Great questions! I have long identified with both definitions of queer, and when I was quite young, I presumed (because of the gay culture I was immersed in) that polyamory was just part and parcel of queer/Queer life.
What I mean is, most of the gay men I knew (and loved) were not much attached to heteronormative ideals. We didn't use the words polyamory or heteronormative in those days but ...
Very few of us believed monogamy was a virtue, and I suspect fewer of us tried to practice monogamy.
Sure, gay couples existed where the partners valued and expected sexual fidelity, but that always felt like an exception to me.
So much so that when gay people started pushing for marriage equality in the late 1990s, I felt perplexed. 'Really?' I thought. 'Why? Of everything we could pushing for, why this? Why ape heterosexual society when we don't live the way they live anyway?'
I didn't yet realize how practically important civil marriage is in a society where it conveys so many rights and privileges. Soon, I would be evicted from my home because I lacked the right to inherit from my late partner Lenny. That convinced me we needed to fight for at least an imitation of (or our own interpretation of) heteronormative institutions.
But I still didn't value monogamy as an ideal, and I've never changed my mind.
My late partner and I had a hierarchical sort of poly bond. We were a primary couple, and that mattered to us a great deal. But each of us had ongoing relationships with other people that were sometimes sexual and sometimes romantic.
For years, I had a weekly 'matinee' with a close friend that usually involved sexual intimacy. Lenny was clear from the time we got together that he had a couple intimate friends he had no intention to stop seeing.
Our cheating rules were pretty simple. If you keep it a secret, it's cheating. Don't keep secrets.
The thing is, none of this surprised me. Lenny and I were more the rule than the exception.
And when our mutual friend Brad came into our life, we came very close to forming what people today might call a polycule. Maybe it was a polycule.
Lenny and I each loved Brad, whom I've written about quite a lot.
When Brad was feeling depressed and unable to handle life, he often turned to Lenny for support and comfort. He turned to me for companionship. Brad slept over a lot, and sex was involved sometimes on all sides, though we never had a threesome. I don't think any of us wanted that, not that there would have been anything wrong if we did.
To me, this was ordinary gay/queer/Queer life. I didn't feel exceptional or in need of a label, because the way we lived was very similar to how most of our gay friends lived. Monogamy certainly existed, but it was neither presumed nor expected.
That reality, however, was seldom acknowledged by Queer people. It clashed with certain priorities. Certain messaging. It disturbed a political effort to win rights by telling the general public that we're just like them minus inconsequential details. (The Love = Love message)
And don't even get me started on our fights to celebrate positive sexuality by bringing back sex clubs. We did it (counterintuitively as a form of safer-sex empowerment, but that's too complicated to get into here) but we didn't talk about it much. Just like we didn't emphasize our general lack of monogamous values.
And that's an easy trap to fall into. When I wrote a fictionalized memoir about Brad's life and death, I struggled to write about the sexual/romantic bond he shared with Lenny and me, the very queer sort of family we formed. I didn't want to feel judged or have my honoring of his life dismissed by a non-queer society.
As the story was being shaped into a screenplay, the same struggles recurred. How much of this do we show? How much is too much?
Maybe that partly illustrates why the queer world is often more quiet than the Queer world.
Are poly people queer? I don't have a precise answer, but my inclination is to say, usually but not always.
