The Two Loves of Tilda Swinton (Or: Performers, Painters & Polyamory)

Tilda Swinton, the acclaimed British actress and now Oscar winner (for "Michael Clayton"), is a rarity in show business. Her choices in roles are extreme in their variety: from a gender-bending reincarnate in "Orlando", to big budget Hollywood flicks like "Vanilla Sky" and "Constantine", to the White Witch in "The Chronicles of Narnia". She has served as muse and inspiration for both actors and fashion designers; the Dutch fashionistas Viktor and Rolf made an entire collection inspired by her. Despite her ethereal, almost alarmingly-stunning beauty, she is down-to-earth, very funny and jarringly honest in interviews. She showed up to collect her Academy Award without a drop of makeup, adorned in an unusual but striking black dress that resembled a painter's smock.

And the smock analogy is quite appropriate for Swinton, 47. You see, she lives with her longtime companion, the artist John Byrne, 68, with whom she has twin sons. However, it is her boyfriend, New Zealand painter Sandro Kopp, 29, with whom she attended the Oscars. Yes, you read that right. Ms. Swinton lives with one man, raising their children together, and is also openly involved with another man. The arrangement, according to all three, works extremely well, and Swinton is wonderfully unapologetic, and even quite funny, when discussing it.

It may seem that the press Q & A, which follows immediately backstage after an Oscar winner give his/her speech and is whisked to the wings, is an odd place for this subject to come up. But this is Hollywood, folks, and of course Ms. Swinton's personal life was subject to some post-speech questions from the assembled journalists. One reporter backstage asked her about her husband, to which she promptly replied, "I don't have a husband, I've never been married."

But she does have two lovers, and to this I say, "Go Tilda!". The relationship with Byrne, according to interviews, comes across more as two old chums who love and care for each other, united by a mutual respect and the rearing of their two children. The relationship with Kopp, it can be deduced, is of a more physical, but no less emotional, nature. It's complicated, as I'm sure Swinton and her men fully understand. But it also works for them, which speaks volumes about the emotional maturity, security, and honesty all three of them must share.

People, being people, raise issue with how Ms. Swinton lives her life, and I raise issue with those people, not Swinton. We live in a society that has somehow evolved (or devolved - depending on how you look at it) to this mindset that Monogamy is King. Even though our ancient ancestors did not practice it, and very, very few animals do, we seem to have taken it upon ourselves to be paragons of monogamous virtue.

This is laden with problems, of course. The biggest being that many of us can't live up to the idea that we are paragons of anything, and we seek out affairs and fulfillment elsewhere, which is deceitful, hurtful, and wrong. So what then is the problem with having more than one loving, passionate relationship, with all the cards on the table? As long as everyone involved knows what's up, it seems to me that there is no problem here at all.

When I look at Tilda Swinton's life -- her remarkable, varied career and unusual living situation -- I feel a breath of fresh, exuberant air. Here is a woman who has bucked tradition and fearlessly declared what works for her. And that is all she needs to say. It's not any of our business how she and Byrne raise their children. There is obviously a lot of love, and a lot of honesty, in the Swinton-Byrne household, and I can't imagine a better environment in which to raise children.

Honesty is the key to the polyamorous life. You have to be flawlessly in touch with your emotions and be able to express them with great intimacy and articulation. This is precisely the reason that most people can't handle relationships like this. We are too laden with "proper" images and conventional understandings. In addition to the honesty thing, you also, quite literally, need to be able to share. And we as a people don't really excel at that.

What is just as important, though, is tact. I have read a lot of really positive responses regarding Swinton's lifestyle, but those responses are always capped off with something like, "...but these relationships NEVER work." Well, of course the ones you hear about are the ones that didn't work. Do you really think those in polyamorous relationships walk around declaring, "I got laid by TWO different men last night!"? Of course not. A natural offspring of the openness and honesty inherent in these situations is tactful discretion. Balancing an open relationship like Swinton's demands rigorous orchestration, and as long as all players involved know their parts, the results will undoubtedly be successful. These relationships can and do work.

With this said, do you think Adrien Brody will date me even though I'm married?

Romancing the Keyboard (Or, The Art of the Bodice-Ripper)

Let me begin with a confession.

I love historical romance novels. You know the ones. They typically feature a busty dame and a muscley hero emblazoned on the cover in an embrace just short of actual schtupping. The stories are usually formulaic, and the bad guys always meet their ends badly, and the good guys always live happily ever after and have lots of good sex. That appeals to me. It always has. As if in some mythical netherworld of heaving breasts and dinner-plate pecs, the world still works: the good guys win and the bad guys lose.

Though my reading is typically on the "serious" side, ever since I was 12 years old I've peppered my Proust and Nabokov with a hearty helping of spitfire heroines, rakish men donning barrel chests, and misty scenes of Medieval castles, Regency England, the Old West, or the antebellum South. It's just plain fun to choose a book to read not based on the quality of the writing, or the author's previous work, or the accolades of the story...but based upon how hot the guy on the cover is. In what I can speculate is only an attempt to further titillate the straight women and gay men of the world, I've noticed that many romance novel covers now leave the heroine off completely. They just sport an oily, sexy image of the hero, usually in period-garb, with a decent amount of chest exposed and a bulging crotch not achieved through the use of a codpiece, thank you very much. There were no small penises in Regency England.

