As I move into my sixth decade of life, I’m posting a series of stories from my past. This is part of that series.
We met at a point of transition in my life.
For nearly two decades, I’d been with my first wife, a woman I met in the late 1980s, in a time before the word “polyamory” was in circulation. My wife (now ex-wife) and I had no benefit of community or a roadmap for non-monogamy; we were making it up as we went along.
We started out, my ex-wife and I, in what would now be called a “polyamorous quad” with my best friend (who was also my wife’s lover) and his girlfriend (who I had a crush on, and who was a snogging friend of mine). Like many people back then, my ex-wife and I had a veto relationship, an agreement that if either of us became uncomfortable with the other’s lover, we could demand a breakup.
I never used my veto. My ex-wife did.
Then I met a woman named Shelly Deforte, a woman who blew me away with her intelligence and insight.
Shelly asked me out. I said yes. Very quickly, Shelly chafed under the idea of veto, the Sword of Damocles hanging over our relationship, a weapon terrible and cruel, always there, always looming like a dark shadow over anything we built together, ready to pierce our hearts without warning. She saw my ex-wife veto another of my lovers, saw what it did to us, and she was rightfully appalled. Veto, she said in many conversations that extended long into the night, was intrinsically destructive, a weapon barbaric and vicious, one that eroded trust, destroyed all hope of a building anything stable and meaningful.
Her ideas, which went straight at the root of my relationship with my ex-wife, forced me to see things in a completely new way, to reconsider the impact of the arrangement I’d made with my ex-wife without any input from anyone else. As you might imagine, this drove the relationship with my ex-wife to the brink of ruin. Even though my ex-wife had more “outside” lovers than I did, and for longer, from earlier in our relationship, she still felt threatened whenever I took a new lover.
It was against this backdrop that I went to a friend’s birthday party.
The place was absolutely jammed, perhaps fifty people packed shoulder to shoulder in an apartment, drinking from plastic cups, chatting while they scarfed down handfuls of potato chips.
I didn’t know anyone there except the host.
That’s when it happened.
Hollywood movies call it “love at first sight,” though of course that’s nonsense. You can’t love someone you don’t know. Biologists talk about major histocompatibility complexes and reproductive compatibility, but that doesn’t give you any sense of the urgency of it, the immediacy, the overwhelming knock-your-socks-off emotional power of it that stops your heart in your chest and makes the rest of the world pale and insubstantial.
She was reading a book on applied cryptography. We saw each other. The universe (or major histocompatibility immune molecules, it’s hard to tell from the inside) sang a song of “Yes!” The host took a photo.
I’d never before experienced anything even remotely like it. For the first time, I understood why people believe in “soulmates” and “twin flames” and “love at first sight,” even though those things aren’t real. Those emotions? Heady stuff.
So we started dating.
None of this is new to anyone who’s read my blog for a long time. You’ll find fragments of this story all through my blog if you look—the good, the bad, the deeply stupid and bitterly regrettable. Funny thng about life: your collection of regrets always increases, never decreases.
She introduced herself as Xtina. We started dating. She and Shelly started dating. She and Shelly stopped dating, for reasons I should have paid more attention to.
“Isn’t it funny that Xtina still thinks she gets to be with you?” Shelly said. “Stop seeing her.”
The woman who argued passionately that veto is and always will be wrong, is and always will be morally inexcusable, is and always will be nothing but evil, demanded a veto. The man who’d come to believe her, to believe that veto is in fact a form of intimate partner abuse, complied.
I saw her only once after that, years later, in Portland, I don’t know why. I messaged her out of the blue. She agreed, more charitably than I deserved, to meet at a bar.
I choked.
We said little. In the car on the way back home, I broke down.
For years after Shelly vetoed Xtina, I did everything in my power to convince myself it was all for the best, that Xtina and I were not compatible, that it never would’ve lasted anyway. It even fueled a deep and lingering distrust of instant connection. It’s often the case that we will employ these sorts of psychological self-deceptions to avoid acknowledging the shitty things we do to people who don’t deserve the shitty things we do.
I have done shitty things in my life, of course. We are all made of frailty and error, which is why it’s important that we learn to forgive one another’s transgressions with grace, at least insofar as we can without compromising our own ethics.
I have made shitty choices. There are two shitty choices I’ve made that I would, were it possible, give almost anything to be able to make again. One was to agree to the veto of Xtina, the other to start dating someone I never shoud’ve dated in the first place.
I still think about Xtina way more than you might expect, considering I ended the relationship decades ago.
The circumstances around the trip sucked. My metamour (my girlfriend’s girlfriend) received a catastrophic medical diagnosis (cancer), so she and my girlfriend decided on short notice to get married. In Wales, where they live, naturally.
The extended polycule did an absolutely bang-up job of pulling the whole thing together on frightfully short notice. My Talespinner and I ended up in an AirBnB in Llanddarog with Eunice, her fiancé, and her girlfriend.
Wales is…um. Wales is very.
Getting there was a whole ordeal, filled with airline snafus and almost-missed connections and ticketing problems…more on that later, perhaps. Once we arrived in London, things took a turn for the weird.
So there we were, a bevy of Americans and Londoners in a rented minibus on the way to Wales. What can go wrong, you ask? Well, now, let me tell you.
Wales is a place where their understanding of “roads” is more or less hypothetical. In Wales, you’ll often find yourself on a one-lane dirt track with trees on both sides, and you’ll like it, because that’s all you get.
Driving in Wales is bonkers. Driving in Wales at night in the rain is utterly absurd, a bizarre mix of high comedy and desperate panic.
Once we arrived, though…
Once we arrived, Wales turned out to be cold, wet, cold, foggy, cold, and almost indescribably beautiful.
That photo up top? It’s the view out the wondow in the room I shared with my Talespinner in Paxton View Barn, a converted barn at Bryngwendraeth Farm.
