I wish people would be as accepting with us as we try to be of everyone else.”Īs many as sixty thousand people in the United States practice polygamy, including Hmong Americans, Muslims of various ethnicities, and members of the Pan-African Ausar Auset Society. They’ve been lucky enough to get married. “I’ve got classmates that came out almost twenty years ago. “I’ve got a wedding invitation on the way from a friend who’s transitioning from female to male,” Julie said. Brandy and Julie take heart from the success of the gay-marriage movement.

The Austins would like one day to enjoy the legal benefits that married couples take for granted. They were constantly trying to find signs of abuse.” After six years, the family moved to Medford, a small town in northern Wisconsin, where they could afford a house that accommodated them all and where social services seemed to accept their setup. One of the kids would have an accident at school-we’d have them there again. “They said, ‘We don’t like it, but there’s nothing we can do,’ ” Julie recalled. Since there was only one marriage certificate, the police couldn’t file bigamy charges. Neighbors called the police, and Child Protective Services interviewed the children. Their living arrangements attracted other unwelcome attention. When Julie started writing a blog about their life, Rich was excommunicated. “I didn’t like having to deny who I was, what type of relationship I was in,” Brandy told me. So Rich began telling people that Brandy was a cousin who had become pregnant by accident. Julie, who also began the conversion process, recalled, “We were talking about how we’re going to set the family up, and the early Mormons already had a road map.” But the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has forbidden polygamy since 1904, and the practice endures only among originalist communities, including the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (F.L.D.S.). The next year, in an online forum, they saw a post from a woman in her early thirties named Julie Halcomb that said, “I’m a single mom, I’ve got a two-year-old daughter, and I’d like to learn more.” Rich wrote, “If you want to know more, ask my wives.” Angela had opposed adding a third wife, but when she got off her first call with Julie she said, “O.K., when is she moving in?” Julie visited, mostly to make sure that the kids would get along, and joined the household permanently a week later.īefore getting married, Rich and Angela converted to Mormonism. Later that year, Rich and Angela married. A Navy veteran, Rich drew disability payments, but for a while the whole family was subsisting on about twenty-eight thousand dollars a year. He was working odd jobs, Angela worked part time, and Brandy was looking for a job. She became emotionally distant, and Rich started to realize what he had taken on. When Brandy became pregnant, she realized that the arrangement was now permanent, and was scared. Then she stopped communicating her mother temporarily thwarted her plans to enter a polygamous union, but, six months later, Brandy called Rich and said, “If I asked to come back, would you ever take me back?” He said, “In a heartbeat.” Online, they met a nineteen-year-old, Brandy Goldie, and after months of chatting she visited them at their home, near Milwaukee.

They got engaged, and, around the time Angela became pregnant, they started looking for another woman to join them. “I felt I had to have Angela on board from the start,” he said. In 2008, Rich met Angela Hinkley, and soon told her how much he liked the show. They were swingers, but Rich wanted more than unattached sex, and broached the subject of polygamy with his wife. “I had a string of broken relationships, so I was joking, ‘Well, maybe if I was a polygamist, I wouldn’t have that problem.’ ” He had a daughter, from a fling a few years earlier, whom the couple were raising together.

“I kind of got hooked on it,” Rich told me. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.įifteen years ago, when Rich Austin was in his early forties, he and his wife watched the HBO show “ Big Love,” about a polygamous family of fundamentalist Mormons in Utah.

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