381 - OPEN with William Winters
The nonprofit OPEN
OPEN stands for the organization for polyamory and ethical non-monogamy, and today William Winters is with us representing it.
“OPEN is a nonprofit organization dedicated to normalizing and empowering non-monogamous individuals and communities. More than that, we’re a movement of people working toward a future where romantic and intimate relationships between consenting adults are accepted and protected regardless of relationship structure, gender identity, or sexual orientation.”
-OPEN’s mission statement
William addresses the following topics during today’s episode:
The current landscape of rights, protections, and representation of non-monogamous relationships.
What have we learned about what works and doesn’t work in enacting real change?
This seems like a campaign that could benefit from a united front, but in a community of so many different people and opinions, do you think that’s possible?
OPEN recently submitted an open letter to Facebook confronting them on the fact that users aren’t able to indicate multiple romantic partners. Can you talk a little bit about the strategy there?
William Winters is the founder and co-organizer of Bonobo Network, a membership community rooted in real-world and virtual events where people learn together – and from one another – about sexuality, pleasure, and relationships.
William’s perspectives on sexual communities, consent culture, polyamory/ethical nonmonogamy, and personal accountability have appeared in outlets including The New York Times, San Francisco Magazine, KQED, the San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous podcasts.
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of The Multiamory Podcast we are talking to William Winters, who is on the board of directors for OPEN, which stands for Organization for Polyamory and Ethical Non-monogamy. He's a seasoned digital campaign strategist for progressive organizations and causes. William's also a leader in the Bay Area polyamorous and sex-positive communities. He's the founder of Bonobo Network, a sex-positive, consent-focused, power-aware community. He's also the founder of Express Yourself a quarterly gathering uniting people of color in celebrations of the erotic. He has been featured in The New York Times and The San Francisco Chronicle and now the pinnacle of his career, The Multiamory Podcast.
William, thank you so much for joining us today.
William: It is indeed an honor.
Dedeker: You're here, you do a lot of different things as people can tell from your intro, but you're here on the show today representing the nonprofit OPEN. I don't think a lot of our listeners heard of OPEN yet so can you just tell us about the organization?
William: OPEN is the organization for polyamory and ethical non-monogamy. We're dedicated to normalizing and empowering non-monogamous individuals and communities. We're basically trying to create a movement of the ethically non-monogamous so that we can fight for our very real interests. It's not just about dating, it's also about raising families, and it's about having access to housing and health care and other areas where folks who are ethically non-monogamous are subject to discrimination.
We're working to create a world where we're protected from discrimination and where we're improving perceptions in some cases, creating presumptions of what ethically non-monogamous people look like and how we live.
Jase: This is something we've talked about a little on past episodes about the legal status of non-monogamy and how- This surprises some people. -unlike being queer, or your race or your religion, which are all protected under various employment discrimination acts that being polyamorous or otherwise ethically non-monogamous is not protected, it's not a protected status and so, theoretically, you could say, for example, lose your job, or have a child taken away or something like that. Those are the things that you're focusing on in terms of those protections, or are there others I'm missing or what do you know? You probably know more than I do about that.
William: A couple of things. First off, very often folks who are queer can be discriminated against in all kinds of ways. The fight for full employment protection, legal protection is ongoing. In the realm of ethical non-monogamy, we see the same realms of discrimination happening. There's the jury legal discrimination that happens, where people are sometimes denied access to housing if you have multiple partners or people in some cases are disadvantaged in child custody proceedings.
People in some cases lose access to job opportunities. Lots of folks who are non-monogamous are forced into a closet of sorts because we just don't know when someone will feel threatened or offended by the ways that we love and the kinds of connections that we make and the ways that we live our lives. That can have a real impact on our material well-being.
Then there's also the kind of social disapprobation or disapproval that comes right along with misperceptions and preconceived notions about people who practice non-monogamy.
There's this entire other rafts of impacts that can sometimes happen where suddenly like someone at school finds out that you practice non-monogamy, and suddenly, your kids lose playdates and find themselves being teased and ostracized, and perhaps you as a parent, find yourself ostracized from your previous social circles and support networks with other parents. There's this like level of social disapprobation as well.
