Sex at Dawn

As Sarah Hrdy reminds us, conventional couples struggling to raise a family in isolation might be the ones fighting Mother Nature: “Since Darwin,” she writes, “we have assumed that humans evolved in families where a mother relied on one male to help her rear her young in a nuclear family; yet ... the diversity of human family arrangements .is better predicted by assuming that our ancestors evolved as cooperative breeders.”⁹ From our perspective, people like Scott, Larry, and Terisa appear to be trying to replicate ancient human socio-sexual configurations. As we’ve seen, from a child’s perspective, having more than two stable, loving adults around can be enriching, whether in Africa, the Amazon, China, or suburban Colorado. Laird Harrison recently wrote about his experience growing up in a house his biological parents shared with another couple and their children. He recalled, “The communal household enjoyed a kind of camaraderie I have never felt since.. I swapped books with my stepsisters, listened in awe to their stories of crushes, exchanged tips on teachers. Their father imparted his love of great music and their mother her passion for cooking. A sort of bond formed among the 10 of us.”¹⁰

Everybody Out of the Closet

An era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted.

ARTHUR MILLER

Much of recent history can be seen as waves of tolerance and acceptance breaking against the rocky headlands of rigid social structures. Though it can seem to take almost forever, the waves always win in the end, reducing immobile rock to shifting sand. The twentieth century saw the headlands beginning to crumble under surges of anti-slavery movements, women’s rights, racial equality, and, more recently, the steadily growing acceptance of the rights of gay, lesbian, transgender, and bisexual people.

Author Andrew Sullivan described his experience growing up both gay and Catholic as “difficult to the point of agony. I saw in my own life and those of countless others,” Sullivan recalled, “that the suppression of these core emotions and the denial of their resolution in love always always leads to personal distortion and compulsion and loss of perspective. Forcing . people into molds they do not fit helps no one,” Sullivan wrote. “It robs them of dignity and self-worth and the capacity for healthy relationships. It wrecks family, twists Christianity, violates humanity. It must end.”¹¹ Sullivan’s comments were provoked by the twisted collapse of the publicly homophobic but privately homosexual televangelist Ted Haggard, but he could have been speaking for anyone who doesn’t fit the socially sanctioned mold of his or her day.

And who does fit this mold? Yes, self-hating gay televangelists and politicians need to come out of the closet, but so does everyone else.

It won’t be easy. It’s never easy to stand up to shame-fueled

anger. Historian Robert S. McElvaine previews some of the

shrill denunciation awaiting those who may dare to wander

from the monogamous fold, declaring, “Free love is likely to

degenerate into ‘free hate.’ Since loving everybody is a

biological impossibility, the attempt to do so [becomes]

‘otherization,’ and the hatred that goes with it.”¹² Like

McElvaine, many relationship counselors seem both terrified

by and ignorant of nonstandard marital relationships of any

kind. Esther Perel, author of Mating in Captivity, quotes a

family therapist she knows (and respects) stating

unequivocally, “Open marriage doesn’t work. Thinking you

can do it is totally naive. We tried it in the seventies and it

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was a disaster.”

Maybe, but such therapists might want to delve a little deeper before reflexively dismissing alternatives to conventional marriage. Asked to imagine the first swingers in modern American history, most people probably picture hairy hippies in headbands lolling about on waterbeds in free-love communes under posters of Che Guevara and Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane on the hi-fi. But be cool, Daddy-O, ‘cause the truth is gonna blow your mind.

It seems that the original modern American swingers were crew-cut World War II air force pilots and their wives. Like elite warriors everywhere, these “top guns” often developed strong bonds with one another, perhaps because they suffered the highest casualty rate of any branch of the military. According to journalist Terry Gould, “key parties,” like those later dramatized in the 1997 film The Ice Storm, originated on these military bases in the 1940s, where elite pilots and their wives intermingled sexually with one another before the men flew off toward Japanese antiaircraft fire.