Megan Katz hasn’t always been so forthcoming about the fact that she dates outside her marriage.
Katz, 51, a librarian in West Hollywood, has two children with her “nesting partner,” and another partner whom she does not live with. She has not experienced prejudice at work or in her neighborhood but knows others who have. She also fears her kids could be ostracized or face discrimination because of her romantic arrangement.
“I do have some consternation,” Katz said. “Once you’re out, you can’t put that cat back in the bag. You can’t unring that bell.”
But in early March, Katz proclaimed herself “proudly polyamorous” in support of a novel law championed in West Hollywood to protect polyamorous domestic partnerships.
West Hollywood’s five-person City Council on March 2 unanimously approved advancing a registry of multi-partner domestic relationships. It’s the latest of a few cities in the U.S. to pursue legal protection for groups of more than two adults living in a single household who are romantically or otherwise committed to one another. Such family structures, experts say, can face systemic barriers in housing, healthcare, education and other services where existing policies often assume dual income or nuclear households.
Actual implementation of a plural domestic partnership registry, however, is still at least several months away. The council established a task force to work out the details and return to the council within six months with recommendations on next steps, at which point the council would take another vote.
In the meantime, the council outlawed discrimination against polyamorous people and others in nontraditional family structures, such as multigenerational immigrant households. The anti-discrimination law, which adds family or relationship structure as a protected class in the city alongside race, religion, gender and other categories, was finalized Monday and will go into effect in mid-April.
West Hollywood Councilmember Chelsea Lee Byers, who introduced the ordinances, said in an interview that the protections were “frankly long overdue” and that giving people other options is crucial amid efforts by the Trump administration to erode LGBTQ+ rights and housing affordability issues more broadly.
“West Hollywood is home to people who build families and choose diverse lifestyles and that’s long been a part of our community’s existence,” Byers said. “Especially in despairing economic times we need to ensure people aren’t being denied access.”
The country’s very first poly-friendly city ordinance came about almost by happenstance.
In 2020, as Somerville, Mass., rushed to get domestic partnership law on the books amid the spread of the coronavirus, one City Council member suggested to fellow officials working on the law that the registered relationships not be limited to two adults. It meant the law, which affords partners some of the rights held by spouses in marriage, could be applied to individuals in committed relationships with multiple people.
It was a “serendipitous” win for a constituency that had not quite consolidated, said Ann Tweedy, a professor at the University of South Dakota School of Law, who has studied polyamory from a legal perspective.
After the Somerville ordinance passed, several attorneys and other advocates across the country exploring polyamory law banded together to form the Polyamory Legal Advocacy Coalition to ensure those drafting future legislation had the necessary support and expertise.
Their efforts are yielding real gains. Two other Massachusetts cities, Cambridge and Arlington, followed Somerville’s example in 2021. In 2024, Berkeley and Oakland passed ordinances outlawing discrimination based on family structure, including polyamorous relationships. In recent weeks, the Oregon cities of Portland and Astoria, as well as Olympia, Wash., have advanced similar protections.
The laws will make a difference in seemingly mundane ways. If a parent wants their domestic partners to pick up their child at school, these protections allow that. Partners can use that recognition to visit each other in the hospital, Tweedy and other legal experts said.
On top of that, the “emotional security” of just knowing your partners are recognized seems small but is important, Tweedy said. The anti-discrimination protections, she said, are “legally significant” because they put landlords, healthcare companies and others on notice.
Brett Chamberlin, executive director of the Oakland-based Organization for Polyamory and Ethical Nonmonogamy, or OPEN, said the group has helped push for such policies in California and elsewhere because nonmonogamy is greatly stigmatized and new legislation “recognizes the fact that most households don’t reflect the mythical arrangement of a nuclear family.”
Chamberlin and other advocates, see it as an opportunity to build protections for a broad group of people, such as immigrant households that depend on extended family members for child care and support. Many Americans, research shows, find nuclear family structures isolating and insufficient, with some choosing to delay or avoid marriage. The new laws help to recognize other connections that people rely on.
“The current legal system was never designed for all of us,” said Christina Fialho, an attorney and founder of bisexual media representation advocacy group Rewrite the BiLine, who first brought the idea of polyamory protections to West Hollywood Councilmember Byers about a year ago. “Cities are realizing families come in many forms and that they should protect, not police those relationships.”
Not everyone supports the recognition of polyamorous relationships, however. When Berkeley and Oakland were on the brink of passing their laws, the California Family Council, a politically conservative religious advocacy group, announced its opposition, calling the affirmation of polyamorous relationships “cultural suicide.”
Rose Montoya, 30, a Los Angeles-area queer activist, said that as a transgender woman who for a decade was estranged from her family, she often relies on friends rather than blood relatives. During a recent health crisis, an emergency surgery to remove a cyst, Montoya said she wanted support in the hospital but did not have any options available to her.
“In moments like that, I think about, ‘Oh, I’m not married … so legally I don’t have a lot of protections,’” Montoya said.
Fialho said that realistically, additional rights will come in phases, given that advocates are “up against a mainstream legal system.” West Hollywood is a case in point, she noted, having been, in 1985, the first city in the U.S. to establish a domestic partnership registry, though it did not extend insurance coverage to city employees’ unmarried partners until 1989.
Technical challenges have made some cities reluctant to recognize plural domestic partnerships, according to a paper Tweedy published last year. Berkeley, for example, had considered a polyamory anti-discrimination law as early as 2017 but did not follow up out of concern it would have to insure an employee’s multiple partners, Tweedy wrote. In some cities that recognize plural domestic partnerships, city employees can cover multiple registered partners under municipal benefits, a benefit not required by private insurers.
The polyamorous community is bigger than many realize, said Amy C. Moors, an assistant professor of psychology at Chapman University who has researched the demographics of polyamorous people and discrimination against such relationships.
According to a 2017 study that surveyed 9,000 people, 1 in 5 people in the U.S. have engaged in some form of consensual nonmonogamy — defined as “an agreed-upon, sexually nonexclusive relationship” — during their lifetime. That proportion remained constant across ages, education levels, incomes, religions, political affiliations and races.
Men, compared with women, however, and people who identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual were more likely to have previously engaged in consensual nonmonogamy, according to the study.
Queer people have robust experience challenging societal norms and are thus “more open to the idea that monogamy might not be the best thing for everyone in the entire world,” said Alexander Chen, a legal scholar and founding director of the LGBTQ+ Advocacy Clinic at Harvard Law School.
Gay advocates first began the push for domestic partnerships during the AIDS crisis. People were dying and their loved ones couldn’t visit them in the hospital.
“There were so many different aspects that really made it clear that kinship to other people needs to be recognized,” Chen said.
But in the push to legalize same-sex marriage, advocates tended to flatten the experiences and family structures of queer people to make it palatable to the American public. Now, there’s a chance to take a more expansive approach, Chen said.
He cited three women in his research who were living together and raising a child as an example. The group was struggling because one had been diagnosed with late-stage cancer; because only two of the women were legally married, the third had to pretend to be a sister for hospital visits. They also worried the third woman would not be able to pick up their son from school while his biological mother was undergoing cancer treatment, and about parental rights in the event of the biological mother’s death.
“You might think, ‘OK, West Hollywood passes this thing that’s just a piece of paper. What does that mean? Well, actually, it means lots of different kinds of things in different contexts,” Chen said.
This story originally appeared on LA Times