Our work in OPEN is trying to address all of it. We're trying to build real political power so that we can fight and eliminate and create protections against the kinds of legal discrimination that can sometimes happen. Then we are also trying to change how the world perceives ethical non-monogamy by advancing cultural acceptance and representation. We're in the very early stages of that work. We stand on the shoulders of giants and are aiming to build relationships with the many folks who have come before us. We think that now is the time for us to take polyamory and ethical non-monogamy really seriously as a political identity.
Dedeker: It's interesting, as you said, there's a lot of different moving pieces to this when we're thinking about actually trying to gain momentum and push the ball forward as it were. I'm intrigued specifically by the perception piece that you talked about. It brought up a memory for me. Several years ago, this is probably close to the beginning of this podcast, probably like 2014, maybe 2015 or so that I remember on my social media posting about, there had been a recent relatively publicized case of someone losing child custody because of the fact that they were in, I forget if it was in a non-monogamous relationship, or some consensually kinky relationship or something like that.
I remember posting about the need for protection and how there's discrimination and being really surprised by people's perceptions that a lot of people I would say, my so-called maybe more mainstream suscept friends commenting to say, "Oh, really, this is something that needs to be protected? This is just people in their bedrooms. Whatever. People can do whatever. Surely this isn't actually something we need to put our energy into."
Of course, at the time being disappointed, a little bit crestfallen to get that response. I do think that that response is starting to change but I do think that a lot of people still have that perception of like, "Why do we need to take this seriously?" I'm curious to hear a little bit more of about how we change that, especially on this kind of grander level.
William: I think your friends' perceptions are understandable I'm--
Dedeker: Oh, they're not my friends.
William: Oh, okay.
Dedeker: I'm just kidding.
William: I think I'm probably just a little bit older than y'all are but I remember that-- I grew up in Louisiana and there were still laws criminalizing sodomy on the books that were enforced in states across the nation, primarily in the south into the early 2000s. I think it was maybe 2000 or 2001 when the Supreme court decided to strike those laws down. For many folks who think of themselves as political people, perhaps your political understanding was born in a world where it seemed like these things were just in place. Of course, why do we have to protect people from what's happening in their bedrooms?
Isn't that protected? The answer is absolutely not. People are still able to be discriminated against for activities that you don't agree with. You can choose not to hire someone because they're a member of the proud boys or because they're kinky or because whatever means it's like generally speaking. I think that the reality is that many people don't tend to think about our bedroom activities as part of our identity.
When the fact is for many of us, if you take away the ability to freely practice what is most intimate and satisfying and fulfilling about our sexuality, our sexual pleasure then that's really dehumanizing. What happens in our private lives is vulnerable. We have a Supreme Court right now that is really bent on keeping it that way with their focus on religious liberty. They actually want to enshrine the ability to discriminate against people for practices that your religion or your particular interpretation of your religion finds immoral.
Emily: I want to continue along those lines a little bit and go back to something that you said earlier about sort of the granular level of how we're going to make these things happen. You talked about policy change and I think even electing people and politicians who go along with the cause and also will potentially put protections in place. I guess as someone who is feeling very crestfallen and downtrodden at this particular political moment, how does one do that I guess?
What are the things that we can do to get people in place in these higher power situations where we're able to pass legislation that is protective of rights and of polyamory and families and all of those things? Is that something that you all talk about and think about?
William: It is absolutely.
Dedeker: We're asking just for the tiniest shred of hope in this moment of darkness, William.
Emily: Because I think it encompasses right now so much and it-- My goodness, I think so many people are feeling so dejected right now and this is an additional facet of that. Another thing that feels as though it can be taken away or have us told that it's illegal or something, who knows?
William: One of our board members Brian De Blank and Sheila, one of Ryan's partners they say all the time that if members of the legislature don't know that we exist as an interest group, then they're never going to work for us. Because to them, there is no us. Even having an established political identity with an established political organization that is ready to do things like lobby days where organizing people to do visits to your state representatives and state senators' offices in Sacramento or at the local legislative affairs office is super important to letting the folks representing you know that you exist and that you have interests that you want protected. That's step one or that is one step I should say.
