Breaking Boundaries ‘10 – Meet Mai Li
Hey ladies and gents! I’m Mai Li. I do a lot of the PR stuff for Modern Poly, and if you listen to Poly Weekly, it was me they were interviewing for Modern Poly the last couple of weeks. SQUEE!
And as most of my close friends will tell you, I’m a complicated gal. 
My story’s long, but hopefully compelling. Grab a cup of tea and a snack or something– It’s storytime!
I’m a 27yo freelance musician in Seattle. I grew up in FL, which was pretty miserable for me. I found myself opposite almost everything the culture values (brunette, nerdy, flat chested late bloomer with hips, Jewish, passionate… eventually, poly and pansexual, too). Since I graduated and moved across the country 4 years ago, I’ve slowly realized nothing is wrong with me for being the way I am, which has been incredibly liberating. I’d barely even seen pictures before I moved… my not-exactly-ex-girlfriend & ex-fiance from my ill-fated triad offered me a couch until I found my own place, and I accepted, hoping life there would be better and the city was big enough for us to heal from our breakup seperately. Anything had to be better than staying in Florida… and while none of it was easy, I was correct on all counts. I’ve been incredibly happy here, and lucky to meet so many amazing people.
I just finally got a business license for my freelancing, and I’m incredibly excited about it, but terrified about tax season…. I’m in the middle of scoring a local theatre production right now, which opens in mid February. The music’s almost entirely blues-dance-able, which excites me and many of my blues dancer friends. I have a website <www.themaili.com> under construction now linking to places that have my music. I have a BM in Music Composition, and play a lot of instruments and sing. In the meantime, I also balance teaching 12 private music students each week, gigging as a singer songwriter, and the occasional odd gig (sitting in with a band, fronting my gypsy jazz side project (the Debaucherauntes), dancing, modeling, acting, choreography, costuming, make-up artist, session work, arranging, or other oddities). My most bizarre gig to date, hands down, was choreographing and starring in an exercise video promoting an Islamic sportswear line, which was kindof like ski suits with head coverings. No joke.
When I’m not in 2 primary relationships with my work, I’m an avid blues dancer, and active in my local Jewish community, mostly through the Ravenna Kibbutz (also see this awesome article). And my co-op, House of the Rising Sun, throws its fair share of epic community and social events as well. Sometimes I actually get a chance to date– I had a relatively nice first date recently with a sweet dancer boy that I found out was in an open relationship. But I’m taking dating slowly because I was in a V for 3-5 months that ended completely about a month ago, so I’m getting my feet back under me again.
But it doesn’t stop practically everyone who knows me from coming to me for relationship advice… which is both amazingly flattering and time consuming. Part of being a poly activist, to me, includes being accessible to people who get in sticky poly messes that don’t know who to ask. And I’ve spent so much time learning from all the messes I’ve been through, and my friends have been through, that it only seems natural to help them find their way outta the woods if they need someone. It’s really, literally, the least I can do to help.
See, to me, poly is like Sesame Street– it’s about sharing and caring. It’s creating bonds strong enough with the people you hold dearest that you don’t need them to close themselves off to every other person around, because you *really* understand and trust each other. It’s about being birds in a flock, knowing you’re coming home to roost in the same tree or migrating together (cause if it doesn’t come back, it wasn’t yours to begin with). It’s about belonging to each other in the sense that family does. It’s about creating a garden of loves that grow well together, for a more well rounded diet. For me, it makes the idea of forever-love possible.
When I was 5, I saw the Princess Bride for the first time and practically memorized it. I was already that much of a believer in True Love– something that lasts a lifetime and has intense storybook passionate qualities. When I was small I believed in “the one,” though I now consider that a myth; but the elevation of the ideal of True Love as something that conquers all has endured all evolutions thus far. But as an early conneseur on what love is, and someone who has always loved people, I looked for it everywhere. I still do– I can’t help it. Music is my first and best language. Love is my first and favorite subject.
I was what most people called boy-crazy in elementary school– I had crushes on lots of people at once, all for different reasons. Sometimes they’d be over in a couple weeks when they tripped me on the bus or put gum in my hair. Sometimes I’d nurse them for a year or more. Sometimes I’d form a really close friendship that felt like it was starting to go a different direction. Being a social pariah, I knew that none of these would really go anywhere, and I was right (until I was 16). But the patterns were always there.
