew up in the 1940s and 50s in what he calls an “Ozzie and Harriet” family in the suburbs of Chicago. Oberon talks like Timothy Leary and looks
The most public polyamorous family in the United States is called Ravenheart. They took the name Ravenheart three years ago when they were living on a remote California ranch surrounded by ravens. They also invented the word “polyamory,” combining the Greek and Latin roots for “many loves,” and it has since been entered into the Oxford English Dictionary. None of the Ravenhearts are related by birth. In polyamorous terminology, they are known as “a nest,” a chosen family. Today they occupy a large house and an adjacent smaller house (which has four apartment units and often houses friends and other lovers) in Sonoma County, about forty-five miles north of San Francisco. There are three men, all heterosexual, and three women, all bisexual. They have an age range spanning over thirty years. As members of the Church of All Worlds, a neo-pagan religion based on Robert A. Heinlein’s 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, which the eldest family member, Oberon Zell Ravenheart, founded back in 1962, they are allowed to marry more than one partner via a pagan ritual called a hand fasting. And although their coupling arrangements are best outlined with a map or flowchart, a description of whom sleeps with who goes something like this.
Oberon, fifty-seven, has been legally married to his wife Morning Glory, fifty-three, for twenty-six years. In 1996, they celebrated a hand fasting with a man named Wolf, thirty-six, who just this past August formally married a woman named Wynter, twenty-one. Though Oberon and Wolf refer to themselves as each other’s husbands—“I can’t imagine life without my husband Wolf,” Oberon says—and Morning Glory and Wynter consider themselves each other’s wives, only Morning Glory and Wynter have sex with each other, although Morning Glory also has sex with Oberon and Wolf. When Wynter became an official Ravenheart three years ago, she had a brief sexual relationship with Oberon, which has since moved into what Oberon describes as a “mentor/apprentice” dynamic. Oberon also has sex at least twice a week with Liza, forty-six, who is also the lover of Jon, twenty-one. The Ravenhearts get regular tests for STDs and the most enforced house rule is that any sex occurring outside the family must involve the use of condoms.
Before I met the Ravenhearts, my knowledge of them was limited mostly to the above information. Oberon sent me biographical sketches of each family member, which explained more or less who is partnered with whom. I knew that they belonged to the Church of All Worlds, but, as my assignment involved gaining an understanding of polyamory and exploring the feasibility or non-feasibility of open multiple partnerships for the vast majority of us, I more or less ignored the pagan stuff.
But when I meet Oberon, who opens the gate to the privacy fence and greets me with a hug, I see his black T-shirt reading “Never Thirst” (one of the big tropes from Stranger in a Strange Land ) and realize that I have stepped into that realm that has long elicited my deepest repulsion. I have stepped into an intersection of science fiction geeks and velvet-caped jousters. And there is absolutely no separating the family’s prolific sexual activity with the fact that they attend ritual events with names like Eleusinian Mysteries and have culled the bulk of their personal philosophies from science fiction novels.
“I never had the slightest glimmerings of monogamy as a personal value,” says Oberon, who grew up in the 1940s and 50s in what he calls an “Ozzie and Harriet” family in the suburbs of Chicago. Oberon talks like Timothy Leary and looks
Similar Books