We're working on a couple of different strategies for-- One is we've been working to develop an ethical non-monogamy day of visibility. That project is ongoing. We're hoping to launch it in a few months. Just like bringing people into a relationship with their own identity as political agents, as political actors is super duper important for where we're at in this moment. It's like building the movement. It's letting people know, like, "Hey, this polyamory thing you're doing is not just about dating."
Dedeker: That actually really clarifies it for me a lot because I think that-- I don't know. I think if someone just told me point blank like, "You need to make this identity political in some way." Personally, I'd be resistant because to me, I'm like, "I want to make it my life." I realize that I live in this particular landscape but it's important that there's change. I think clarifying it in almost these terms of this is just how the game is played. I find that very, very-- Just clarifying is the word about this idea of like you need to just be visible. That's almost step one of trying to get anything to move forward in this particular system. I think that makes a lot of sense.
William: It is step one. If we continue as ethically non-monogamous people, as sex-positive people, as kinky people who hide in the shadows and to treat our very real interests as something that-- Being forced to hide is okay if we behave in that way, then we're going to keep being forced to hide. We have to start perceiving ourselves and our place in the world very differently. When I look around the non-monogamous landscape in the Bay Area which probably has more ENM folks than most places else in the world.
Emily: Like the three places where we're all from, LA.
William: What I see is an increasing number of people living their lives out loud because they don't have to rely on just their friends, cis mono-normative like parents for play dates. There are so many relationships and there's also kind of a background cultural understanding of ethical non-monogamy in many parts of the Bay Area now, thankfully. It basically means that we're not as scary and we're not as demonized.
I see families increasingly making decisions about their level of exposure as in their level of outness that when I first landed in the Bay Area 14 years ago, parents were still not making those decisions. They were having so many more conversations with their kids, just in my personal circles about, "Okay, make sure you don't talk about daddy's other girlfriend," and that kind of thing. Of course, that still happens to a certain extent, but it is not the same.
Dedeker: Yes. I think we can all definitely comment on that as well. Just how much we've seen it change drastically over the last 10 years or so.
William: Yes. The stance of OPEN is that we can't just do the political work. The work is not just going out and talking to legislators. it's also cultural. It's also about making sure that people understand that folks who practice ethical non-monogamy are regular parents. They are your neighbors, they are on the PTA, they may be teachers themselves. There are lots of us and our lives look a lot of different ways, but very often they look like yours.
Emily: Yes. What you're describing, it reminds me of something we talk a lot about on this show is just bringing humanity to ethical non-monogamy or to polyamory or being open or kink or whatever, because so many people out there probably aren't exposed to this, and having, as you said, this exposure, it'll make it for lack of a better word, more normalized people, as you said, won't be as afraid of it.
I love that. I think, yes, that seems a great place to start because so many, more "fringe communities", even queer communities or whatever at one point that was more demonized or scary for people and now it's normalized very much. I think, yes, bringing non-monogamy to the forefront in that way as well will normalize it more.
William: If we go back to looking at the movement for gay rights, and especially the focus on marriage equality of the 2000s, ethical non-monogamy has long been a part of cultures, so much of that was suppressed in the public narrative in favor of monogamous marriage and strategically, I can understand that choice because, you're trying to bring this highly marginalized, highly sexualized identity from the margins of civic life into the center and into lots of people's understanding of what American civic and family life can look like. I understand the strategic decisions that were made and we have to understand that also has an impact on people for whom regular monogamy is just not what they're built for, not what makes them happy. Now it's time to really look at ethical non-monogamy and build some power and bring that identity towards the center as well.
Jase: Yes. I think that discussion about strategy is an interesting segue because this is all stuff that we've talked to people about before. We see a lot of people in the non-monogamous community online talking about oh, lack of any legal protections or wanting to normalize this. Some of us have gone about that in different ways. We created this podcast in part as an effort to normalize and humanize and say, "Hey, this isn't something where we all need to use pseudonyms and hide it like it's some secret dirty thing.
It's like, no, this is just a normal thing that people do."