That tiny tower waaaaay off in the distance in the left is Paxton Tower, a Victorian folly erected in honor of Lord Nelson, or so the story goes (I find it much more likely that the dude who bilt it didn’t much give a toss about Admiral Nelson and just liked the view).
Everything about Wales is breathtakingly gorgeous, even if it is brutally, bitterly cold. That’s the thing aqbout Europe, they just leave history and natural scenic beauty lying around on the side of the road, instead of packing it up and selling it the way we do here in the Colonies.
I mean, just look at this! Even the town streets are ridiculously scenic. Treacherous to drive, yes, but scenic.
After the wedding, we found a lovely old church.
Our last day, we’d planned to visit Paxton’s Tower, because, hey, you can’t visit a foreign country with a faux-castle nearby and not go.
A ferocious squall swept in on our last night, bringing rain and such fog as can scarcely be imagined by human intellect…
…but we made the trek anyway.
There’s remarkably little to see there—it is literally only a model—but from the foot of the tower, the landscape is breathtaking. You can see the Emyn Muil across the Dead Marshes almost to the great gates of Mordor themselves!
I’m sitting in my Talespinner’s living room, tending to her dogs, who believe with surety and absolute conviction there is something Outside that requires their immediate attention every fifteen minutes or so. The fact that they’ve been wrong about this three times in a row now does not in the slightest deter theri certainty that this time will be different. She (my Talespinnter) is at work, where she will be until ten o’clock tonight.
I flew in from Portland, after an entire day of travel. When I left, it was suny and 40 degrees; I connected in Huoston, where it was dark and in the 70s, and arrived late last night.
A week from today, she and I fly together to London before traveling on with much of the extended polycule to Wales.
This wasn’t the trip we had planned.
We’d planned for me to fly to Springfield in late November, when she’d be able to take some time off work, rent a cozy little cabin she found in a remote corner of Missouri, and isolate ourselves from the outside world to work on the third draft of our novel spin, a sprawling far-future, post-Collapse magical realism literary novel that is, in structure and narrative, the most ambitious, challenging, difficult writing project I’ve ever been part of.
Life got in the way.
We’re flying to London and then on to Wales because a person in our extended polycule, my girlfriend’s girlfriend, has received devastating medical news. Almost the entire polycule dropped what it was doing to go out there to support her.
I would not have been able to make the trip on such short notice without help from the rest of the extended network, and the unexpected generosity of complete strangers on the Internet, for which I am incredibly grateful.
The situation is unimaginably shitty, yet I am deeply, profoundly thankful to be part of such an amazing, supportive, generous, resilient, healthy, vibrant polycule.
If there is one lesson I could go back in time to give my younger self, it would be…well, it would be buy Bitcoin when it was still 25 cents. But if there were another, it would be this:
Franklin, there’s a word for what you are. That word doesn’t exist yet, but it’s “polyamorous,” and it means “loving many.” You aren’t alone in this, and you don’t need to settle. There are others like Find them. And if ever it should come to pass that a person you love tells you that you must break up with another person you love, or that they refuse to be around your other partners, never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever say yes. It is, in fact, possible to be part of an extended network of people who genuinely support each other, and don’t play those kinds of games.
My metamour, my girlfriend’s girlfriend, has received some absolutely devastating medical news.
The entire polycule has done an absolutely amazing job of stepping up to support her. In two weeks, I leave for Springfield, where I will join my Talespinner to fly out to London and from there travel to Wales to be with her. The extended polycule did an amazing job of pulling this together in a very short time, and supporting each other to make it happen. My metamours and meta-metamours who were able to even helped the rest of us financially so that we could make arrangements to fly out last minute.
Even complete strangers helped. I would not have been able to go without the kindness of people on social media who offered financial support, completely unasked and unexpected. I am overwhelmed grateful beyond measure for the kindness of people I don’t even know who contributed out of the blue to make this happen.
Thanks to the government shutdown, the FAA is reducing flights at many airports, including PDX. It’s not clear yet whether or not my flight will be one of the ones cut, or what will happen if it is.
United Airlines has offered no-questions-asked refunds on flights ahead of the FAA cuts in air travel…but because international travel isn’t affected by the mandated cuts, they’re only offering me a refund on my domestic flight. I have tickets from Portland to Springfield, then Springfield to London and back, then Springfield to Portland, and right now it’s completely up in the air when (or even if) I will be able to get to Springfield.
I am so goddamn tired of this.
I’m tired of him.
I’m tired of the pettiness. I’m tired of the meanness. I’m tired of the grift, the selfishness, the pointless purposeless malice. I’m tired of his followers, so eager to hurt themselves as long as the people they hate are hurt more.
I’m tired of trying to have empathy for people who are sobbing that they’re losing their jobs or ther farms because he isn’t hurting the people they think he should be hurting. They voted for the leopard and now they’re shocked their faces are being eaten, too.
The stupidity, the venality, the cruelty, the mendacity, the sadistic malignity, I am just so absolutely sick of all of it.
It’s not necessarily her fault, mind you. And yet, and yet, the sex party blew out my knee, a fact for which Ms. Weaver bears some responsibility.
Lemme back up a bit.
I saw Star Wars (the original, before it was “Episode 4: A New Hope”) at the tender age of 11, when it first came out, and oh. My. God. It blew me away. I’d say I was obsessed with it, but that would be, if anything, understating the single-mindedness with which I obsessed over that movie. I collected all the trading cards (which I no longer have, the awareness of which gives me the same feeling in the pit of my stomach that I get when I think about the fact that I could have bought Bitcoin at $2 a coin but thought, “what’s the point?”), I built a flying model X-Wing (and ended up in the ER when the XActo knife I was using slipped…I still have the scar)…that movie moved into my mind and took up residence like a meth addict in an abandoned single-wide.
