God, Frank is disgusting. Who was his first spouse? An actual woman or another troon? If it was an actual woman, I hope she's found healing knowing that everyone in the world privately thinks her ex is a weirdo freak. Who wouldn't be repulsed by someone who pegs Brianna Wu right in his artificial manhole? It's so common to think that your abuser actually is a better person, that everyone loves the abuser over you. But at least with Frank, rest assured no one thinks that.
Brianna is gross enough, but there's also something foul and nasty in Frank that he would be with Brianna for 16 years. Calling that deranged lunatic your "wife" when you had an actual one, a talented one, a probably beautiful one before. Now he's with a hideous, grifting lunatic who sucks all his money away and only has a fungus-packed stinkditch to offer.
To my knowledge, Frank was married twice before he finally shacked up with his Frankenbride (pun semi-intended). I believe kiwis dug up the announcement of his first marriage in a newspaper article, but I'm not sure where that is exactly; maybe another John scholar can find it. I don't think we have any info on how that one ended.
His second marriage was to a woman by the name of Alison McBain (who has since remarried so that isn't her maiden name), marrying her when she was 24 and he was 39. By her account, he was abusive and manipulative towards her, bullying her out of her budding writing career, and even physically harming her through a cigarette burn at bare minimum. When she left him, he continued to harass her and even tracked her down cross-country to try and worm his way back into her life. Happily, she is doing much better now, with a loving and supportive husband, kids, and a successful and award-winning career as an author. That still didn't stop Frank from attempting to shittalk her years later when GG was getting started, which she shut down emphatically with
a blogpost detailing how much of a scumfuck Frank is. It's hearsay, to be fair, but given what we know about Frank, it's more than plausible.
This has led armchair kiwi psychiatrists (like me) to hypothesize that Frank is less attracted to John as a spouse, and more to the idea of having complete control over him. Frank can't stand the idea of others competing in his wheelhouse or potentially being better than him, which is why he was so abusive towards Alison; he saw her as a threat towards his own sci-fi writing ambitions. This feeds into his need for control, not wanting his spouse to be able to do anything without his say so. In that regard, John is the perfect husband for him. John has no ability to compete with Frank in the things he cares about (have you
seen John's art or writing?), nor does he really have any interest in doing so. John cannot support himself on his own, or at least not to the standard to which he feels entitled, because he's a colossal fuckup that can't hold a job. Without Frank, John would be a destitute tranny living on the streets of Denver, and he gets off on that knowledge. He's fine with John pretending to wear the pants in the relationship and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on his delusions, knowing that he can pull the plug whenever he wants. And in the meantime, he gets a fellow manchild to hang out with and continue his prolonged case of arrested development.
It also doesn't matter that Frank is straight, at least in theory, because John being a troon enables both his control freak tendencies and his bizarre monsterfucker fetish (don't ever look up Frank's painting of John as a half-octopus thing, trust me). Frank sees all of John's surgeries as literally building his perfect wife, and he also knows that John wouldn't have gotten any of them without him opening up his wallet. I shudder to think if they actually have a sex life like John claims, and honestly I don't want to think about that.