We see people approaching this in different ways, some of which are helpful, some of which are maybe not, of just shouting into the void of social media is not always helpful. Sometimes it is though. Then I think the same thing when it comes to lobbying and trying to get attention on things is that for so many of us, we just feel like I want there to be a change. I have a lot of feelings about wanting there to be a change, but I don't really have the experience or the skills to necessarily know what are the most effective ways to make that change.
I'm curious if you could talk about that a little bit, however, you want to take that question, because you have a lot of experience in organizing campaigns for other sorts of progressive organizations too and other causes. I'm just curious, actually being in that world, what have you experienced about what is successful versus not successful, to get back to Emily's question a little too, of what can we be doing or supporting your organization to do or however that is to actually make real change?
William: Sure. I would bring the conversation back to open and our theory of change. We think about things in terms of the theory of change because that basically defines our strategy. What is our best guess for how we can get from point A to point B? It's a little of that linear version of logic, which is not everyone's cup of tea, but it really works in the political world.
You can't have just that, but being able to be like, "Okay, I have a plan mapped out for linearly, how we get from point A to point B, I can constantly test those assumptions. Then if something doesn't work, I can go back to the drawing board and make adjustments." That's really important to be able to do. For OPEN, our theory of change involves one, building political power in part by bringing ethical non-monogamous folks into collective political identity and then expressing that identity in the halls of power.
Second is changing the perception of ethical non-monogamy so that people who don't practice ethical non-monogamy understand broadly what we're about and that we're human and deserve housing and protection for our families and employment protections and all those things. Then the third thing is that we want to support building infrastructure in ethically non-monogamous communities. We want to help people to understand what the options are and to form local organizations that similarly have the capacity to fight for perception and build political power locally.
We understand that this is not a movement that is going to be won by having one central organization. We need OPEN and we need the Polyamory Legal Advocacy Coalition, and we need the Leuthold Foundation and we need the National Coalition of Sexual Freedom and we need Loving More and we need just all of the many different national and regional and local organizations and communities that are doing everything from organizing conferences to organizing local potlucks that are helping to build connection and capacity in polyamorous and ethically non-monogamous communities. We need Black & Poly, we need all of these amazing organizations that are doing incredible work. We need the landscape of sex educators and relationship educators that are growing capacity. We need all of these people to be helping to build an understanding of this practice, just because it is good for us as people. In the monogamous world, there is so much support.
Some of it good, some of it not for how to be in relationship with other people who are monogamous and I feel like it is all to the good for there to be similar education and learning and support built in for folks practicing ethical non-monogamy. All of that also supports building our movement politically. We can't think of it as it or. Those are the three elements of our theory of change, the political, the cultural, and the infrastructure.
I would say that whatever you as an individual are doing to support those things like being out about being ethically non-monogamous is a political act. I'm not saying it is enough. I'm not saying it is all you should do, but being as out as you can with the closest circles where you can still feel reasonably safe. I say reasonably safe because yes, push it, and experience some challenge but hopefully, you're not going to lose your job or your housing over your decision to come out.
Understand that is part of the risk for some of us and so we need to figure out how can we assess those risks and how can we find support in our decisions to come out. Being out is super important to people understanding our stories and that way-- Like I'm out to my family. I have been out to my family for probably a decade now. I remember being just so nervous about coming out. I knew my family loved me, I knew that they would not disown me or anything and yet it was still just like really hard to get over the hump.
Then when I finally told my mother that I was in an open relationship. Her response was essentially, "As long as my babies are happy, I'm happy too." Not everyone is going to be rewarded in that way for taking the risk, but understand that that's also a possibility, it's not just hate and anger and separation and that thing.
Dedeker: Yes, that's a really good reminder I think to everyone listening out there. Something you said reminded me. It is interesting to think about the push for the legalization of gay marriage. I know it's not an exact parallel to this particular fight, but it does feel like it's the closest proxy that we have to think about building that particular momentum.
This is just armchair analysis.