This isn’t a post about Star Wars. It’s actually about a sex party. Hang on, I’m getting to that.
So. My parents, who wanted to feed and nourish my interests, heard about this movie called Alien. They, being generally reasonable people who didn’t know the genre of sci-fi horror existed, largely because Alien kinda invented the genre of sci-fi horror, decided, he likes space movies with spaceships and stuff, this is a space movie with spaceships and stuff, he’ll like this movie.”
And so, I trotted into the theater, expecting something like Star Wars and getting…something else.
That movie traumatized me. Like, I had nightmares about the alien in Alien. Literal, actual, wake-up-in-a-cold-sweat nightmares.
For the next thirty-five years.
That alien became the shape of all my fears for decades. And so it came to pass that my wife, who loves pushing my buttons, during the course of a casual, ordinary conversaion on a casual, ordinary day, wouldn’t it be intersting if, given that I was teaching myself to make sex toys, I made an alien facehugger strapon? A…hiphugger, to coin a phrase?
Now, the thing about me is that once I get hold of a project, I don’t let it go until I’ve figured it out. The alien hiphugger moved into the space in my brain hollowed out by the Star Wars prequels (which not only killed my love of the franchise stone dead, but squatted over the corpse and farted in its face), I fired up Blender, and, two years and seven design revisions later, I created…
…the Alien Hiphugger Strapon.
It took seven design revisions and years of work to get here, but this is my wife during the first test fit of the first completed, assembled, and usable hiphugger.
Which she had never, until two nights ago, actually used.
Okay, so.
I am currently in Orlando, helping her get the RV ready to move cross-country to the West Coast. (Well, more likely we’re replacing the RV with a new one, but anyway.)
There is, here in Orlando, a swinger’s club which my wife and her boyfriend frequently attend. Not for sex—well, not just for sex—but also because they have the cheapest pool and hot tub in Orlando, where she’s been doing physical therapy for an injury for quite some time. Yes, people can go to swing clubs for therapy, and read Playboy for the articles, shut up.
Anyway.
Since I got to Orlando, we’ve been going to the swing club regularly. My wife does her PT, while I sit and write porn (specifically, a porn novel that takes place in two parallel narrative threads, one in London in 1871 and one in Buffalo in 2025), while people have sex around me, because that is, apparently, the life I lead now.
Two days ago, we decided that we should maybe go to the swing club for sex, because, you know, sex, and so a Plan was hatched.
My wife couldn’t find the syringe that I included with her xenomorph hiphugger strapon, so I procured a replacement on Amazon, for free, as I belong to their “free stuff if you write a review” program…but only for certain products. The lineup changes daily. The good news: they had a syringe available. The bad news: It was ludicrously, comically large.
Problem solved, the next step was acquisition, at remarkable effort, of tiny tapioca pearls, as you cannot have an alien violation experience without alien eggs (obviously, duh).
So.
We packed the hiphugger, the Ludicrously Large Syringe, and the eggs, with a carrier fluid of milk because at this point why the hell not, in a Box™ with some other toys and set off, the three of us, to the swingers club. Along the way, I took a quarter of a cannabis edible, on account of the fact they make me suuuuuper suggetible.
Now, there’s a thing you have to understand about swingers.
Swingers are, generally speaking, extremely conservative. They’re basically, by and large and painting with a very broad brush, PTA members and homeowners’ association managers who happen to enjoy shagging other people.
The swingers club inspects incoming packages. My wife cheerfully presented The Box™ for inspection, with its horrifying dildo-tailed alien facehugger and its Ludicrously Large Syringe and mass of Far Too Many Alien Eggs, owing to making just a bit too much tapioca…
The people doing the inspection behaved the way one might if one were to be served a lightly grilled roadkill opossum on a plate with a side order of Klingon gagh.
The injury toward which I am slowly working my way happened in one of the swing club’s themed playrooms, each of which has a door and a large window, through which other people can watch the goings-on within.
Now, I am not a voyeur. I’ve watched people have sex countless times, which is occasionally interesting in a “huh, I didn’t know people could bend that way” sort of way. It’s a shame I can’t hand those experiences to someone who would appreciate them better, because I know if watching people shag is your thing then it is very much Your Thing, but for me, it’s like, eh.
So my wife started with her boyfriend, and they started Doing Stuff, and I guess I blanked out a bit thinking about a scene in the porn story I mentioned earlier and how it needed some rework, so she’s like “you okay?” and I’m like “I was thinking about the novel” and she’s like “of course you were.”
Because of course I was. Writers: we’re not like other people.
My writing setup in the RV. That’s my wife’s tea mug. Twice the size means half as many trips to make more tea!
Anyway, a short time later I was on my hands and knees for the Great Xenomorph Parasite Violation.
If it seems like I’m Using Caps a lot, it was that kind of night.
Now, my wife is a dancer. And the play rooms had music piped in. And my wife started swaying to the beat of the music, and at the risk of using more capital letters, Oh My God.
Remember that cannabis edible? Cannabis does two things to me: it makes me hyper-suggestible, which my partners love with the love of a benevolent Divinity to all creation; but it also puts me in touch with my body, in a way that I’m generally not.
So fast forward two hours, during which I’m either on my knees or flat on my back. I won’t disturb you with the details, because they would…err, disturb you, but let me just say, So Many Alien Eggs. The tapioca had congealed into a slippery mass and it was So Gooey that, could I adequately express it in text, your computer screen would start dripping.
There was this kind of back and forth between “ooh, that’s nice” and absolute horror: in one particular position, the alien ovipositor would encounter the mass of eggs and…again, I won’t disturb you with the disturbing details.
Anyway, after hours of this, we went home sated and happy and just a touch horrified. After a brief Denny’s stop, because low-quality food after kinky threesomes seems part of my life now, I wrote in the car on the way home, then tumbled into a deep sleep.
I took this self-portrait on the way out of the sex club.
