I am also trying to become more accepting of corniness, so I relate to a lot of what you wrote. I’ve noticed two taxonomies of corniness: One is about overly simplification and infantilizing the audience. The other happens when someone is earnest - which is honest, which requires bravery! A lot of that latter kind of corniness has been excruciating for me exactly because someone else is telling a truth I’m not yet capable of bearing myself. I aspire to be corny in that way.
Gosh that book. I also bounced off it somewhat but I do appreciate that a lot of the stories in it felt like they too place in genuinely queer spaces rather than at the assumed-female-bisexuality spaces of a lot of polyamorous meetups I actually went to. (My feelings about books on polyamory are also colored by the fact that for a while everyone in the space was recommending Fr*nkl*n V***x's book, and I was a meta-metamour of said dude and was not impressed by either firsthand experience or thirdhand gossip, so I have a lot of resentment about that left over that has nothing to do with any of your points!)
I wonder if we'll ever get back to the scrappy activism and optimism of a bi centric magazine like Anything That Moves. I miss that.
And yeah, there's a lot of corniness in some of the early polyamory books. There used to be a convention for the poyamory usenet group alt.polyamory, and the bi group soc.bi .
I am also trying to become more accepting of corniness, so I relate to a lot of what you wrote. I’ve noticed two taxonomies of corniness: One is about overly simplification and infantilizing the audience. The other happens when someone is earnest - which is honest, which requires bravery! A lot of that latter kind of corniness has been excruciating for me exactly because someone else is telling a truth I’m not yet capable of bearing myself. I aspire to be corny in that way.
Gosh that book. I also bounced off it somewhat but I do appreciate that a lot of the stories in it felt like they too place in genuinely queer spaces rather than at the assumed-female-bisexuality spaces of a lot of polyamorous meetups I actually went to. (My feelings about books on polyamory are also colored by the fact that for a while everyone in the space was recommending Fr*nkl*n V***x's book, and I was a meta-metamour of said dude and was not impressed by either firsthand experience or thirdhand gossip, so I have a lot of resentment about that left over that has nothing to do with any of your points!)
I wonder if we'll ever get back to the scrappy activism and optimism of a bi centric magazine like Anything That Moves. I miss that.
And yeah, there's a lot of corniness in some of the early polyamory books. There used to be a convention for the poyamory usenet group alt.polyamory, and the bi group soc.bi .