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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Sleeping with the enemy
While I'm planning security for the IMF demonstrations, my husband is getting thrown in jail. He better not ask me for bail.
By Lisa Guide
[04/24/00]

Born to pop pills
I have a well-chosen capsule for every occasion.
By Elissa Schappell
[04/20/00]

Our town
The place I share with Timothy McVeigh.
By Mark Phillips
[04/19/00]

Baby barf rules
Take the hit, then reach for the tequila.
By Jonathan Kronstadt
[04/17/00]

Of football and flamenco
A coach's kids flee sports for the wussy arts.
By Kerry Madden-Lunsford
[04/14/00]

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I, on the other hand, felt like a captive, wrapped in a blanket of depression trying to reconcile a lifetime of lies and deceit. Why did he marry me in the first place? How blind could I have been? Who exactly was he thinking of during those infrequent times we had sex? Why did he wait so long to tell me? Did he ever love me? He was impatient with my torment and stormed out the door when my questions (and I had many) became too probing or uncomfortable for him.

Amity Pierce Buxton, author of "The Other Side of the Closet: The Coming-Out Crisis for Straight Spouses and Families," estimates that 2 million families have been affected or will be affected by the fallout from "mixed orientation marriages." Jean Copeland, a veteran member and host of the online support group Straight Spouse Network, calls Buxton's number "conservative" and adds, "We have only seen the tip of the iceberg."

As it becomes a less frightening process to come out, she explains, more gays and lesbians married to straight spouses will find the courage to reveal their feelings and more of the spouses left behind will speak up.

Copeland says she found little support after discovering that her husband of 26 years was gay, so she channeled her energy into heightening public awareness of this complex issue and providing a safe haven online for dumped spouses to seek advice, gain perspective or simply vent. The ultimate goal, she says, is "to lessen the isolation of spouses and offer them as wide a range of resources for support as we can." In the four years since Copeland came to the network, she says, she has watched it mature from a mere six members to thousands of visitors and veteran participants.

The Internet is familiar territory to a lot of the dejected and rejected spouses, though not always as a source of solace. Many of us were made aware through domestic disaster that there are hundreds of chat rooms and message boards out there where gay spouses meet or arrange meetings with new partners or engage in cybertrysts without compromising their carefully maintained facade.

While I had heard some fairly amazing tales from out-of-the-closet unmarried gay men before, the cyberworld allowed me to watch it go down. There they are, "happily married men," posting their profiles online in search of "discreet encounters" with other men. Ironically, these sites offer troubled straight spouses a means of uncovering the truth about their life companions (we do snoop) and a way to find support after the explosive revelations.

Very little has been written about the impact of the coming-out process on straight spouses and their children. Buxton's book, published in 1994, is considered the most reliable text. Writer Lisa Rogak, whose husband came out three years ago after two years of marriage, published a novel last year -- "Pretzel Logic" -- that is loosely based on her own experience. "Husbands Who Love Men" by Aileen H. Atwood also is popular in the support community for straight spouses. And Copeland is a contributor to "The Gay Husband Checklist," a resource book by Bonnie Kaye on mixed-orientation marriage scheduled to be published later this year.

Buxton, who is updating her book, says that "straight spouses go into their closets when their spouses come out. They therefore cope with painful issues in isolation and feel they are the only ones in this bizarre situation." Adds Rogak, "It drops on you like a bomb out of nowhere. At first you think that since it appeared instantly, it will go away instantly, so a lot of people suffer silently, hoping the whole mess will go away by itself."

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