The next morning, I woke with a knee that refused to bend without agonizing pain. As I write this, I’m wearing a brace.
I blame Sigorney Weaver.
Not that it’s her fauly, exactly, but she is the sexy part of a casual chain that led directly from the theater to nightmares to the hiphugger strapon (I think it’s safe to say my wife may have, with her simple suggestion, invented the entire genre of xenomorph play).
This morning, I answered a question over on Quora, the social media site where I spend most of my time these days.
The question asked, What do partners say to each other in sex, like when you are thrusting and such?
As it turns out, I had an example from some rather spectacular sex last night, the kind of sex that makes you see the face of God, that may have led to my lover and I creating a new literary genre…one that we’re tentatively calling “hyperurbanized noir retrofuturism.” It’s kind of a spinoff of the cyberpunk retrofuturism of entertainment like Bladerunner or Akira or Cyberpunk 2077.
Okay, so.
I call my Talespinner my Talespinner because she has a gift for weaving worlds from words, something she does pretty much all the time, including during sex.
When we have sex, we build shared worlds—we talk about fictional characters and settings in which characters are having sex. We explore fantasies together by inventing these characters and setting them loose in a shared universe very different from ours.
Like the dystopian, oligarchical world we’ve created where the State is controlled by a kleptocratic class and the apparatus of the State, modeled loosely on Stalinist Russia, arrests political dissidents who are conditioned and brainwashed to serve as pleasure objects, leased to the oligarchs for staggering sums of money to fulfill the oligarchs’ most perverse desires. (We’ve opened this shared world to my crush and her other boyfriend, and written over 170,000 words of fiction with a cast of dozens of characters.)
So before I go further, a bit of backstory is necessary.
Some time ago, I shared this H. R. Giger image with my crush:
I said it looks like a machine for forced sexual stimulation, she pointed out that all sexual stimulation can be forced sexual stimulation if it goes on for long enough, and at that point it was off to the races.
Before long we’d invented a world in which an all-female Yakuza-style street gang had arisen with a unique punishment for members who erred: rather than cutting off a finger to atone, they were strapped into this device, then raised into a soundproofed plexiglas cube in the middle of a posh restaurant owned by the gang, where the machine forced orgasm after agonizing, unendurable orgasm from their helpless bodies for eight or nine hours while they screamed and sobbed in uncanny silence for the amusement of the restaurant’s patrons.
I shared this scenario with my Talespinner. One of the things I love about my polycule is that it’s fertile ground for creativity: my Talespinner’s other boyfriend is contributing to an erotic anthology my Talespinner and I will be publishing next year, my wife has created the entire history of fashion for my Black Iron universe; my wife designed the Victorian house that serves as the setting for a novel my crush and I were writing, that my Talespinner may help finish…you get the idea.
It’s magnificent.
Anyway. I shared this scenario with my Talespinner, and together we fleshed out the world a retrofuturist, quasi-cyberpunk world that abandons the signature chrome-steel, neon, weirdly Orientalist fetishistic background of traditional cyberpunk:
for a more grounded environment that’s less chrome and neon and more Cubist hyperurbanization:
Imagine an endless, densely packed urban environment, but not the Sprawl from Neuromancer; rather, this is an immense vista of great towering Cubist architecture, spanned by a complex web of covered pedestrian bridges far above street level—a huge multilevel Cubist metropolis in which you can walk for a dozen blocks or more without ever descending to street level.
Subways accessed through stations beneath the buildings allow travel to the far corners of the immense city without ever setting foot on the street (which is dominated almost exclusively by robotic taxis and self-driving supply vehicles).
Our main character is a member of this all-female gang, young but ambitious and on an upward trajectory through the ranks.
You will notice that the Giger painting features space for two people. What, then, happens when only one person transgresses against the gang’s rules?
In such a case, another gang member may volunteer to serve alongside her or, if no volunteers are forthcoming, one is chosen at random. Serving in this capacity awards a certain measure of honor and respect, more if it’s voluntary than if it’s assigned randomly.
The tale my Talespinner and I wove over many hot kinky sex sessions during the past week or so, involves our unnamed gang-member heroine and an unnamed gentleman who happened to be dining in this restaurant (owned and operated by an ostensibly retired former gang member, of course) on a day when our heroine is randomly chosen to endure hours of unimaginable sexual torment alongside another member caught transgressing the gang’s rules.
He becomes so enamored of this mysterious tattooed woman locked in this cube, suffering so magnificently, that he waits until the restaurant closes and follows her, still shaking and weeping, home.
A dangerous game to be sure, but he is a civilian and has no idea what he’s up against.
He spies on her for weeks, but somehow whenever he tries to follow her to figure out what she does for a living, poof! She vanishes like a ghost.
Eventually, he works up the courage to ask her out for coffee, and is quite surprised when she accepts. They have a few dates, and soon become lovers…
…but…
…but…
…she knows, of course. She knows how she first came to his attention. She knows he has stalked her. And she resolves to teach him a lesson.
Which brings me, in roundabout fashion, to my answer to the question, what do lovers say to each other during sex, like when thrusting and such?
You need to understand that at this point, my Talespinner and I had had sex…um, four times, I think? Not including the threesomes with her other boyfriend the night before.
The last time we had sex, I’d already had…oh, man, I don’t know how many orgasms. Enough I was convinced I couldn’t have another.
That’s when it started.
My Talespinner murmured in my ear an entire scenario in which our heroine took this fellow out on a leisurely day-long date, one where she gave him every possible opportunity to come clean. She even took him to the indoor garden cafe in the building across the street from her apartment, and had lunch with him at the one table overlooking her apartment from which he spied on her.
She was disappointed, of course, that he failed to be forthcoming about his behavior prior to asking her out. Disappointed, but prepared.
