
Image: Canva.
Author’s note: Names and places have been changed to protect privacy.
Toby’s one of those dating app matches that I have to connect with across two platforms before we actually get a chat going. First Hinge, then Feeld, and even then it’s really a matter of hearing from them at the right moment—when I need to feel valued—that sparks an interest.
I’ve lost my job. The company I was working for has gone bankrupt. I’m on a temporary bridging visa while the Department of Home Affairs decides whether or not I should get to stay in Australia—a visa on which I can get kicked out of the country with sixty days’ notice at any time—so no one wants to hire me. The job that I’d been doing owed me about $20,000 in wages and entitlements when they declared insolvency. I’m not entitled to any income protections or Centrelink, even though I’ve been in the country for years. That money is gone. I’m trans, broke, angry and scared.
I’m fare evading on the 86 and staring out the tram window when I get a message from Toby:
I see on your profile that you like Dune, but you also like piss play. It’s going to be hard to get piss play going on Arrakis.
I belly laugh for the first time in weeks.
Within certain suburbs of Melbourne, you’re increasingly the odd person out if you aren’t queer and ethically non-monogamous. I live south of the Yarra, but on the apps I exclusively get Likes from inner-north lefties. As a pansexual, non-binary person in my late thirties, with a decade of ethically overlapping relationships in my rear view, this should make the living rooms of Coburg and Northcote my heaven.
You’re increasingly the odd person out if you aren’t queer and ethically non-monogamous.
Etched in the dating profiles of the thirsty within these algorithmic radii, a three-word shorthand appears: ‘kitchen-table poly’. If polyamory refers to the desire to consensually pursue multiple emotional and sexual relationships simultaneously, the kitchen-table variety refers to the ambition that all of a person’s romantic partners, lovers, friends-with-benefits—and even exes—get to know each other and get along. While the exact texture of what this means varies from person to person (and group to group), it refers to the wish to integrate all of one’s emotional, sexual and sensual connections into one cohesive social experience.
Toby, like me, is non-binary. They’re two years into exploring ethical non-monogamy (ENM), so it’s new and exciting. They’re hung up on a lot of their exes and before ENM they just used to cheat. They are, however, great at sex, debilitatingly handsome, wealthy enough to have free time and interested in going to the same public kink events that I am. Occasionally they are also hilarious. This is how Toby and I become new friends who have filthy friendship sex with each other.
Legs splayed on their couch with a Splash Blanket spread out underneath me like I’m a picnic, they eat me out and I forget how precarious everything in my life is. After we collaborate on having orgasms, they ask, ‘How are you coping with losing your job and not knowing if you’ll be allowed to stay?’
‘Sex helps because being in my body helps,’ I say. ‘Meeting kind queer people who treat me like my existence has value…helps. Right now, that’s as good as things get for me.’
As Toby and I start seeing more of each other, they tell me, filter-less, about their life. The romantic dramas unfolding in their inner-north hobby band, what it was like to play their first gig (around the corner from the inner-north home they own) and how their partner, Kirsten, said to them post-gig, ‘It’s good that you don’t suck, as a musician. It would have been a real turn-off if you sucked at this.’ It’s the kind of comment that, here in Australia, often passes for ‘flirty banter’.
They eat me out and I forget how precarious everything in my life is.
Kirsten is likewise non-binary and lives in a queer share house a block away from Toby. Between the three of us, it makes effective use of pronouns to differentiate persons basically impossible. Toby says the day-to-day of the poly romance they share with Kirsten is easy to navigate. As a result of established ease, Toby’s dating profile strings together subculture shorthand that would be incomprehensible to anyone not already immersed in poly vernacular:
I’m interested in ENM, RA with kitchen table characteristics
RA—relationship anarchy—puts forward the idea that every relationship, be it lovers, romantic partners or platonic friends, are all valued equally. No one is more important or privileged than another, regardless of the nature of a relationship.
There are some sex-on-premise public events coming up that I’m planning to go to, and Toby’s planning to be at them as well, but with Kirsten.
‘Kirsten can get jealous,’ Toby tells me. ‘I might not spend as much time with you if they’re there.’
I reply: ‘Should we all grab dinner sometime then, so that the first time Kirsten meets me isn’t potentially in a loud, dimly-lit party while someone’s getting fisted?’
The plan is paella from a five-star food truck in a Preston parking lot. Toby and Kirsten will arrive and leave together. The plan is to build Kirsten’s sense of security.