I have no training or background in this whatsoever, but what stands out to me is thinking about how with the queer rights movement, there has to be this point where people who are not queer care, and care enough to be vocal about it and to support the people in their life who are fighting for this and things like that. That's something that's been, I think at least for me, also starting to creep into what I want for multiamory, what I have wanted for a long time, which is being able to create that space where people who have nothing to do with non-monogamy can still care and can still respect it and cannot be just immediately either threatened by it at the worst or at the best just ambivalent towards what happens to us or how things affect us.
Yes, I am just thinking that it does feel like we have not quite yet reached that tipping point where also all your monogamous friends actually care about non-monogamous rights. Not that that doesn't exist yet, but it does feel that seems that's probably part of this as well. Would you agree? Do you have a different take on that?
William: Yes, my take is that humans aren't just one thing, we're not just good. We're not just bad. One of the great strengths of humanity as a species is our ability to empathize to listen to someone else's story and see ourselves in it. That is an important aspect of being who we are. Another really important aspect of being human, something that we're fighting against here is our ability to recognize differences to be like, "Oh, this person isn't like me, or I don't like this thing and so I will excise it, I will manage it or whatever." The thrust of our effort is at activating the parts of people's brains that do empathy really well.
That's what y'all are doing on Multiamory, that's what the Normalizing Non-Monogamy are doing, that's what Dan Savage is doing, that's we're doing at Bonobo Network, and that's what we're doing in OPEN. We're trying to get people to hear our stories, to witness our lives, and to potentially see a bit of themselves in those stories. That is why this work cannot simply be political. That's why it has to be cultural. That's why it has to be grounded in people coming out and telling their stories.
That's why it has to be grounded in people taking risks with family members and with other parents in the pickup line at school and in your churches, not just the Unitarian ones and your Synagogues, and not just your Reform ones and so on. It's why this work is so important and what y'all are doing is so important.
Emily: We really appreciate you saying that and I think that's in a lot of ways about our mission from the beginning is just putting ourselves out there in a way that makes it feel more normal and accepting and something that anyone could do or be interested in or want to learn more about. I appreciate that comes through to people out there.
Jase: I also love that emphasis on supporting other groups doing the same stuff too. Our impact isn't better if we're the only podcast people listen to we're like, "No, let's have people from other podcasts on, we want to promote them too. We want people listening to all of us." I love that idea of, for you as an organization at OPEN, really focusing on, "No, we want to help foster all these other ones. It's not like we're trying to be the monopoly on how to push this forward." The same for whatever you are doing listener out there at home of it's doing that then also finding ways to make it easier for other people to do that too.
This sense of let's build each other up and not feel we're in competition with each other, or we need to tear each other down, even if we're doing it a little bit different from how we are.
William: Yes, exactly. In the Bay Area where I do most of my work with Bonobo Network, we see all the time that we're about cooperation, not competition, even in some place like the Bay Area, where there are lots of poly folks and organizations and so on. There are still are not so many of us that we can afford to take a stance of competition against one another. The ecosystem is stronger when there are many different access points to this world, many different takes on similar sets of values, and similar practices that maybe appeal just a little bit more than the way we present it. That's our approach in this political world as well.
Dedeker: I just want to invite our listeners to use your little rewind 15 seconds button and just listen to that quote just like 600 times.
Emily: I was going to say, wouldn't it be nice if our whole world operated in that way, that it's all about collaboration and not competition? That's awesome. I think we'd be much better off in many ways.
Jase: Indeed.
Dedeker: Hey folks, we're going to take a quick break from our conversation to talk about this week's sponsors. Our sponsors are really instrumental in helping us to keep this show going. Please take a moment, listen, and help us keep doing what we're doing.
Emily: I did want to pivot to this OPEN letter that OPEN recently submitted to Facebook confronting them on the fact that users aren't able to indicate multiple romantic partners and the like. Is it still a thing that it says in a relationship or whatever and you essentially can't do that with multiple people? Can you talk a little bit about the strategy there? Also, I'm interested in the fact that New York Times picked this up and did a whole thing on it and how cool that is and how you were able to get that publicity.
William: Yes. This campaign is a part of the cultural work that we're doing. Again, something like 20 million people in the US, it's only like 5% of the total population have some experience with ethical non-monogamy. It's a huge number. Maybe it's 16 million people. I think that might be more accurate, but still, that's a really huge number of people. Facebook already recognizes them somewhat in having the open relationship option.