So when she invited him back to her apartment, she’d already set up the chair with the straps and the projecting rod and all the implements she needed to impress upon him the value of open, honest communication in a relationship.
Including a rather lovely item of jewelry something like this, but with the blades blades on the fingertips wickedly sharp:
She has, while she binds him, a calm, reasoned conversation with him, about honesty and openness, and how she’d really hoped he’d be more forthcoming, but regardless, the time for that conversation had come, and now there was nothing for it but to talk.
It was around the point where she described the narrow, almost thread-thin, but very strong cords she wrapped around his body to encourage him to remain very still without struggling lest the cords cut painfully into his skin, and the way she ran those thin sharp blades down his skin, that I had the last, strongest, and definitely most painful orgasm of the evening, and indeed of the past several months.
We will likely end up writing a novel set in this world, but there are so many projects in the pipe ahead of it I don’t see us starting on it until 2027 at the earliest.
Now, of course, I’m not suggesting this is what you, dear reader, should necessarily talk about during sex. It may be that hyperurbanized noir retrofuturism isn’t your particular taste.
Perhaps you’d rather talk about the interpersonal social dynamics of My Little Pony, or the alternative economics of non-monetary tips for the pizza delivery dude.
The point is, talk about your interests. Listen to your partner talk about their interests. Find the overlap. Explore the area between.
This might mean that you talk about what you’re doing, or what you’d like to. It might mean you invent characters in fictitious worlds and talk about them. It might mean you talk about Vulcan philosophy, or pon farr rituals, or how the latter doesn’t really mesh with the former but is really more about Gene Roddenberry’s own particular and peculiar sexual tastes.
Whatever.
You don’t need someone else to tell you what’s okay to talk about. Explore! It’s your life and your relationship.
Hard to believe it’s been a year. These past twelve months have been a wild ride. Bits of it have been extremely good, bits (like the death of my mother) extremely bad, but there’s been nothing average anywhere in this year.
Today marks the one-year anniversary of something very, very good.
It began, as these things often do, more than a year ago. A beginning is a very delicate time, I hear, and so it was much more than a year ago that I first talked to her about beta testing some new prototype sex toys.
I don’t exactly remember how we first noticed each other. I know where—it was on Quora—and I vaguely remember seeing her around, thinking she struck me as a good writer and a generally positive person. She said something in passing about trsting sex toys, I had some prototypes, I was looking for beta testers, so I slid into her DMs with something like “I hope you’ll forgive the intrusion, but would you be interested in trying something out?”
We started talking after. She invited me to a pen and paper role-playing game. I grew to appreciate her skill at wordsmithing, of the pragmatic and erotic sort. She called me her Toymaker. I called her my Talespinner.
A friend of hers observed that the Talespinner and the Toymaker sounds like a YA novel. We were both like “You know…”
I said “Do you wanna?” She said “Sure!”
Time went on. I invited her to accompany me to Barcelona with the rest of the poly network. She said yes.
And so, a year ago, I got on a plane to Springfield.
She showed me around her town: a giant alien xenomorph made of scrap iron.
Chrome steel bunnies and a frog.
And a lovely little rum bar, where I confessed I would very much like to kiss her. “Hold that thought!” she said.
She took me to a rushing fountain, where we shared our first kiss, one year ago today.
We went to Barcelona, where she met the rest of the polyfam. Later, she would tell me she was amazed by how warm and welcoming they were—no hesitation, no reservation.
I am so deeply grateful to have surrounded myself with people I love who love me, who have no weirdness, no animosity toward one another. It’s deeply relaxing and wonderful.
The book still marches on. We meet over videoconference to work on it when we aren’t together. We are, as I write this, just over 93,000 words in, which in any other book would mean we’re nearly done, but this thing is a monster—the most complex novel I’ve ever been part of. We’re targeting 160,000 words.
We’re calling it Spin, and it’s grown into something that is definitely not a YA novel, something dark and brooding, something complex and ambitious. Fitting, I think, because our relationship is turning out to be something more than I expected as well.
Trigger warning: Stalking, graphic death and rape threats, doxxing, threats of swatting, impersonation
I’ve been putting off writing this for a while now, because it involves dredging deep into some incredibly ugly stuff.
Most of you know that I’ve been stalked for years by a stalker (or stalkers) who has created fake social media profiles in my name to harass other people, and sent explicit, violent rape and death threats to me, my family, my friends, and those who follow me on social media.
This person, or these people, have made repeated rape and death threats directed at me, my wife, my father, and people who have expressed support for me or been rumored to be connected somehow with me online. They’ve sent death threats containing photographs of my partners. They’ve doxxed my family and partners.
The harassment has escalated over the past three years, as the rape and death threats have become more frequent, more violent, and more graphic. The stalker has escalated to threats of swatting (phoning fake tips to the police to have SWAT teams sent to the homes of the target). My websites have been DDoSed.
Last December, as I was leaving for Florida to help care for my mom, who was in the final stages of terminal cancer, I had an unexpected and rather uncomfortable conversation with Portland PD about an email I’d supposedly sent them saying I was stockpiling guns and the voices were telling me to murder my wife.
Fortunately, I have been documenting and reporting the stalking, rape and death threats, and harassment as it’s happened. The nature of the conversation changed once they pulled up the previous police reports and realized this was part of an ongoing pattern of harassment.
So how did we get here? And what does this have to do with polyamory?
Propaganda and the Poly Scene
So how did we get here? And what does this have to do with polyamory?
My first inkling something weird was going on came when a number of different people, some of whom I hadn’t spoken to in years, all messaged me to say “Do you know someone named Louisa Leontiades? She says she’s a journalist and she’s asking questions about you.” A few of those people sent me screenshots of messages or emails they’d received:
Louisa is a client of a former partner. After the relationship with that former partner ended, Louisa started messaging pretty much every female-presenting person who’d ever interacted with me online, going back through this very blog for decades, looking for women willing to dish dirt.
