When a spouse comes out, support groups can help with pain, confusion

By Lornet Turnbull
Seattle Times staff reporter

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY HEATHER MCKINNON / THE SEATTLE TIMES

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Most read articles Most e-mailed articles

One by one, around the room, they told their stories of abandoned love and broken promises.

Donna Nolan talked about her 26-year marriage to her college sweetheart and best friend.

For years, she said, her husband had sought answers to the yearnings that filled his life — for a new job, a new house, a child — only four years ago coming to terms with his sexuality and confessing to her that he was gay.

Pam Davis talked about the man who had swept her off her feet. When they married five years ago, she was in her late 30s and joked that she'd stay with him until she was 94 and then "year to year after that."

In January, she discovered photos her husband had prepared for a personal ad in which he described himself as gay. It took him weeks to admit this truth to her.

One day he left for work and never came back.

Men and women — straight spouses of gays and lesbians — are often a silent voice in the increasingly loud debate over gay marriage.

On a recent Friday night, 10 of them gathered for a monthly meeting of Puget Sound Spouse Support in Nolan's living room. The group, which Nolan started two years ago, is one of 65 nationwide in the Straight Spouse Network that help spouses of gays and lesbians confront the hurt when their husbands and wives come out.

Only Nolan and Davis would allow their names to be used for this report.

The fight for gay rights is not theirs, and on this night, there's not a single mention of gay marriage. Yet, they believe they are a casualty of laws that restrict marriage to a man and a woman. Unable to legally wed one another, they say, gays seeking commitment and family will continue to set up doomed heterosexual marriages, ruining lives and destroying families.

"It's hard for many of us to explain to friends and families what happened to our marriages — marriages that appeared for all the world to be rock solid," said a 36-year-old from Olympia, a stay-at-home mother whose husband came out six weeks before their third child was born.

The Puget Sound support group, whose members range in age from their 30s to their 60s, is a cross-section of America. They had been in marriages that lasted from five to 39 years.

All are parents. While many are in various stages of separation or divorce, a few have continued to live with their gay spouses.

They seek out each other in this group, they say, because family and friends can't relate to what they're going through.

Eventually, many seek therapy, although, "That's not always so simple," Nolan said. "Some therapists have never heard of this. And some may make the wrong assumptions."

Their stories could easily have been those of heterosexual couples facing divorce or infidelity but for one stark difference: They all still desperately love their gay husbands and wives but know the feelings can never be truly reciprocated.

They all ask the same question: "Was the marriage ever real?"

"You are clawing and scratching feverishly at anything that will help you save the marriage," one man in his early 40s and in the technology field described the desperation.

"Deep down in your gut you already know it's over."

A deep hurt

There are no good statistics on the number of mixed-orientation marriages, as they are called. A recent high profile incident, when married New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey resigned after coming out in the wake of a gay-affair scandal, brought national attention to the issue.

Amity Pierce Buxton, executive director of the Straight Spouse Network, uses a formula that considers the size of the gay population and the percent of that population that has been married. She estimates that in up to 2 million marriages in the U.S., a spouse has come out or may yet disclose being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender.

One woman in the support group said the gay community doesn't acknowledge what some gays and lesbians have done to their husbands and wives. "The gay community doesn't talk about this," she said. "It's an embarrassment to them."

Still, not one in the group blamed a spouse — not directly — but rather a society they say makes it shameful for gays to acknowledge their sexuality.

The Rev. Craig R.J. Darling, a gay pastor at Seattle First Baptist Church, said the experiences of these couples reinforce the importance of sexual-awareness education.

"It's important for schools and churches and other social institutions to provide wholesome education about homosexuality so that gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender young people aren't out there wondering whether what they feel is strange," he said.

Darling, who was in a heterosexual marriage for nine years and has two sons, said he and his wife talked about his feelings toward men before they were married.

"We believed it was some adolescent thing that would go away," he said.

Eventually, the marriage ended because "I didn't think it was fair once I understood myself in a whole way to keep my spouse from finding love in a fulfilling heterosexual relationship."

Darling said it's crucial for gays to reassure their straight spouses that their "masculinity or femininity is not in question."

Buxton, who has interviewed more than 9,500 spouses over 20 years, said questioning their own sexuality is one of the deepest sources of pain for many straight men and women who learn that their spouses are gay.

"In a heterosexual relationship you think, maybe if I lose more weight, or wore different clothes, I could turn this around.

"Here, there's nothing you can change. You're being rejected for being a man or a woman; that cuts to the core of your identity. You start to think, 'I'm not enough of a man; I'm not enough of a woman.'

"That's where peer groups are important."

Laughter and tears

The support group that Nolan hosts has taught its members that the pain they feel now is a pain others have known.

They learn it's OK to cry. Eventually they learn, too, that laughter can help ease some of the hurt.

The Olympia stay-at-home mom recalls how her husband first came out to her: "He didn't exactly come out as gay. What he said was: 'Sometimes I'm attracted to men.'

"Well, sometimes I'm attracted to Carmen Electra," she said she replied, referring to the actress/model. "What does that mean?"

They share their common fears about being alone, about learning to love and trust again. More than anything they fret about being role models for their children and what to tell them when they are old enough to understand.

"Mom has this guy; dad has this guy," one of them suggested. "Thank God it's not the same guy," another chimed in.

The light-hearted moment quickly passed.

"I don't want my daughter to end up in a group like this," said one woman, who was married for 20 years and has four children with a man who revealed that he is gay a year ago.

Enduring partnership

Crying, Davis told the others how she fell into a deep depression after her husband filed for divorce weeks after he walked out.

"I'd lost the will to live," she said. "I couldn't cope. I hit bottom. He took my power away, and I let him."

On her husband's old computer she found evidence that he had been visiting gay, pornographic Web sites before they were married and had been having unprotected sex with other men throughout their marriage.

"He was never my husband," she said.

Nolan's story is different.

She and her husband continue to live together in the Bellevue home they share with their 8-year-old daughter, four years after he came out.

They have a strong partnership that endures, she said. They take family vacations together. And she offers him her shoulder when his dates aren't going well.

She said she knew her husband was bisexual when they met and married. "I didn't know that for some, bisexuality is a transitional state," she said.

Nolan said she's trying to prepare herself for whatever decision she'll ultimately make about their lives. Her husband runs a support group for men in marriages similar to theirs. Locally, there's also a support group for gay fathers.

"I want to be ready when and if I choose to break this marriage," she said.

Perhaps one of the most profound stories of the night came from a 64-year-old woman whose husband came out to her 18 months ago.

They'd spent 30 years overseas as educational missionaries, she said. "I never dreamed he could be gay."

When they married in the 1960s, she said, there was no other path he could take. "He repressed his feelings."

When he came out, they were two years into retirement. They have four adult children.

"Even now I know who he's with," she said of her husband. If he goes out with someone, he usually brings that person to the house to meet his wife.

She said they plan to stay together and remain married.

"It's not a secret thing he's done to me," she said. "At first I thought, 'What's wrong with me?' But I know this is not something that he chose."

Lornet Turnbull: 206-464-2420 or lturnbull@seattletimes.com

On the Web

For more information about the support group, go to www.ssnetwk.org/index.shtml

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

E-mail this article

Print this article

Search archive

More living headlines...