As an activist and public speaker, I have always been of the mind that the more open you are the better. Better to be out and deal with the occasional argument/awkward discussion with a relative than to live in secrecy. I want to reiterate that this is MY belief--I would never presume to tell another person what is the best choice regarding non-mongamy and being out with family, co-workers, etc. Having said that, my experience has shown that undue stress and anxiety are often presented to me by folks who for one reason or another are hiding who they are from the people near to them. 

For all the ways that I complain about my family and grumble my way through thanksgiving (which for the record I still believe is Imperialistic brainwashing at it's best. Let's just call it what it really is, 'Genocide celebrations' and stop pretending). But I digress... The fact of the matter is that I am polyamourous and living with my two partners, yet my mother and brother (and my partner's parents, sister and 2 kids) are all coming to our home this weekend to break bread.

For those of you out there who worry about all the bad that can come from letting people in and showing them who you really are, remember that you are also robbing them of the opportunity to embrace you and accept you.

Have a great holiday if you can manage it and shop local if you're into the black Friday thing (down with corporate America)! etc, etc.

It's been a few months since the last blog entry but I'm back with some stories and a call to action.

Team Triad has just returned from the great white north. For reals y'all, we were just in Tornoto, Canada for the amazing Playground Conference. We were asked by Samantha Fraser to present our workshop The Power of 3: Triads, Threesomes & Dating a Couple (we are also proud to be presenting this same workshop tonight for the TES novice group), in addition to speaking on a few other great panel discussions and as always, it was a learning experience and a blessing (insert corny yet accurate anecdotes about pupils teaching teachers). The meat and potatoes if you will (or tofu and quinoia if you won't) of the workshop is around the concept of triggers and it was during this segment that we all learned the most. 

Just to give those who aren't familiar with the term an idea, urban dictionary describes a trigger as:

This is obviously a basic working definition, in short its the things that remind you of a bad time in the past and set you off. It's important to address this concept whenever one talks about relationships, because when someone is triggered while in relationship, the way in which it gets handled can affect everything.

We asked people to share triggers in a small group and were amazed to discover the results. Many people reported a lot of anxious feelings--they were triggered by talking about triggers! The reason why we emphasize this in our workshop is because when we're in relationships, ultimately we all want to be understood, to feel safe and secure--knowing that our feelings will be respected and cared after. Communicating triggers to our loved ones enables us to cultivate safety and understanding within the relationship. 

Brian, Lisa and I made a pledge at the end of Playground to build community through extending the conversation beyond this past weekend, and that's what I hope this thread can do. If you feel so called, whether you were at Playground this weekend, heard us talk at another event or simply have something to share around triggers, please drop a comment on this thread and lets chat. 

Looking forward to talking

love, Jazz

 As a person who advocates for open honesty and forthrightness in all my relationships romantic or otherwise, I was still thrown off balance by my own knee-jerk reactions to the recent hard times in my life. I have to admit that I ran and hid. I shut down, stopped communicating with family and friends and spiraled into a very dark emotional space that I'm just beginning to feel the strength to climb out of. And as my mood is shifting, I realize that the driving force behind it was trying to be perfect.

 I was lucky enough to experience 3 years of polyamory with virtually no hiccups or drama. Then a lot of major shifts happened (graduated from college, started paying back loans and paying other bills, moved out of the nest, got a new job) you know...all the common big transitions one makes into adulthood in the 21st century...and somewhere in the midst of all that change, something just snapped. I don't know if it was my capacity to let things go that went first or my ability to not be a total dramatic puddle of emotions, but things got hard. I could go into the mushy details of my changing sexual identity, my exploration of new relationship dynamics and my ongoing struggle to integrate my family with my chosen family--but really the bottom line is, I was able to begin to climb out of the hole when I began to tell people everything wasn't simply ok.

For me this show renewed my interest in talking about something that’s been brewing in my mind for a while now. Because polyamory as a relationship style is still relatively new to a lot of people, I (and my partners) am often asked a lot of questions. The questions start: How does it work? Don’t you get jealous? Do you all sleep in the same bed? How does your family feel? I understand when something new is encountered there will be curiosity, however I’m still a little surprised at how often people relate to polyamory as some foreign species and I’ve become the newly discovered exotic bird.

This country thrives on divisive politics and binary ways of relating to everything from gender identity to sexuality. We also consistently look for what’s different or similar so we can see where we fit into the world. I’m not interested in pitting people or relationships styles against each other here. I’m interested in creating dialogue where we can discover commonality, learn more about ourselves and others and open up new possibilities for our lives. I’m challenging the idea that monogamy and polyamory are so different from each other. 

