Why closet gay men marry straight women
My Husband’s Not Gay, a show on TLC, has caused an uproar. The negative attention is unfortunate because this could have been a show that highlighted mixed-orientation couples and how these couples can actually make their relationships work.
Why do some people become so outspoken and judgmental about marriages with one straight and one gay spouse? There are several reasons. These marriages raise concerns about infidelity. They carry out people’s decisions about what marriage should or should not be. In particular, they transport out people’s verdicts about monogamy.
Finally, these relationships suggest to some people “reparative therapy,” the unethical and impossible claim that a person can be changed from gay to straight. The men in this television program aren’t claiming to be ex-gay nor that they can change their sexual orientation (at least not on the show). They report they are attracted to men but choose not to live as a gay gentleman and their linear wives accept this.
People seem to fetch up in arms when a dude says he is not gay but rather simply attracted to men. In our culture, we identify ourselves via a sexual-attraction binary: gay or linear. This is severely limiting
An Introduction
My client sat in the chair looking down at the floor, glancing up briefly to make eye contact, then darting his eyes back to the carpet. He spoke quietly, as if almost terrified to be heard. He clutched his hands throughout the session, displaying all the markers of an anxious dude in the throes of shame. He was a novel client to my practice: a married, middle-aged, suburban dad with a high-powered career. A colleague had given him my number months before. It took him a prolonged time to muster the courage to call and build an appointment. Towards the end of our first session he looked up at me and said, “I ponder I’m in love…with another man. I’m scared and I don’t know what to do.”
I include worked with hundreds of gay men in heterosexual marriages struggling with entity in the closet or wanting to emerge from it. There is so much about these men that is misunderstood and very few studies or little literature to provide insight. I decided to give my thoughts and research about these men and their struggles at a conference a scant years ago. That presentation led to other opportunities to tell their story and of my work with them. Those presentations prompted men to document to
Most women know nothing aboutof their husbands' sexual orientations before getting married. Photo: Yang Hui/GT
More than 16 million women in the Chinese mainland are currently, or have been, married to men who are gay or multi-attracted , according to a principal expert on AIDS and HIV, Professor Zhang Beichuan, of the Qingdao University. He has been researching and collating information as well as the often sad stories of these women who find themselves in relationships that involve secrecy and often violence and violence.
Despite the numbers involved, most Chinese wives married to gay men stay silent about their situation fearing that they would become discriminated against or gossiped about if they go public.
To earn an insight into this rarely discussed problem, the Global Times talked to three women who establish themselves married to male lover husbands. They each hold different stories and alternative relationships but all include suffered.
Wives are unaware
Zhang told the Global Times that about 80 percent of homosexual men in China get married because of traditional family values. But, in most cases, the wives of gay men are unaware of their husbands' sexuality before the marriage.
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I recently spoke with Bonnie Kaye, author of Vertical Wives, Shattered Lives: Stories of Women with Queer Husbands, among other books, and host of Bonnie Kaye’s Straight Wives Chat Show on BlogTalkRadio. Bonnie has spent much of her adult life first living with and attempting to love a male lover husband and then helping other women in the same mis-marriage situation. (“Mis-marriage” is Bonnie’s term for “mistake in marriage.” Other people sometimes refer to these relationships using the term “mixed marriage.”)
Source: Shutterstock
Because I know countless lgbtq+ men who were once married to straight women, with varying degrees of short and longer-term happiness and misery, I wanted to discuss this topic, and I wanted to do so from the straight wives’ perspective. Who better to speak with about this than Bonnie Kaye? Our discussion was wide-ranging, beginning with her own marriage to a gay man and advancing to how she was able to move on post-marriage, eventually becoming a rock for other women in similar situations.
In this post, I have presented part one of this discussion, the story of Bonnie’s marriage and breakup. I will post part two, the aftermath, in a few weeks.
Bonnie, Asarchaicas it might sound, even with all the media hype, touting celebratory strides forward for LGBTQ rights, there's still a grimy little societal secret getting brushed under the rug... gay men, in droves, are still being forced, shamed, and belief-poisoned to do the right thing -- marry heterosexual women even though they (the men) know they're male lover. Now, before you glass house dwellers start throwing your vicious verbal and judgmental assaults, I propose you to swear on a stack of Bible's that you've stood in a gay man's shoes, pummeled emotionally and intellectually by family, church, and society's pressure to be the heterosexual marrying gentle . Yes, stand in his shoes and make sure they fit perfectly fond Cinderella's glass slipper, before you open your condescending, wicked stepsister, sneering mouth. If you haven't lived and breathed sexual orientation confusion, felt gay shame, or laid awake at night wishing that you really could pray the gay away, then honestly, you've nothing to contribute to this discussion and everything to learn from reading further as to why some gay men take the road of heterosexual matrimony instead of embracing the truth of who they are