pop culture and politics for the new outcasts

Test Tube Lovers

By Annalee Newitz

"We want to make the world safe for rock 'n roll."

-- Eve, member of the Kerista family for 21 years, in a 1988 pamphlet

When a couple breaks up, there is no mistaking what has happened. Sure, there may be murky details. Who stopped wanting to have sex first? Who forgot to take out the garbage six nights in a row? Who started that horrible, final fight by making a face, or by refusing to answer a question posed repeatedly, or by not acknowledging the importance of arriving for dinner on time?

No matter what the circumstances, the narrative arc of the event - the loss of love and sorrowful separation -- is no mystery. We've heard breakup stories told a zillion times. We know the drill. Foolish rebound sex is had; ice cream is eaten; friends are sympathetic.

But if a romantic relationship deviates from the script, the stories dry up. There is no narrative framework to describe the terrible fights that ended the 21-year marriage of roughly two dozen people who called their family Kerista. It was not like Kramer vs. Kramer, not like a Hank Williams song, not like Sonny and Cher. It wasn't like when your parents got divorced, or when your best friends dumped each other after what seemed a lifetime of stability.

When an event is like nothing at all, we are tempted to forget about it. History leaves behind its aberrations. But I refuse to forget. I have my reasons.

When I walk past the houses where the Keristans lived during the 1970s and 80s - only blocks from my flat in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district - I can imagine them going about their daily lives, making breakfast and writing and building their business and having parties and being in love with several people all at once. I can glance down Frederick Street and see them bustling around the small storefront that housed Abacus, their multi-million dollar Apple computer dealership. I can read the piles of idealistic newspapers and pamphlets they handed out at the space they called the Growth Co-op.

The people of Kerista invented the idea of polyfidelity - being romantically committed to more than one person simultaneously - and dared the world to look at them, to judge and imitate them. Members of the group toured the country, appeared on Phil Donahue and 20/20, were written up in countless academic studies and glossy magazines. They called it "life in the test tube," and believed that their experiments with reimagining the nuclear family could change the world.

Kerista and other groups like it gave a name to my experiences. Without them, there would be no record of what it's like to love more than one person at the same time, no map (however badly drawn) to lead me as I attempt to navigate multiple relationships in a culture which wants me to parcel out my desires and affections to only one person, as if there were a scarcity of feeling and it must be hoarded.

There is no social frame in which to place Kerista, but fourteen years after its dissolution it has become its own social frame. Cloaked in its context, poly people like me can begin to explain ourselves. We have our own epic love story - and, like all good romances, it serves as both a seduction and a warning.

Sleeping Schedule

Hoping to flee the constraining traditional families and straight life that they had grown up with, Eve and her best friend Eva Way signed up right away. They wanted an anti-family, an anti-marriage: a warm network of unrelated kin with whom they could be faithfully unfaithful. Over the years, they were joined by dozens of others who eventually occupied seven flats near the intersection of Frederick and Stanyan Streets, at the edge of Golden Gate Park.

Kerista was organized into subgroups with fanciful names like Purple Submarine and Sanity Mix -- members called them "best friend identity clusters." These clusters, which might contain anywhere from 4 to 15 people at a time, were marriages of polyfidelity: the people in them slept with each other and no one else. But the situation was flexible. If a person in Purple got sick of the scene there, he or she could court another cluster. Over the years, clusters formed and fell apart as membership in the commune changed or current members created new subgroups.

Luv, who joined Kerista in 1980, remembers that the early years of his marriage were idyllic. He was part of a small, four-person cluster called Jubilee and he loved the two women in his family tremendously. He continues to be close friends with the other man who was in the group (homosexual sex was not part of the Keristan agenda at the time). "Jubilee was magical," says Luv. "We were very gentle with each other, and that was the time when I got the most benefits out of Kerista's practices of sharing and communication. For a guy who wanted to learn about himself, it was wonderful."

One of Luv's jobs, when he first joined the commune, was to computerize the group's rather elaborate collective finances. Those were the early days of personal computers, and knowing how to use a spreadsheet program made Luv something of an expert. But he was also to computerize something else: the family's "balanced rotational sleeping schedule."

Until Luv arrived, the Keristans determined their nightly sleeping partners using something like a chore wheel. Nicknamed "the washing machine," this wheel listed every woman as a letter and every man as a number and was turned one notch each night. "We had the idea that you would be non-preferentially attached to each person," says Eve. And the most logical way to express this non-preferentiality was to use a system that guaranteed every person in a cluster slept with everyone else of the opposite sex in a cyclical order.

But the washing machine was getting unwieldy - there too many people to keep up with, and there was always the question of how to assign people to bedrooms. Electronic spreadsheets seemed like an ideal solution. It was this innovation that probably led to Kerista's reputation as a Utopian commune whose rap about free love was expanding to include a rap about the joy of computers.

You'd be surprised how often the scheduling demands of being poly drive us to technology. Let's say I have three partners and one of my partners also has another partner, who is married. How to plan our regular rendez-vous without having endless phone conversations with multiple people everyday? If I didn't have a sleeping schedule in my PDA, I'd go insane. Monogamous people accuse us of lacking in spontaneity for engineering our love lives. But as the Keristans used to say, what could be less spontaneous than sleeping with the same person every night? I know more than one group that plans their dates via a web-based calendar. I haven't gone that far yet. My partners and I have settled into a weekly routine, where certain nights are assigned to certain couples.

Unfortunately, the comforting routines of poly life do not breed perfect contentment any more than monogamous ones do. Fights are inevitable, and the Keristans tried to deal with strife as rationally as they dealt with sleeping arrangements. Jud introduced them to what he called "gestalt-o-rama," a group therapy process cobbled together out of pop psychology and method acting. When somebody got "gestalted," it was because they had failed to adhere to the commune's "social contract" - a fungible document whose dozens of principles each member agreed to uphold when they joined a Keristan cluster. Everyone remembers them as emotionally difficult encounters, often focused on one or two individuals who had broken a rule. Jud tended to lead the gestalts, peppering the offending family members with accusations and painful questions that Luv refers to simply as "brow-beating and manipulation."