You're listening to Sex & Politics at savage.love. We've taken a lot of calls here over the years from friends who are thinking about having a baby together, a gay man and his lesbian best friend. As well as calls from people who are worried about being outed as Paulier Kinky or who have just been outed as Paulier Kinky and have lost custody of their kids or might lose custody of their kids or have already lost their jobs.
And also calls from people who are wondering how they can protect their secondary or even tertiary partners in their wills. And my go-to guest expert in all of these cases, Diana Adams. They're an attorney in New York who specializes in protecting LGBTQ people and polyamorous people and their partners. In some cases, like the friends who want a co-parent, Diana helps people create and protect their families but also protect themselves.
They're the founder of Diana Adams Law and Mediation, a petite law firm in New York City, specializing in the same sex couples, platonic co-parents, polyamorous families, and also the executive director of Chosen Family Law Center. This is Sex & Politics, a special bonus podcast we do at Savage Lovecast for our Magnum subscribers.
You, if you can hear the sound of my voice right now, are not yet a Magnum subscriber, but we wanted to share some of my conversation with Diana Adams with you to give you a little taste of what Sex & Politics is all about and to tempt you to become a Magnum sub. Like I said, Diana's been on the love cast a lot because they're the perfect person to turn to with questions about forming families that fall outside the heteronormative mold and the homonormative mold too.
But I wanted to invite them on Sex & Politics because after so many years of talking with Diana about other people's problems, I was really curious about their journey. What attracted them as a working class kid to studying the law, how they began to specialize in the particular kind of legal work that they do and how they formed their own family. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Diana Adams. Diana, thank you for coming back on the show. I love being on the show, Diana.
It's always an honor. You've been on the love cast a few times, but I wanted to have you on Sex & Politics so we could have a more relaxed conversation because I'm really interested in your history, your journey to polyamory and the kind of advocacy and the work that you do. And to do that, to really get into it. The love cast, it's a little tighter, the show's a little shorter, and we've never really been able to have that kind of conversation on the love cast.
I wanted to have you on Sex & Politics to have that conversation. But first, congrats are in order. A big win today. Can you tell us about it? Thank you. Yes, we just passed the first West Coast relationship structure and family status non-discrimination law in Oakland, California. So we've already passed that in Somerville and Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was drafted by an organization I co-founded, polyamory legal advocacy coalition through my work at Shosen Family Law Center, my nonprofit.
And we worked together with a bunch of legal academics and psychologists to draft this law so that it would allow for non-discrimination based on whatever your family status is, whatever your relationship status is, because that way that would include people who are polyamorous,
but also people who are in platonic partnerships, people who are ACE, people who do collective living, single parents, the majority of kids in this country don't live with a married mom and dad and are in some other kind of family configuration. The majority of American adults are in different kinds of family configurations. And this would allow for non-discrimination in Oakland for housing, for other kinds of government
services. But moreover, every time we pass one of these laws, it raises awareness. It raises awareness about just how many of us are in other kinds of family structures and that our whole system is set up revolving around this idea of a different sex married, nuclear family instead of having a social welfare state.
But only 18% of American adults are married. And then how many of the rest of us are polyamorous, like me, who are in some of their kind of family configuration that you can't see on paper. And so I think it's really valuable to be valuing the families that are out there, helping us all
work on our shame about it. And also this is part of not just doing this work in Oakland, but raising awareness for all of us of the fact that we all deserve to be valued in whatever kinds of caretaking relationships were in because in these times we really need that caretaking. Okay, so this new law that the organization helped pass in Oakland is going to protect people in polyamorous relationships, other relationships structures from discrimination.
How often are people discriminated against because of their, you know, they're in a polyamorous triad or they have a platonic triad or quad partnership where they're home sharing. The problem being addressed by this legislation, how big a problem is it? It's a really good question because it's difficult for us to see. This kind of discrimination often
happens in covert ways. When I tried to rent an apartment most recently, if years ago in New York City, I applied to 100 apartments and was only invited to view 20, even though I have perfect credit and was amply financially able to afford the apartment. Is that because of a non-binary transgender and polyamorous activist? Potentially, that could have been part of it, but they don't, of course, they don't say that when they reject you, right? But every time we make
discrimination less socially acceptable, less normalized, that helps all of us. And we do see in things like situations like child custody cases that being polyamorous or another kind of family
configuration is used against people. I see this as supportive and helpful using lessons from the same sex domestic partnership movement that once you, once the state has stamped something, you know, once a male same-sex couple could go and have a cute picture in front of City Hall and have a piece of paper, suddenly their churches and their parents and their employers were willing to say, yes, it's acceptable for your husband to come to the company function. Yes, it's acceptable.
