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Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 09:47:04 -0500
To: improvetheworld &AElig umich.edu
From: Robert Felty <robfelty &AElig umich.edu>
Subject: more on gender / sexuality
Status: O

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

---------------------------------
'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."