Dedeker: That's weird that I feel like that's like a legacy option . Hasn't it been around from the very-
William: Oh, since the beginning.
Dedeker: -beginning. It’s so odd.
William: Totally.
Emily: My young self and my friends would put that on there, like in an open relationship with my friend Rebecca or whatever.
Dedeker: Oh, would you really?
Emily: Yes. That was the cool thing to do.
Dedeker: Oh, funny.
William: We know that Facebook has the capacity to do this. People can name, for instance, different family members. You can name your 15 first cousins. You can name all your siblings individually. You can name these relationships via Facebook. I can designate that Eugene Winters is my brother. Karen Winters is my sister. Or that William Winters is my father. I can name all of these things.
Jase: I have multiple stepdads and a dad and mom and stepmom.
Dedeker: Oh, wow.
Jase: You can list all those on your profile. That's a good point. I didn't even think about that.
William: Facebook already causes polyamory. Amazing.
Emily: There you go.
Jase: In a way. Yes.
William: Exactly. You can name all of these close family relationships. It just seems odd, like Facebook isn't living up to its own purported mission of creating a more connected world. When we can practice ethical non-monogamy are not able to name the partnerships and loverships and other relational titles and roles that make up our family constellations. We're just calling on Facebook to live up to its own creed.
I don't think it's particularly controversial, but the impact of being able to, once again, allow people to be out about who they're connected with and not just leave it to the imagination or have people assume that it's a joke as you said you were doing earlier in your youth, that really matters. It makes it real. It makes it more real for my family when they get to actually meet or see the other people I'm partnered with. That concretization is big.
Emily: Especially, billions of people that use Facebook on a daily basis that that's an option, a potential option. That's huge publicity, I think, and also huge I guess this sphere, like you can see that actually in writing on there. That's really cool.
William: We think that this is going to be a really important campaign area more generally, not just Facebook, but what are the other opportunities to advance the cultural narrative about ethical non-monogamy to create more acceptance through non-governmental means? In changing the political landscape, we are going to want to see-- I think that politicians and the courts if it gets down to the courts although as we've seen relying on the courts for big policy change is not necessarily the best option.
Policymakers are going to want to see that there is already movement towards acceptance. Most legislators don't want to be at the vanguard of something.
Jase: They want to follow us.
William: They want to follow, exactly. They're very cautious. A liberatory approach to democracy demands that we as the governed are leading. That's always the way it's been. We have to create the conditions that demonstrate that there is already significant movement. That means that we're going to have to ask major corporations to have non-discrimination policies against ethical non-monogamy. We're going to have to have corporations provide benefits to multiple partners and that kind of thing.
The groundwork has to be laid through other means in order to achieve the ultimate political ends that we want. We think that this campaign against Facebook is just the first step in a much bigger strategy to create a landscape of acceptance in American life and at points that are much more susceptible to this kind of public pressure.
It's much easier to change a corporation’s HR policy or to pass an ordinance at the local level, particularly in more progressive cities than it is to pass a bill through the California state legislature or through Congress. We’re clear. You can't pass much through Congress these days.
Dedeker: Apparently not.
William: Exactly. That is a broad look at the strategy and where the role of campaigns like this Facebook campaign fit in.
Jase: I think that's a great example too of how they're all connected like that. How this visibility and normalizing of something, and then getting change at these small levels then trickles up to the larger levels and how it's all kind of connected to each other. I also just as a quick side note as someone who works in the IT space, the fact that you also identified, "Oh look, Facebook already has this mechanism in place in other areas, it should be relatively easy."
Nothing's ever as easy in software as people think it should be, but it's relatively easy for them to be able to pull that off. This is just something that I'm seeing come up more and more in conversations about how we structure the backend database for our medical information system can be a really hard thing to change. If we've set it up in one way, we can end up locked into it. When it comes to things like gender, for example, or sexual preference or something like that. Sexuality that if your database was built a certain way, that can actually be incredibly hard to ever change that just logistically even if you want to.
