I'm perhaps seen as, while not the token gay on the RKMBs, I am perhaps the most vocal.

I'm taking this opportunity to open up a thread about general gay issues. I presume if specific discussions get going on a particular subtopic, we can move that to its own thread.

I didn't want this to just be about me, but yet I can't feel there's any other way than to start off with something that originates in the personal. I opted to open this with portions of an article from THE ADVOCATE about an issue that's particulary of interest to me on personal and intellectual levels: gay men who are or have been married and how the Internet has served to allow married gay men to come out. You don't need to read this to post, but it seems to fall in line with some of the other threads here to open with a passage outside this forum.

Quote:

Gay men, straight lives
Like a certain governor, many gay men married to women are now coming out, longing to live the life they’ve been missing

By John Caldwell
From The Advocate, October 12, 2004

On a second date in the early 1980s, Michael Sklar took his girlfriend to see Bloolips, a popular British show featuring gay men in drag, in Manhattan. Outside the theater his date told him that he seemed remarkably open-minded for a straight man. “That was my moment of opportunity,” Sklar says. “I told her I wasn’t exactly straight. I said, ‘I think I’m bisexual.’ ”

His date wasn’t surprised or upset. Instead she calmly pointed out that most of her male friends from high school and college were gay. The pair continued dating, and within a couple of years they were married. Today, they live in New Jersey with their 15-year-old son. Sklar, now 46, describes himself as “a gay man in a straight marriage,” but he has been thinking about leaving. “I’m approaching 50,” he says. “How long do I wait before I start my real life? And how fair is this to my wife? We’re best friends, but there’s no intimacy in our relationship.”

Some estimates put the number of gays and lesbians who have or have had a straight spouse at around 2 million nationwide. Gay men like Sklar who are 40 or older grew up at a time when they were expected to get married. They wanted careers, children, and the societal acceptance that came only with marriage to a woman.

However, with recent advances for gay rights, including the fall of sodomy laws and the legalization of same-sex marriage, many married gay men now see the possibility of a gay life that didn’t exist before, and they are coming out and leaving their wives. Though he was seemingly forced out, the dramatic picture of New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey publicly announcing that he is gay, with his wife at his side, highlighted the phenomenon for the nation.

But there’s a big price to be paid for coming out and ending a marriage. “A lot of times there is anger from the spouse and the children, and that has to be repaired over time,” says Joni Lavick, director of mental health services at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center. “But at a certain point many of these men overcome their own internalized homophobia and can’t live a lie anymore. The pressure of keeping a secret is so great that dealing with what is going to happen is less toxic than staying in the closet.”

Jim made regular trips to New York City to have sex with men and never told his wife. But the marriage ended in divorce after 22 years, and he married a second time. Then he discovered the Internet. “Suddenly the pieces fell into place for me,” he says. “In investigating Internet sites and exploring porn I began to understand my sexuality. I found it liberating to discover that I was part of a large bunch of married [gay] men.” After his stepdaughter discovered some gay material on his computer in 1997, Jim came out to his current wife, to whom he has been married 21 years. “She felt betrayed,” he says. “We went to couples therapy together, and I began to build a whole new life with her. I describe myself as a person who wants to be married. I have no desire to leave any of this behind."

Jim has since come out to everyone and belongs to the Boston Gay and Bisexual Married Men’s Support Group. The group, which meets twice a month, has about 15 regular members, some of whom have either ended a marriage or are on their way out of one. After 32 years of marriage, three children, and a divorce, Eric Kurtz, 68, of Arlington, Mass., met his current partner, Dick[JJ note: I swear, how can any guy call himself "Dick" anymore], at the group, which he describes as a place to “work out your own destiny.” Despite his attraction to men, Kurtz got married because he wanted to have children and because he fell in love with a “wonderful” woman, he says.

“I didn’t want to get divorced,” he says. “I wanted to have a loving wife, and I wanted to have a loving [boy]friend, and I wanted to have sex with both of them.” But years of gay sex on the sly created an overwhelming sense of isolation for Kurtz. Only after joining the Boston group did he discover he wasn’t alone. “Every city has men like us,” Kurtz says. “Some of them are men who have sex in the parking lot. There are guys who are best friends who get together and have sex and don’t tell their wives. There are thousands of men doing this, and they feel very lonely. Who do you talk to? You can’t talk to your wife. You can’t talk to your married friends. And it’s very hard to talk to other gay men. It’s a lonely place to be.”

Once a gay husband comes out, however, that loneliness is often transferred to the wife, says Amity Pierce Buxton, author of The Other Side of the Closet, a book about the straight spouses of gay men and lesbians. Not only are they devastated by the news, she says, “the spouse usually feels rejected, because people kind of minimize their issues. That’s why that image of McGreevey’s wife at his side during the press conference was so striking. You couldn’t ignore that there’s someone else involved.”

Buxton has interviewed over 9,000 gay and straight spouses since the mid ’80s. When one partner in a marriage comes out as gay, she says, about a third of the couples break up right away, a third break up after about two years, and a third stay married indefinitely [JJ: I didn't fit any of these. Mine broke up after nearly 10 years with her knowing my truth.]. Buxton’s husband came out to her in the early 1980s after 25 years of marriage. As a Catholic he saw marriage as the only realistic path in life, she says, even though he had had a boyfriend before her. Toward the end he became withdrawn and depressed, and Buxton began to suspect he was gay. “When he told me the whole story, we both were laughing because it was just like a soap opera,” she says. “We separated, and he became healthy and happy again, but he was no longer available to me as a husband.”



We all wear a green carnation.