West Hollywood approves domestic partnership registry for polyamorous people

West Hollywood has become the latest city to create a domestic partnership registry for polyamorous relationships, with the city’s five-person City Council unanimously approving the legal protections for alternative family structures.

The ordinance, approved Tuesday and introduced by Mayor John Heilman, allows people to register their multi-partner relationships with the city, giving them rights to hospital visitation and additional tenant protections, among other benefits.

The law is limited in scope and does not confer the same rights that marriage or state domestic partnership laws do. But advocates say it is an important step to address barriers that adults who are romantically or otherwise committed to more than one person often face in housing, healthcare, education and other services — with much of existing policy assuming dual-income or nuclear households.

“This law is just the beginning,” 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 Chelsea Lee Byers in early 2025. “I think it makes it possible for people to dream about a future they once thought was out of reach.”

Per the ordinance, a group of three or more people can file a statement with the city clerk to create an official record of their relationship. They must meet certain basic requirements, such as that the relationship is consensual and they are not related by blood.

Under the ordinance, all healthcare facilities will be required to allow the partners of a patient to visit, as will jails in the city’s jurisdiction. It also creates protections against termination or nonrenewal of a lease if a partner is continuing to occupy a rental.

Notably, people living outside the city’s limits can register their union.

Fialho said the availability of the registry to people outside West Hollywood could help others to legitimize their relationships on paper for school pickups, hospital visits and other situations even if they don’t live in cities that specifically afford rights to polyamorous partners and whose hospitals and other institutions aren’t required to grant these rights.

Fialho herself lives just on the outskirts of West Hollywood, and she said that — as a bisexual woman who has been in various relationship structures — the registry option helps her “feel protected.”

The new registry comes after West Hollywood officials in March barred discrimination against polyamorous people.

At the March meeting, when council members approved an antidiscrimination ordinance introduced by Councilmember Byers, the council also instructed city staff to work out the details of a potential multi-partner domestic registry.

At the time, Byers described protections as “frankly long overdue” amid efforts by the Trump administration to erode LGBTQ+ rights.

The Massachusetts cities of Somerville and Cambridge several years ago became the first to explicitly allow multi-partner relationships to register with the city. Bay Area cities Berkeley and Oakland outlaw discrimination based on family structure, and Oregon cities Portland and Astoria, as well as Olympia, Wash., advanced similar polyamorous relationship protections earlier this year.

Megan Katz, a librarian in West Hollywood who supported the registry and other antidiscrimination protections, requested a change in the new ordinance at Tuesday’s meeting.

Although the local law embraces triads, foursomes and other group relationships, the language bars registering of couples who have already declared other partnerships.

“That does not describe how I practice polyamory at all,” Katz said.

Katz has two children with her “nesting partner,” to whom she is married; she also has a partner with whom she does not live. Although she does not have immediate plans to register her relationship with her second partner, she, Fialho and others said the ordinance should account for these non-monogamous setups.

“One of my pet peeves is this popular conception that polyamory is only ‘triads’ or ‘throuples,’” Katz said. “Yes, there are triads who are happy and thriving, but many people are in discrete dyads,” or twosomes.

Byers said at Tuesday’s City Council meeting that she would pursue amendments to the ordinance to clarify that, beyond partnerships of three or more, multiple twosomes can also be registered.

Legal experts say multi-partner families are increasingly common, but without laws allowing for domestic partnerships of three or more people, they are left spending thousands of dollars on attorneys’ fees to form corporations and craft contractual protections already conferred to married couples.

“Families are becoming more and more complex,” Alana Chazan, a Glendale attorney at All Family Legal, told The Times earlier this year.

Members of poly households who end up hiring lawyers are often looking to protect jointly held assets and ensure they can care for one another in health crises.