I think that's also worth keeping in mind that as you get some of these companies that do have the resources or things in place already to do that, that others in building their systems might follow a suit and go, "You know what? Just in case, we should probably build that in to our system as well."
Emily: That's correct.
Jase: It just makes sense all around and that's really cool. As we're getting close to the end of this episode, could we take a quick moment for you to tell us a little bit about the Bonobo Network that you started, that you run? What is it? What are you doing with that?
William: Sure. Bonobo Network is a private membership organization that creates community for those of us who recognize that monogamy isn't always the best option for everyone and that pleasure comes in many different packages, where in many ways you can think of us as a social club. I really like to think of us as a community. We do lots of different events to do that capacity building and education and just creating tightly woven social networks that we talked about as being the third peg of OPEN's theory of change.
We throw parties and we facilitate workshops, we host retreats, we organize potlucks and happy hours, and discussion groups, and a book club. We do online mixers. We have an interview series and so much more. In short, we bring people with sex-positive values and often non-monogamous leanings together to find real support and learning and connection with others who share values around consent and empathy and accountability and inclusion and interdependence. That is the snapshot of Bonobo Network and what we do. I'm the founder. The entity that became Bonobo Network began with my 31st birthday party in 2010 and--
Dedeker: Wait, sorry. Just when you're saying the entity, I'm thinking of some spirit realm or some summon elder god or something. That's creating some really--
William: I just mean LLC.
Emily: It's a legal entity,
William: I mean the legal entity, not the spiritual entity.
We're not that kind of organization.
The entity that became Bonobo Network got it to start with my 31st birthday party in 2010. It was just a small gathering of friends in my two-bedroom apartment and has since grown to thousands of participants across the Bay Area and around the world. We have something like 1,500 active paying members now and growing.
Emily: Nice. That's awesome. Also, could you talk briefly about Express Yourself as well?
William: Oh, yes. Express Yourself is an extension of the work that I was doing in Bonobo. I think I had my first conversation with friends about throwing a POC play party in 2011 or something like that. I think it was November 2011 when that conversation first emerged. Then in 2017, I partnered with an amazing person and we actually brought that vision into reality. We created a POC play party in Oakland and it was incredible. It was just such a positive affirming experience.
We did it again with a larger team the next year. We've since been doing these events quarterly, pandemic notwithstanding in Oakland. Express Yourself came at a time when there was a lot of really cool stuff happening in the POC sex-positive organizing landscape in the Bay Area.
Now there's Express Yourself as a regular event. There's Soul, which is mission controls version of a POC party. There is Black Kink Bay Area. There's Kinky, Colorful, and Conscious, which is a discussion series. There's Four Folks of Color. There's just a lot of capacity in the Bay Area POC sex-positive community which is just really important. Because I think that sometimes these spaces and the practice of ethical non-monogamy and the practice of sex-positive values and culture can look really white and look really exclusive and hard to approach for folks of color.
Creating these spaces where we can come together-- I guess your viewers can't see me. I'm a Black man. Where we can build that capacity with one another has just been a magical experience that is good for the folks of color in this community and is also good for the community at large. Really happy to be doing that work and definitely looking forward to the next Express Yourself event in early August.
Emily: Nice.
William: Yes.
Emily: This has been a really excellent conversation, William. We really appreciate having you on the show. I hope that we can continue hearing about what is going on with OPEN and helping in any way that we can. Also for our listener's work and we find more of you in your work and then also work in people follow OPEN.
William: Yes, for sure. Like I said, most of my day-to-day work is with Bonobo Network and you can find us @bonobonetwork.com. If you like what you see, if our values and vibes align with what you're looking for in a community, you can click the apply button and complete our membership application and join us. You can also find Bonobo Network on Facebook, and Instagram, and even Twitter, but we don't say very much there. You can also find me at OPEN. That's open-love.org. That's open-love.org. You can find out about OPEN, you can join our email list.
You can donate. That's another really important piece of the puzzle. Organizations as it turns out need capital to survive. We have an amazing executive director, an amazing political director. Political staff deserve salaries that they can live on as it turns out. You can join our email list. You can donate. You can plug into the various efforts that I've mentioned on this program there.