Described as a “multi-character exploration of the complex, ever-evolving landscape of sexuality, monogamy, and intimacy in relationships,” the project was written and co-created by Ryan Murphy (creator of Nip/Tuck, Glee, and American Horror Story) and Dexter producer Lauren Gussis. Murphy and Gussis will also serve as executive producers, along with Ryan Murphy Productions president Dante Di Loreto.

Not much else is known about the project so far, but it should be interesting to follow.

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This post, Ryan Murphy’s “Open” gets pilot order from HBO, originally appeared on OpeningUp.net on April 18, 2013. Tweet This Post!

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Alan of Poly in the Media braved the treacherous waters of the episode in order to write about it for the rest of us:

 Usually “Wife Swap” ends with the two families sitting at a roundtable to discuss the experience. But ABC made a big thing in its publicity that this was the first time in the show’s history (it’s now in Season 7) when one family refused to met and discuss.

Which chickened out? The Loudons. A narrator says that John and Gina’s attorney informed the show that they would no longer participate in any way. So, we are left with the triad and their kids at the roundtable alone, discussing how awfully things went, how disrespectful and judgmental the politico-religious couple were, and how utterly overjoyed they all are to be back together safe again in their own happy home.

 . . . My assessment:  The show displayed Religious Right evangelicals being their worst. No viewer can have missed this. The poly family came off as trashy at first, but became much more sympathetic during the ordeal as they pulled together and stuck up for each other at every turn. The happy ending was lopsidedly pro-poly.

Read the entirety of Alan’s review. And if you’d like, watch the full Wife Swap episode on ABC’s site.

The episode was also a topic of discussion on a recent episode of the Poly Weekly podcast.

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This post, Poly family do cringe-worthy Wife Swap, originally appeared on OpeningUp.net on April 15, 2013. Tweet This Post!

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Black has been involved with several different media pieces over the years (notably an episode of 20/20), and she’s written about the experience on Huffington Post, detailing specifically the ways in which mainstream media tends to erase some aspects of her identity and relationships:

TV makes it look like I have A Husband and A Boyfriend and A Girlfriend (in that order), not a spectrum of relationships with different friends and lovers and partners. There’s no sex in my TV relationships. On TV, I never worry about money. My husband’s Latin American background is erased, as is his complex queer identity.

. . . When 20/20 filmed us, they were here for three days to get seven minutes of final footage. They spent many hours talking to us all as a group and to each of us individually. All the brilliant, witty, insightful things my unmarried lovers and friends said wound up on the cutting room floor; they used only interview material from the two married couples in the group. That sure made those pairings look like primary relationships in a way that the original interviews did not.

They took hours of footage of me with the two women I was romantically linked to, and used only a few seconds of it, while focusing lots of screen time on my lunch date with the charming young man I hang out with. That editing choice sure made me look straight in a way the original filming did not.

. . . . the media is cleverly misrepresenting my life to fit a certain model.

Black spoke to Alan of Poly in the Media about the upcoming “Hidden in America” episode, where she explained:

We filmed it last summer, and it’s been delayed considerably. We liked the producers a lot; they seemed generally respectful and like they “got us”. They asked thoughtful questions, backed off when we corrected them about mistaken assumptions, and took a lot of guidance from us in shaping what they filmed. They spent a long time interviewing us individually, which gave people a chance to say really interesting things, but who knows how that will play on TV or how much of it they’ll use.

. . . I think in some ways it will be very similar to the 20/20 piece; they asked a lot of the same kinds of questions and used some of the same settings. Which was a little disappointing, but maybe unavoidable — there’s a clear story to tell here. My hope is that it will be more reflective of our actual lives and less supporting the kinds of mainstream stereotypes the 20/20 piece played into, but I have no idea how they will have edited the footage they took.

Catch the episode this Tuesday, April 16th on the Destination America Channel. Find the schedule and locate the channel here.

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This post, Free love on “Hidden in America” this Tuesday, originally appeared on OpeningUp.net on April 13, 2013. Tweet This Post!

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Then, Dr. Eli Sheff will talk about her new book based on her groundbreaking work with Polyamorous Family Study, a 16 year project whose mission is to provide high-quality, research-based information about poly families with kids using sound research methods based in years of sociological study.

Read more about both guests here, and tune in at 8 p.m. EST, 5 p.m. PST.

Today’s show is live, so you can call in with questions at 1-866-472-5788, join the discussion on Facebook or Twitter, or even e-mail tristan(at)puckerup.com and I’ll read them live on the air!

	Listen LIVE every Friday at 8:00 pm EST, 5:00 pm PST
	Stream or download mp3s of past episodes
	Subscribe to the RSS Feed
	Download and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes [read how here]
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Download the VoiceAmerica App for your iPhone, Android, or Blackberry!

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This post, Today on Sex Out Loud: Dr. Eli Sheff, originally appeared on OpeningUp.net on March 8, 2013. Tweet This Post!

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The show has been in the works since last August, when Robyn Trask, director of Loving More, was contacted by producers of the show. After some sniffing around to make sure the show would be respectful, Trask put the producers in contact with several poly families.

Ultimately, the show will feature Trask and her long-term partner Jesus V. Garcia and their partners, plus a triad from Vancouver and a quint from the Philadelphia area. The Philadelphia quint run the blog Polyskeptic. Shaun wrote a short post about the upcoming show, and Gina wrote about the process of coming out at work in preparation for its airing. Trask found the filming process to be pleasant:

Working with the producers, crew and Lisa Ling, who is an award winning journalist, was a delight. We spent three full days filming at our home in Loveland, CO. Overall it was a fun experience and very different from other TV crews I have worked with.

