There was an article yesterday in the Detroit News (it seems like it
was reprinted from the New York Times) about married couples where
the husband is gay or bisexual. I thought it was worth sharing. You
can view it on their website, or read the pasted version below. I
felt it was a bit negative, but I think it is good that these type of
issues are becoming more public. It seems that Brokeback Mountain
really has had quite an impact. I hope that by opening up these
sorts of discussions, there will be fewer surprises about the sexual
tendencies of spouses in the future.
Enjoy.
Rob
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060314/LIFESTYLE/
603140405/-1/ARCHIVE
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'Brokeback' affairs wound wives
Complicated set of emotions lead to mixed-orientation marriages
Katy Butler / New York Times
One hour into "Brokeback Mountain," Amy Jo Remmele began to cry, and
not just for the woman on-screen who was standing in a doorway in
Riverton, Wyo., watching her husband embrace a man.
"When I saw that look in her eyes, I thought, 'Oh, yeah.' Even though
I never saw my husband with another man, I knew exactly how that
woman would have felt," says Remmele, a respiratory therapist in
rural Minnesota.
On June 1, 2000, Remmele, then 31, discovered her husband's profile
on the Web site gay.com. The couple stayed up all that night weeping
and talking. Soon afterward, 10 days before she gave birth to her
second child, Remmele's husband went off to spend a couple of nights
with his new boyfriend. "I tried to talk him out of it, and he left
anyway," Remmele says. "I was devastated." Three months later, the
couple divorced.
Remmele -- now married to a farmer who raises cattle, corn and
soybeans -- is one of an estimated 1.7 million to 3.4 million
American women who once were or are now married to men who have sex
with men.
The estimate derives from "The Social Organization of Sexuality," a
1990 study that found that 3.9 percent of American men who had ever
been married had had sex with men in the previous five years. The
lead author, Edward O. Laumann, a sociologist at the University of
Chicago, estimated that 2 to 4 percent of ever-married American women
had knowingly or unknowingly been in what are now called mixed-
orientation marriages.
Such marriages are not just artifacts of the closeted 1950s. In the
16th century, Queen Anne of Denmark had eight children with King
James I of England, known not only for the King James Bible, but also
for his devotion to male favorites, one of whom he called "my sweet
child and wife."
Other women include Constance Wilde, Phyllis Gates, Linda Porter,
Renata Blauel and Dina Matos McGreevey, wed respectively to Oscar
Wilde, Rock Hudson, Cole Porter, Elton John and James E. McGreevey,
the former governor of New Jersey.
Although precise numbers are impossible to come by, 10,000 to 20,000
such wives have contacted online support groups, and increasing
numbers of them are women in their 20s or 30s.
On the whole these are not marriages of convenience or cynical
efforts to create cover. Gay and bisexual men continue to marry for
complex reasons, many impelled not only by discrimination, but also
by wishful thinking, the layered ambiguities of sexual love and
authentic affection.
"These men genuinely love their wives," says Joe Kort, a clinical
social worker in Royal Oak, who has counseled hundreds of gay married
men, including a minority who stay in their marriages. Many, he says,
considered themselves heterosexual men with homosexual urges that
they hoped to confine to private fantasy life.
"They fall in love with their wives, they have children, they're on a
chemical, romantic high, and then after about seven years, the high
falls away and their gay identity starts emerging," Kort says. "They
don't mean any harm."
Neurochemical triggers
Helen Fisher, a research anthropologist at Rutgers University, says
that human partnerships are shaped by three independent neurochemical
brain-body systems, responsible respectively for sexual attraction,
romantic yearning and long-term attachment.
"The three systems are very fickle. They can act together or they can
act separately," Fisher says. This, she says, helps explain why
people can be wildly sexually attracted to those they have no
romantic interest in, and romantically drawn to -- or permanently
attached to -- people who hold no sexual interest.
"Once the system is triggered, it's so chemically powerful that you
can easily overlook everything about that person that doesn't work
for you," Fisher says "Even straight people have fallen in love with
people they could never make a life with," she says.
This is cold comfort to women who lose not only the men they love,
but also their faith in how to parse reality. "A lot of women feel
that they were just used as covers, but I know in my heart of hearts
he loved me," Remmele says. "You can't fake the way he used to look
at me.
"I had no suspicions whatsoever. He's very masculine looking. It's
not like he had Barbra Streisand or show tunes on."
Kort, however, says that women should look deeper. "Straight people
rarely marry gay people accidentally," he wrote in a case study of a
mixed-orientation marriage published last September in Psychotherapy
Networker, a magazine for which this reporter is the features editor.
Some women, Kort says, find gay men less judgmental and more
flexible, while others unconsciously seek partnerships that are not
sexually passionate.
But that sort of speculation infuriates Michele Weiner-Davis, a
marriage therapist and author.
"That's psychobabble," Wiener-Davis says. "A lot of gay people don't
know they're gay. So how in the world are their spouses supposed to
have some sort of 'gaydar'?"
She continues, "Therapists should deal with the real issues -- the
shock to her system, that her husband wasn't who she thought he was
and the impact on her own identity."
In the months after the discovery, Remmele says, her husband left her
alone with the baby on many evenings as he explored desires he had
never dared to acknowledge. "So many of the gay spouses, they've
denied themselves for so long, and it's like they're going through
teenage-hood," Remmele says. "I don't know if they really realize how
much they're hurting their spouse."
Some marriages survive
About two-thirds of the women who contact the International Straight
Spouse Network in El Cerrito, Calif., eventually divorce, says Amity
Pierce Buxton, 77, a retired school administrator who founded the
group in 1992 and has been researching the topic since 1986.
Despite their shock and their anger, many women, especially those
criticized by gay husbands for being too sexually demanding, are
relieved to understand what was wrong.
The remaining third of those she has studied try to preserve their
marriages, Buxton says. Half of those stay married for three years or
more. More than 600 such couples belong to online support groups.
In a 2001 study, published in the Journal of Bisexuality, of 137
still-married gay and bisexual men and their wives, Buxton found that
most lived in suburbs and medium-size cities and had been married for
11 to 30 years. Only tiny percentages lived in rural areas, where
family privacy may be harder to maintain.
The survival of even a small minority of these marriages calls into
question the conceptual shoe boxes into which human partnerships,
affection, attraction, commitment and sexuality are often jammed.
Describing their permutations and combinations turns out to be much
more complicated than checking a box on a form labeled "gay,"
"bisexual" or "straight."
Paulette Cormack, a teacher who lives in Napa, Calif., has been
married to her husband, Jerry, a retired city planner, for 36 years.
For 34 years, Cormack says, she has known that although she and her
husband are sexually active together, his erotic desires otherwise
focus almost exclusively on men. "It's not easy, but I truly do love
him," Cormack says.
Jerry Cormack is now involved with another married gay man, and
Paulette Cormack has had extramarital relationships. Neither has
explicitly discussed this with their son, who is 25.
They remain intensely committed to each other. Last year, Jerry
Cormack nursed his wife through four months of cancer treatments,
eventually making a fully recovery.
"What is intimacy?" ponders Jerry Cormack, as the couple sat in a
coffeehouse in Berkeley, Calif., after watching "Brokeback Mountain"
with others in similar situations.
He adds "I am totally committed on all levels to Paulette. I felt so
intimate with her when I was caring for her during her cancer
treatments -- to me, that's a stronger expression of love than
whether I'm having anonymous sex with a man."
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