A few months ago, I came across a downright brilliant website. It's called Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books. The two women who write this romance novel-driven blog are fierce. Intelligent, warm, insightful, and laugh-till-your-panties-are-wet hilarious. I don't know if men qualify, but I like to think of myself as an honorary Smart Bitch Who Loves Trashy Books.

Given my self-proclaimed Smart Bitch status, I've decided to write an historical romance novel. I've flirted with this idea for years, but it's never really come to fruition until now. Honestly, what propelled it to actually happen were the staggering statistics I read on romance novels:

• Romance novels generated 1.37 BILLION dollars in sales in 2006.
• Nearly 6400 romance novels were released in 2006.
• Of all the readers around the globe, one in five read romance novels.
• One out of every two paperback fiction novels sold is a romance novel. That's 50%, folks!
• Those who read romance novels have 70% more sex than those who don't.
• Those who read romance novels have 70% more sex than those who don't. (I just felt that bore repeating.)
  

These numbers called forth a romantic hetero love story I've been developing in the furthest recesses of my brain for the last five or six years. At last, a few weeks ago, I sat down and put this tale to paper, and I gotta tell you, it's a lot of fun -- and a hell of a lot harder than I thought it would be.

It's given me a newfound respect for both the genre in general and the romance novelist in particular. It is tremendously challenging to write these stories. Believability isn't so much as important as creating a natural progression to the unfolding of the story's dynamics. Love is capricious and can come about in a variety of ways, but stretching those ways to encompass 400 pages is a challenge. Sub-plots and sub-genres within the novel are key to making the story work and further solidifying the total rightness of the hero and heroine's love.

Also surprising to me was the amount of research required to write one of these novels. I mean, you can't just say, "She whisked the eggs in the bowl." You have to know very key things. Like when was the whisk invented? Did it exist in 1802? Was it used in the part of the world where the story takes place? What did it look like? Was it different from the whisks we use today? You see the hardship here. These ladies have to do their homework before writing even the most trivial detail. And I've found a lot of historical romances to be infinitely detailed, down to the smallest points worthy of note, and this, I'm learning, requires a major degree of scholarship and study.

I realize I face a major obstacle should I ever decide to try to publish this manuscript: I have a penis. Men don't write romance novels. This makes sense, of course, because what woman wants to pick up a female-centric love story written by a man? There have been, however, men who have published romances under female pseudonyms (the late Tom Huff, a.k.a. Jennifer Wilde, wrote some of my favorite historical romances), so this is the path that I too am going to have to take. Deciding on a female pen name is difficult, as I don't want to sound like a porn star, but I also don't want it to be a forgettable and commonplace moniker. Email me your suggestions, I'm open to anything flowery and saucy, but not slutty or cheap. Despite what you may have heard.

Undertaking this book has been, above all else, challenges aside, a lot of fun. I find myself thinking of these characters all day long, brimming with excitement to get home and continue their story. And it's just wickedly delightful to write love scenes. Love scenes, too, pose their own set of unexpected challenges, because where else in literature can you use words like "elongated hardness", "pink bud of pleasure", or "hard rosy aureole" with a straight face?

All this begs the question, How does one write a love scene and still respect their computer in the morning? Should I buy my keyboard flowers? Or should I ignore it for the day, despite its repeated voicemails on my cell phone? Or maybe I should get it something practical, like one of those aerosol cans with the long red straw that blows air between the keys?

Damn, that sounds kind of sexy.

Off the Field: The Men of the Sandbach Rugby Club

I was recently sent this video about the members of the Sandbach Rugby Club in Cheshire, UK. If you check out the link, be advised the video isn't appropriate for work (unless you're a porn star), but it's not exactly gratuitous either. The cameras follow the young men around on a night of drinking and flirting and carousing after winning a game. Pretty humdrum stuff, you're probably thinking. But what makes this video interesting is that these heterosexual frat boy-types are not drinking and flirting and carousing with the local girls. They're drinking and flirting and carousing with one another.

Despite the open sexuality and incredible good looks of these fellas, I wasn't drawn into this video as a form of low-rent porn. I was drawn into it as a study of human sexuality. I can hear now (as is reflected in the You Tube comments alone) the protestations of gays and straights alike. Gay men are exclaiming, "Come out of the closet already!". Straight men are asserting, "That's disgusting! They went too far!". My response is in neither of these categories.

You see, I felt proud watching these guys. I was more appalled by the bar-diving and 330 pints consumed throughout the night than I was by the unabashed display of sexuality. Young people drink. A lot. This is an unfortunate reality and far be it for me to judge it. My feelings of pride came into the picture when I realized that these guys, all of whom I would venture to say are heterosexual, are grasping a very important and healthy concept: Sexuality is fluid. It is in constant flux. It is never cemented or nailed down if we are open to it. Society demands that we label it; our hearts do not.

And is it really such a stretch to believe that these young men, living and working in such close quarters and undeniably bonded, would be open to the possibility of expressing their feelings in a physical manifestation? I think not. In fact, it makes a lot of sense. I salute these guys for not buying into some butch-jock stereotype and doing their own thing. In spite of the hardcore partying and daredevil antics, I actually think they are pretty mature, having already understood lessons that the rest of us can't even let into our fields of possibility. Society will place its restrictions upon them soon enough. For now, let them have this.

Play on, Sandbach Rugby Club! Play on!