Next thing I know, somehow there are more “exes” that are accusing me of having “abused” them than the total number of people I’ve ever dated. Few forms of gaslighting are more head-twisty than someone you’ve never dated, never talked about dating, never wanted to date, never had sex with, never talked about having sex with, and never wanted to have sex with telling all and sundry about how you abused her when you were “together.” For a while, I quite literally thought I was going insane.
These “survivor stories,” as Louisa calls them, tended to the bizarre (like the woman who I’ve never been sexually or romantically connected with and never been in the same room with except in passing at a party claiming I abused her by flirting with someone else in front of her), toward the utterly untrue (a former partner claiming I “got her into” BDSM and that a 25-year-old is “too young to consent” to BDSM, when in fact she was interested in BDSM long before we ever met, and the fact her ex-husband wasn’t interested in BDSM was one of the reasons she divorced him), and the technically kind of true if you squint hard enough (my ex-wife claiming she was an “abuse victim” because I yelled at her on the phone once—which did happen—but declining to mention that it happened after we’d separated, when she broke into my house one night while I was out of town, stole a bunch of stuff like consumer electronics, then sold it to buy a new laptop).
As a side note, there’s a lesson here in how to spot the difference between journalism and a smear campaign. If a journalist hears “he yelled at me once on the phone,” he or she will ask followup questions: “Did this sort of thing happen often? What happened?” Ethical journalists also disclose personal or financial connections with the stories they cover.
My goal is not to go through all the rather strange “survivor stories” here. I may end up doing that at some future point, but that’s not the point of this blog post.
Right now, I’m here about the aftermath of these weird, wordy-but-vague accusations, what it says about the way many people see “social justice” as a tool of bullying and control, and how the poly scene’s support for “social justice” led directly to a barrage of rape and death threats against a whole bunch of other people beyond just me.
Louisa published these “survivor stories” from exes and non-exes with results you might predict: the Internet Hate Machine™ cranked up into full gear, I had to lock down comments on my blog because random strangers started posting death threats, I lost friends.
With all the various contradictory stories (“Franklin dated someone ten years younger than he was, he’s obviously an abuser,” “Franklin refused to date me because I’m younger than he is, he’s obviously ageist”), they became a sort of Rorschach test, with different people seeing different things in them. It’s kind of a Gish gallop of accusations.
One dude on social media wrote that I was clearly a bad person, because it was plain to him that I’d written the stories myself as a sort of humblebragging, since the theme to a lot of them is “I knew when I dated Franklin that he was polyamorous but he’s so awesome I wanted him all to myself and he said no.”
Seriously. Someone over on Quora actually said that.
Dr. Elisabeth Sheff, a sociologist and author who serves as an expert witness in court for abuse cases, published an analysis of the “survivor stories” that concluded the stories don’t actually describe abuse.
The poly community as a whole thought about her analysis, set aside their first knee-jerk emotional response, said “huh, I wonder if there’s a reason she might have reached those conclusions,” went back, and re-evaluated the survivor tales with a more considered eye…
Hahahahaha, I’m kidding, that didn’t happen. Instead, the Internet piled on to Dr. Sheff. She was threatened personally and professionally, and received so much harassment and abuse she was forced to back away from the whole situation. You know, classic straight-up bullying.
And it wasn’t just threats. A lot of folks sent her emails that they probably wouldn’t think of as problematic—messages like “don’t you realize you’re just hurting women who have been abused?” and “I’m so disgusted that an academic would support an abuser” and “I used to be such a fan of yours, but this has really made me rethink that,” because they couldn’t even consider the possibility that she might, you know, be right.
After that, things got even weirder.
“I want a just, fair, and equitable society, and I don’t care how many rape threats it takes to get there.”
Now let’s fast forward a bit, to a nonprofit polyamory convention run by a registered nonprofit in London, called “PolyDay.”
COVID interrupted the convention for a couple of years. During the COVID lockdown, a team not previously involved with PolyDay announced they would be taking over the PolyDay name and launching a new for-profit convention under that name.
The organization that owns the PolyDay convention informed these people firmly that it owns a trademark on the name, and they would not be permitted to use it.
Lockdown ends. The organizers of PolyDay announce the convention was on once more. I don’t know if the person who tried to steal the name started the rumor or merely amplified it, but anyway, someone starts a rumor that I own PolyDay, or run it, or somehow profit from it, depending on which version you believe. (For the record, I have absolutely nothing to do with it—I live in Portland, and it is owned and operated by a nonprofit in London.)
As the rumor spread through the North American polyamory scene, people said “Hey, we can look up the history and organization of PolyDay and figure out if this rumor is true.”
Hahahahaha, I’m kidding, that didn’t happen. Instead, a large number of people determined to make a more just and equitable society and stand up for women raced to their keyboards to send a flood of rape and death threats to the scheduled speakers at PolyDay. So many threats of serious violence poured in, the conference organizers canceled the event.
Apparently, threats of rape and murder are how some people think we create a more peaceful, more enlightened Utopia.
And it just kept going. Once this kind of harassment and bullying gets going, it takes on a life of its own. A former BBC and Guardian journalist named Jonathan Kent published a book on polyamory. Someone started a rumor that I profit from the book somehow, or (depending on which version you believe) that I secretly wrote it under his name, or something.
By now, I’m sure you can predict what happened next:
People looked up Jonathan online and realized he’s actually a person, a reporter with a long documented history, and not an alter ego for me? Hahaha no. Of course not.
People harassed him, called for a boycott of his (I mean “my”) book, threatened and harassed his podcasting co-host…because in this brave new world of empathy, compassion, and social justice, that’s what you do. You harass and intimidate anyone you don’t like, or anyone associated with anyone you don’t like, or anyone rumored to be connected to anyone you don’t like, so that one glorious day, if you harass and threaten enough people, you’ll wake to a world of perfect social justice.
