Deborah Anapol and Polyamory Get Their Own Blog on PsychologyToday.com

Dr. Deborah Anapol, co-founder with Ryam Nearing in the early 1990s of  Loving More and author of Polyamory: The New Love Without Limits (now out of print) has just announced the following:

"...in case you’re still wondering whether polyamory has gone mainstream, I’ve just been asked to blog about polyamory for Psychology Today. My new blog, Love Without Limits: Reports from the Relationship Frontier will be up soon. Please visit me there, offer your own views in the 'comments' section, and share this link with your friends."

No wondering on my part, other poly leaders and I have been discussing and writing about the mainstreaming of polyamory for more than three years now.  It's gratifying to see that the polyamory movement has now reached a place where mainstream psychology is taking note and recognizes that this trend is important and substantial enough to warrant regular, high visibility commentary. 

Anapol must have a good publicist to land such a plum writing opportunity.  Her re-entry into the world of polyamory is also being fueled by publication next month of her new book, Polyamory in the 21st Century: Love and Intimacy with Multiple Partners, about which I've heard good things and will post a review here once I've purchased and read it.  She asked me to write a piece for it on recent polyamory leadership initiatives, which I did.  It will be interesting to hear what she has to say about the current state of the practice of polyamory, especially since she dropped out of polyamory circles and remained pretty much silent on the subject for the last several years, seemingly focusing on other things. Younger poly leaders, used to the fast pace of the flow of information via the internet and social networking sites, seem to barely know who she is, if at all.  Still, for ten years or so Polyamory: The New Love Without Limits and The Ethical Slut (1st ed) by Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt/Janet Hardy, were the only books available by which to navigate the waters of polyamory.  For their existence I will always be grateful, especially Anapol's section on jealousy.  We'll see whether this new book has the chops to rate up there with Tristan Taormino's Opening Up and the vastly expanded and improved 2nd edition of The Ethical Slut as a staple reference resource on polyamorists' book shelves.  If you are one of those polyamorists who knows little or nothing about Anapol and would like to know more, visit her website.

O'Reilly Weighs In on Polyamory - Again

Thanks to "Family" web series actor Ernie Joseph for the tip on this. Bill O'Reilly and his guest commentators, "Culture Warriors" Gretchen Carlson and Margaret Hoover, take up the debate about polyamory and same-sex marriage. Hoover has a lot more on the ball than the other two, especially when she points out that polyamorists aren't interested in legal marriage. (This is not to say that there is zero interest in it, but there's very little at this point in time.)

After viewing a clip from Family in which a discussion takes place about who is going to sleep with whom that night, Carlson first poo poos O'Reilly's claim that Oprah has called Terisa Greenan to talk about an episode (she did), calls the clip ridiculous and claims that "most Americans believe this is ridiculous, tawdry." She also says she doesn't believe polyamory will become a trend. Clearly she isn't up on her poly facts as to how widespread the practice is today.

Hoover also flatly states that what polyamorists want is to be able to live their lives as they want to, and even O'Reilly agrees that as long as it's behind closed doors, he being all libertarian and all, whatever. But he then goes on to conflate polyamory and plural marriage as a way of proving that the subject should be taken seriously.

Amazon's "Cataloging Error" of Polyamory, LGBTs, Other Books

UPDATE: Amazon has restored the books I reference below to their normal searchable ranking status. We're still learning how the LGBTQ books have fared. It seems that others are still in limbo, with the authors still pleading with Amazon to do the right thing. An example is Mark Michaels and Patricia Johnson's tantra books in hardback and paperback - somehow the "glitch" never excluded books available on Kindle, Amazon's electronic reader.

Here's what the New York Times says Amazon has reported. Apparently whatever happened, it was genuinely inadvertent, an admittedly "embarrassing and ham-fishted cataloging error."
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In a highly disturbing attempt to make their searches more "family friendly" (not to mine, certainly) Amazon implemented over the weekend a new policy that uses its ranking system to derank and exclude from searches on the topics "polyamory" and "open relationship" just about every contemporary book on those subjects. In particular this includes the just released new edition of the Ethical Slut, Tristan Taormino's Opening Up, Jenny Block's Open, and Pete Benson's Polyamory Handbook, all published within the last year. Also affected are, of course, books with erotica, on sacred sexuality and tantra. And then there are all the LGBTQ books also affected. I am very concerned about this appallingly ham-handed attempt at being family friendly that is in effect censorship, especially considering that Amazon is the largest book vendor anywhere.

I have so many author friends who are seriously adversely effected by this, including but not by any means limited to those listed above. It is frightening to think that this can happen so easily, thus resulting in polyamorists being unable to find the most basic texts on polyamory on Amazon without knowing the name of the book they need. Ironically, apparently if you already have the URL for what you want to buy, it can be found and purchased that way. So Amazon will still gladly take our money. If Amazon were a realtime store, this is analogous to their selling our books from a back room only to customers who come in and ask for it by name.

As many people know, I frequently give workshops on various aspects of conducting polyamorous relationships, and Amazon has just deranked what amount to MY TEXTBOOKS. This is very serious, especially if it becomes a trend with other book vendors, both for our valued authors and for our community.

As of Sunday night Amazon's customer service people have been telling concerned authors who call them that there was a glitch they are going to fix in the next 48 hours. No public statement has been made as of yet, and it's looking less and less like a glitch is really responsible. See here for more on that, and also search for the hashtag #glitchmyass on Twitter.

In the meantime, there are no such issues at Barnes and Noble and Borders, who at least as of now are surely glad to take our money. Plus, you can usually order these texts directly from the authors on their websites or from other sources, as the links above demonstrate. If you do a Google search for these books by name and/or author, the Amazon links come up and you CAN still go there and buy the books, but I urge you not to and instead too patronize less abhorent vendors.

This event quickly went viral over the weekend. Social networking site Twitter saw the search term #amazonfail quickly rise to the number one topic of Easter Sunday tweets, even more than "Easter" and "Masters". The hashtag #amazonfail is being used as a form of protest. Twitterers who have an opinion or more at stake include #amazonfail in their tweets so a thread is created. Just put #amazonfail in the Twitter search field to find those tweets.

Excellent explanations and analyses of all this can be found here and here.

PLEASE SIGN THE PETITIONS at Change.org here and on The Petition Site.

Let's hope that Amazon can be persuaded to come to its senses. No doubt LGBT activists are already making Amazon's management's life miserable. Especially if you ahve an Amazon account, please do all we can to help by, as I have, writing to Amazon expressing the unacceptable nature of their decision, the value of the materials being deranked, how long you've been a customer, how much you have spent with them (a guess is fine for these purposes) and how it is that you will be cancelling our account very soon if this problem is not solved to our satisfaction.

Speeches at Poly Pride Rally

Several of the speakers at the Poly Pride Rally in New York City on October 3, 2008, on the Great Hill in Central Park have posted their remarks online: keynoter and poly author Tristan Taormino (pictured here) who inspired us all, author Jenny Block, who spoke on communication and her experiences since her book was published a few months ago, Polyamory-in-the-News blogger Alan M. with a cautionary message, anthropologist Leanna Wolfe on polyamory culture, and my remarks on the mainstreaming of polyamory.

Enjoy!