Amy Nash-Kille knows that not everyone would choose a polyamorous family like hers. But she called it the “greatest blessing” of her life.
Nash-Kille said she has spent the last 17 years in a committed relationship with “two gentle, loving men”, sharing the costs and responsibilities of raising four kids.
But she’s concealed her family arrangement from her graduate school adviser, co-workers and even her hairdresser. She said someone harassed her family for more than a year, and she took out a restraining order to stop it before moving her family from a Colorado suburb to Portland, Oregon, in 2011.
In March, the city became the largest in the US to pass an ordinance protecting polyamorous people and multipartnered households from discrimination in housing, jobs and public accommodation. For Nash-Kille and her partners, it was “one of the greatest relief moments of our lives”.
“People are still going to judge what they don’t understand,” said Nash-Kille, who told her story to the Guardian and in city council testimony. But the new law, she said over email, “is helping to establish the inherent worth and dignity of people who have unusual family configurations when considered by society at large”.
Portland’s ordinance is the latest in a recent wave of cities including West Hollywood and Olympia, Washington’s capital city, extending civil rights protections to those in nontraditional family or romantic arrangements. Eight cities across Massachusetts and the west coast now have some form of legal recognition of polyamorous relationships.
Taken together, the efforts signal the emergence of a stigmatized group as a political constituency, as well as a challenge to the legal dominance of the traditional nuclear family – which has become the exception rather than the rule.
In 1970, about two-thirds of Americans ages 25 to 49 were living with a spouse and at least one child, according to the Pew Research Center. Over the next five decades, that figure dropped to 37%, according to Pew.
“I’d like to get the government out of the business of evaluating our personal relationships,” said Diana Adams, an attorney who heads the Chosen Family Law Center and helped write ordinances in Massachusetts.
Adams said their bigger goal isn’t marriage for polyamorous people, but “unbundling” rights and benefits tied up in institutions that favor people in traditional relationships, including taxes, health insurance benefits and hospital visitation.
Brett Chamberlin – the executive director of the Oakland-based Organization for Polyamory and Ethical Non-monogamy (Open), which has campaigned for the ordinances – said polyamorous people are moving from being viewed as a “lifestyle oddity” to organizing into a movement.
Efforts are already under way for more ordinances in Pacific north-west cities such as Seattle, Eugene and Astoria, as well as Hazel Park, a small city near Detroit. Chamberlin hopes this will eventually create a tipping point where states and the federal government adopt protections for polyamorous people.
A more visible population
While there are no definitive counts of polyamorous people in the US, they’ve become steadily more conspicuous. A 2016 study estimated that more than one in five single adults engage in consensual nonmonogamy at some point. Other studies estimate that 4-5% of people are currently in consensual nonmonogamous relationships.
“If you’re in an office of 100 people, there is almost guaranteed to be at least one person who is not monogamous,” said Chamberlin. “The question is, is it a safe enough environment where they feel comfortable sharing?”
Philip Cohen, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, said the US had a very compulsory marriage system in the 1950s and 60s, which he called “an anomalous period” that the baby boom generation quickly abandoned.
“The norms are weakening or there’s just less regulation of what people do,” he said. “And so the natural variation in what people want is being allowed to come out.”
Greater visibility hasn’t always come with greater acceptance. Open’s 2024 survey of nonmonogamous individuals found that 60% had experienced stigma or discrimination when dealing with healthcare, child custody or acceptance from their own families.
Dr Elisabeth Sheff, a sociologist who’s long studied consensual nonmonogamy, said she’s seen “significant judicial bias” against polyamorous people who are assumed to be inadequate parents during custody fights.
After Portland’s ordinance passed, Skylar Cruz recalled her group chats lighting up with supportive messages. Cruz, a 33-year-old transgender programmer, said she has been in a polyamorous relationship for about a year after she and her male partner of six years added a trans woman to their relationship.
Aside from some intrusive questions and negative reactions to her relationship, she said she hasn’t faced any systemic discrimination while sharing an apartment with her male partner. Now, she and both her partners are thinking about moving in together. She hopes Portland’s ordinance means three consenting adults don’t have to conceal their relationship while looking for a bigger place.
“I feel like we’re at a crossroads in a lot of our political values here in the US,” she said. “And we ultimately have to decide whether or not people are worth protecting for being different. As somebody who is very different, I can’t opt out of being different at this point.”
Outside the traditional nuclear family
In 2020, Somerville, Massachusetts, quietly became the first city to recognize polyamorous rights when it created a domestic partner registry, which was later replicated in nearby Cambridge and Arlington.
The registry doesn’t have a residency requirement and is open to people who consider themselves “in a relationship of mutual support, caring and commitment”. That meant people registered as domestic partners were granted hospital visits and other limited rights.
Adams, the head of the Chosen Family Law Center who helped fine-tune the ordinance as part of the Polyamory Legal Advocacy Coalition, said the registry was also designed to help people form a “chosen family”: voluntary bonds people form with polyamorous or platonic partners.
A multidomestic partnership could benefit a situation like in the Golden Girls, allowing a group of older widows to participate in each other’s medical decisions, Adams said.
Domestic partnerships still don’t offer many benefits of marriage, such as with immigration status or federal taxes, but they do offer some stability to the majority of Americans who now live outside traditional nuclear families, Adams said.
In a related effort, activists in Washington are pushing for legal recognition of chosen families with “Indigo’s Law” – a piece of proposed state legislation that would make it easier for unmarried people to give their chosen family more control of their remains and funeral arrangements after their deaths. The proposal is named after a Seattle transgender woman whose remains were transferred to her family, who did not support her transition, rather than her fiancée.
“In most states in the US, if you live with someone for 20 years and you’re not married when you die, then it’s like you’re just some random stranger,” said Jessa Davis, a local activist hired as the next executive director of Open.
Despite the recent momentum for protecting polyamorous people, advocates say there are hurdles ahead. For instance, Seattle’s city council has yet to officially introduce the ordinance that local advocates have lobbied for, said Davis, which she believes is partly due to political concerns.
“Olympia was a lot easier because it is a relatively small city, and we had a very supportive city council who aren’t exposed to the same kind of political pressures on a national level that a larger city is,” she said.
Davis said councilors in larger cities have privately expressed concern that adding polyamory protections to their municipal code could draw the ire of the Trump administration. Both Portland and Olympia’s ordinances were pilloried by conservative talk radio hosts. Davis shrugged it off, saying that most people will conclude that polyamory isn’t hurting them.
Even with the looming possibility of polyamory becoming the focus of another culture war, Chamberlin, the outgoing head of Open, said there are many conservative, white and older red-state residents who engage in some form of nonmonogamy. He added that while there is a conception that nonmonogamy is practiced by “liberal coastal elites with blue hair”, he knows owners of swingers clubs who are Trump supporters.
Chamberlin said a chief difficulty in enacting protections for polyamorous people is the sheer complexity of family law, which extends to mortgages, sick leave and other areas while varying by state.
For now, Cruz said, she was considering what the future holds after securing legal protections for her relationship, which she hopes lasts the rest of her life.
“I’ve got probably 50, 60 years left,” she said. “And in that time, I want to ensure that not only are we not being discriminated against, but that we are moving towards being seen as more ordinary, more common, more accepted.”