Meanwhile, of course, the rape and death threats aimed at me and those close to me kept rolling in. My co-author Eunice and I released a science fiction novel; a bookstore that planned to host a book event got harassed into dropping the event. Some random stranger I’ve never met made a YouTube video about what a terrible person I am, repeating the “survivor stories,” insisted she wasn’t making the video for money, then used it to beg for Patreon donations.
So it goes.
And is still going. People are still following me around on social media, doxxing and threatening my partners, friends, and folks who follow me.
Just like with the “survivor stories” themselves, the stalking and threats have become a Rorschach test of their own. A random woman on Facebook told me, with what seemed like perfect sincerity, I must be making it all up, because men never get stalked, only women have stalkers.
So here’s the thing: The North American polyamory community has a problem.
I want to be clear this is not a problem everywhere. Poly folks elsewhere largely seem to roll their eyes at all this.
But the poly scene in North America is overrun with folks who are okay with using rape and death threats as a way to express themselves, who don’t do even the barest minimum of fact-checking, who are so caught up in righteous fury that sending women anonymous messages saying “I am going to rape you to death, here’s a photo of your house” seems like a perfectly reasonable way to support social justice for women.
Now, if this is you, if you’re one of the people who sat down at your computer to type out threats to Dr. Sheff or to the people scheduled to speak at a conference because you heard a rumor that it was somehow connected to me and couldn’t be arsed to fact-check, this essay is not for you. You are irredeemable and I don’t care what you think of me. I don’t quite understand the mentality of someone who says “I’m going to stand up for women and justice by sending a bunch of people I’ve never met anonymous emails saying I’m going to murder them if they present at this conference,” and honestly I don’t want to. If this is you, fuck off.
If this isn’t you, and you’re on the sidelines saying things like “I don’t know what the hell is going on but I don’t want to get involved,” well, I get it, I really do. I’ve been there myself. I’ve unquestioningly accepted stories because they fit a narrative I believed in, and discovered later that the things I’d been told didn’t actually happen, at least not the way they were presented to me. (I may write about that at some point as well.)
And I’m not saying the fact that a bunch of bullies and Internet trolls have taken it on themselves to send rape and death threats all over the Internet because, you know, that’s how you support women and fight for social justice automatically proves that what I’m saying is true and what they’re saying is false. Only that mmmmaybe it might be worthwhile to look a little closer, you know? After all, if people are wrong about basic things that can easily be checked, like who runs a nonprofit conference or who wrote a book, perhaps it might possibly be worth considering whether or not they’re trustworthy about things you can’t easily verify.
Moving the Overton window
I’d like to believe this is a fairly new thing—that twenty years ago, communities dedicated to egalitarianism and self-determination wouldn’t so quickly embrace this kind of toxic behavior. That’s probably wrong—the same thing was common in the 1970s feminist circles—but I do believe that events like GamerGate brought a new level of toxicity into acceptability.
If you don’t believe bullying and threats are okay, but you really don’t want to (or don’t care enough to!) get involved in other people’s drama (or you really don’t care enough to get involved), so you stay out of it, or you “don’t take sides”, or you choose a default rubric like “believe all women” because investigation is too much effort, well, that’s kind of how we ended up here, in a world where harass and threaten in the name of social justice, because they feel safe in their communities who appear to support them, or at least don’t oppose them.
Just a thought.
Brandolini’s Law, or the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle, tells us it takes longer to refute bullshit than it does to put it out there, and if there isn’t a corollary that tells us this is especially true when people have been told that it’s morally wrong to question the bullshit, there ought to be.
Few subcommunities have figured out how to deal with vague claims of mistreatment that kinda follow common narratives, and anyway few people really have the inclination to try to sort through it all. It’s easier to just assume that where there’s stuff that kinda looks like smoke, there must be fire, and accept a generalized “so-and-so is a bad person even if I’m not exactly clear on what he or she did.” Kinda the way people who still say the 2020 election was stolen say “there are thousands of affadavits about election fraud, it must be true.”
I mean, hell, I’ve done this myself. When you want to do right by the people around you, and you know enough about social justice to understand the uphill struggle people have faced for years getting anyone to take abuse they’ve faced seriously, you default to believing whatever you’re told by anyone who presents as an abuse survivor—a noble inclination, but one that is also easy to exploit.
Abuse is about power and control. When the poly scene went after Dr. Sheff, everyone else got the message loud and clear: Do as we say, or you’re next. Believe what we tell you to believe, or you’re next. Don’t ask questions. Keep your head down. Hate who we tell you to hate, or you’re next.
So perhaps this might be a good guideline: When you see people facing off against each other, with both sides claiming they’ve been mistreated, it might be helpful to ask yourself, “which of these two sides is sending rape and death threats, punishing anyone who steps out of line, and controlling the narrative through intimidation and threats of violence?” Because it’s hard to champion social justice and also think those things are okay.
I know the people sending the rape and death threats are a small minority, whose noise and zealotry make this seem more common than it is. That’s the thing, though: if you want your community to be a good space, sometimes you need to stand up to the bullies.
It’s okay to ask questions and look for more information. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Note: Any comments containing abuse apologism, denialism, threats, rationalization, whataboutism, sealioning, or victim-blaming will be deleted.
I met my Talespinner online, as is often the case; when you live much of your life on the online, you frequently encounter people there. We started talking on Quora, then moved to Discord when she invited me to join a pen and paper role-playing game she runs, and eventually it came to pass we decided to meet in the real, the world of atoms and molecules.
I invited her to Barcelona with me to the extended polyamorous network get-together. And so it was that our first extended meeting also overlapped with her first meeting with my other loves and their other loves.
