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Radical Faeries. And that’s just inthe United States. Even if you don’t belong to any of these sexually oriented communities, it’s worth taking a look at them for what they can teach us about our own options as they develop ways of being sexual, ways of communicating about being sexual, and ways of living in social and family structures that are alternative to sex-negative traditions in America.
    Dossie’s favorite dance club in 1970 was a remarkable miniculture of polymorphous perversity. She remembers:
    The Omni, short for “omnisexual,” was a small North Beach bar whose patrons were men and women, straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and often transgendered. The sexual values were very open, from hippie free-love freaks to sex industry professionals, and most of us came there to dance like wild women and cruise like crazy.
    Thanks to the large transgender faction, there was no way of pigeonholing the person you were cruising into your categories of desire. You might dance with someone you found very attractive and not know if they were chromosomally male or female. It’s difficult to get attached to preferences like lesbian or straight when you don’t know the gender of the person you are flirting with.
    This may sound crazy, but the results were surprising: I patronized the Omni because it was the safest environment available to me. Because there was no way to make assumptions, people
had
to treat each other with respect. No one could assume what kind of interaction might interest the object of their attention, so there was nothing to do but ask. And if you were, as I was, a young woman in your twenties, to be approached with respect was a most welcome relief from straight social environments where it was customary for men to prove their manhood by coming on too strong, evidently in the belief that women who cruise in singles bars have problems with virginal shyness and don’t mean “no” when they say it. The Omni provided my first experiences with true respect.
    Since we see some of the problems in attaining a free and open expression of our own individual sexuality as having to do with living in a sex-role-bound culture, we have found it useful to learn from people who have shifted the boundaries of what it means to be maleor female, or what it means to choose partners of the same or opposite sex. Thinking about different ways of living and loving can help us as we consider whether we want to change anything about how we go about living as men and women, or somewhere in between.
LESBIAN WOMEN
    In the lesbian community, we get to look at what happens in a world consisting almost entirely of women. For women, relationship can get confused with their sense of identity, especially since our culture in its most traditional form hardly allows women any sense of identity at all. Thus, many women act as if they would lose their entire sense of themselves without their relationship. The most common relationship sequence, as we see it magnified in the lesbian community, is the form of nonmonogamy known as serial monogamy. Often the connection to the partner of the future precedes the breakup with the partner of the past, with accompanying drama that presumably feels safer than the vast, empty, unknown, and terrifying identity void of being a woman living as a single human being.
    Younger lesbians are questioning these traditions, and often that questioning includes looking into nonmonogamy as a way to form less insular relationships. Lesbian polyamory is characterized by a lot of serious thoughtfulness and attention to consensuality, and thus to tremendous openness about processing feelings, an area in which the women’s community excels.
    Our lesbian sisters also have a lot to teach us about new ways of developing a woman’s role as sexual initiator. In heterosexual culture, men have been assigned the job of initiator, and men are trained to be sexually aggressive, sometimes to a fault. In the world of women who