History of More Than Two

Image: minervastock

My goodness, what a ride it’s been. This site has existed in some form for nearly thirty years now, which seems, as I look back at it, almost impossible now. I believe the content here is the oldest continuously-updated polyamory content on the Internet!

A strange thing has happened in the last few years, though. A persistent, and rather weird, Internet rumor that More Than Two doesn’t belong to me, that I somehow created it with someone else and then tried to claim credit for it, has started slitering around some corners of the Internet (*ahem* Reddit *ahem*), which is...bizzare, given the site’s history stretches back nearly theirty years, and the Internet Wayback Machine at archive.org documents twenty-five of those years.

So I’d like to take a minute to look back and talk about what a strange journey this has been.

In the Beginning...

I had no idea, when I first started writing about polyamory online, that it would become such a major resource, nor that I’d still be doing it three decades later.

In fact, I didn’t set out to write for anyone but myself. The year was 1997. I’d been in polyamorous relationships since the 1980s; I lost my virginity in a threesome with my best friend’s girlfirend, then later, when I met and started dating the woman who became my first wife, we were in what today would be called a “polyamorous quad” with my best friend and his girlfriend, though of course back in 1988 we didn’t have that language.

I have, in fact, never been in a monogamous relationship—not once, not in my entire life.

So, 1996. The year this site began.

I was co-editing and producing a small press underground ’zine with a university buddy, a small-press literary magazine called Xero Magazine, a tiny art, photography, literature, and kink magazine we produced and distributed by hand. (In fact, a couple of years ago I found a box of old back issues in a long-forgotten storage bin!)

We started publishing Xero in...um, I want to say 1993? 1994? Somewhere around there.

On January 4, 1997, we finally registered a domain, xeromag.com, to go with the magazine. I taught myself Web design (poorly; that first site was quite dreadful!), and my friend and I each set up a personal “about me” page on the site as well.

In mid-1997, I put up a new page on the Xero site, “fvpoly.html.” I wasn’t really writing it for anyone else; it was a page full of stuff I wish I’d known back in the 1980s, when we were flailing about trying to figure out this polyamory stuff, without the Web or any polyamory support groups or, really, anyone else we knew who was doing this weird “non-monogamy but not, like, recreational sex” thing.

Within months, that one page was the most popular page on the site by far, so I kept adding to it. In 1998, the Wayback Machine at archive.org found the Xeromag site and added it to the archive, though the archive before 2000 is incomplete, thanks to a coding error on my part (the image link to my polyamory page actually went to my Resources for Photographers page...d’oh!).

You can actually see the fvpoly page as it appeared back in December of 2000, about twenty-five years ago as I write this, here.

Pretty dreadful, isn’t it? Check out that nonresponsive, fixed-width design optimized for low-resolution displays!

Over the years, I kept adding to the polyamory pages over at Xeromag until eventually they represented a large part of the site, and nearly all the site’s bandwifth.

In 2004, I started working on a book, tentatively titled More Than Two. In January of 2006, I registered the domain morethantwo.com, intending it to be the home of the Xeromag polyamory pages, and copied all the polyamory content from Xeromag over here. (The url "fvpoly.html" over on Xeromag now redirects to More Than Two, but many of the other pages from the old Xeromag poly site, like the polyamory glossary still remain, unlinked and not updated, bugs trapped in cybernetic amber.)

The pages on morethantwo.com kept the same content but went through a number of redesigns (some less successful than others) in the years that followed:

...until it finally arrvied at what you see now. In 2018, the site was archived by the Library of Congress as a website of historical anthropological significance.

Back about the time I moved the site over to the morethantwo.com domain, I also started querying to book to publishers. In fact, I sent out more than fifty queries for the book over a two-month period, and got back fifty rejections, many of them of the form “we don’t think a book on polyamory will sell, but if you’re interested in doing a memoir, we’re open to a query for that.”

It’s kind of astonishing, now, half a lifetime later, to look back thirty years and see how that first small page grew over the ages. It’s kind of weird, too, to wander around the Internet and see a bizarre alternate history, a strange looking-glass delusion about something I’ve built over so many years...a weird cultural collective gaslighting, often told by people who weren’t even alive back when I started writing what would become this site. So it goes, I guess.

When I was growing up, my mom—who was a very wise woman—always used to say “information by itself almost never changes attitudes.” It’s interesting to see how that plays out in the modern political climate, to live in a time when significant numbers of people sincerely believe, with absolute conviction, that Hillary Clinton runs a child sex slave ring from the basement of a pizza shop that doesn’t have a basement. We live in a post-fact world, where easily accessible evidence no longer matters and facts are, like, just another opinion, man. Thank you for reading this, my small attempt to set the record straight in a largely fact-free world.