When I finally started dating in high school, it meant someone liked me back who would been seen holding hands with me in public, and we’d occasionally find ways to make out. I was an overachiever and Captain of the Star Trek Club, with really strict parents who wouldn’t let me out of the house. But school was enough of a community to discover that the possession expected in most monogamous relationships made me feel watched, not trusted, and guilty about feelings or attraction to others than my boyfriends. I didn’t feel wrong about caring about them all when I didn’t have someone who wanted to posess me. I couldn’t understand why being with someone meant everyone else had to dim, and why it meant other people would handle me like borrowed goods. I grew to detest chivalry as anti-feminist and controlling, and to question what love was, until the end of my freshman year in college, when I started dating my good friend Alex, who would later become my ex-fiance.
From the beginning, we knew each other really well. We’d seen each other through a number of romantic tangles, and had dated casually for a month earlier in our friendship, never thinking we’d date again. We decided to have an open relationship, and while more of it was in theory than practice, it was the best and happiest relationship I’d ever had so far. We trusted and supported each other immensely, growing through psychological issues, social upheavals in our friend groups, sexual explorations, my crushes not being interested in me, and most of the other trials people face in college. But as long as we loved each other and could talk about everything, nothing mattered.
We didn’t know that “poly” would describe our approach pretty well. But I started my activism work pretty early, getting in heated arguments with people about how cheating wasn’t what we would be doing if it came to fruition, and how important good communication was.
“If you want to sleep with, or have feelings for someone else,” my 19yo self would lament,
“If you talk to the person you’re with about it first, either way, you’re going to adjust the rules of your relationship, and you don’t HAVE to cheat. Just change the rules of your relationship. Either you’ll know they’re not ok with it and you have to decide what’s more important to you, the new experience or what you have; or you can work out what the deal is with this new person. And if they’re both ok with it, and they’re not left out and they know what’s going on, sometimes it’s ok. Our rule is as long as we still love each other it’s ok.”
While naive in many ways, the roots of many sentiments I still possess were present in most of those debates. In the years between then and now, I’ve been in at least 3 other active poly configurations (depending on what you count) at different points. They are some of my happiest moments when they were each functioning well, and when they weren’t, they were the points that have taught me the most about relationships and how I love and communicate, and how to set good boundaries and help my partners do the same. In one of those “learning” moments, I turned to seeking out poly community (since I was the most experienced poly I knew at the time and thus unable to get any advice on my love life from anyone.) Already no stranger to community organizing, I immediately started helping with local events, and running my own, which eventually led me to be introduced to Jess, which in turn brought us to the moment this summer when we created Modern Poly.
This is what happens when I want relationship advice bad enough. 
No, really. My life has this bizarre swashbuckler’s streak, where it tends to become an epic, meandering quest in dogged pursuit of a seemingly simple goal, where a lot of amazing things happen along the way because I don’t let obstacles dissuade me. And I certainly got what I’m after… I have a FB note up with a bunch of my friends debating back and forth on some of my love life issues right now, which I’m immensely thankful for as I’m sorting through things. But I love the life I’ve found helping people connect and grow, and being part of something that I feel the way most people can feel the tide coming in– it’s exhilarating. I just never could have guessed any of it.
This is where the Poly Living conference enters the picture.
We all (The Modern Poly team) want to go. We have never actually all met in person. The 4-6 of us meet weekly on phone conferences about the site business and exchange sometimes dozens of emails on a weekly basis, and have gotten to know each other a little through the process, offering sympathy through computer explosions, breakups, deaths in the family, and sharing in joys like new relationships, successful projects, and other things beyond just the site. We’ve also talked a LOT about what we want to see happen with the poly movement, and about what IS happening with the poly movement right now… and while our objectives aren’t identical, there’s enough overlap to manifest some major changes, if we can hook up with the right people at the right times.
