Gay men who marry women
I recently spoke with Bonnie Kaye, author of Straight Wives, Shattered Lives: Stories of Women with Gay Husbands, among other books, and host of Bonnie Kaye’s Straight Wives Talk Show on BlogTalkRadio. Bonnie has spent much of her adult life first living with and attempting to love a gay husband and then helping other women in the matching mis-marriage situation. (“Mis-marriage” is Bonnie’s term for “mistake in marriage.” Other people sometimes refer to these relationships using the term “mixed marriage.”)
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Because I know countless gay men who were once married to straight women, with varying degrees of short and longer-term happiness and misery, I wanted to discuss this topic, and I wanted to do so from the straight wives’ perspective. Who better to talk with about this than Bonnie Kaye? Our discussion was wide-ranging, beginning with her own marriage to a gay man and progressing to how she was able to move on post-marriage, eventually becoming a rock for other women in similar situations.
In this publish, I have presented part one of this discussion, the st
I’m a Straight Noun Who Married a Gay Man
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Dear Prudence,
I met my husband 13 years ago, and we’ve been together ever since. We fell deeply, madly in love with each other and include been married for nine wonderful years now. He’s patient, kind, gentle-hearted. He’s also always been honest about being gay and has never hidden it from me. Only one of our mutual friends knows this about my husband. Our son also knows, since we thought it would be finest to remain reveal with him about it, so he never “found out” by surprise or from our shared friend. Our son took the news very well and doesn’t care that his father was gay.
I’ve never told my family, or really any of my friends, as I think they’d all be judgmental. My siblings don’t like my husband, but that’s a different letter
An Introduction
My client sat in the chair looking down at the floor, glancing up briefly to make eye contact, then darting his eyes back to the carpet. He spoke quietly, as if almost terrified to be heard. He clutched his hands throughout the session, displaying all the markers of an anxious guy in the throes of shame. He was a brand-new client to my practice: a married, middle-aged, suburban dad with a high-powered career. A colleague had given him my number months before. It took him a prolonged time to muster the courage to call and build an appointment. Towards the end of our first session he looked up at me and said, “I reflect I’m in love…with another man. I’m scared and I don’t know what to do.”
I possess worked with hundreds of gay men in heterosexual marriages struggling with being in the closet or wanting to emerge from it. There is so much about these men that is misunderstood and very few studies or little literature to provide insight. I decided to contribute my thoughts and research about these men and their struggles at a conference a several years ago. That presentation led to other oppor
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I recently spoke with Bonnie Kaye, author of Straight Wives, Shattered Lives: Stories of Women with Gay Husbands, among other books, and host of Bonnie Kaye’s Straight Wives Talk Display on BlogTalkRadio. Bonnie (unknowingly) married a gay man in , suffering through several highly abusive years before the marriage ended. You can read about that in my previous post to this site. In this post, we are focused on how Bonnie moved forward as a single mother with two small children, going to educational facility, becoming a therapist, and working to help other women in circumstances similar to her own.
How did you transition from being a single mother in her early 30s with a toddler and a toddler and a sky-high school equivalency diploma to the gal you are today?
When Robert left me, I was in a state of poverty. I had no education. I went on welfare. And during my three years on welfare, I decided wasn’t going to live like that forever. I wanted to have something to offer my children. So I used to sneak to school because you couldn’t leave to school back then when you were on we