Their textbook descriptions of polyamory were solid and positively framed.  And, the families they chose represent a nice cross section of America…   A married couple, Kamala and Michael, decide to invite their long-time partners, Jen and Tahl, who are also married, to move in with them and then young son, Devin.  Anthony and Lindsey are married and living with the third in their triad, Vanessa.  Lindsey has just returned home from a 6-month stint at graduate school in Northern California, and is missing her new boyfriend.  They're people you might encounter at work or at the grocery store or on vacation and not once guess they might be living a life that's slightly different from the usual dog-and-two-kids existence. 

The show is played out in typical reality show fashion.  We're a fly on the wall, spying in on the day-to-day lives of both families.  The producers frequently cut to studio interviews with families members as they candidly recount their thoughts and feelings of the experience as the drama is happening.  Not surprisingly given the tight schedule, editing is extremely fast paced, and important decisions seem to get vetted in mere minutes of conversation, with the focus of the editing being on the greatest points of friction.

It's very hard to ask for help when you think you ought to know. Ought to know what, you might ask? Well, my friend pretty much everything. I pride myself in being really smart--able to work my brain around problems, especially intellectual and emotional ones. I'm typically the friend people come to for advice, the person who can help parse out the nonsense from the facts and help straighten things out. But i've been having a really hard time lately and it's all snowballed and gone out of control. Endless hours of tv, lots of food, hardly any exercise all the typical stuff you do when you don't feel great. But then recently, in the past few months a fog of hopelessness and cyncism came in so thick I could no longer parse of the nonesense from the facts for myself. 

But the reason why I'm writing this article isn't just to vent about the quiet isolation i've been grappling with but to voice the intense shame I've felt at admitting that I need help. I know this isn't PC but it feels awful. I feel like a big, crazy, messy failure. As I try to build a name for myself as an activist, public speaker and sex educator, increasingly I feel the need to always appear perfect. How can I purport to be an expert at anything if I don't always have it together. You might then ask me another question. But Jazz, you wouldn't expect your friends and family to be perfect all the time now would you? And the answer is, kinda yeah I would. I like people who have their shit together, who are fun, motivated and positive (if also skilled in sarcastic conversation). I can't help but to have been indoctrinated by the Mary Poppins philosophy: she is after all, practically perfect in every way and why shouldn't I be to?!

What it boils down to, is the sense that if I admit that I need help, that I can't keep it altogther for myself, how in the world would any ever listen to me? So yeah, my ego is pretty raw right now and not much of my logical/reasoning brain is functioning.

I don't have a pat ending for this one, just the hunch that it's better out with these series of horrible feelings that keeping them bottled up. Thanks for listening.

However if we were to boil it down to the simplest thing, sex provides pleasure, which has us feel good and be relaxed. I was just speaking at a conference in DC at the end of March where I heard Dr. Joycelyn Elders, former US Surgeon General say “It’s time to admit sexuality is about pleasure.”

I’d assert for many people we still have a hard time with the pleasure piece. We have a lot of questions, confusion, shame and fear in America when it comes to sex. We get a lot of mixed messages of what’s “normal” and what’s “weird”, what’s too much sex, what’s too little, as a culture we use sex to sell things and yet are often afraid to talk about sex openly and honestly. We let things get in the way of us experiencing full joy and pleasure when it comes to sex.

So what to do about it? One of the first things is to start building some awareness of where you’re at with your sexuality and where you’d like to be. Here are a couple of questions to consider:

1. How empowered are you about your sexuality on a scale of 1 to 10?

1 being I have a lot of fear and shame around sex...
10 being I feel full joy and pleasure around sex

2. What gets in the way of you experiencing full joy and pleasure when it comes to sex?

3. If you were to consider creating three goals for yourself and sex, what would they be?

Now comes the fun part! Are you willing to take some action to create that? Do you need some support?

(This is a repost from Lisa's coaching blog)

I've been sitting at my computer on and off since 11am this morning, finding myself the victim of yet another round of paralysis of the pen. It's a tricky little condition, greatly aggravated by the internet, facebook in particular. But this post isn't about how effectively facebook saps your focus and energy, perhaps more on that another time. Today, I wanted to write about my life thus far and how it has been intersecting with my career and the world at large.