Two teaser videos have been released, entitled “Plenty of Love to Go Around” and “Monogamy’s Not For Everyone.”

“I Love You & You… & You” will air Tuesday, March 5th at 10 p.m. Eastern on OWN (use the channel finder to determine the channel number). It will re-air three hours later, and again on subsequent dates. The schedule can be found here.

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This post, Poly on OWN for “Our America with Lisa Ling”, originally appeared on OpeningUp.net on March 4, 2013. Tweet This Post!

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The schedule is jam-packed with exciting sessions, plus other fun events such as trivia, poly family feud, an auction, and a St. Patrick’s Day themed dance. The closing keynote will be led by Alan M. of Poly in the Media.

Register for Atlanta Poly Weekend here, and follow the conference on Twitter.

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This post, Atlanta Poly Weekend is almost here!, originally appeared on OpeningUp.net on March 2, 2013. Tweet This Post!

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I will be on “To The Best of Our Knowledge” as part of a show called ‘After the Romance,’ which airs this weekend on NPR stations. I’ll talk with host Steve Paulson about my book Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships, open relationships, swinging, polyamory, and more.

You can hear it during the following times on local NPR stations:

Atlanta, GA: Monday and Tuesday 11:00 am on 91.7 WUGA-FM
Columbus, OH: Sunday 3:00 pm on 89.7 WOSU-FM
Eugene, OR: Sunday 8:00 am on 1280 KRVM-AM
Los Angeles, CA: Sunday 9:00 pm on 88.3 KCLU-FM
Milwaukee, WI: Sunday 12:00 pm on 90.7 WHAD-FM
San Francisco, CA: Sunday, 8:00 am on 91.7 KALW-FM and Sunday, 7:00 pm on 88.5 KQED-FM
Seattle, WA: Friday (3/8) 8:00 pm on 94.9 KUOW-FM
Springfield, MA: Sunday, 8:00 am on 640 WNNZ-AM

For other local areas, click here to search by state.

You can also stream or download the mp3 of the entire show featuring me, Esther Perel, Kate Bolick, Brian Kaufman and Martin Swinger, and more or listen to and download my segment here.

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This post, Tristan Taormino talks open relationships on NPR, originally appeared on OpeningUp.net on March 1, 2013. Tweet This Post!

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Deciding to do his own bout of research, Fuller distributes a questionnaire to 21 peers, measuring their jealousy scores. While the average score is a 56, his friend Kina’s score is 23 — making her much less jealous than the others.

Kina’s survey results made me wonder: had being poly and working on her insecure feelings actually made her a less jealous person? When I asked her about it, Kina said she thought it had, and she was glad for it. “Jealousy is just a counterproductive emotion,” she said. “It doesn’t make me happy.”

Of course, evolutionarily speaking, jealousy doesn’t work by making you happy. It works instead by creating an unhappy feeling, a feeling that your partner is threatening to reproduce and raise offspring with someone else. And once you have that feeling, you need to do something about it, whether it’s something immature, like attacking the person flirting with your partner, or mature, like talking to your partner about it.

In Kina’s case, she found ways to get rid of her jealous feelings, and that’s made her feel happy. In the end, evolution aside, that’s the question that mattered most to me.

Read the rest at Youth Radio.

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This post, How jealousy affects poly teens, originally appeared on OpeningUp.net on January 30, 2013. Tweet This Post!

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A recent study by relationship researcher Terri D. Conley and four colleagues at the University of Michigan concludes that there is no evidence to suggest that monogamous folks are any more satisfied than non-monogamous ones.

The study is a review of other research on consensual non-monogamy, and appeared in Personality and Social Psychology Review with the title A Critical Examination of Popular Assumptions About the Benefits and Outcomes of Monogamous Relationships.

After reviewing the research, the study concluded a few things: that “sexually unfaithful” individuals were less likely to use barrier methods than consensually non-monogamous (CNM) individuals; that gay men in CNM relationships felt a comparable level of satisfaction to gay men in monogamous relationships; and that jealousy was lower, more manageable, and less problematic for people in CNM relationships. The study elaborates:

Men reported that their open relationships accommodated their intimacy needs as well as their desires for sexual diversity. Moreover, the men in these partnerships often felt more intimate with their partner when they agreed to be non-monogamous. Just as monogamy can provide a sense of support and protection, consensual non-monogamy can provide the emotional support of a primary partnership while also allowing exploration of other sexual relationships.

Over at Psychology Today, Bella DePaulo summarizes the study’s findings in a series of three posts: Are Monogamous Relationships Really Better?, Satisfied? Jealous? On Deciding Not to Be Monogamous, and Is Polyamory Bad For Children?.

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This post, Study finds poly people less jealous, just as satisfied as monogamous people, originally appeared on OpeningUp.net on January 28, 2013. Tweet This Post!

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The popular Showtime reality docu-series, which followed one triad and one quad, concluded its first season last August. After that, the stars of the show made the media rounds, appearing on Dr. Drew, The Ricki Lake Show, and as experts in various online articles.

In October, show producer and director Natalia Garcia put out a call for new applications, although the second season was yet to be confirmed. Now it has been!

It’s still unknown whether the new season will include any of the previous participants. It should be interesting to see how it goes.

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This post, Showtime poly reality show renewed, originally appeared on OpeningUp.net on January 24, 2013. Tweet This Post!

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