Toby is nervous. For me, this dinner isn’t a massive deal. I’m comfy with casual sex unmoored from a sense of community. But I’m also open to having a place at a table where interconnected queers take care of one another. If I could sit at a kitchen table like that, as my authentic self—who wouldn’t want that?
Kirsten and Toby rock up hand-in-hand to our parking-lot dinner thirty minutes late, despite the fact I’ve come from the south side of town to meet them in their neighbourhood. It’s a cold August night, and I’ve been sitting on a bench shivering while waiting for the two of them. Toby asks if they can kiss me hello. Kirsten evades eye contact and says hi to a nearby dog instead of me. I feel like I’m the one who is supposed to put the two of them at ease. They’re the couple who are supposed to be happily enjoying their ethical non-monogamy.
I decline Toby’s make out offer. They order all of us food and drinks, and I concentrate on showing Kirsten that I’m interested in getting to know them. I know a lot of intimate things about Kirsten from Toby’s tendency for TMI, but I tread towards safer topics. I ask them about how they like their work, how long they’ve lived in Melbourne—all the normal get-to-know-yous. Kirsten answers my questions like an urban planner building a city of dead ends. It’s stressful. I drink to fill the void left by their perfunctory responses.
I feel like I’m the one who is supposed to put the two of them at ease.
Kirsten starts bringing up details they know about my sex life. Toby’s oversharing spreads in all directions. I don’t want to discuss what’s most intimate to me with Kirsten—not when they’ve been nothing but cold and short with me. I still need the individuals at the kitchen table to be able to establish genuine rapport. I drink more, trying to find some fun in the situation.
I pivot the conversation towards less exposing topics: music, TV shows, the weather. Kirsten looks me dead in the face.
‘I like deep conversation, Sly. I find small talk boring.’
I try to think of a non-hostile way to let Kirsten know that their negging won’t prompt me to seek their approval by sharing my intimacies. I can’t find kind words. I wash down the words I have with booze.
Toby gets up to get us all more drinks. As Toby leaves, Kirsten’s tone does a one-eighty. They start complimenting my looks. They smile at me like the two of us are on a date. I’m grateful for the easing up on the icy front but, at the same time, it feels icky.
Toby gets back with drinks. Kirsten asks me about my kinks. I’m tipsy. I should get up and leave. I think about how nice evenings at a big queer kitchen table might be and how much—especially now—I need community. I give Kirsten the information they want. They pay close attention. For a moment I’m glad I’ve compromised. Then Kirsten turns to Toby and says that all the kinks that I’d just said were important to me are kinks that the two of them should explore in their romantic partnership.
Something snaps inside me. I had showed up to this dinner to try to put Kirsten at ease, I’ve sat through microaggressions, suffered tonal whiplash and have now been mined by Kirsten for ways that they can get closer to Toby. I’ve drunk more than I would if I felt supported and I want to flip this table very dramatically.
Toby breaks the silence. ‘I think I’m getting tired, you two,’ they offer.
‘Order an espresso martini and wake up,’ says Kirsten. ‘You’re coming back to mine to go down on me.’
I can’t pretend that pissing-to-mark-territory is a hallmark of relationship anarchy. I hate that I’ve succumbed to the pressure of someone I don’t trust just because we suck the same dick. My emotional hangover is going to be worse than my physical one. I’m hurt that Toby has let me be humiliated and used.
Poly vernacular becomes harmful, rather than hot, when it’s lip service.
The sex and intimacy politics practiced in the inner north suggest potential for new definitions of love and community. But terms like ‘ethical non-monogamy’, ‘kitchen-table polyamory’ and ‘relationship anarchy’ are only progressive if they are more than a new set of norms for people to simply go through the motions of participating in. It’s not possible to productively date people who claim that relationship anarchy is on offer when their actions imply a hierarchy. There’s nothing ethical about kitchen-table poly when some of the people at the table treat their seat as guaranteed, while others have to sing for their supper. Placing a shorthand on a dating profile is not the same thing as practicing new ways of exploring sex and care. Poly vernacular becomes harmful, rather than hot, when it’s lip service.
I stop wrapping my lips around Toby. I wonder if Home Affairs will let me stay in Australia. I wonder if I’ll recover from losing $20,000. I hustle for cash gigs while on a visa that in-practice makes me unemployable. I fare evade, swipe liberally on the apps and am told by my matches that the inner north of Melbourne is where I’ll find what my queer soul needs.
I fuck to forget the things I cannot change. I wonder if any of the messages I get intertwining sex and sandworms will turn into familiarity, poly or otherwise, that makes me feel cared for and seen.
My life sits in an existential waiting room, just on the outside of something divine. Maybe. I am waiting.