COMMENTS on ANNA's POST...

Over at Kids of Queers, comments to Anna's posting a child's point of view of her gay parent, have been coming in.

Anonymous said...

I appreciated this from the adult child's point of view. Thank you. I think the harm caused by living a lie is huge. There is another choice that can be made that I rarely hear discussed. The man who discovers he is gay later in life could actually start being honest with his loved ones, and choose to stay in the marriage and be loyal to the vow he made his partner for life--the whole life--and to his children and his own integrity as a man--and live up to his commitments. I think the coming clean about his gayness would go a long way.

Everyone in a marriage is tempted to have sex outside of marriage. Deciding you are gay should not automatically entitle you to have sex outside of marriage. You DEAL with it, and remain in your commitment, include your wife in the struggle you are going through, get therapy, etc.

Once you make a life commitment you don't get to have sex outside marriage--gay or straight matters not. You sound like a wonderful person and it pains me that your father laid all of that on you while growing up. How incredibly selfish and small of him and others like him!

Jen said...

Anonymous,

There are indeed many couples who try to do exactly what you suggest. I say try because once a spouse comes out there is much pressure on both spouses to end the marriage. The only way to avoid this pressure is to keep it a secret. Secrets can destroy people. My parents stayed married. I don't know if my father came out to my mother before or after he had strayed.

I don't think it matters. In a perfect world it might work where a couple can remain together even though one of them is attracted to members of the opposite sex. In my family, we had resentment, contempt, anger and insecurity constantly with us. I would not wish that on anyone. My parents stopped pretending around the kids while we were young. I think they both hurt so much that they couldn't see what they were doing to us. They both took pride in the fact that stay married to the end.

While I admire their perseverance it didn't do me much good. I would have much preferred that my dad could be who he wanted to be. Loved for who he was, though I think my mother did. I would have preferred for her to be loved utterly completely, truly, madly, deeply as she deserved like anyone else.

To suggest that couples stay together under these circumstances is tantamount to forcing them, yes them, back into the closet. Do gay people not have the right to be who they are? To love who they want to love?

To suggest that everyone just suck it up is hardly the answer. When we all accept that gay people are human just like everyone else and they have just as much right to choose their own mate as anyone else then our world will truly be a wonderful place.

And one other thing. Rarely does a man discover later in life that he is gay. Without exception, every gay man I know knew he was gay from a very young age.

Bose said...

Anonymous said:

The man who discovers he is gay later in life could actually start being honest with his loved ones, and choose to stay in the marriage and be loyal to the vow he made his partner for life - the whole life - and to his children and his own integrity as a man - and live up to his commitments... Deciding you are gay should not automatically entitle you to have sex outside of marriage. You DEAL with it, and remain in your commitment.

Some of us have done exactly this, and found that, never mind any/all of the best efforts devoted to preserving or re-inventing healthy relationships, such was simply not possible. Jen said:

Rarely does a man discover later in life that he is gay. Without exception, every gay man I know knew he was gay from a very young age.

It was the 70s, growing up in a small town in the midwest where the only thing we knew about sexual orientation was that variations from the hetero norm were either sick or happened only in radical activist pockets of the big, scary cities we wanted nothing to do with. When I came out to my wife (in 1993), saying "I think I might be gay, but I'm not sure, and I've never acted on it," I came to terms with the fact that I had hidden too much from her for too long. The hurt I caused her was real, and deep, and that was tough stuff for me to own.

One of the hardest parts of that process, though, was that the person I cared for so deeply and never wanted to hurt was not just hurt, but became convinced that our 10 years together had been an elaborate scheme in which I had defrauded and manipulated her from day one.

It was fair for her to ask about how deep and long my deceit had been in play... and to look for my contrition. It was less than fair, it seems to me, for her to cling to a sense that I had chosen her, and marriage, solely out of selfishness, with a master plan of cutting myself free later.

The first comment more or less describes the twenty-five years of my marriage: I figured that everyone in a marriage is tempted to stray, and I was merely fighting off a different temptation. It is true, but it is not the whole truth.

Bose writes of something so like the last years of my marriage that it takes my breath away. The terrible thing about the end of a marriage [and you can see it in any divorce, not just in "our" variation on the theme] is that, looking back, the empty half of the glass suddenly becomes overwhelmingly apparent, and the half of the glass that belies that appearance becomes harder and harder to see.

I had all the air knocked out of my heart as well as my lungs almost fifteen years ago, when Isis made it clear that she had misinterpreted my actions and statements from the beginning. On some level, it was the beginning of the end, though of course, the fact that she had stayed with me in spite of putting the worst possible interpretation on so many things was eloquent testimony of the depth of her love. But to spend ten or fifteen years with someone, only to discover that they have misunderstood you from the beginning, is a terrible experience.

What depresses me most is the dread similarity of the experiences that turn up in blogs and comments around "our" issues. I am occasionally reminded that I don't have AIDS and don't live in Baghdad, so I should just "suck it up" and get on with it. But the suffering of all concerned in these families, in our families, still haunts me. Leaving causes as much suffering as staying, it would seem; there is no good way out no matter how good our intentions were on the way in. We are truly damned if we do and damned if we don't.

The fact that I have landed on my feet, found love and a new lease on life in no way diminishes the memory of what I have lost, and perhaps the most painful thing is that I chose to leave and take the loss.
C