I am a lapsed performance artist and a budding sex educator, so when I came back from the amazing Momentum conference in D.C., I was buzzing with ideas and possiblity. Shortly after returning home on April 1st, I was hit with a wall of sadness and panic. I returned to see a powerful web of veritable fascism weaving it's way into my life. Another bill has been passed, adding to the nation's race to see who can demolish the Bill of Rights and Constitution the quickest. Now, if you are arrested, which you can be for "suspicion" of being a terrorist or just plain old suspicious behavior--a decidedly broad term, you can be strip-searched. That's right, if you go to jail your bodily autonomy is completely handed over to the state without any checks and certainly not a shred of balance. If you think this law only applies to serious felons, you would be sorely mistaken. Just ask Albert Florence who is currently sueing  after he was strip-searched twice in a six-day period while being imprisoned for an unpaid traffic violation. You know how shifty those folks are who avoid traffic tickets!

To summarize--the government can now imprison you at will and indefinitely if you are suspected of terrorism. You can be imprisioned for up to 10 years if you protest near any person who has a secret-service agent with them, and when you are imprisioned, you can be strip searched--over and over all in the name of safety and security. Let's not forget about the much contested Patriot Act, the expansive legislation that arguably started this horrifying trend (see page 3 for the really scary and relevent segments). You might be asking yourself, how does this tie into sex education and over all sexual freedom? I will answer your question with a different question-why is the sex positive community seemingly unlinked with the larger, more mainstream politically active communities? In the face of current events, in would seem that political liberals should be banding together to stop this stuff, but as far as I can tell they simply are not.

My fear and anxiety over these issues deepened as I realized no one in my sex-positive circles mentioned these terrible pieces of legislation. In my humble opinion, the sex positive community is frightenginly isolated from larger issues and I believe this is to the detriment of sex positive activist goals. These kinds of laws affect everybody, whether they are polyamorous, gay, kinky or straight and married with children-therefore all political activists should be banding together to stop this nonsense. If our bodily autonomy is stripped away in prision, in the doctor's office (if unnecessary transvaginal ultrasounds as a pre-requisite for getting an abortion catch on any more), then it's only a little while before the government starts coming after the rest of us, only if we appear suspicous that is. 

I'm putting out a call to action for activists to drop partisan agendas and work together. Get your church involved with your LGBT activism, get your polyamorous group involved with kinky events. Go out and have those sometimes awkward, but incredibly important community building conversations so we can all start working together!

In particular, I've felt helpless as I've watched an energized, well organized, well funded minority of fundamentally religious and social conservatives take control of the narrative around a number of issues (especially around sexuality and gender) and also take over much of the Republican Party in the process...  by carefully and strategically using pre-existing prejudice and anxiety around sex, race, gender roles, social programs, etc to associate negativity with not only progressivist language, but also a number of pretty cool plain English words.

That's how despicable (and extremely clever) culture warriors like Andrew Breitbart, Karl Rove and those in the Fox media empire have managed to redefine and/or stigmatize words like choice and liberalism and progress and diversity.  They all play by the same playbook, they're relentless, and they know how to scare the crap out of hard working Americans who are only trying to make a living and feed and clothe their families.

The most recent proof of the Right's attempts at inciting class warfare were revealed just last week thanks to a leaked memo coming out of the conservative National Organization for Marriage.  The memo revealed a comprehensive and long-term strategy to "drive a wedge between blacks and gays -- two key Democratic constituencies" by helping those communities to orchestrate media campaigns which are intended to provoke hostility between the two groups by preying on long-standing, but relatively dormant, divisions between those groups.

© 1992 Carolco/Le Studio Canal+ V.O.F.As the movie progresses, we learn more and more about Stone's character, and her relatively colorful sexual history, including sexual relationships with men and women, kinky tendencies, and a refusal to fall in line with the conventional wisdom of sexual exclusivity and male sexual power and privilege over female sexuality.  We also eventually learn that she's a deceitful, manipulative, and murderous nut-job.  A guy friend of mine, who was also watching the movie, at one point excitedly exclaimed something along the lines how empowered a woman Stone's character was, and noted how awesome that was.

Now, I'm all for honest portrayals of empowered women in movies, but my friend's comment left me somewhat perplexed.  Stone's character, while obviously sexually expressed and adventurous, was also deceitful, murderous, emotionally unstable, and used her sexuality to manipulate others into doing her bidding.  In fact, this movie seems to go out of its way to convey the notion that "sexually expressed woman" = "nut-job".