Image: Chris Liepelt
As 2025 draws to a close, the twenty-eighth anniversary of my first online writings on polyamory draw near.
28 years years. Nearly thirty years of recording my musings, thoughts, and natterings about this way of living that flies in the face of traditional ideas about relationships.
What does that have to do with professional wrestling? Hang on a minute, I’ll get to that.
Looking back, it seems a bit unreal. I would never have guessed, back in 1997 when my first writings on polyamory went live, that it would still be on the net nearly three decades later, nor that these pages would form the seed of the oldest continuously-updated website about polyamory on the internet.
I didn’t, back then, expect that anyone would really notice or care. I wasn’t writing for an audience; I was writing for the version of me back in 1988, the version of me trying to figure out this non-monogamy thing with no community, no support network, no roadmap.
I’ve never been in a monogamous relationship, not once in my entire life. I lost my virginity in a threesome. My first wife and I were in what would today be called a “polyamorous quad” with my best friend and his girlfriend, though of course back then we didn’t have that language. (My first wife would later go on to call herself “monogamous,” though she had multiple boyfriends in long-term relationships lasting many years while we are together; people’s words and behavior don’t always match.)
In the Beginning…
The pages that eventually became the More than Two site began on Xeromag, a site for a small-press underground ’zine called Xero Magazine published by an old uni friend and I. I wrote a few pages about polyamory on that site, and before long, the site became known for its polyamory content…oh, and something about a magazine, too.
I’ve changed a lot in the last 28 years. For example, when I first started writing about non-monogamy, I was in a primary/secondary relationship with veto power; I have since come to believe that veto is intrinsicaly harmful, disempowering, and destructive, and may be a form of abuse. I no longer engage in prescriptive hierarchy. I have become deeply skeptical of poly/mono relationships (relationships between monogamous people and polyamorous people); I think one of life’s hardest lessons is that two people can genuinely love each other and still be incompatible. I’ve tried to own it when I’ve got things wrong, and been quite transparent about changing my views as I’ve grown and learned.
In January 2006, since almost all of the traffic on xeromag.com came to the polyamory pages, I created MoreThanTwo.com with an eye toward moving the poly pages over here. For a long time, I kept the pages over on Xeromag and also here, but only updated them here; in fact, a few of the poly pages still exist on Xeromag, frozen in amber.
The More Than Two site looked quite a lot different in the early days than it does now:
I also started thinking about writing a book; in fact, I originally chose the domain name More Than Two because that’s what I planned to call that book.
The icon you see in the upper left corner of this screenshot was my first early cover concept for the book. Here’s a blast from the past: an unfinished cover mockup/concept sketch from the very earliest concept of a book, which I designed in October 2004!
It’s a bit surreal to be sitting here, close to thirty years later, and look back over the various twists and turns that led me here.
In the past few years, something quite peculiar has happened. Something that reminds me of pro wrestling, and specifically a phenomenon in pro wrestling called kayfabe.
What is kayfabe? Here’s what the Internet says:
Kayfabe is kind of a shared suspension of disbelief, an unspoken agreement between wrestlers and promoters on the one hand and wrestling fans on the other that they won’t acknowledge that the wrestling performances are scripted, the wrestlers are portraying characters, and the history of spats, disagreements, personal grudges, and so forth are fabrications.
There are consequences to violating kayfabe. The community revolves, to a significant degree, around acting like the staged performances are real—that the villain characters are real villains, the hero characters are real heroes, and the stories are genuine.
What does that have to do with the More Than Two site?
In the past few years, there’s been this weird whisper campaign, mostly on sites like Reddit and Twitter (yes, if Elon can deadname his kid, I can deadname his social media hatesite), this weird revisionist history that says I didn’t write this site, I just…came along and took credit for it, or…err, something, I guess?
This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened. A couple years back, someone started a rumor that I either secretly ran or somehow profited from (depending on which version of the rumor you believe) a polyamory converence in London, which resulted in the scheduled speakers receiving so many rape and death threats the conference organizers canceled the conference.
The dirty secret of the North American sex-positive scene is how comfortable so many thought leaders are with the idea of corrective rape; even after the organizers canceled the conference, there was nary a murmur about the folks who thought that sending rape threats to people halfway across the globe was an appropriate thing to do. So it goes.
What do these things have to do with kayfabe?
These stories, like the stories in pro wrestling, are obviously over the top. They’re clearly, demonstrably not true. At the same time, these stories, like the stories in pro wrestling, are not to be questioned. Part of the price of admission to your community is you accept what you’re told at face value, and don’t look too closely at the stories you’re given.
In which Franklin gets a wee bit cross
There’s something deeply weird and kinda gaslighty about being told you didn’t do something you’ve spent decades doing.
Especially when the stories aren’t just lies, but stupid lies.
See, here’s the thing: The content on the More Than Two site has been here for a very long time. Before that, it was on the Xeromag site for a decade. You can, for example, see a version of these pages on the Wayback Machine from 25 years ago, or look at the domain history of morethantwo.com.
And yes, I know, information by itself almost never changes attitudes.
But still, I do sometimes kinda wish we weren’t so swamped in stories that are just so goddamn ridiculous. The entirety of the past few decades seems to be a continuing saga in How Transparent a Lie Will People Believe.
Democrats running sex slave rings from the basement of a pizza shop that doesn’t have a basement. Jewish space lasers. They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats. Windmills cause cancer.
It’s easy to look at the political right in the US and laugh at the mind-bending gullibility on parade, but honestly, this is a bipartisan problem.
Why does it persist? It’s kayfabe. It’s the stories that on some level, deep down inside, you know don’t make sense, but you have to support anyway because they’re the price you pay for remaining part of your chosen tribe.
So what? Why does this matter?
Toward a Low-Trust Society
At the beginning of the month, my wife, her boyfriend, and I went to DragonCon, an enormous science fiction convention in Atlanta. For years, my wife has helped run the Skeptics Track at DragonCon, the set of panels on skepticism, rationality, and critical thinking.
I spent much of the convention in the parking lot working on an RV (long, long story), but I was able to catch a panel featuring Curt Anderson, who is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in deception.
During one of his panels, he said something that struck me: like a thunderbolt
Societies where people are aware of deception but don’t speak out about it become low-trust societies.
The sex-positive community claims to hold values like open communication, transparency, integrity, ethics, and trust.
I am not convinced it walks the walk.
You cannot build a society based on those values without honesty. It’s not possible. Honesty is the necessary prerequisite of all these things. Let’s just tag that #ShouldBeObvious.
You cannot, you cannot create a culture of consent without trust. You cannot build a society that values consent and agency without trust.
2025 America is becoming, if it hasn’t become already, a low-trust society. When it’s led from the top down by a man who lies more easily and more often than most people drink water, this is probably inevitable.
But truth matters. If you won’t stand up for it because you think your community will cast you out, maybe…maybe your community isn’t all that.
Especially when the lies you’re being asked to believe are so heckin’ dumb.
Just a thought.
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