My part in this is pop-culture and art-centric. I write mostly catchy, poppy music <link to Xmas Time for Jews>. I’m getting ready to release (finally) my first album (hopefully this summer), riddled with catchy stuff about poly, bisexuality, love, and other obvious themes. Like any aspiring musician, I know better than to bank on that big record deal… but I can hope that my catchy subversive music gets passed around a lot and starts making people think about their relationships and how they treat other people. I the lack of that review process (or a faulty review process with poor communication or follow through) causes most relationship problems, whether it’s between 2 people or an entire culture, and whether or not sex are involved. (I think feelings are always involved in some capacity. Only sociopaths can usually manage to stay completely emotionally uninvolved with the universe and be happy about it.) If I have my druthers, my ideas will spark others, and we’ll see a surge of new art– theatre, TV, film, visual art, and music, where relationships are presented differently. That’s when, I feel, things will really start to change.
But those kind of random instances of idea and creativity are much more rare and unreliable in the wilds of cyberspace than in person at a convention. Giving a bunch of activists the chance to attend workshops, debate, party, and bond together, lets those random moments of inspiration that give way into projects and progress actually happen, naturally, and is a *really good idea* for the poly movement. What we need now is recognition on a national level. And if you ask me, what *I* think we need is a little bit of street cred.
Every subculture that gets normalized has its moment of cool. I think poly is coming up on its own.
The gay club scene exploded in the 90s. Motown (hot, right?) was roughly concurrent with the Civil Rights movement. And I don’t think I need to go on diatribes about activist psychedelic rock in the late 60s/early 70s.
So, let’s take a look around. Who do we have?
We’ve got a lot of co-op kids, activists (all stripes), cyclists, and DIYers. Anyone who is willing to approach some major act of “living outside of the box” is more likely to include relationship styles in that equation. We have kinksters, people who realize that every scene, sex act or lover they get into has something differently sexy about them. We have a lot of blues dancers, who know how to create really intense connections for a single dance, with a lot of different people over the course of a night, on a regular basis… forming a close knit community where sensuality, artistic and personal expression, and connection are valued. (I think it’s natural that leads to a high concentration of polys, or at least draws them.) We have geeks, who like to figure everything out. We have the queers who are approaching their sexuality differently anyway (though there’s a strong divide there with the queers who are bent on cultural assimilation and are about monogamy and “normal” life and relationships… Dan Savage and others recurrently talk about the marriage movement and those who don’t think marriage works in the current government implementation). We have libertarians, who want to government the hell out of their love lives. We have pagans, whose religious culture fosters those kind of connections between folks in a community. And I’m sure we have high concentrations in ever growing groups.
Look around you. Think of your friends. Who are you? Who are we? What can we become? What do we all have in common?
I think we all like connections of different flavors. I think we like to look at things a little differently than how they’re being done right now, and want to build our tomorrows our own way. And I definitely think we know how to have a good time. In a group that knows their boundaries and how to be true to them and respect others, but is more necessarily emotionally open, and communicate well, spells out some pretty epic bonding abilities with great, heartwarming stories with less people getting hurt (if we’re doing it right), because we’re fostering tools to navigate those situations better… which if done well, ultimately means more fun for everyone without hurting people. Hence, we know how to party.
I don’t know about you guys, but I *like* building community by doin’ it. …Selectively.
I really hope you guys can help us get to this conference. There are going to be pictures, blogs, stories, and crazy times. And I think a lot of important lines will start to shift if we show up like rockstars– not in the trash-the-hotel kinda way, but in the fun and interesting, can get some big important things accomplished way. We want to help all the things going on, as well as show our ideas and hopes for the movement and compare notes with other activists. And we need you to get there. Like, seriously, I’m not kidding. *I* need you. I’m broke, man. We’re volunteers. Did I mention I’m a freelance musician? I go to the food bank on Thursdays, where, ironically, they often have Perrier. I decided it tastes better than store bought, with the dash of irony.
Please donate. We’ll give you stuff, and make you all proud in February.
<3!
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Thanks, Mai Li!
Thank you for sharing. I appreciate your make-a-difference attitude.
<3! Thanks guys.
[shrug?] I always wanna make a difference?
Beautifully written! And the Star Trek picture…awesome
Lol. That was my HS senior picture. The “personality” one, you know where most girls brough a teddy bear, their cheer pompoms, or an instrument, and guys brought the guy versions of those.
But I had enough pictures of me playing bass/violin/piano/etc, and figured, “Well… Everyone’s seen me wear this uniform every club day anyways. Why not?”