We'll have a picture of the two of you. And perhaps it's my problem and it's uncouth for me now, even if it's just about what's socially acceptable to be openly discriminating against people. I wanted to jump in and say this, you know, anybody out there thinking, okay, there's no poly triad in Oakland. The landlord is attempting to discriminate against them. But this is how it's done. I'm old enough and gay enough to remember a time when there weren't even domestic partnership
registries anywhere in the entire country. And we won marriage equality first by in a city like Madison, Wisconsin or some other college town or Seattle getting domestic partnership registries that then became civil unions, that then became state level marriage equality laws that passed at the ballot box, that then became the victory at the Supreme Court. And this is how you build protections for people in different kinds of relationships structures.
It is the model. It is the roadmap of marriage equality. You start with a city like Oakland where this isn't controversial in the same way that being gay in Madison, Wisconsin, there were still bigots. There were still homophobes, but it wasn't controversial and it made sense to people to pass a domestic partnership registry that allowed a same-sex couple to have a piece of paper that they could show to a landlord that gave this stamp of, you know, state approval shouldn't
really matter, but sometimes you need that, you need that piece of paper and it matters. And there is discrimination against individuals and couples and triads and quads based on their relationship structures or how they love. And your organization shows in family law center takes those cases. And often it's child custody where, you know, a vindictive acts finds out that their former
partner with whom their share kids has two partners now. And they superchild custody or to bar visitation based on the prejudices that attach to people who have more than one partner.
And to protect that person who may live in some shitty part of downstate Illinois where there isn't the kind of law that just passed in Oakland, you need to build piece by piece protections that cover everybody in the same way that piece by piece we built protections for all same-sex couples by moving marriage equality from city domestic partner registries to state protections for same-sex couples to state same-sex marriage laws to federal rights for same-sex couple. Exactly, that's
the strategy. So it's not necessarily about a massive concern of discrimination against probably people in Oakland or in Cambridge or Somerville. But instead about building this momentum. And it's also a way for progressive cities to take a stand that's in opposition to the way that many red states, many places in this country. We hear these horrible city council and school board meetings talking about trans people as less than human, talking about massive potential infringements on
women's rights. And this is a way to go in the other direction and say we are going to be a queer utopia. We want the Boston area, we want the Bay area to be the kind of place that is the opposite of that, where this is a place that you can come to. And frankly, in some of the trans sanctuary bills that I've been involved in in New York state and in Chicago and the state of Illinois, there's an intentional awareness of we want to make it easier for your queer people and your
feminists to get out of that state and come here. Where a lot of these bills are making it easier to streamline the professional licensing so that maybe a lawyer or a physical therapist or a doctor or a teacher could get their state license transferred. And frankly, in part, it's not just benevolent, it's also strategic. I'll happily take your brain drain to Chicago or the Bay area or to the Boston area floor to go ahead, have people like me and Dan and lots of feminists want to leave and
want to come and do interesting things where we are instead. All my life, I always said for decades queer people's refugees. If you grew up in a place with 500, I've heard someone describe this as a kind of metropolitanism, which is this idea that to be queer, you have to go to the big city. Well, if you grew up a place with 500 people, it's not going to be much of a dating scene there, even if it was a wonderfully accepting place. And we are queer people move to the cities.
I remember meeting queer people who were refugees in the city that they grew up in because they had to flee their homophobic families and so they lived on the other side of Chicago and never saw their family of origin. And they kind of had a refugee vibe. Even if they didn't have to go far, even if it was just an L right away. And as red states become worse and worse about queer people, about women's rights, about trans people, you are seeing more refugees, fleeing these places
for blue states for more welcoming, bigger cities. And the passage of a law like this in Oakland really does send up a flare. It also shows that we can still make progress that we're not just fighting an endless rear guard action to protect the winds we've already had. We can have a win and this is a win. And it's really inspiring to see this win. So congrats on it. Thank you. And I agree that I think it's important that we take those wins. If sometimes it's
controversial and I've been in the LGBTQ, I legal movement for 20 years now. And you know, sometimes there's been this discussion of like we can only focus on same sex marriage, just like we can only focus on rovy weight in terms of feminism. And just hang on to what we can get. We don't have time to talk about trans issues. We don't have time to talk about family structure or polyamory. And I see it differently. I think that we can do both at the same time.