I am privileged to have an extended polycule made up of extraordinary people, people I am profoundly grateful to have in my life. That really came home for me when my Talespinner told me she had been a little nervous to meet my other lovers, but she found them to be incredibly warm and welcoming, and from the very beginning she found herself accepted by them. “I never had the feeling I was auditioning,” she told me, “or trying to prove myself. It’s as if I was important to you, and that was good enough for everyone else. They took it on your word.”
Me, Eunice, and my Talespinner cuddling in the orgy pit in the villa in Barcelona; photo by my wife.
It’s taken me a long time to get here, but at last I feel like I understand exactly the qualities I want in my lovers, and I can now spot those I don’t in a way I never could before. I am privileged to be surrounded by extraordinary people who love me exactly for who I am, and words cannot express what a joy that is.
I have, in the past, let people close to me who loved me, or thought they loved me—but.
But only. But only if I toned it down. But only if I changed the way I presented myself. But only if I changed my habits. But only if. Don’t do that, do this. Don’t spend your time that way. Don’t say that. You’re wonderful but you’d be even more wonderful if you’d do as I say.
And y’know, for a long time, I put up with that. I believed it was necessary. “Good relationships require compromise,” people often say, and I thought that’s what compromise looks like.
And I regretted it Every. Single. Time.
The poet e e cummings has a wonderful quote:
To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
It is perhaps a bit ironic that all of my current partners identify as solo poly, yet they are far warmer and more open than the partners I’ve had who’ve said they wanted closer, more “family-style” polyamory. There’s a deep truth there I’m still working to tease out. I wonder, in my more cynical moments, if kitchen-table polyamory isn’t sometimes the goal of those who want their extended network close because that way they’re easier to control; that is, if there are at least some people driven toward that kind of relationship more from fear than from desire for connection.
Something to think about.
I am absolutely grateful that I have, finally, built a social circle, a network of friends and lovers who truly love me for being me. Every single one of them, without one single exception. There is no joy in the world greater than that of being seen, really seen, by another human being who loves what they see.
In which our hero has alien sex toys scanned for bombs, and urethral sounds confiscated…
Okay, so. I travel a bit, sometimes internationally, and so it was I found myself jetting off to Barcelona for a vacation with the extended polyamorous family a few months back.
I have, as those who follow this blog know, been working for several years on a Xenomorph Hiphugger Strapon, inspired by (a) my lifelong fear of the alien from Alien (a movie my parents took me to when I was, like, 11 or 12 or something, thinking it was like a new Star Wars…no exaggeration, I had nightmares aout that alien for more than 30 years after), and (b) a suggestion by my wife that I should make a sex toy inspired by the alien, because she loves to push my buttons.
In fact, a photo of one of the early prototypes ended up going mad viral on the Internet, and I’m told has even been uploaded to the official Sigorney Weaver fan page, which means Ms. Weaver has likely seen it. 0.o
Anyway.
I cast four prototype xenomorph hiphugger strapons and one xenomorph facehugger gag in the runup to Barcelona, with the idea that having multiple lovers in the same space would be a fine opportunity for a xenomorph gangbang, truly a test of the design.
So it was I packed all these xenomorph hiphuggers in my luggage and jetted off to Springfield, MO, to meet my Talespinner, who would be accompanying me to Spain.
You would not believe what this looked like on the X-ray. Sadly, they refused to allow me to take a pic.
The problem started quite early. Whilst carrying my luggage aboard the plane, the X-ray showed a suitcase absolutely packed with aggressive alien endoparasites, which, as you might imagine, elicited some…excitement at screening. (I didn’t put them in my checked bag because it was mainly filled with photographic gear and clothes.)
The bag got bounced, the TSA checker opened the lid, and gentle reader, if I could have photographed his expression and shown it to you, you would know that it is possible for surprise to take on human form.
Within minutes, there was a crowd around the table: the TSA inspector, the woman running the X-ray, and two other people, all of them staring in slack-jawed astonishment. The TSA checker called for his superior, who was like “What the…?” One of the other TSA screeners said “Holy shit, that looks like the alien from the Alien movies!”
TSA screener: “Should I—”
Supervisor: “Yes.”
And then they, hand to God, scanned the hiphuggers for explosives.
Eventually convinced the hiphuggers weren’t actually bombs, they allowed me to board, where I sat in a chair that through the miracle of Science flew through the air.
But that’s not the end of the story, oh my no.
When the time came for us to head from Springfield to Barcelona, I re-packed everything, in no small part because of the way TSA freaked out about the xenomorphs, but also prompted by the need to rearrange in order to fit two rather large studio lights for the xenomorph photo shoot we had planned. (That was an adventure in itself; the tripods for the studio lights were an inch and a half too long to fit the suitcase, but fifteen minutes with a hacksaw soon fixed that.)
We set off for the airport, confident that this TSA experience would be far smoother. Alas, it was not to be.
During the rearranging, I’d put the more conventional sex toy kit in my carryon whilst the hiphuggers ent in checked baggage with the studio lights, UV-reactive body paints, UV blacklight, and other miscellaneous orgy supplies.
I did not know, Gentle Reader, I did not suspect, that I had planted the seeds of my own undoing.
For you see, in my conventional sex toy kit I’d placed my collection of sounds. If oyu don’t know what those are, I won’t disturb you with the details, except to say that I had about ten or fifteen and they looked like this:
The TSA guy…
…confiscated and threw away the sounds.
When I asked him why, he looked me straight in the eye and told me, you could stab someone with them.”
You. Could. Stab. Someone. With. Them.
Words…words fail. Whatever danger these may pose as a weapon, Gentle Reader, let me assure you that the 100% sustainably made, biodegradable wood cutlery they gave us aboard the plane would be a far better stabby weapon in every single axis.At this point, it’s hard to escape the perhaps paranoid conclusion that my name exists on some TSA list somewhere. I had a slab of Barcelonan chocolate in my computer bag on the way home and it got scanned for explosives every single time I went through security.
