A Tacit Interview with Franklin Veaux

Franklin Veaux is a long-time polyamory writer and commentator. He’s still working on a book about polyamory. I encourage you to poke him to finish the damn thing! I wanna promote it here, dammit.

First things first: Basic stats. Who are you *grin*, what got you into polyamory and how long have you been poly?

Hmm. “Who am I” sounds like a philosophical question. I could say “the future ruler of all mankind,” but I’ve recently discovered I’m actually much too much of an optimist to be a proper evil overlord.

I can’t say that anything ever “got” me into polyamory, so much as it’s the way I’ve always been. I remember even as a kid thinking that the idea of one and only one partner didn’t make very much sense. Why should the fairy-tale princess need to pick one of her two suitors?

Princesses live in castles; everyone knows this. A castle has plenty of room for both of them, right?

My first relationships were always non-monogamous, even though I didn’t have the word “polyamory” back then. I took two people to my high school senior prom, and I lost my virginity to my best friend’s girlfriend, with his knowledge. Looking back, the three of us were struggling toward what would now be called a “V” relationship, though at the time we didn’t really have the language or the models to put to it.

That was actually something of an ongoing problem while I was trying to learn how to navigate around this relationship stuff–I knew that the normal way of doing relationships didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I didn’t have any models for what I was trying to do, and didn’t know anyone else who was trying to do the same things. As a result, I ended up making quite an astonishing number of very basic mistakes. Experience is a good teacher, but the tuition tends to be very high. Had anything like a poly community existed back then, I might still have some folks in my life today who are not part of my life any more.

My GOODNESS you’ve got a big… website *wink*. When did you get started with it and what caused you to start writing it?

The first iteration of the poly Web site went up in August of 1999.

The Web site originally didn’t start out to be poly-related at all. A former business partner and I had founded a small-press magazine called Xero magazine, and in 1996 we set up a Web site for the magazine, hosted on his brother’s server. The site gradually started to expand past its intended function; in 1998 I added my own personal section to it, which had a gallery of black and white photography, and in 1999 I added sections on BDSM and polyamory.

It’s kind of spread out a bit since then. I’ve been adding new sections to it ever since; the last new page in the poly section went up two weeks ago. It’s the Web equivalent of the city of Atlanta–the result of years of unrestrained urban sprawl. Not as many pot holes as Atlanta, but a lot more typos.

My original goal in writing it was to provide the kind of information I wished I’d had access to when I first started trying to make non- monogamy work. That’s still the goal–to provide a practical, hands- on toolkit for getting multiple relationships to succeed, without the paganism, New Age spirituality, or Tantric sex mysticism I tend to see on other poly-related sites. (That’s not a criticism of any of those things, mind; it’s just that they have nothing directly to do with polyamory.)

I think that when a person becomes deeply involved in two or more subcultures, there can be a tendency to conflate them; a person who is pagan and also polyamorous might see the two as being connected when really they’re not. A person can be polyamorous without being pagan, or pagan without being polyamorous. My site has a lot of information on a wide range of different things–BDSM, transhumanism, and so forth–but these things aren’t related to polyamory, and a person who’s interested in polyamory doesn’t have to be interested in them as well.

Two of the sections of the site were originally created for presentations that Cherie ve Ard and I did at the Florida Poly Retreat a while back.

You’re quite publicly involved with the polyamory community. What got you started with it and why?

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