And also advocating for our own personal liberty and having these wins at a local level keeps up our own personal inspiration. It keeps up my own inspiration. As I try to write trans sanctuary bills in New York State, it keeps up my inspiration to be able to get affirmed that there are places that are with us that want us where queer people were trans people, were polyamorous people aren't just tolerated but celebrated and welcomed.
I wanted to have you on sex and politics because we've had these conversations on the love cast where we briefly touched on our histories as both of us poly people, people with polyamorous relationships. But I wanted to be able to have a more relaxed conversation. I wanted to more about you. Where did you grow up? And when you were young, when you were a young person, what did you want out of love? What kind of relationship did you think about having when you
were an adult? I'm going to guess here that when you were 13, the kind of relationships that as an adult were the right relationships for you weren't the relationships you were even able to conceive of. The only people I've met who are poly from the beginning of their sexually active adult lives, you know, poly from the jump are people under 30 who benefited from those of us who were older and poly and came to polyamory being out and open about it and put it
in their heads that this was an option for them. But where did you start? Thank you for asking that, Dan. And I have been openly by for 25 years, polyamorous for 20 years. And I grew up in a small town in upstate New York and did not have internet access, didn't have exposure to anything other than the options of, you know, Mary a man. And frankly, as a working class girl, I was socialized to want
to marry a rich man. You want to get out of here. That's your ticket out. Meanwhile, I was very smart and found my own ticket out by getting some financial aid and going to Yale. But that wasn't one of the that wasn't one of the options that was presented to me. And I remember having a lot of fear and anxiety because I knew I wanted to have kids. I wanted to have connection. I wanted to fall in love. But I didn't even have the word for bisexual, but I or polyamory. But I knew in my heart that
this was not going to be easy for me. And I imagined with fear that sure, maybe I'm going to marry some nice doctor, but I'm probably also going to be sleeping with my nanny. And I might also be sleeping with the pool boy. And I just don't know that I could, you know, choose to be with a man instead of a woman for the rest of my life. And also that monogamy was something that I actually
wanted. And I think I came to a place of being interested in polyamory before I had those words because I saw so much oppression of working class women around me, domestic violence, in my own family and in my own communities, the ways that women being financially entrapped and entangled by men kept women in abusive relationships or just unhappy relationships,
just controlling relationships. And so the idea that I was going to try to find my freedom by finding the best one of those rich guys to own me was not appealing to me. Well, I'm a little confused. Like you looked around and you saw a lot of women in your community in shitty abusive relationships. And your thought as to how to solve for that was have multiple potentially shitty abusive relationships. No, no, no. Drowns, drowl line between those dots for me.
Yeah, good clarification. I think I wanted to not have anybody be able to be in control of my sexuality or my financial well-being. I didn't want to be financially dependent with an marriage. And I also really chafed at jealous boyfriends, you know, being able to tell me or my dad being able to tell me what I could wear, what I couldn't wear because they didn't want men looking at me when it felt like this is my body and my decision. And if you're uncomfortable with
it, we can talk about it. But I'm I wanted to be in control of my own body and my own sexuality and not have a man tell me what I could and couldn't do in terms of relating to other people just as I didn't want to be in a situation of feeling financially controlled and coerced into being
in a marriage and then feel stuck. So I didn't have the words for it at the time. And you were actually my first queer friend because I grew up in a small town near Albany and when there was a chance to drive into the big city of Albany, we would pick up the free artsy paper and your column was in the paper. And I would secret away to the backseat of the car and be so excited to read it because you were the first queer person I knew of. Period. And then it was like Ellen on TV,
you know, but I had no so what hearing your voice was incredibly powerful for me. And you were actually a bit of hope even if you were, you know, writing about blow jobs and things like that the time, which is great. It just gave me some hope of both open sexuality and queerness. And it encouraged me to to find other people. And now it's awesome that I get to be on the love cast and be your friend. That was a little bit of my conversation here on Sex and Politics with Diana Adams,
executive director of the chosen family law center. If you'd like to hear the entire conversation with Diana Adams, please consider becoming a magnum subscriber today at Savage.love.